The infrastructure piece is what they do best. I'd be happy if Anthropic became the AWS of AI. But this product is just a mediocre shot at Figma, when no such shot is strictly necessary for them. These kinds of consumer products are not what they do best.
If that is what they are optimizing for, then they are not doing a great job on that either. Their latest model is more expensive and less impressive, their downtime is abysmal by any comparison, their "Dispatch" product is unworkable - conversation threads don't sync properly, the UX is quite bad -, their Desktop app is slow and clunky, Cowork is by all accounts mediocre.
It really feels like Anthropic's product area is extremely overextended at this point. If they want to extend themselves horizontally in an unlimited fashion, they will need unlimited focus, and agents can't supply that. Things will fall through the cracks. Why should I believe that Anthropic will care about this product in 2, 3 years? Whereas I firmly believe that Figma will care greatly about its product in that time
Sex is not like other subjects, it is peculiarly liable to harm, obsess, distract us. Sexual content is uniquely powerful in its ability to reduce human beings to objects for use, and having the ability to generate endless amounts of it completely privately is a very dangerous power to have. I worry about what it will do to us to have this technology, and I worry that OpenAI is treating this subject with too little concern.
I've recently read the great moral philosopher Alisdair MacIntyre's book "After Virtue", and in it he defines a "practice" as:
> "any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended. Tic-tac- toe is not an example of a practice in this sense, nor is throwing a football with skill; but the game of football is, and so is chess. Bricklaying is not a practice; architecture is. Planting turnips is not a practice; farming is. So are the
enquiries of physics, chemistry and biology, and so is the work of the historian, and so are painting and music. In the ancient and medieval worlds the creation and sustaining of human communities-of households, cities, nations-is generally taken to be a practice in the sense in which I have defined it. Thus the range of practices is wide: arts, sciences, games, politics in the Aristotelian sense, the making and sustaining of family life, all fall under the concept."
Programming is a practice (especially during the golden era of open source software), with its own "internal goods" such as described by this article: the pleasure of optimizing an algorithm, the "ah-ha" of finding a great root cause, the beauty of a well-written function, the fun of it.
MacIntyre also says that practices can only be incubated and cultivated within "institutions" - organizations which specifically exist to protect the development of a practice from the intrusion of external goods, by careful management of external goods. But institutions can become corrupted and degrade the practices within them. And indeed recently programming has been degraded into a simple skill used to obtain external goods, namely wealth and fame, and the institutions where programming tends to be cultivated tend to have deeply corrupted themselves. One can still recognize people in tech companies that fight against this tendency, but it's a remarkable confirmation of his thesis in my opinion.
Wait — isn't that exactly what good investors do? They look for what stocks are going to beat expectations and invest in them. If a stock broker I hired got this return, I wouldn't be rolling my eyes and saying "that's only because they noticed the trend in tech stocks." That's exactly what I'm paying them to do.
It once again completely fails on an extremely simple test: look at a screenshot of sheet music, and tell me what the notes are. Producing a MIDI file for it (unsurprisingly) was far beyond its capabilities.
>> Apple’s stated intents to actively incriminate you by scanning your photos on a personal device
You do realize that Google also scans your images for CP, and furthermore that Google's current business model is literally surveillance advertisement, right?
Additionally, the while the publicity of that announcement was terrible PR for apple, it was really a request for comment. They got comments from security professionals, and then they acknowledged the problems, retracted the announcement, and are working with those professionals on a system that will be better from a privacy perspective.
Try getting that behavior from Google, a company who's existence is dependent on surveillance advertising.
Very few make or believe that argument. There's absolutely nothing wrong with wishing that things had gone a little better than they did at the time. We can still believe in a more humane world while still greatly appreciating the benefits that modern society has given us.
I wish they didn't look so silly to ride. I know that scooters will slowly become more ubiquitous and, as a result, will be considered more normal and less goofy to ride.
But for now, it just kinda looks goofy to a lot of people.