It is cheaper now, but I wonder if it will continue to be cheaper when companies like Google and OpenAI decide they want to make a profit off of AI, instead of pouring billions of dollars of investment funds into it. By the time that happens, many of the specialized service providers will be out of business and Google will be free to jack up the price.
I use Claude through OpenRouter (with Aider), and was pretty amazed to see that it routes the requests during the same session almost round-robin through Amazon Bedrock, sometimes through Google Vertex, sometimes through Anthropic themselves, all of course using the same underlying model.
Literally whoever has the cheapest compute.
With the speed that AI models are improving these days, it seems like the 'moat' of a better model is only a few months before it is commoditized and goes to the cheapest provider.
If you actually read the article you'd know that unbundling is not not what it's about. It's about the dark patterns that trick or coerce people into purchasing "extras" that they don't want, or didn't know they had to pay extra for.
Seeing all the praise in this thread, I downloaded the app, and I must admit I'm disappointed and confused at the effusion, but maybe I'm doing something wrong.
I tried a very basic task of getting driving directions to a specific address and that doesn't seem to be supported. For some streets, it will give me directions to the street as a whole, but that's not useful for long streets. Other streets don't seem to exist in the map.
Then I typed in a simple query: "ice cream", and the closest result listed was 4 miles away, but there are several ice cream shops within less than a mile. Other business listings are out of date or inaccurate.
A lot of the effusive praise is from people in Europe, who navigate slightly differently (often directions are based on intersection, etc) and have a lot longer OSM tradition. My guess is that you're American (or at least not European) and so unfortunately the fact is that volunteers like ourselves have to do the work of adding addresses to the map. One easy way anyone can do that is with the RapID / MapWithAI address layer from the National Address Database, I myself have taken to doing large formally-approved imports as well.
OM's only data source is OSM itself and their volunteer dev team is already overloaded so that's the only option there for now (basically the same as with OsmAnd) but if you really want an OpenStreetMaps based GPS app with full address support ASAP you can try Magic Earth in the meantime. It's not FOSS, but at least it's not Google.
As for ice cream, it's a matter of checking to see if those closer businesses are mapped correctly or not. If they're properly tagged as "ice cream" in OrganicMaps but not displaying in the correct order then that's an OM bug to report, but my guess is that they're not entered properly into OpenStreetMap to begin with. Both are free open source projects though so we can make things better ourselves without begging a big corporation to do it for us.
Yeah I bought a new build in a greenfield community and so it was a fun first project to pull the new street and address data from the county auditor and create the streets and addresses for my community in OSM. I did it the “hard” way with JOSM I guess not knowing about the MapwithAI stuff.
Sounds like you have the opportunity to make the map better for yourself and everyone else. The data comes from Open Street Map which is community edited and maintained https://www.openstreetmap.org
If you are interested in contributing to OSM to make the data better in your region, you can even make basic edits from within Organic maps, including adding addresses.
Sadly you still have many sites that have stupid password rules like requiring numbers and "special characters" -- but no spaces, and no, periods don't count as special characters, and blah blah blah. Point being, the ideal of a simple phrase that's easy to remember gets thrown out the window when you have to deal with all the different rules.
I’m getting very confused about the comments here that are trivially refuted. So make a passphrase like: Correct6$Horse7&Battery and be done with it. That’s still easy to write down and remember while transcribing.
Nobody’s arguing that passwords/phrases should only be remembered and never written down or stored in a password manager. That ship sailed a long time ago.
Not only that, but don't rely on third-party services to do your validation for you, and yes, that includes the US Post Office, if you're looking for a physical address. There are many physical addresses in the United States that the Post Office doesn't deliver mail to, and yet people live there. I know because I live in one of those places. UPS and Fed-Ex have no problem finding the address, but for regular mail I have to use a PO Box. It is frustrating when I don't know which method an online store will use. It is also frustrating when a site repeatedly tells me my address doesn't exist.
We're in the same boat, and it gets worse than this. Our local post office asks that when addressing packages to be shipped by UPS or FedEx, we include our PO Box as an apartment number.
The reason for this is that parcel services sometimes have agreements with USPS to hand off last-mile delivery to USPS. Which means USPS is stuck trying to figure out how to deliver a package to an address they don't serve.
Adding the PO Box number as an apartment number gets them over this hump. Needless to say, it causes absolute havoc with address validation. All of the humans locally involved in delivery know what's up and it all just works, but getting an address following this convention past the computers can be a special kind of hell.
It also turns out that at least one validation service thinks our street address is in a different zip code than it actually is. Having to fudge the address with merchants using such validation services sometimes ends with a trip to the wrong post office and profuse apologies while they rummage through the back looking for a package that's genuinely misaddressed, but wouldn't have been shipped otherwise.
Please, please give your users an escape hatch to use the address as entered, even if it doesn't validate.
Assuming the USPS and physical addresses are in the same town, the following format can work quite well:
314 Something Rd / PO 404
Town, City 12345
This works because the postal service tries to deliver to the last thing on the label that they recognize. Using slash as a separator works better than a comma or newline because it's less likely the service you're shipping from will "notice" that you put a PO box in and force the package to send via USPS.
The same goes for Canada Post for addresses here in America's hat; I've been to addresses that exist but don't have postal codes, and others that can't even be looked up, and those in southern Ontario. We've made sure that users can still enter addresses manually even when using Canada Post's address widget on our websites.
Don't build software for salons; start your own salon that uses software you create, and make that your competitive advantage. Don't know how to cut hair? Then you probably don't know what software would help in that business anyway. Find a business you can do yourself, and help yourself using your technical skills.
This is also why this (very good) advice is not so easy to follow in real life. You need multiple skillsets.
The obvious problem here being that there is a very, very fine line to tread where software actually matters.
If you're not as well placed as the incumbents at the core product (salon, sure), software will not save you.
If you're better placed than the incumbents at the core product, software doesn't matter.
If you're (roughly) equally placed as the incumbents at the core product, software can help you, but it will likely take a while to realize any competitive advantage.
And, I say placed, because there are a lot of factors at play. There's the quality of the service/product (itself a huge set of variables), pricing, location, and availability, to name a few. None of those will custom software directly help you with.
The art of marble or bronze sculpting is still around, although much rarer than it used to be. It's a trade like any other, requiring years of study to achieve a high level of competence (notwithstanding the trend of throwing a bunch of random metal pieces together and calling it art - true art requires creativity and skill; one or the other does not suffice).
Many university art programs have a sculpture department. Student and faculty artists will make works on commission, although it's hard to find good figurative art among the sea of abstract political B.S. If you're really serious, Italy is the place for the best artisans, as it has been since the Renaissance[1].
There are still some old-school sculptors around [2] in America who take the craft seriously.
