About half of US households don’t have any retirement at all. Making their point that “shareholders” are a distinct class separate from the whole of the population.
Yes, DeepSeek is open-weight, but these third-party providers offering similar prices are subsidized with VC money as well. And you can find a range of prices for deepseek-v4-flash going up to and over $1/Mtok.
Even that $1/Mtok provided by Together AI is heavily subsidized by more than $1B in VC money.
This makes it unclear how the true cost curve is progressing. It’s not possible to confidently comment one way or another on the rate that cost is coming down when the entire industry is so heavily subsidized.
Unless your insider is the CFO, I wouldn’t trust these sources to have the access, knowledge, or insight to determine whether they’re running inference at a profit.
Simple test: can they get their hands on a data center contracts and financials?
Search isn’t anywhere near as high profile as the profitability of AI inference, and yet, even aspects of the Search org were walled off from the rest of the company such that other employees couldn’t see what we see.
I say the following not to brag but to offer up some more perspective for you: you’re comp is in the lower-mid range of the market. Comp was there for remote, startup eng positions back in 2017.
As you move up in comp, the market actually gets more difficult, not just because the market is more competitive but because some companies won’t even interview qualified engineers with FAANG on their resume because they don’t believe they can afford them.
So I can understand why you might have an easier time compared to other engs.
Your first two quotes are about targeting in the Iraq War; specifically how the breakdown in careful analysis, precipitated by the new systems, led to the exact mis-targeting they were trying to solve. That’s what the entire article is about.
And your third quote is from an ex-official commenting on the event after the school strike happened.
These quotes contradict your original point, ie they show how careful analysis has been designed out of the system.
> We killed young kids, but not on purpose. We targeted a building and intent matters. I refuse to believe anyone in the decision chain would move forward if they believed kids were going to be killed. If you do - how can you? Why would they?
This sounds incredibly naive. For starters, plausible deniability due to diffuse responsibility is a thing.
“Of course we don’t target schools and kill children, this was a system error.” But the message gets sent regardless and meanwhile we have people arguing back-and-forth over grains of sand because they took an action with deliberate plausible deniability.
Of course they didn’t intend to kill the children, they only intended to disperse the strikers by setting their tents on fire. It was simply a mistake.
You’re acting like the U.S. government is a monolithic good faith actor right now. The current administration’s behavior is qualitatively different than past administrations.
Do you also believe this administration will ever officially confirm Renee Good and Alex Pretti were not domestic terrorists?
It’s hard to interpret your points charitably here.
> An ongoing [United States] military investigation has determined that the United States is responsible for a deadly Tomahawk missile strike on an Iranian elementary school, according to U.S. officials and others familiar with the preliminary findings.
So I read the entire TFA, where do you see “quotes [from] those in the know who believe this should have been eliminated as a target”? I saw no such quotes about the school in TFA. Maybe I missed it.
> there was precisely one mis-strike in 1000s of sorties
How did you verify this? Because I’ll remind you, the U.S. administration denied responsibility for some time before owning up to this due to public pressure. Absent public pressure, I guess we would’ve had zero mis-strikes.
> so this already is a low error rate
As a father of similarly aged daughters, I can’t express enough how grotesque and disturbing the term “error rate” is here.
We targeted and killed young children. Plain and simple.
> However, you have made a very, very strong assumption that these targets were not carefully evaluated.
Let’s take the opposing assumption that this target was carefully evaluated then. Please reason through the implications now?
How much did this cost? Has there ever been an engineering focus on performance for liquid?
It’s certainly cool, but the optimizations are so basic that I’d expect a performance engineer to find these within a day or two with some flame graphs and profiling.
Apologies, I may have misinterpreted the passage below from your repo:
> This crate was developed with the assistance of Claude Opus 4.5 initially to answer the shower thought "would the Braille Unicode trick work to visually simulate complex ball physics in a terminal?" Opus 4.5 one-shot the problem, so I decided to further experiment to make it more fun and colorful.
Also, yes, I don’t dispute that human written software takes iteration as well. My point is that the significance of autonomous agentic coding feels exaggerated if I’m holding the LLM’s hand more than I have to hold a senior engineer’s hand.
That doesn’t mean the tech isn’t valuable. The claims just feel over exaggerated.
Weird, I broke Opus 4.5 pretty easily by giving some code, a build system, and integration tests that demonstrate the bug.
CC confidently iterated until it discovered the issue. CC confidently communicated exactly what the bug was, a detailed step-by-step deep dive into all the sections of the code that contributed to it. CC confidently suggested a fix that it then implemented. CC declared victory after 10 minutes!
The bug was still there.
I’m willing to admit I might be “holding it wrong”. I’ve had some successes and failures.
It’s all very impressive, but I still have yet to see how people are consistently getting CC to work for hours on end to produce good work. That still feels far fetched to me.
Good points - admittedly, I didn’t put enough effort into building connections through different pipelines back when I was contracting. Upwork and a few personal connections were my sole sources.
It just felt really difficult to do both the engineering work while trying to do customer development at the same time.
The fact that OP has been able to do this for so long, while supporting a family, piqued my interest.