Here in rural USA, we were paying $150 for very slow DSL, and now we're paying about $50 for quite fast Starlink.
In Asia I was paying $50 for very fast fiber, but that was in a major city; out at the farm you're on the mobile networks. So if I build a house out there and can do Starlink, I will do it.
Plus, there's the whole Starlink Roam thing: in California this summer, I see more and more vans with the little Starlink rectangle on top. "Work from Campsite" is pretty compelling, honestly.
I just went to Apple.com and specced out the top of the line 14" Macbook Pro, and the price is $9,849.00. Well over 10K with California sales tax.
I could absolutely justify having that machine for the actual work I do, and I'm not even doing any of the really hard AI things. If I were, I might prefer a Thelio Mega workstation from System76, which is $90,383.00 fully loaded.
Alas I can not afford a 10K personal computer right now, which is not the same thing.
For my own projects, I'm very happy with an outcome that is "not faster, but better" as a result of my use of generative AI.
I still hope this will be a shared goal in at least some tech companies long-term. But the headwinds are strong. "Not better, but faster" is starting to look like a job requirement.
Totally doable and I would buy one. Only problem is that most of the time when I'm doing "SWE" stuff I'm around other people and can't have the conversation out loud.
This is a problem that banks deal with all the time.
It truly is a pain in the butt. But if access to (US banking | Fable) is worth it, you do the annoying work, and the customers accept the annoying limitations.
That part is up to Anthropic. KYC[0] is not exotic, it's just a pain in the butt: if Fable is that good, they can do the KYC.
I don't think this is the right move from the government, but we shouldn't pretend that "citizens only" is an insurmountable hurdle for a company that just got a $65B capital infusion.
Your manager will look at your token usage and the number of Jira tickets you closed, and if you have not increased both 10x in the past year then you will be let go. 10x is the new 1x.
Whether that's early retirement depends on how much money you have.
They might also ask why a bunch of static CSS inside a bunch of JavaScript is hiding inside __init__.py[0] - hopefully before trying to fix some detail of the CSS.
(I'm surprised to see it actually, since my own use of Claude has mostly yielded well-structured code. But I'm not doing proper vibe-coding, more like friendly Socratic arguing with another engineer who happens to be a robot.)
In order to not un-build the data centers, they at least have to make more than it costs to operate them, and also not have some attractive liquidation value (the land, maybe).
I could imagine something like “inference is done at home or in China, that’s the price to beat” and it’s not worth keeping all those GPUs cool out in Nevada.
I’m a high-agency, high-energy, eclectic, serious, fun, creative techie who’s done lots of things at BigCos and startups. My happy place is working hard with smart people on something big and complex that makes the world better.
After several years in the consulting/contracting game, I am looking for an ambitious team to join. Maybe yours!
A few of my spinning plates right now: Golang inference worker, two Expo apps in TS/RN, Python data pipeline, AWS IoT for HVAC-adjacent devices, shared FFI components in Rust, and a HealthTech web app in TS/React.
Interested? Drop me a line, and if you’re in the Bay Area let’s grab a beverage!
On the other hand, it's pretty easy to imagine the full range of Skynet activities being done by a supercharged (but non-AGI) agentic LLM. Meanwhile, every company that can say so with a straight face is trying to become Cyberdyne Systems, and there's no shortage of hackers like us lining up to work for them.
To me at least, the intriguing part has nothing to do with the textbook goals of whichever foulmouthed trillionaires you have in mind.
The intriguing part is that we could get objectively good outcomes, but at a cost of being dependent on the machines. So it's not that you couldn't actually unplug Skynet, it's that if you did civilization would collapse (or whatever) because Skynet stops doing its thing.
I'm not sure that gets us to a better place overall, but I doubt we could resist the temptation.
I'm no mathematician but it seems like if this happens, we get to a quite intriguing place as a species.
Say we achieve interstellar travel, but nobody actually knows how it works.
Or we cure cancer, but the "cure" requires a microrobotic implant, and it runs as a blackbox AI, and only the other AIs can make one, and there's no guarantee they will know how to make one tomorrow.
Or we solve global warming but it requires giant cooling machines running 24/7 and again, nobody knows how it works, but with the added bonus that the planet is cooked if they ever stop working.
Recently I reviewed some vibe-coded stuff and sent a list of issues and suggestions to the “author,” figuring he’d read it and then go through each one with Claude until fixed.
Instead he didn’t read it at all, and just threw the whole thing at Claude Code as a big prompt. The result was… interesting!
They’re still meaty and they aren’t taboo everywhere!
Whenever I go to the family farm I check to see if there are any fat juicy grilled rats at the local market. Alas, I’m still too squeamish to eat them, but I’m working up to it!
https://biztos.com