> I was imaging if LLMs could finally solve the micropayments solution people have always proposed for the internet. Part of my monthly payment gets split between all of the sites that the LLM scraped knowledge. Paid out like Spotify pays out artists.

As a software user I wish I could do the same for all the software I use.

Many open source projects accept donations. There's also explicitly paid-for software. What exactly do you wish for that you can't do right now?

Specifically the part where engineers get paid the same way as artists on Spotify.

So a handful will make a buttload but the vast majority won't make enough to pay rent?

Certainly that's how open source pans out.

Doesn't sound nice if it happens to us does it?

So not at all for their work and with a reverse Robin Hood model? That would be terrible for software. The way artists gets paid on streaming is a genius play at catering to the biggest artists and labels and screw over the smaller ones, especially true on Spotify with their freemium model

Trust, reputation, and credibility will become (even more of) a premium.

It's like chairs!

Macs will just get more expensive. C'mon man, we're supposed to be Silicon Valley engineers, the pinnacle of human intellect.

I don't really understand all the comments here downplaying or ridiculing those who are worried about the impact of these tools.

The way I see it, the existence of these tools have negative impact on some people and they are reacting to that. Are they not allowed to fight back in the way they think is appropriate?

We see what we want to see. I mostly see anti-AI comments littered on hn. Maybe it is because my brain is picking them out, or maybe it is because they're much stronger than the "I'm ok with AI" comments.

I dunno, I feel it's just democratizing insider trading. And as everyone knows, if it has "democratizing" in it, that means it's automatically good.

In a way, it's even worse. (Yes, I know the post is sardonic, I mean it's even worse than that.)

Many of these things are not really democratized either, they're centralized systems with a "we empower you" sales-pitch. The opaque and unaccountable central authority has an incentive to pick-and-choose what's possible, and to put their thumb on the metaphorical scales to get certain outcomes.

Kind of like ride-share apps: Any pretense of "democratizing" jobs faded, instead they enabled new flavors of monopolistic exploitation.

It's funny, after posting the above message I started thinking what else can be made to sound "good" just by prepending it with "democratizing". Surprisingly it works really well.

Professor Farnsworth: "Good news, everyone! We're democratizing your health insurance!"

Leela: "You mean we can all together vote on the best plan?"

Farnsworth: "Hmm? Oh yes, as long as you do it all alone."

> democratizing insider trading

Those are contradictory words

Are we entering the Reverse-Moore's Law era.

Why do they want my email though? Well, I can guess why. But why would some random email be useful for such a site?

Building a newsletter, so I can keep sending cool pieces to your inbox

Everybody hates this and you know it, worsening the experience of real people for an absurdly small chance of personal profit

removed it

what profit?

Does Claude Code (or whatever harness) have it's own system prompt of on top of Opus'?

Yes, in fact it has an entirely different system prompt from the ones that Anthropic publish on https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/release-notes/system-pro...

The Claude Code one isn't published anywhere but it's very easy to get hold of. One way to do that is to run Claude Code through a logging proxy - I was using a project called claude-trace for this last year but I'm not sure if it still works, I've not tried it in a while: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/2/claude-trace/

A sucker is born everyday

One a day? I think we're up to over 4 a second.

https://worldstats.io/clock