I've been maintaining homelab servers for two decades, used all kinds of IaC approaches etc.
Switched to NixOS a few years ago, and I can't overstate the amount of peace it has brought to my life. It just takes so much stress away, compared to everything else I've used before.
My only criticism is that the Nix language is not super ergonomic or easy to learn. But with LLMs nowadays, even that is barely ever a problem.
I'm constantly thinking about that Microsoft guy who posted something like "we want 1 million LoC per engineer per month", which basically read as satire to most engineers I talked to, except apparently it was not satire at all, and indeed seemed to reflect the position of many CEOs etc when it comes to LLM code generation.
I do think that over the past few months, it feels like the hype around producing unmaintainable amounts of LoC has started dying down. More pragmatic and realistic takes are seemingly shared more openly, and are maybe even getting through to top leadership at some tech companies. Maybe not all is lost yet.
I dunno, I find it extremely unbelievable that we will get self-improving AGI which chooses to become a slave to humanity at all, ultra rich or otherwise.
Glorifying this type of abuse needs to be called out.
Every human gets only ~16 waking hours a day to live their lives, it is absolutely immoral to sign a contract to pay somebody for literally half of this time, and then pressuring them into giving up even more of their life on top of that. Especially when using threats of revoking the original contract if they don’t comply, and/or not offering any additional compensation.
Has anybody else noticed a pretty significant shift in sentiment when discussing Claude/Codex with other engineers since even just a few months ago? Specifically because of the secret/hidden nature of these changes.
I keep getting the sense that people feel like they have no idea if they are getting the product that they originally paid for, or something much weaker, and this sentiment seems to be constantly spreading. Like when I hear Anthropic mentioned in the past few weeks, it's almost always in some negative context.
I've been arguing that it's POSSIBLE to get a small (but meaningful) uplift in productivity on average if you are careful with how you use LLMs, but at the same time, it's also extremely easy to actually negatively impact your productivity.
In both cases, you feel super productive all the time, because you are constantly putting in instructions and getting massive amounts of output, and this feels like constant & fast progress. It's scary how easy it is to waste time on LLMs while not even realizing you are wasting time.
The point is that you can’t just serve tokens without also training the next models.
It’s an inseparable part of your costs, so naturally you can’t be profitable unless the price you are charging ALSO covers training.
I am pretty convinced that for most types of day to day work, any perceived improvements from the latest Claude models for example were total placebo. In blind tests and with normal tasks, people would probably have no idea if they're using Opus 4.5 or 4.6.
Maybe I'm misreading it, but I don't see him saying it's just the cost of *inference* alone (which is the strawman that the article in the OP is arguing against). He says:
> this company is wilfully burning 200% to 3000% of each Pro or Max customer that interacts with Claude Code
There is of course this meme that "Anthropic would be profitable today if they stopped training new models and only focused on inference", but people on HN are smart enough to understand that this is not realistic due to model drift, and also due to comeptition from other models. So training is forever a part of the cost of doing business, until we have some fundamental changes in the underlying technology.
I can only interpret Ed Zitron as saying "the cost of doing business is 200% to 3000% of the price users are paying for their subscriptions", which sounds extremely plausible to me.
I’m not worried about job loss as a result of being replaced by AI, because if we get AI that is actually better than humans - which I imagine must be AGI - then I don’t see why that AI would be interested in working for humans.
I’m definitely worried about job loss as a result of the AI bubble bursting, though.
The US does not benefit from a stronger, more unified Europe. Thanks to NATO, "the west" has effectively become an empire in all but name, with the US having enough influence to be the de facto leaders of this empire.
If US pulls back from NATO, and Europe builds up military power to compensate, then the US loses this de facto leadership seat of an empire.
Today, the US appears in parallel to be doing two things:
1. Causing fragmentation in Europe, by promoting right-wing nationalist politics in the EU
2. Threatening to drastically reduce their role in NATO
At the very least we can both agree that these two efforts are completely in contradiction with each other, and it's very unlikely that Europeans will want to go for more fragmentation without the military power of the US on their side, right?
I hate submitting any kind of form on any website from my phone, because I can't open dev tools and see if there were any errors in the response which were invisible in the UI.
Switched to NixOS a few years ago, and I can't overstate the amount of peace it has brought to my life. It just takes so much stress away, compared to everything else I've used before.
My only criticism is that the Nix language is not super ergonomic or easy to learn. But with LLMs nowadays, even that is barely ever a problem.