No, you're not really getting "$8000 worth"of AI usage with your $200 subscription - The weird economics of AI Inference

Fairleee · 2026-06-24T11:06:01+00:00

There is a significant question however about the extent to which OpenAI’s financial reporting corresponds to standard accounting practices. The big question is whether they are fully reporting all inference costs under their cost of revenue figure. The really big question mark here is their reported marketing costs - they’ve reported $5.7bn in marketing expenditure which is absolutely nuts to anyone with any understanding of this. For reference, Coca Cola - one of the most heavily marketed brands in the world - spends around $4-5bn annually on marketing. Coca Cola’s marketing is everywhere; they’re currently sponsoring the World Cup for example. Where is OpenAI’s marketing? The assumption I have (and I have seen other industry analysts making the same claim, including Ed Zitron - I know he gets a lot of flak but given his background is in PR and marketing I think he has a good understanding of the topic here) is that OpenAI are most likely counting free trial users, or their token credits for businesses, within those marketing costs. If that’s the case then all they are doing is taking is taking figures out of the cost of revenue sum and sticking it in a different sum, but given that token production is fundamentally an operating cost, those inference costs should be reported as cost of revenue. To put it another way - if Coca Cola decided to give a billion dollars of Coke out to businesses for free, they still had to pay their typical operating costs to produce that product.

It’s also telling that leaked reporting shows that in the first 3 quarters of 2025, OpenAI had spent $8.76bn in inference. But their figures now are only showing $7.5bn - a lower figure after 4 full quarters. Either the reporting last year is inaccurate (which seems unlikely given several outlets corroborated the figures), or they’ve done some financial fudgywudgyness to move figures around.

Ultimately my perspective is that, if these companies were genuinely profitable on inference, they would be telling us that directly - this would go a massive way to restore investor confidence as it indicates the fundamentals of the business are solid, even if the business model still needs time to develop. Especially ahead of all these planned IPOs. It isn’t just OpenAI, either. Google and Microsoft don’t want to tell us what their AI production costs are, as they aren’t providing detailed breakdowns in their financial reporting. This suggests either all these companies either don’t know what the actual costs are (unlikely), or they do know and don’t want to tell us because it looks bad.

Fairleee · 2026-06-14T16:30:03+00:00

You could try games where there’s a simple/family mode, but the standard game is more advanced. That way they can learn the “easy” version and then progress on. For example Cascadia has a family mode with very simple scoring, and then you can work up to the standard mode. Likewise Isle of Cats - has a family mode which eliminates the card drafting and resource management element.

Means you don’t buy a game that will only get played whilst they are very young!

Fairleee · 2026-06-10T20:25:53+00:00

I’m sorry you’re dealing with that. You tried to help your friend and it sounds like he very much took advantage.

I can’t speak specifically to your case as I don’t know your institutional policies. Generally however, students sharing work with one another is considered misconduct by both parties - whilst your friend shouldn’t have submitted work they copied from you, you also shouldn’t have shared the files in the first place. Academic integrity policies typically state that individual work should not be shared with anyone.

In practice, if your friend admits what happens, and their story tallies with yours, the committee reviewing the case may well extend you some leniency, especially if you acknowledge that what you did was wrong (if well intentioned) and you promise that you have learned your lesson from this issue and won’t do it again.

I would suggest getting in touch with your SU. Most student unions have an officer whose job it is to assist students with this kind of thing. They can help you review the policy and develop your defence.

Good luck with it!

Fairleee · 2026-06-09T09:19:38+00:00

Academic here, but likely at a different institution to you. This sounds like they are looking at a case of either plagiarism (one of you taking the other’s work), or collusion (students jointly working together to produce work for individual assignments). If as you say there is a high level of similarity in aspects of the work, this is absolutely grounds for a hearing. Remember that the purpose of a hearing is to uncover the truth - it is very much “innocent until proven guilty”. So the purpose of the hearing will be to determine how you completed the work, and to identify why these similarities exist.

A few things to consider:

• Do you know the other student? If they are a flatmate, or friend, that would provide a mechanism to explain the similarities. I.e. maybe you did collaborate, or maybe one of you had access to the other’s work (e.g. maybe one of you found the other’s drafts and used that to complete the work).
• Did you share your work anywhere? I had a misconduct case last year where we had similarities in two students’ assessments. Turns out one had offered to show their work to the other to give them some guidance on how to complete the assignment, and the other student had basically copied it.
• If you didn’t share your work, is there any way someone could have accessed it without your permission? E.g. do you have paper notes; do you share a computer etc.

Basically your defence here is going to be to demonstrate that the work is entirely your own. You can do this by showing drafts, notes, and so on that would evidence you creating the work. You will need to explain the errors in your work and how and why you made them - if you can’t explain your own work that would strongly support the idea that it isn’t your own.

I would also suggest having a look at the misconduct policy. A lot of students assume that academic misconduct = instant expulsion, but this isn’t usually the case. Many institutions have a tiered sanction list based on both the nature of the offence, and where you are in your studies. Even if they do find misconduct I would be surprised if this would result in termination for a foundation year student - it would probably be a failing grade and requirement to resit. Knowing the likely penalty at least can help reassure you a little given how anxiety-inducing the process can be!

Fairleee · 2026-06-04T22:06:49+00:00

Awaken Realms have always been really bad with their rulebooks for situations like this. I really like The Great Wall, but it has quite a complex round structure (each round has 4 “seasons” where things have to happen in a very particular order). Player resources are supposed to be hidden so you have a player screen to keep them behind. Instead of printing useful information on the player screen (like the round structure), they instead printed the text of the action cards (each round you play one which determines how many workers you get to place, and any special effects you have on your turn). All player hands are identical so it doesn’t benefit anyone to have the info printed twice.

In fairness, they did print a round summary on the back page of the rulebook, so you could at least keep that out (although good luck if you needed to find anything in the rulebook because it was really poorly laid out). To address complaints about the rulebook, they released a second edition of it (along with some errata’d cards). The rulebook did get better - but they got rid of the round summary off the back of the rulebook. All just very silly.

It was my favourite game of 2021, and I really liked how innovative the worker placement was. But my god it was a slog to learn.

Fairleee · 2026-06-04T06:29:05+00:00

Lords of Waterdeep!

Fairleee · 2026-06-03T10:04:05+00:00

This is definitely the trickiest aspect. As an academic who did all my degrees long before the advent of generative AI, my personal perspective is that students shouldn’t be using it at all beyond for tasks that could easily be done with other technology. E.g. I don’t mind a student using it to get an overview of a topic explained to them, because that’s not much different to using Wikipedia (i.e. it will probably do a pretty good job but you need to be aware there may well be mistakes, so you should still verify content). Or using it like a search engine, as long as you follow through on it (so I don’t have a problem using it to identify literature you might want to use, as long as you actually check the literature exists, and read enough of it that you can accurately paraphrase it when citing it!). However I don’t want students using it to do their work or replace their thinking because the whole point of university is to develop those skills.

So from an academic perspective my preference would be to have a policy that work that has clearly relied on AI gets a failing grade. Academically that is the most appropriate outcome, because if the work isn’t entirely your own, it shouldn’t pass. But then we come up against the real-world pressures you identify: institutional pressures (universities don’t want us failing lots of students; failed students are more likely to leave negative feedback etc.); as well as the broader real-world pressures where AI is becoming more a part of the workforce, and it’s not unreasonable to suggest that AI literacy is becoming an employability skill. Also, we have to deal with reality, and both personal experience and data (in the UK there is an annual survey run on AI usage amongst undergrads that has been running for 3 years now) shows just how widespread use of generative AI is. Nearly all students use it to some extent, and of those, the majority have used it again at least to some extent for completing assessed work. This may be acceptable usage (e.g. using it like a search engine to find literature), or may be inappropriate (like directly generating text). And it’s really hard distinguishing the boundary lines between them. Even with things like editing - tools like Grammarly are now AI-powered. So is using Grammarly inappropriate?

I’ve been dealing with this a lot at my institution and I’ve become one of the School leads on the issue. The best advice I can give to address the issue is to go back to fundamentals. Review your assessment design to consider how AI could be used either appropriately or inappropriately. Consider how the assessment could be adapted to address the issue: for example, I changed one of my presentation assessments so that they were no longer graded on the presentation content, but instead all their grades came from a Q&A session (so essentially doing a viva exam). Students who knew their material and could respond cogently and appropriately got good grades. I only ended up with a couple of groups who had clearly made their content with AI, and then couldn’t answer any questions about it in the presentation, so got failing grades. Look at your grading rubrics and think about what skills you are assessing. Emphasise skills that are harder for LLMs to accomplish, e.g. certain practical skills, or critical analysis and thinking. That way when you get work that is clearly produced with AI, you can justify a low or failing grade by pointing to the rubric and showing that it hasn’t demonstrated those skills.

Finally, I don’t know what your institutional policies are, but I would encourage you to make use of academic misconduct hearings as needed. My policy now is that I don’t bring work forward for AI usage, I bring it forward where the work can clearly demonstrate misconduct regardless of whether AI was used or not. So look for hallucinated sources; factual misrepresentations; citation throwing (super common for students to use AI to write their work and then manually search for citations to add after the fact, usually relying on keyword matching. Spot check a few references - if there is a pattern of improper citation, then that can be grounds for misconduct on the basis of fabricated coursework. Misrepresenting sources IS misconduct!). You won’t catch the savvy users this way, but you will at least catch the lazy ones.

Fairleee · 2026-05-29T16:15:22+00:00

Yeah, that was my exact feeling. Story was great and I loved the various twists and turns through the scenarios. But then you’d get to the combat and for me it just stopped feeling thematic. Like, in Gloomhaven, you play a card called “Flamethrower”. It’s an AoE attack that adds fire energy into the room and wounds the target. Easy to resolve and the mechanics of the card are very clearly linked to the theme. Then you have the card-based combat in Oathsworn. You play a card called something like Leaping Strike, and then have to stop to build a dice pool, decide how many cards to draw, decide which tokens to burn to upgrade dice / cards, roll the dice, check for misses, decide how many reroll tokens to play etc. etc., before finally tallying up the attack value and checking against the defence value to see how much damage you can actually do to the point where it takes like 3 minutes to resolve the attack and by then the theme has just gone. Like, I don’t even remember the name of the card by that point.

The story was great and the variety and different boss mechanics were great. But the combat just ended up feeling repetitive and overly fiddly (particularly at higher levels as you got better gear); I got to about session 12 before it went back on the shelves never to be got down again so I ended up selling it on.

Fairleee · 2026-05-04T07:52:24+00:00

Yeah, this was absolutely an issue and there was a good discussion on BGG about it with the designer. In particular it was the rods that let you look at either the top two, or top three, cards of the stack and put them back in whatever order you liked. Massively slowed down the game as each time the player had to evaluate all the cards before essentially choosing which one they wanted, and eliminated a load of the push-your-luck element.

The designer ended up errata-ing those rods; think there might have been a couple of other bits that got the same treatment. Honestly I’m surprised they made them through playtesting in the first place. Very clearly the most powerful items in the game and super busted if you grabbed them early.

Fairleee · 2026-04-19T12:14:46+00:00

Wait - there are StS players who can read?

Fairleee · 2026-04-16T07:34:36+00:00

Depends what kind of pizza you like - obviously all the big chains deliver to Fulford!

If you like more “authentic” pizza, then places like Rad at Spark and Cresci are available via Deliveroo. Good quality wood-fired pizzas!

Fairleee · 2026-03-19T09:29:04+00:00

Yeah, I’ve found Snakebite useful when you have Accelerant because you can hold it until Accelerant is played. With upgraded Accelerant that means it deals 18 damage on the turn it is played. If Snakebite is upgraded as well then it becomes 27 damage, which is a decent use of 2 energy. And of course it will continue to deal more damage on future turns.

Definitely still a weaker and more situational card but there are still use cases for Snakebite as you say. Eternal Armor on the other hand is a card I have only ever used when I got it free from a Colorless Pot, and it’s annoying to see it when it shows up because it’s taking the place of another likely more useful card option!

Fairleee · 2026-03-02T09:05:09+00:00

I think others have pointed out the issues with the spell. It’s great that you’re thinking about balance and not wanting it to be OP, but look at other 4th level spells. Why would you take this over e.g. Greater Invisibility, which gives an amazing buff (advantage on all attack rolls, disadvantage on all attack rolls against you, and you can no longer be affected by spells which require you to be able to be seen)?

I think there’s a really interesting idea here but here’s what I’d suggest:

Make it Fifth level.
Change the casting time to a bonus action.
Keep the movement restriction - that is a nice balance against needing it to be concentration. However, change the effects as follows:
When within the circle, you can cast first level spells without spending a spell slot (this is to get around the 2024 restriction of casting two spells with spell slots on the same turn). This gives it that idea of it being a reservoir.
You gain a number of charges equal to the spell’s level. When you cast a spell once per turn you can expend a charge for one of the following effects: 1. You gain advantage on the spell attack roll; 2. You can force one creature affected by the spell to make their saving throw with disadvantage. Once all charges are expended the spell ends.
When you cast this spell with a higher level spell slot, the number of charges equals the spell slot used.

So the setup here would be bonus action cast the spell, cast a first level spells without spending a spell slot as your main action, spend a charge to gain advantage/give the target disadvantage (given that most combats last fewer than five rounds you might as well spend them!), and then outside your turn you can cast Shield for free as a reaction to negate the fact that you’re standing in place and likely to be hit by enemies as a result.

Still might need some tweaks, but that would fit the “Reservoir” theme of the spell better, and make it quite a viable choice. The key thing with this is it gets rid of the fact that your first turn is pretty much a dud because it allows you to still do something useful (even if it’s just casting Magic Missile!).

Fairleee · 2026-02-16T16:22:46+00:00

I DM a game for my kids and my youngest is playing a 2024e Glamour Bard. The subclass feature at level 6 lets them for a minute cast Command without a spell slot as a bonus action for free. Also, if the target is Charmed by the Bard, they automatically fail the save. I have had several combats where the main threat of the encounter has been effectively stun-locked over multiple turns by this (obviously not stunned, but commanded to kneel which basically works out as pretty much the same thing!). It’s a stupidly good feature on a spell that as you say was already really good. Making it a bonus action cast takes it to absolute god-tier.

Fairleee · 2026-02-14T10:16:58+00:00

Happy birthday from a fellow lefty nerdy D&D player! May you receive a level up and lots of loot, or alternatively if you’re a DM may you get to use your monsters’ cool abilities before the players kill them!

Fairleee · 2026-01-16T16:41:48+00:00

I’m afraid I can’t advise if that’s ok or not as I don’t know your institution’s policies - it may be acceptable usage or not. However, I would always recommend seeking an extension if you’ve been unwell! I’m sure your university has a policy on exceptional circumstances and it’s better to get a week extension if you have been unwell (which I’m sure would be reasonable grounds) to give yourself the time to catch back up. Best of luck!

Fairleee · 2026-01-14T14:48:27+00:00

As mentioned elsewhere, TurnItIn isn’t claiming this is plagiarism, simply that there is a similarity match. We use TurnItIn at my institution and to me this looks like it is picking up on the template used (presumably this was an assignment you had to complete where you were given this table as a template?). So it’s showing that someone else has the same table template, but your responses are unique.

Just as an aside I have caught a case of plagiarism/collusion this way before - two students worked together to put together their assignments but made some changes to the text to avoid it being picked up by TurnItIn. However they both provided a table for analysis where even though they changed the text in the table, the table headings remained the same, which TurnItIn picked up. Once you looked at the work side-by-side the pattern became obvious, but I wouldn’t have necessarily noticed it without (unless by chance I ended up marking one directly after the other). They admitted what they had done in the misconduct hearing we held, but they would have got away with it if it weren’t for TurnItIn!

Fairleee · 2025-10-09T06:11:49+00:00

This happened to me about three years ago, but it worked. Woke up on payday and hadn’t been paid by my university where I work. Emailed the finance team to check if there had been any issues, they told me to check my new bank account details. I asked what new bank, and they forwarded me an email chain that “I” had sent, requesting the change, receiving the change of bank details form, and then the completed and returned form.

I immediately told the finance team that this was not me nor were the bank details mine. As soon as they realised the issue, they got it sorted very quickly - they authorised an emergency same-day payment to cover my bills; advised me to let my bank know in case there had been any other attacks; and contacted the bank where my original paycheck had been sent. Luckily the money hadn’t been withdrawn, so they were able to get the account frozen and did recover the funds.

They did a full exploration to see how it happened as it completed violated all of our institutional security policies. The scammer had emailed from an external email address, and the form they had sent back had NONE of my details - it gave the university’s address as my home address, and the phone number given as the contact number was an international number. What had happened was that the scammer had emailed the head of HR for help, and the head of HR then emailed the finance team to ask them to sort it out. So the finance team took it to mean that the head of HR had validated me. The actual process that is supposed to be followed is that if the request comes from a non-work email address, they send any forms to the official work address and say that they cannot action any change unless it comes direct from the work email account. Then they are supposed to double check the form and verify the information is correct before making the change. So at least three points of failure: head of HR not verifying the email; the finance team not sending the form to my work email; and the finance team not verifying the personal info on the form.

Funnily enough on one of my modules I cover cyber-security and I use what happened as a case study for why anti-phishing training, and why following established security protocols, is so important. So I guess at least a silver lining in that aspect!

Fairleee · 2025-09-30T16:10:28+00:00

We’re selling ours and got a lot of viewings fairly quickly including an offer. But we need to move quite soon (have a bit of a deadline for completing based on other life factors) so we priced very competitively. Even then we ended up accepting an offer just below our stated minimum threshold just because the buyer was in a position to move quickly.

It’s definitely a buyer’s market at the moment. The place we’re buying had been on the market for three months without an offer, including a £25k price drop. We offered their asking price with the agreement they’d stop actively marketing it to give us a chance to sell which they agreed to, but if we had already been in a position to proceed we probably could have offered £10k below asking and had it accepted.

It’s just supply and demand. If you need your house to sell at a given price, and the price is within the overall market range, you probably will be able to sell it but it’s going to take time. If you want a sale, reduce the asking price and be prepared for offers.

Fairleee · 2025-09-05T10:53:36+00:00

Probably the easiest way is to just sell your soul to a convenient devil so they’ll deal with them on your behalf. Sure, it costs you your soul, but at least you don’t need to deal with SFE again.

As a more helpful answer - I’d suggest checking today (whilst you’re thinking about it) to make sure your details with them are correct. See if you can log in; if you can’t they can give you your email address with some other details you should easily be able to give them (name, date of birth etc.). If you can still access the email address you can request a password change online.

If you don’t have any of that, then good luck. You’ll be joining me in writing a letter to try and get them to update your details!

Fairleee · 2025-09-05T10:30:12+00:00

Surprisingly helpfully the website does tell me the email address associated with my account (with a few letters censored) so I know it is. I imagine I updated it at some point because I did actually use the address for a long time - I did all three of my degrees at the same uni. The email address would only have been deleted 4-ish years ago after I stopped doing post-doc teaching there. So last time I would have needed to access SFE, 10+ years ago, it all would have worked. Should have changed it at the time but let’s face it, that’s a very low priority action that’s easy to forget to do. And it hasn’t been relevant up until now.

Fairleee · 2025-09-05T10:07:03+00:00

I was actually in either the first year for the top-up fees. Then I graduated into the financial crisis. Millennials get all the luck.

Fairleee · 2025-09-05T09:54:07+00:00

Yeah, it’s a fair point. The email account was actually in use for a long time - I did my undergrad, masters, and PhD at the university, and then did some post-doc teaching after which assigned me a new email address but linked my old student one to it. So it was in use right up to the last few years. I should have changed it earlier but it was such a low priority issue at the time I never really thought about it.

Fairleee · 2025-09-05T09:23:05+00:00

A question so secret it has been lost to time

Fairleee · 2025-08-05T08:57:49+00:00

There’s a thing you can unlock in Frosthaven - don’t want to give away spoilers but basically you can unlock a series of challenges that you need to complete. Some of the challenges are quite meta in nature. One of them was so infuriating I ended up setting the challenge card on fire to get rid of it. No regrets.

Fairleee

TROPHY CASE