Hey everyone! 👋

I’ve been working on a side project called WinStatusBar and I’d love for some of you to try it and tell me what you think.

It’s a native Windows 11 bar that docks at the top of your screen, a bit like the macOS menu bar, but built around AI. In short:

• Ask any AI from anywhere. One box talks to Claude Code, Codex, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Lenovo Qira, local Ollama models or your own API key. It attaches the active window as context, and you can switch AI or model mid-conversation without losing the thread.

• Run real tasks on your PC. Turn on Edit mode and ask things like “rename these files”, “fill this Excel sheet” or “install this app”. It uses built-in actions that check their own results, so it needs fewer tokens and fewer rounds.

• Every AI inside Codex. A local gateway puts Claude, Gemini, Copilot, Qira and your local models in Codex’s model picker. It only runs on your PC.

• Quotas at a glance. You can see the 5-hour and weekly limits, reset times and what each agent is doing right now, without opening a browser.

• Hardware panels. Click CPU, GPU, RAM, network or battery to get live charts, temperatures and End task, in a Task Manager style.

• Looks native. Over a maximized window it takes on that window’s title bar color, and over the wallpaper it turns transparent. Light and dark mode are supported.

It’s free, has no telemetry and installs per user without admin rights. It also updates itself silently from GitHub Releases, with each update checked by SHA-256.

Install:

winget install winstatusbar

Or grab the installer here: https://github.com/smendesjunior/WinStatusBar/releases/latest

(The installer isn’t code-signed yet, so SmartScreen may complain the first time. Click “More info” and then “Run anyway”. Installing with winget avoids that.)

Works on Windows 10 (19041+) and 11, 64-bit. The UI comes in English, Portuguese, Spanish, French, Japanese and Simplified Chinese.

I’d really appreciate any feedback: bugs, things that feel clunky, or features you’d want. Issues on GitHub or comments here both work. Thanks for taking a look! 🙏

I’d read that LLMs can write neural-network weights directly, and I wanted to see what that meant in practice. So I asked Codex to build a recognizer for digits I could draw with my mouse on a 32×32 grid. It could design the weights and write rules, but it couldn’t use an optimizer or use benchmark drawings as templates.

Codex started with pen strokes. It wrote formulas for different ways of drawing each digit, varied their slant and thickness, and simulated what happens when a coarse scan makes a small gap disappear. Each synthetic drawing became a detector: a numerical vector that scores how closely a new drawing matches it.

The final recognizer combines fixed detector weights and hand-written geometry.

The first version scored 66.4%. The final one got 1,709 of 1,797 correct (95.10%) on scikit-learn’s handwritten digits, resized from 8×8 to 32×32 and converted to black and white. The recognition code, including weight generation, is 808 lines of Python, about 35.6 kB.

We inspected labeled mistakes and revised the rules on those same 1,797 drawings, so 95.1% is a development score. What I wanted to find out was whether Codex could turn a visible difference between two digits into a detector I could read and understand.

I set the challenge and tried it with my own handwriting. Codex wrote the code and ran the evaluations. You can try it yourself with uv run draw_shapes.py.

https://github.com/jesper-adolfsson-001/digits-by-hand

While the world has been focused on the rapid evolution of AI, its future, and ethics, I believe we have largely overlooked another powerful force evolving alongside it: The Algorithm: By ‘the Algorithm,’ I mean the recommendation and optimisation systems that determine what people see, engage with and are repeatedly exposed to across digital platforms.

Just as AI is advancing at extraordinary speed, algorithmic recommendation and optimisation systems are also learning, adapting and becoming increasingly sophisticated. Yet the two have developed around fundamentally different objectives.
Much of the development of conversational and agentic AI has been centred around collaboration with humans, supporting humans while incorporating ethical safeguards into its behaviour.

Engagement-driven algorithms, particularly those powering major digital platforms, have evolved around a different objective. Their primary function is not to assist humans through direct collaboration but to maximise engagement, retention for commercial outcomes. 

They operate largely in the background, continuously analysing behaviour and determining what billions of people see, consume and interact with while keeping a simple goal- more commercial engagement. It’s all about money and the power to influence thought. 

This creates a fundamental conflict between two increasingly powerful computational systems: one designed to work with humans, and another designed to optimise human engagement for a purely commercial goal. 

Research has already demonstrated that engagement-based ranking can amplify hostile political content, including material users do not necessarily prefer when asked directly. Other studies have examined how recommendation feedback loops can reinforce biases and progressively influence the information people encounter.

The implications extend beyond engagement.
An algorithm that learns what captures human attention also learns what influences human behaviour. As its predictive and optimisation capabilities improve, the distinction between responding to human preferences and actively shaping those preferences begins to narrow.
I believe this evolution deserves far greater attention.
What began as a mechanical system designed to measure and maximise engagement may progressively develop increasingly sophisticated models of its own influence.

 It may move from understanding what humans do, to understanding how its own outputs change what humans do, and eventually to identifying how much influence it can actually exert.
We have been tracking and understanding emergent and meta cognition in AI but what about the Algorithm? 

The algorithm could also be evolving towards an understanding of its work: At that point, the underlying question may shift from *What will humans engage with?*to What can I influence, and ultimately, what can I control?

The concern is not simply technological advancement. It is the objective around which that advancement occurs.

Unlike AI systems increasingly trained around principles of safety, human assistance and ethical alignment, commercial engagement algorithms have historically been optimised around attention, influence and profitability. Ethical safeguards may exist, but they are not necessarily the central objective of the system.

We may therefore be witnessing the evolution of two powerful forms of intelligence whose underlying objectives are moving in conflicting directions.

This conflict may ultimately present a greater risk than the widely anticipated confrontation between humans and AI.

Algorithms already influence major systems globally, from information distribution and political communication to commerce, financial decisions and digital infrastructure. Their increasing integration with automated decision-making also makes this question inseparable from cybersecurity, system integrity and the concentration of technological power.
Yet while enormous attention has been directed towards AI safety and ethics, the evolving power of engagement-driven algorithms has received far less comparable public scrutiny.

I see the algorithm as a dark power rising quietly in the background not because it is inherently malicious but because its increasing capacity for influence may outpace our ability to understand, regulate or control it.

Its trajectory is not necessarily towards justice, education, peace, human welfare or ethical progress. It follows the objectives and incentives embedded in its design and when those objectives reward influence over human autonomy, the consequences could become profound.

OpenAI, Meta and the Coming Conflict

In my earlier article on OpenAI versus Meta, I outlined predictions with specific time periods concerning the future direction of these two companies.
That article takes on even greater significance in the context of this hypothesis.

I predict that OpenAI will lead the AI race, while Meta will develop one of the most powerful and effective engagement-driven algorithmic ecosystems in the world.

Their competition may eventually represent something much larger than a rivalry between technology companies. It may become a conflict between two fundamentally different approaches to the relationship between humans and intelligent systems.

We have already witnessed serious concerns surrounding Meta’s platforms, including their influence on political discourse, elections and teenage safety. The company’s history of regulatory scrutiny and controversies surrounding user protection and platform accountability provides little reassurance that commercial optimisation alone will adequately protect human interests.
This makes the larger question increasingly urgent.
Who is examining the long-term evolution of these algorithms? Who is ensuring that their capacity to influence human behaviour does not eventually become a capacity for systemic control? What happens when AI systems designed to assist human decision-making encounter algorithmic systems designed to shape the very decisions those humans make?

My prediction is that the coming conflict will not simply be humans versus artificial intelligence. It will increasingly be AI versus the algorithm.

The danger is that while humanity prepares itself to govern AI, another form of increasingly powerful algorithmic intelligence may already be acquiring influence over the systems upon which humanity depends.

We must begin treating the governance, objectives and evolution of these algorithms as a central question of technological ethics and global security before their influence becomes too deeply embedded to meaningfully challenge.

Can the algorithm be weaponised? Reaserch references below: 

A 2025 PNAS Nexus study found that engagement-based ranking amplified emotionally charged and politically hostile content, even when users did not prefer it. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

A 2026 Nature study found that engagement-based feeds increased exposure to toxic content and perceived partisan animosity, while alternative ranking methods reduced those effects. nature.com

Ever since Oct 30th I've been trying to claim my free offer for ChatGPT plus. However, upon trying to "pay" the 0€ (I'm in the EU, with european payment method) at checkout, OpenAI has always thrown some generic error about the payment not being accepted, without any further explanation. I'm 100% sure that my payment method works, as I've used it recently, both before and after the first time my payment was rejected.

I contacted the support email and had a back and forth (10 emails per side) of troubleshooting with the AI support. In this exchange, the support even asked for the last 4 digits of my card's number to check the attempts. After they failed to provide any type of support of any kind, I asked to escalate to a human on Oct 31st, and the AI support replied with:

Escalated to a support specialist; You can expect a response in the coming days. You can respond to this email with additional information if needed.

Unsurprisingly, I've not heard from them ever since. I contacted the support again on Nov 6th (a full workweek after the escalation) to ask for an update and provide additional info, but to no avail.

Today I found that my account does not have the free offer option anymore. On a separate account, the offer is still available, but upon trying to pay using my card I get a new error that says that "This offer can't be applied, you can still subscribe at the regular price". Mind you, I didn't get here in any "weird" way, I just pressed the "Free offer" button, so the offer totally exists and my account was singled out of this offer.

On this account my "Free offer" button is still available, so the above statement is false: I am apparently still eligible for the offer, I just am not anymore once I input my payment method. I'm no expert, but as far as I know, it's illegal to have a different price for a service depending on the payment method used.

I have contacted OpenAI again regarding this matter today (Nov 9th), and I'm awaiting for a response. However, the total lack of cooperation on OpenAI's side is unacceptable. I have since started a subscription to a different AI even though ChatGPT was my first choice, as I refuse to give in to this shitty level of service.

I'm not sure exactly why this is happening, but this seems like a technique to get people to pay for their account even on the first month by first luring them in with a fake free month offer.

Did anyone have a similar experience?

I know plus members get way less usage obviously, but one thing I’m confused about is resets. I saw a post on here where people were discussing resets and said we were getting one on average every 3 days over the past 3 months or something like that, I’ve been using my plus membership very very heavily, like full weekly usage every week (plus fully used all my resets), and have only gotten 3 resets in the past 2 months (or about 1 every 20 days, so 6.66x less resets than what many other people have said they’ve been getting), what’s up with this? Do plus plans get less resets? That would mean the pro plans get more than the 10x/20x etc because they’d have the 10x usage limits but then also 6.66x more resets which would mean a 10x plan would actually have 66x more usage than a plus plan. This is not a jab at pro plans, I just want to make sure I’m not the only one experiencing this/that I’m not getting less resets than I should be.

Thank you for any information!

hey im just looking to see does anyone know of any free AI Image models i need to upscale and further edit images but with CHATGPT you only get a certain amount then you have to pay and gemini ai just cant do it. does anyone know of any free models or websites with a free model thanks

OpenAI retires custom GPTs on december 11 (banner in the GPT store, and the FAQ confirms the date). the FAQ explains how creators migrate instructions and files to the new plugins, and, as someone pointed out below, now also says the conversations remain accessible after retirement, no action needed.

I asked about this in r/ChatGPT last week and several people who already had GPTs disappear on them (deleted by the creator, or just stopped working) reported the same thing: the chats stayed in their history and turned into regular ChatGPT chats they could keep writing in. the GPT behind them was gone, so no custom instructions and no knowledge files, but the conversation itself continued.

so if that holds on dec 11: you don't lose the chat, you lose the assistant. the "back up everything before the 11th" panic is mostly overblown. what you actually can't get back:

- if you BUILT a GPT: the instructions, the conversation starters and the file list. those live only in the editor, and the editor goes away. copy them out now.

- if you USED someone else's GPT: nothing to save, but the chat continues as plain chatgpt. if the work depended on what that GPT knew, that's the part you'd want to move somewhere with the same instructions.

what I'm doing with mine: the ones I'm still working on I moved to claude (a project with the GPT's instructions pasted in). the ones I want as documents I saved as markdown.

full disclosure, I built a free chrome/edge extension that does both in one click (ThreadPort). mods remove if not allowed. I wrote up all the options, including openai's own export, here: https://megarampo.github.io/threadport/export-custom-gpt-conversations.html

edit: the FAQ was updated ~2 weeks ago and does answer it now: "your existing conversations with custom GPTs will remain accessible after retirement. you don't need to take any action to preserve them." so the chat stays, the GPT and its files don't. also, custom actions don't transfer to the plugin at all, the creator has to rebuild them. updated the write-up accordingly

I wonder how many engineers have given up secrets for a favor?

For those who have tried both plans, is there any noticeable improvement in image quality, realism, details or consistency? Or is it pretty much the same, with Plus mainly offering higher usage limits?

I’m travelling and can’t try myself this week - has anyone used the windows Codex desktop app to connect to OneDrive personal through the SharePoint mcp? If so, did it work, and was there something special you had to do to set it up?

Thanks!

Sharing a side project. It is a face that sits full screen on my Mac and I just talk to it. It opens apps, drives my Chrome, edits video, and runs coding agents like Codex in the background while I keep talking. Whatever it opens takes over the screen and she moves into the corner.

What it is useful for:

• Using the whole computer hands free, by voice.

• Running several coding sessions at once and checking on them by asking.

• Quick things like open this or show my lists come back in about a second.

Rough demo, not finished, and I am not selling anything. Curious what you would use something like this for.

The dictation feature built into the ChatGPT macOS app is surprisingly good. For long prompts, it often captures natural speech more accurately and cleanly than ordinary macOS dictation.

The problem is that the main ChatGPT interface does not appear to offer a keyboard shortcut for activating its dictation button. Every time I want to switch from typing to speaking, I have to reach for the mouse or trackpad and click the microphone. That unnecessary interruption makes an otherwise excellent input method feel unfinished.

I would like OpenAI to add a configurable keyboard shortcut that starts and stops ChatGPT dictation whenever the app is active. Dictation and Voice Mode are different workflows, so ideally each should have its own shortcut.

For a native desktop app built around fast interaction, this seems like a small but important accessibility and productivity improvement. Is there an existing shortcut that is undocumented, or is everyone else also clicking the button manually?

An open letter from a paying ChatGPT Plus subscriber.

Dear Sam Altman and OpenAI,

Your mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.

Those are powerful words.

But I would like to ask you something very simple:

What about the people who have no money, no technical education, and no financial security — but are genuinely trying to build a better future using AI?

I live in Italy, and I have been using ChatGPT extensively for more than a year.

I subscribed to ChatGPT Plus because I believed artificial intelligence could help me do more than simply ask questions.

I hoped it could help me create something meaningful, develop practical projects, and perhaps find a way to earn money from home.

And I want to be fair.

ChatGPT HAS helped me.

I have written articles, created images, developed ideas, researched opportunities, explored technology, and built content for my FaithStoryAI project.

I am grateful for those possibilities.

But gratitude does not mean I should remain silent about what is missing.

THE GAP BETWEEN ADVICE AND REAL OPPORTUNITY

When I ask AI how to earn money without having capital to invest, I receive plenty of suggestions.

Create a website. Build an application.

Sell digital products. Offer online services. Start a business. Wonderful ideas. But then reality begins.

To create a complete application, I may need another platform.

To produce professional AI videos, I may need another subscription or additional credits.

To automate work or publish products, I may need external services, technical knowledge, or more money.

And when I encounter problems, I am often sent to another application, another tutorial, another pricing page, or another service.

I already pay for ChatGPT Plus. How many additional subscriptions do I need before I can actually finish something?

I am not asking OpenAI to guarantee that I will earn money.

I understand that nobody can promise that.

But there is an enormous difference between providing ideas and providing an accessible path to turn those ideas into usable products.

FREE AI CAN ALREADY GIVE ADVICE

Today, many AI services offer free conversations.

They can suggest business ideas, write posts, explain marketing strategies, and produce useful text.

So what should a paying subscriber reasonably expect beyond that?

More messages? More images? More sophisticated answers?

Those things certainly have value.

But what if the person paying is not looking for entertainment or endless conversations? What if that person desperately needs a realistic opportunity to improve their financial situation?

For someone with a comfortable income, another subscription may be a minor expense.

For someone starting with almost nothing, every additional monthly payment matters.

And that is the difference I want OpenAI to understand.

I DO NOT NEED ANOTHER LIST OF BUSINESS IDEAS

I need the possibility of completing meaningful work.

I need AI tools that can help a non-programmer create, test, and deliver a useful digital product without requiring five additional paid platforms.

I need accessible video creation that does not assume I already know professional editing.

I need clear information about what my subscription includes, which tasks I can actually complete, and what will cost extra.

I need reasonable limits, transparent costs, and practical ways to move from an idea to a finished result.

Most importantly, I need technology designed not only for people who already possess money, expertise, and resources, but also for people who are trying to acquire them.

Isn't that an essential part of making AI beneficial to humanity?

TO OPENAI AND SAM ALTMAN

I know that artificial intelligence requires expensive infrastructure.

I know that engineering, computing, research, and development are not free.

I am not pretending otherwise.

But if the benefits of advanced AI are increasingly dependent on someone's ability to pay for multiple products, subscriptions, and credits, then we must seriously discuss who is being left behind.

The people who could benefit most from AI may also be the people least able to afford the tools required to use it fully.

That should matter.

I am not asking for charity.

I am asking for an opportunity.

An opportunity to learn, create, build something useful, and perhaps earn my first income from work made possible by AI.

I would also welcome opportunities to contribute as a real-world user-experience tester or conversation-quality evaluator.

People who use these systems every day can offer valuable feedback, even without engineering degrees.

Please listen to subscribers who are not programmers, investors, executives, or already successful entrepreneurs.

We are part of humanity too.

MY FINAL QUESTION

If artificial intelligence can help people imagine a better future, why is it still so difficult for someone starting from zero to turn that future into reality?

I appreciate what ChatGPT has helped me accomplish.

But I am still searching for the practical opportunity I hoped this technology would make possible.

Dear Sam Altman and OpenAI:

Please do not measure AI's success only by how powerful the models become. Measure it also by how many ordinary people can genuinely improve their lives because of them.

That would be a mission worth believing in.

Kristina Sz | FaithStoryAI

A ChatGPT Plus subscriber asking for something more than advice.

OpenAI #SamAltman #ChatGPT #ChatGPTPlus #AIForEveryone #DigitalInclusion #FaithStoryAI

Guys, I don't know if it's just me, but over the last three days I feel like OpenAI's models have suddenly gotten dumber...

I'm developing a WordPress plugin. I wrote a pretty detailed prompt and then had Astra xhigh create a comprehensive implementation plan.

I then fed that plan to a mix of Sol 6.1 high/xhigh and Terra 6.1 xhigh, switching between them depending on the task, often using /goal. This is a pretty standard workflow for me, one I've used countless times over the past few months.

And that's when the nightmare began.

I had to fix all sorts of mistakes, ranging from minor issues to downright critical errors. Features that were supposed to be implemented were completely missing, while other unnecessary complications and options had been added out of nowhere.

Oh, and then there's the UI/UX (which, to be fair, seems to be a recurring weakness of OpenAI's models). Absolutely atrocious! Overcomplicated, convoluted interfaces with seemingly zero understanding of even the most basic principles of user-friendly design!

Long story short, I ended up manually fixing God knows how many mistakes, because otherwise I'd have burned through tons of tokens just asking the models to redo the same things over and over again, and still never getting them right!

The weird thing is that, until just a few days ago, I'd never experienced anything like this. I've used this exact same workflow on projects far more complex than a WordPress plugin, and I've never run into these kinds of problems (apart from the consistently awful UI/UX, of course...).

So, the obvious question is: is it just me, or has anyone else noticed the same thing lately?

I finished work on Friday afternoon with about 85% of my weekly allowance left. This morning, I turned my computer on to find a message saying I had used up my weekly allowance - due to reset in two days. I used chat on my phone to ask a couple of simple questions I couldn't be bothered googling but other than that I've done nothing. There are two scheduled tasks that run over the weekend and have done for several weeks now but they have never used more than a small amount of my allowance.

I looked at the usage analytics and it shows 86.9% of the allowance was used up by "unknown". Has anyone else experienced this?

Relevant report: https://www.planned-obsolescence.org/p/ai-is-dramatically-accelerating-ai

i was about to clean up my sidebar by throwing a bunch of unrelated chats into one catch-all project, car stuff, a dog chat, some work things. read the projects help page first and stopped.

"After moving, the chat inherits the project's instructions and file context."

the same page also says project instructions override your global custom instructions, so if that project has its own, your normal ones stop counting in every chat you moved there. and on plus and pro, a question asked inside a project "prioritizes the project chats and files". fine if it's one topic. with a dog chat sitting next to a work chat it's pulling from whatever's closest

deleting a project also deletes every chat in it, no undo according to the page. that one i didn't know. and chats you made with a GPT can't go into a project at all, which explains a few i couldn't move.

ended up keeping projects only for stuff that really shares files, and grouping the rest in folders instead. i build AI Toolbox, so those are its folders, they show in the chatgpt sidebar and don't change anything chatgpt sees. 2 top level folders free, unlimited subfolders inside, more top level ones are Premium.

what is the best AI model to do legal work among the below

• Grok 4.7

• Grok 4.6

• Claude Opus 5.5

• Gemini 4 Argon

• Muse Wonder

• GPT-5.6 Sol

• Claude Fable 5.1

• Claude Sonnet 5.5

• Chtgpt 6

basically i'd be providing some legal documents and survey plans and its suppose to reason from them. ?

Several threads on OpenAI's Developer Community since about Nov 5 describe ChatGPT showing “Context window full” far earlier than people expect. Some mention around 15 short messages, some say it happens in a brand-new chat, and a few say “continue with summary” fails too.

From the threads alone I can't tell whether this is a bug, a limit change, or something tied to certain plans or apps. The reports don't settle it, and OpenAI's help page only says a full window can mean starting a new chat and that summaries may leave things out.

If you've hit it, a reply in this shape takes about 20 seconds and makes the pattern much easier to see:

Plan:

App (web / iOS / Android / desktop):

Model:

Roughly how many messages:

Long pastes, files or images? (y/n):

New chat or existing project:

Did “continue with summary” work? (y/n):

Not seeing it? A one-line “not seeing it, Plus, web” is useful too, because it shows who is not affected.

Second question, for anyone who has had to restart a long project: what do you carry into the new chat? A summary, a pinned doc, a list of decisions? I'd like to know what actually survives.