We made the same change for our patient app last month, took 2 months to rewrite from react-native to two mobile apps, but we had the PoC in under a week.
Interestingly Apple approved it very quickly, which I was afraid of given such a huge rewrite.
IIRC it's thousands per day on these systems, mainly due to high power density and low mass, even small lapses in computation (100-500ms) rapidly change the temperatures of stacked die.
So even a GPU averaging 98% utilization may have thousands of cycles per day.
Compared to a regular server blade it may be dozens or barely any at all.
Surprised to see no acknowledgement of how "AI Menu Slop" has become deeply associated with ChatGPT.
Everywhere I go now I see places that blatantly used ChatGPT for their menus or posters and they all look the same.
It feels almost existential to the service, I know its a bit of survivor bias but so many images you can tell immediately are ChatGPT vs other image providers, and I feel many people are sick of them.
It's not like a lot of these small-time outfits used their own photography to begin with.
They'd pick a kebab from a menu of professionally made kebab pictures the printer has in stock. Or worse, they'd take pics of their own plated food with a dead-centre point flash in a dark cupboard or something and you end up with awful-looking food, no matter how good.
I'm not sure if I'm working with ChatGPT Images 2.5 or 2.0 here...
The original photo I took was at https://www.reddit.com/r/Tovala/comments/1pfuwrb/meatloaf_pa... - it's a cheeseburger meatloaf with potato wedges taken with a phone camera. And I was going for a consistent documentation approach for the photograph, not trying for menu proper.
I suspect that someone doing a menu could take a properly plated meal from the kitchen (rather than me photographing on top of my oven) and have it get redone for a good image for a menu without fundamentally changing what is being served.
I think quite a lot of people can distinguish between AI and real (maybe 30%?) but almost no one is worried about distinguishing between ChatGPT and other image generators
What if I told you.. the average person LIKES ai slop images and prefers them to "regular" ones.
The same way the average person prefers McDonalds food to healthy food
It's the great desemantification machine: want to look, read, sound, feel just like the median, without personal traits or individual expression? This is for you! (And people used to talk about communism and everything being same. Well, tech-broism actually achieved this.)
One of the things I keep running into in day to day work is that it seems increasingly thin the labor pools in the USA.
For example, getting developers with strong Healthcare / Pharmacy experience, with robotics to boot is nearly impossible. There's probably only 1,000 in the whole country. So we're forced to train up people. Our pay is quite competitive, for those wondering.
I can only imagine humanoid robotics is in even worse shape, and meanwhile in China theres probably one company with 1,000 engineers in it by itself. With 10 others all competing.
As more and more Boomers, and soon Gen X retire, we're going to be absolutely cooked on skilled labor.
China's biggest humanoid robot manufacturer is Unitree, who sold 5215 humanoid robots last year: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/R2t4zdvCZmWj_HpTRJAXzg According to the filing for their IPO this month, they had 175 R&D workers end of September 2025, 480 employees total: https://static.sse.com.cn/stock/disclosure/announcement/c/20... Of the 175, 4 PhDs, 69 master's degrees, 94 bachelor's degrees and 8 polytechnical school graduates. And of course they have to train new employees, too.
Always funny to me how people expected Google to do anything else other than roll over.
Should be a lesson to the dems next term, either extort the tech giants, the mere threat of the government taking action against Google makes them jump on these dumb name changes. Otherwise, get them on their side to change the law to prevent this kind of shit show ever again.
It's pretty clear you could do serious damage to a corporation as the president and get away with it, and that should change.
China basically has been running a "do nothing, win anyway" campaign since the Trump era.
More and more people view the US as a bad ally, and China is stepping in to help in many places.
People should get out more, go visit South America, Dominican Republic, etc. They have cheaper AC, cheaper cars, cheaper appliances, all because they can import from China without tariffs. This is not to say they have worse quality, I would argue the opposite, much of what they import is at least as good or better than what you get in the USA.
It will be no surprise to me when we end up forced to use equal or worse American AI for a premium in price, while the rest of the world moves on.
Speaking as someone living in Asia who visits the US every year or so, you are falling more and more behind and I don’t see a way for you to catch up without a drastic societal reformation.
The EV market alone should scare the average citizen, but it seems like a non issue every time I bring it up.
I think the US economy has painted itself into a corner and this all in bet on AI is its last real play before the house of cards collapses.
Yep, even with cache hits that like submitting uncached 80k-token prompts over and over.
My Claude.md + framework stuff has it tell me when it recommends /clear before the next prompt (and write itself handoff notes) and I rarely see >100k context size even on large work.
Swear whenever your company decides to invent its own font its like a version of "The Headquarters Curse". You had nothing else better to spend your teams time on so might as well make a new font that 10% of your customers will notice if you are lucky.
They could have just picked any other font and used it. It's a video streaming website, how much text content is there vs video content?
Headquarter Curse: A theory suggesting that companies often experience setbacks or decline after constructing a lavish new headquarters.
Not sure this counts for Nebula. Font licenses (even very liberal ones) are a massive pain and expense for content creators who publish to multiple platforms in a variety of different mediums.
Collectively their creator/owners will be paying thousands of dollars/month for their fonts. Something you’ve correctly assessed that a very low number of their viewers will notice or care about.
Nebula can make one upfront payment (likely less than a single months font foundry payments for their owners), and give the creators absolute certainty that the created font is free forever, no matter the viewing platform or medium.
Seems like a decent place to allocate some idle cash.
Plenty of fonts with the same SIL open font license around already, especially if what you're after is a nice but generic modern sans serif font which 99% of users can't distinguish between.
Can't think of any reason why Nebula creators would go for this one other than to blend in with the platform's corporate house style for the 1% of users pedantic enough to notice and... well they could have picked an existing SIL open font for that if it had been about simply minimising creators' costs
I'd understand it way more if they were a big corporate creating something very distinctive and very closed source for their marketing material...
Judging from the kind of content creators nebula hosts I'd imagine they do in fact have the kind of nerdy audience that notices miniature font differences.
In some ways I feel that caring a lot about fonts is on the opposite side of the spectrum to whatever it is making a population feel their lives have more meaning during wartime or crisis.
As a visual designer, sure, it is you job. As a computer user whose ultimate goal of using a computer is something else... I am kind of an old fart, but I often find that the best content is often found in conjunction with "font-family: sans-serif".
I'm a mechanical engineering PhD who works on numerical computing, data analysis and the like. I've spent several hundreds of dollars on fonts. Because I like things being just so, because I like seeing the artefacts I produce being nice to look at, and because they're just plain beautiful.
Day to day, I use open source fonts that Butterick recommends. But once in a while, I like using just nice stuff. It's like a nice fountain pen for others.
I believe everything you say. I hope you didn't feel attacked. It is just a feeling I often get when I'm online. Some people seem to spend more time on form than actual content, and while I agree that how things look is a part of the expression, I am somewhat of a brutalist because I feel that it rarely matters much, and most of the time it is a distraction.
but again, I am an old fart who is sad gopher lost.
> When Nebula found itself facing exorbitant fees to license the font it relied on for all of its branding, the company decided to find a new font that would work just as well.
This is even more baffling because Source Sans is open under SIL which permits free commercial use without restriction.
So if the goal was to save money, wouldn't the smart move be to use Source Sans for $0, instead of paying the designer of Source Sans to make some very minor tweaks to end up with another SIL font?
You are misunderstanding. The Nebula people were previously using the Whitney typeface. The organization that produced/sells Whitney changed ownership and the licensing became prohibitively expensive overnight.
They wanted something that could be a drop-in replacement for Whitney with the same letter sizes and spacing, so that they could put it into all of their products without needing any other redesign.
They couldn't find anything like that available off the shelf, and fonts they found that were close to Whitney in appearance were still also somewhat expensive, so their alternative was to take Source Sans, which has a free license, and make some quite significant but semi-automated modifications to it.
Making changes to just the typeface was presumably cheaper than making changes to all of their other designs.
Perhaps I'm your typical HNer like the GP comment and the topmost comment, but I don't see an issue with changing the style of the font entirely. Sure, it may be jarring to customers, but it's a short term pain for almost zero cost.
That's why they didn't design an entirely new font. Instead they made semi-automated modifications to a free font, and then tweaked a few specific characters afterwards.
The result is not as good as what they had before, and not as good as it would have been if they hired a professional to design a new font from scratch, but it was cheap and solved their problem.
you should have seen the reaction when Are.na collaborated with Dinamo on a new version of Arial (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45012995) - like, are we not allowed to make art for arts' sake?
Hacker News gets mad if you deviate a little from the usual profit maximizing routine to do something a little humanistic. And then they keep upvoting articles on how corpo streamlining sucks all life out and how the modern society lost its humanistic spirit. You can't win. May very well just play you own game and enjoy it.
So, funnily enough in my own career I've experienced The Headquarters event several times, and each time, after the lavish new headquarters is built, I think to myself, "this is it, we've peaked!" and each time it was an inflection point followed by even more growth and success.
I think I'm at 5 now.
Also three of those companies designed their own font too, though none of them still use it.
It also seems like they are trying to put this out as a creative endeavor that gives access to a really nice set of fonts without a fee associated (they link directly to Hoefler saying this is an open license replacement)
Feel like these things happen all the time in software as creative projects? Could be a tool for attracting design talent / interest?
I think it's important to point out how much easier it is to create a new typeface based on an existing one and using the metrics of another one, than to create one from scratch.
For example, I've built metrics-compatible versions of Aptos and Verdana in the last few days based on other open-source fonts that matched the shapes closely.
For Verdana I just told an LLM to add bars to DejaVu Sans and extend some shapes. For Aptos I had to get a bit more creative, designing a new double-storey g, but it was otherwise fine.
For me personally, I feel like a lot of tech companies are bloated and a lot of people are justifying their salary by doing unnecessary projects.
In many cases, it's all internal and no skin off noses such as this font project. In other cases, it means the UI changes every 4 to 6 months or even worse, the software becomes so bloated with "features" it becomes unusable so a clean replacement comes on the scene then the cycle repeats.
Sometimes, I feel, it would be better for companies to clap their hands and go "We did it, we solved the problem" then just stop. Keep the infrastructure running, do bug fixes, listen to customers on new features or changes but otherwise not do product churn for the sake of justifying salaries.
To expand on my view in an abstract way, when constructing a building construction workers, architects, project managers, and the whole cadre are hired then the building is built then all those people move onto new projects. Continual development of software is like if construction never stopped so that the construction crew still had jobs. A construction site should strive to transition from architects, cranes, and concrete trucks to maintenance staff, mop buckets, and screw drivers.
> And it sounds like it saves money on commercial font licensing.
Nebula Sans is a derivative of Adobe's Source Sans which is available to use for free for any purpose include commercial under the SIL Open Font License (the same license Nebula Sans has to use as a derivative of Source Sans).
So they could have just used Source Sans for free and virtually nobody but the most dedicated font nerds would have known the difference between that font and Nebula's tweak of it if not for the PR announcement.
All that said, I don't care what Nebula spends their money or time on, so I'm not saying they shouldn't have had this font made... but doing it wasn't a money-saving move.
I understand your point, but it does send a message that the company values design and art. It can be a great signal to attract talent. I know I would be!
A lot of font foundries are switching from one-time payments to pay-per-use licensing schemes, to try and get huge payouts from e.g. companies which serve web pages trillions of times, and those companies are mostly responding by just commissioning their own fonts instead.
The problem wasn't as simple as it caused harm, it was the companies knew it caused harm and did nothing.
Just like how Meta, it's staff and leadership all knew they were making decisions that harmed people, and did nothing to stop it while profiting immensely.
It's not the same. Aesbestos makers knew, their customers didn't, and they actively fought against the customers knowing it. Whereas NaOH makers know and go as far as writing it on the packaging.
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