Anthropic recently dropped all inclusive use from new enterprise subscriptions, your seat sub gets you a seat with no usage. All usage is then charged at API rates. It’s like a worst of both worlds!
SSO Tax is a large part of it, controls around plug-in marketplace, enforcement of config, observeability of spend. But it’s all pretty weak really for $20 a month.
And Microsoft are going the same route to moving Copilot Cowork over to a utilisation based billing model which is very unusual for their per seat products (I’m actually not sure I can ever remember that happening).
If you want other people to know whether you're being genuine or sarcastic, you'll have to put a bit more effort into your comments. Your comment just adds noise.
Because code is fundamentally not a creative work the way art is. Code "just" has to be correct, even if that correctness has demanded to come up with ideas. And as a software developer you usually get paid a nice salary to write it, no matter if you're typing it yourself or generate it with an AI.
Art can't be generated. We can only generate artefacts mimicking art styles. So far we have no AI generated images that are considered actual Art, because Art's purpose is to express the artist's intent. And when there is no artist, there is no intent.
I have to stop now, but I guess you can see where I'm going with this.
Art can be generated perfectly fine. Only artists and connoisseurs care about details and art style. Most art is purchased by a business, and that business just wants a picture of a woman being happy next to a cake that looks similar enough to the other corporate pictures.
Code can be art the same way writing can be. There's a big difference between artistic code and business code, the same way there's a big difference between poetry and a comment chain on hacker news.
I don't mean to be mean, but I don't think you understand what Art is. For example, I don't consider a picture of a woman being happy next to a cake art. That's a decorative artefact. And I don't really consider myself a connoisseurs, nor do I particularly care about details or art style.
I'm not trying to be pretentious or precious about art. But I consider the process of creation to be as much a fundamental part of art as the resulting artefact. If I can't contextualize a work of art to a human's inner life - be it implicitly or through knowing about the artist - it's not really art to me.
Artistic code can be a work of art. But only if created by a human (in a way that humans make art), and I think the same principles should apply to it as any other medium of art. But that kind of code is so rare and insignificant compared to all other code being written and published, that I don't think it's worth watering down the discussion with it.
I would only consider AI generated output art, if the way to get there were a substantial artistic expression.
So I think visual arts and music fall in a different category because it's much more artistic, unconstrained, and personal by nature than code. Even if that difference sits on a spectrum. But on that spectrum they're worlds apart.
I struggle explaining my point of view better and hope I manage to get my point across at least to some extent.
Having said all that, I do consider training LLMs on other people's code without compensation wrong as well. Just not as wrong as I do with other stuff.
I don’t think that’s completely true, there is an art to code beyond it just being correct. There are a great many correct implementations of a program, but only some of them are really beautiful as well. Most people don’t see the code or appreciate this, but the difference between correct and art is clear to me when I see it.
Code can be beautiful or ugly but that doesn't make it art.
Art is not just about beauty, it is about expressing the mind (feelings, experience etc) of the author. AI will never do that (except if it learns to express its own experiences, which would be art, but not something competing with human art; it would be like if we had contact with alien art).
I think that's the main thing many people who've never seriously made art or aren't deeply involved with it on an emotional and psychological level are unable to grasp.
I think most of us agree that writing code can be expressive. But I don't think that alone qualifies you code as art.
I have written code myself that I deem beautiful and expressive. But I'm also a musician, and making music (and listening to it deeply) has given me such intense, mystic experiences, that they dwarf anything I've ever experienced writing code. It's also much harder to make good music because it requires a kind of courage and psychological constitution that is simply not required for writing code.
I respectfully disagree, I think code has always been more of an art than a science. It's an odd one, I'll grant you, as you need to do a lot of work to really appreciate it.
If the dataset weren't valuable, big tech wouldn't depend on it to train their models.
I don't care about getting a millionth of a cent as an artist (which btw is a number *you* just pulled out of your imagination). I care about them paying a fair share instead of pocketing it, so the money stays in circulation instead of creating a new class of technofeudal lords.
Serious question, as someone who started his professional developer career as a RoR developer in 2012: Isn't vibe-coding top for straight up CRUD?
I'm not trying to be glib. The thing that seemed magic to me at that time was all the scaffolding that Rails provided with a few simple commands, making it possible to quickly build something that let the user authenticate and enter and display data. Sure, Ruby itself and the culture around it back then was also great and will always have a place in my heart. But the whole convention-over-configuration and scaffolding thing, that was what I liked so much about it, and I never found that in any other language/framework combo in a way that felt as smooth.
But now, I use AI for scaffolding, and for my side-projects often never have to touch code.
So why would I choose something for a CRUD application that might give me headaches down the road, when there's a possibility that the app might morph into something less conventional, when I could use *any* language/framework that's not as rigid and have the scaffold be built by AI?
I get it if you enjoy actually writing code. But I don't quite get the benefits if the goal is to have something working quickly and be able to potentially build it out to something that is not served that well by RoR.
Geohot is the epitome of someone who thinks because they're exceptionally intelligent and competent in a niche area, they're in a position to confidently explain how the world "really" works, without having to put any effort into actually researching areas outside of their niche.
His blog posts and general opinions voiced in his streams in any other field than what he's working in are so incredibly stupid and put forward with so much misguided confidence that they make me cringe in pain.
Not everyone knows who geohot is and even if they do they may not see the url handle. They may (like me) think why is a glorified shower thought tweet on top of HN.
They may not know that this dude was an anti-masker (with nuance) for example. This could really make them decide not to even spend too much time thinking about the passage which in theory is profound for 10 seconds but no further.
As much as ad hominem attacks are not great approaches, the one scenario I feel it's justified is in cases like this.
Masks didn't work for people needing an immediate cure, but it was never that, it always was a multiplier, and even an multiplier with only 30% efficiency would translate to 4x reduction in spread through 4 levels.
And that reduction was there to give healthcare workers a chance to not be overwhelmed as they were for a large part of the initial pandemic.
Public health recommendations aren’t medical advice though. The advice agencies give is given to everyone and so has to take things like supply chains and the economy into consideration before making recommendations.
I might be misremembering, but I think the WHO claimed this at some point?
It was obvious nonsense, and did not comfort me as I watched an avoidable catastrophe become, day by day, an unavoidable one; politicians caring more about pacifying the populace with platitudes than about taking measures to render SARS-CoV-2 extinct in the wild – measures which would have been several orders of magnitude cheaper than the extended pandemic lockdowns, disabilities and trauma, loss of life, and now a new disabling endemic disease we're going to have to fight the hard way, for centuries, until it can finally go the way of smallpox.
There was an extremely brief period where public health advice discouraged the general population from masking. This was because there was a huge undersupply for medical workers and because we hadn't fully figured out whether covid aerosolized mere weeks into the pandemic.
Once we had a bit more information in a rapidly evolving situation public health advice switched to recommending masks and stayed that way for years.
We cannot possibly expect public health advice to get everything right immediately during a once-in-a-century pandemic and this error should definitely not be used as a general "wow public health officials are dumb idiots or engaged in a malicious conspiracy", as this error is often used.
There was indeed a huge undersupply for medical workers. The appropriate response from public health officials should've been something like "surgical masks help protect others, and right now, we need to protect hospital patients", not "we want to keep masks available in hospitals where they're needed, because they're important, so let's tell people they're not important to make sure they're available". This is the kind of plan that would be used as an example of Adults Are Useless in a children's novel (ref: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AdultsAreUseless): it was never going to not backfire. (Does it even count as backfiring if you point the gun at your foot, and lean down to watch it go bang?) Institutional dysfunction can produce decisions that no individual would ever author, but there's a reason the Evil Overlord List has #12:
> One of my advisors will be an average five-year-old child. Any flaws in my plan that he is able to spot will be corrected before implementation.
And… it's SARS-CoV-2. Of course it aerosolises. The "we hadn't fully figured out" was sheer incompetence (see doi:10.1080/02786826.2024.2387985); just like the "we aren't sure whether it's reached our jurisdiction yet, so be vigilant", "oh lots people are showing symptoms", "actually turns out it reached us 3 weeks ago and is now endemic, haha oops" pattern we saw playing out in country after country, region after region, while open source intelligence collated on LessWrong obviously showed what the governments apparently could not see until tens of days too late. "Paranoid" early lockdowns could've lasted two weeks, allowed us to identify who was affected, and then allowed us to give them top-of-the-line isolated care while they recovered, and while the rest of the region got back to doing an economy. Instead, COVID-19 is still claiming new victims today.
Australia managed it, and everyone could've copied that, but they didn't. China could have managed it right at the start, and saved the world, if their accountability culture hadn't favoured a cover-up. (Their belated attempts to pursue a zero-COVID strategy were not particularly effective once it was a global pandemic and multiple strains were circulating, because it turns out you can't persuade people into not being ill; and sealing residential buildings is neither necessary nor sufficient contact tracing / isolation.) Zero-COVID would've been feasible as a global strategy, even starting as late as February 2020, if not for all the politicised bullshit. (No, "don't kill your neighbours by giving them a novel respiratory virus while all the hospitals are full" isn't authoritarianism. Sensible precautions are not setting a bad precedent, because it's a conditional precedent: if we were to wipe out the disease, there would no longer be a reason for those measures. In fact, the cryptographers figured out how to do privacy-preserving contact tracing, and shipped the protocol very quickly, so that the best available system was inherently anti-authoritarian.)
While I wouldn't use the phrase "dumb idiots", public health officials are, largely, responsible for long-term policy decisions, not rapid response. (If a response to a seasonal respiratory disease fails, you've usually got 8 months to put together a better one.) They had had little practice making the snap decisions, and they almost invariably made bad ones when it mattered. Replacing soap with diluted alcohol gel at handwashing stations, for example, is stupidity. Soapy water is one of the most effective anti-coronavirus measures disinfectants there is. A roughly 70% alcohol solution is a close second. (There are viruses that are not denatured by soap, for which alcohol is a much better disinfectant: I can only imagine that people got confused.) 30% alcohol solution is basically useless. Alcohol gel is useful because it's portable, but it's not as good for removing SARS-CoV-2 as washing your hands with soap and water.
So many resources were used (and entire supply chains were established!) ensuring that every surface is wiped, even though it's a respiratory disease and surfaces were not a major transmission vector; but very few resources were employed to ensure sufficient ventilation which, again, respiratory disease. It does not take a genius to make the link between "it infects your air holes" and "we should ventilate or filter the air". (Yes, I witnessed many people closing windows using the disinfectant cloth as a glove, to avoid touching the handle, right before filling the room with occupants.)
We were not prepared for the pandemic that happened, and I will condemn that, because are we going to do any better next time? Have we put measures in place to ensure that accurate information about the disease, including appropriate disease-specific hygiene measures, are rapidly disseminated? Have we ensured that international authorities and the populaces will calmly overreact, because overreaction is cheap and allows each patient to receive specialist treatment and maybe lets us wipe out the disease entirely? From where I'm standing, the WHO is weaker than ever, we've traumatised a generation to the point they'll resist any attempt to impose another lockdown (even though acting early means it might only last a few weeks, or even a few days!), and we've gained a political playbook for profiting from pandemic denialism.
A once-in-a-century pandemic should be expected to happen once in a century. Allocate a hundred people around the world whose jobs it is to know how to deal with that, and then listen to them if the rare event shows up. It's not conceptually difficult. That this is difficult for us in practice is damning.
The US is completely fucked if another pandemic hits within the next ~20 years. Or at least until a large percentage of the anti-vaxers created in the covid pandemic age out of the population. Having a decent response when half the country is going to be on team virus is not possible.
> Have we put measures in place to ensure that accurate information about the disease, including appropriate disease-specific hygiene measures, are rapidly disseminated.
This is irrelevant if half the country has the through process of "goverment says it therefore it is fake news bill gates microchip conspiracy".
The title is >Create value for others and don’t worry about the returns.
Isn't being an anti-masker the opposite of this viewpoint? Literally saying, I only care about the returns for myself, even if creates negative value for others.
It's so we can definitively identify this person as a Nazi, as persona non grata, so we can feel better about ourselves while we break quarantine and contravene public health orders to get clandestine haircuts and attend illegal cross-household parties.
So you must be careful to do everything they tell you.
But do not do what they do, for they do not practice
what they preach. They tie up heavy, cumbersome loads
and put them on other people’s shoulders, but they
themselves are not willing to lift a finger to move
them.
Everything they do is done for people to see: They make
their phylacteries wide and the tassels on their
garments long; [...]
Full stop disagree. This is not what HN is for, and should never be for. I have spent hours on IRC with geohot back in the late 2000s / early 2010s mind you, I never liked him, but this is not what HN is for, and not what it should ever become. You can do all of that on reddit, let's not ruin a good rare slice of the internet with meaningless bickering.
Ad hominem attacks are never good approaches. They're irrational in nature. Ad hominem is one of the first fallacies taught in a critical thinking class.
Ad hominems are formal fallacies. They are not valid deductive reasoning.
But people basically never use valid deductive reasoning for anything. Using available evidence to make predictions about things and act on those predictions is fine. If somebody has a history of poor thought or writing and then I encounter more of their thoughts or writing it is not unreasonable to say "this new material is likely to be poor and I don't need to spend time on it."
If somebody says "hey do you want to see Transformers 7", responding "I did not like Transformers 1-6 so I'll pass" is fine even if it is not deductive proof that you won't like Transformers 7.
if ad hominem attacks were of no value, humans wouldn't have evolved the strong tendency to engage in them.
they are not proofs in logic, hence the fallacy, but that does not mean they are irrational. it's irrational to think that human discourse can be capture by logic.
Surgical masks don't stop you from getting Covid. That was never what they were for: they were to reduce the viral load you exposed others to, between when you got infected and when you noticed that you were infected. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surgical_mask#Function.
Some cloth masks can (when dry) also trap small particulates through electrostatic interactions, although they are less effective as a mechanical filter than surgical masks; and many washing methods destroy this effect.
The distinction is important! The mechanism by which surgical masks prevent you from getting COVID-19 is peer pressure: it's important for people to know this, so they know how to protect themselves. (And there are fitted masks that protect the wearer: there was just a shortage of them, because despite all the warnings we were not prepared for a pandemic.)
The distinction does matter, because by not wearing a mask, instead of indicating that you don't care about your own safety, you're indicating that you don't care about anybody else's.
It was more nuanced than that and importantly, "Anti-masker" as a derogatory statement was about "This person is literally unwilling to do anything at all that doesn't pay off for them personally" because a goddamn mask is such a simple thing to do, and they just couldn't handle it, because it was someone else telling them to do something and some people just cannot function when that happens.
People lost their damn minds because "Hey could you maybe take a single small step to ensure you don't sneeze on produce" was protest worthy.
I do not believe someone saying "Masks made out of T-Shirts don't work well" or "Surgical masks aren't as effective as real N95 masks" are an "Anti-masker".
It was about vice-signalling. All the people who get pissy about masks do plenty of things for their "health" that have zero science behind them.
These people often did other things like hiding or downplaying any symptoms, and choosing to go to events while sick, and were often basically superspreaders.
This was all well understood like 25 years ago when WoW did that blood plague thing and people put effort into spreading it as much as possible. We've seen this with other diseases including ones that have no real controversy or political angle. Some people are just that insistent about doing everything they can to make the world a worse place.
But seriously, I think the level of discourse has gone down considerably on HN in the last few years. I know people always say this in their forum but I think it's true.
For instance, you'll see a post about GPT. Top comments are often "I use Claude", completely irrelevant. And then when [political thing happens] you get these passive-aggressive submissions with a lot of upvotes "how to switch to Claude". It's all just so exhausting. Constantly this moral grand-standing. Here is an example:
> I switched not because I thought Claude was better at doing the things I want. I switched because I have come to believe OpenAI are a bad actor and I do not want to support them in any way. I’m pretty sure they would allow AGI to be used for truly evil purposes, and the events of this week have only convinced me further.
I almost posted this exact comment. You're not alone in thinking HN has changed for the worse in recent years.
I get that it's just a reflection of cultural change and (over)reactions to anything adding friction. But for a forum dedicated to the "hacker" lifestyle, it's disappointing to see so much gatekeeping and FUD. I really wish this audience could start swinging back towards a response style that contains nuance and recognizes nuance.
I find myself opening this site less and less each week.
It feels like the quality of reddit collapsed over the last decade and a lot of the reddit style posting has come over here. Especially the examples above. To be fair both the good and the bad.
The upvoting for political tribalism (whole political spectrum) is so truly mind bogglingly unintelligent and unoriginal. Its just brings the bar down.
Did he struck a nerve? All I'm seeing here are attacks on his person rather than discussing his post, which is not even that controversial, just some common sense stuff.
I haven't yet read what the post submitted here is about, and personally I already have the same opinion as the comment you replied to. So I suspect they just wanted to comment about that rather than caring about this specific post, to remind people not to make the mistake of assuming that someone being well known doesn't automatically mean they always know what they're talking about.
In fairness to geohot, who exactly is an expert on what's going to happen to the labour markets as a result of AI? Whose take should I be weighing more heavily than this one?
Or should people just not bother sharing their opinions on this matter? Since it's impossible to predict the future.
Nobody can predict the future. But there are people whose job it is to deeply study the ways that various technologies have changed labor markets. Plenty of historians of science out there who can draw connections to and distinctions from the past.
As someone who actually used to IRC with him back in the day... (man... I'm starting to feel old lol) he's kind of arrogant in his demeanor. He embodies the true spirit of a hacker in the sense of "Hacker" as in Hacker News, but he gets under everyone's skin over the years. This eventually takes a toll on people, and it mounts up.
GeoHot could cure cancer, not put it in the blog post title, somewhere near the bottom, and all of HN would miss it and nobody would ever get the life saving treatment they could have gotten because of blind hatred.
As much as I disliked my interactions with him, I would rather always take someone on a per-event basis, I see his new blog post for what it is and go from there. If it's trash, its trash, otherwise, I'll acknowledge it.
I don't want HN to be another reddit where we blindly attack people.
This trope also contains a trap, however. There have been major insights from people stepping outside their lane. Physicists went into econ and built a whole subfield called econophysics, with Pareto and Mandelbrot among them. Mathematicians have transformed biology with population genetics, which led scientists to predict how genes spread through populations. Or the SIR model for how infections spread. Hidden Markov models lead to gene finding. Closer to home, we have exceptional programmers making giant piles of money in finance, with Simons and his Medallion Fund returning some 66% before fees. And then there's Bitcoin.
Many of the advances in biology in the middle of the 20th century were also helped along by physicists who switched to biology, often inspired by Schrodinger's What is Life? (1946). The list includes Francis Crick, Maurice Wilkins, and (coming from physical chemistry) Rosalind Franklin.
How is this "context"? There is no information here, just a snarky opinion about the person posting the blog, with zero relevance to the posted content.
From what I gather the maxxer/maxxing suffix is young Gen Z slang for hyper fixation. Looksmaxxing is being obsessed with your looks. Jestermaxxing would then be an outrageous jester or clown for the sake of it? Maybe it's a synonym for rage-baiting? I'll return to guarding my lawn.
Exactly the same on the other side though. If we believed that Dario Amodei or Sam Altman really knew how The Economy in its entirety worked, which is what they’re constantly pretending to do, then we should give them the central planning keys to the kingdom and declare communism tomorrow. I’m not being entirely facetious.
1) You are not engaging with the content of the post at all. I would not mind if you actually articulated why you found this particular take so asinine/cringeworthy. But you don't.
2) You're unnecessarily uncharitable (the blog footer already reads "A home for poorly researched ideas that I find myself repeating a lot anyway"; there's no need to be so snarky).
As a 2018 Tesla owner I strongly disagree with the idea that Elon's got a track record of success. The Model Y was their last successful product and it's just a stretched Model 3. FSD is not there. Robotaxi is an embarrassment. Cybertruck failed to deliver the gigacasted exoskeleton and shipped at double the original price point. Tesla has lost its way completely. (Also, Twitter has lost users and revenue ever since he got involved.)
I don't launch rockets into space, don't want a housekeeping robot, don't have a Twitter account, don't do ketamine, and have never been laid off from a government job, so I can't speak to any of those things which Elon has involved himself with more recently.
My personal experience with Elon's promises is through the Model 3 which I do own, and essentially none of his promises for it have materialized. It hasn't morphed into a revenue-generating taxi which drives around strangers at night; it can't be summoned from across town (or even across a parking lot); it can't even safely drive itself without oversight, which was a goal only "months away" in 2019.
You mean the tele-operated "autonomous Robots" ? Also, I'm waiting for >10 years now for his (really!) self-driving cars he promised would be just about 2 years away - every 2 years.
SpaceX is what gives him leverage but the success of the reusable rockets are the engineers behind it - he's just the ketamine-driven hype-man that drives the stock via publicity now.
What exactly would that be a winning track record in - as near as I can tell, his actual track record is in buying companies with an already-successful product team, and managing not to run them into the ground for a while?
You have got to be kidding me, you can dislike someone without being this wrong. Hes literally the richest man in the world, started the largest space delivery company in the planet and has brought extreme returns for his investors in every endeavor he’s undertook.
> literally the richest man in the world... extreme returns for his investors
This isn't really a benchmark for effectiveness at anything beyond making money.
I don't think anyone would dispute that he has an eye for investments (helped along by a healthy dose of the ol' silver spoon), not to mention a certain flair for convincing Uncle Sam to pick up the tab (i.e. a significant part of Tesla's growth relied on federal EV subsidies, and NASA heavily buying SpaceX launch capacity).
Effectively helping elect a dictator who is in love with fossil fuels undercuts at lot of his "wins". Never mind the Nazi saluting, fraudulent advertising, or bypassing safety regulations.
A foreign national buying one of the largest American media platforms and turning it into a right-wing propaganda machine should probably concern you at least somewhat.
I'm not interested in analog summing myself, but I think you're missing the point. It's not about "better" summing. You want more euphonic summing. Analog audio processing often comes with artefacts that give the signal sent through it a more pleasing character, for whatever reason (phase shift, saturation, channel differences between left and right, transient modulation, slew rate, power sag, etc.).
I personally think analog summing is a waste of time, because the differences are too subtle to be worth the investment in setting it up. But that's just my opinion. Some people are really into it (Eric Valentine comes to mind).
Just wanted to point out that in the context of audio equipment (both professional and audiophile) "sounds better" often means "sounds worse but more engaging". Just like a polaroid picture often evokes more emotions than a photo taken with a modern digital camera and a great lens.
What you're describing is the expected and correct outcome inside a profit-oriented, capitalist system. So the only way I see out of this situation would be changing policy to a more socialist one, which doesn't seem to be so popular among the tech elite, who often think they deserve their financial status because of the 'value' they provide, without specifying what that value is (or its second-order consequences). Whether that's abusing a monopolistic market position they lucked into, making apps as addictive as possible, or building drones that throw bombs on newborns in hospitals.
I think we're after the same goal but have a different view of mechanism.
Regulation enforcement against the anti-market behaviors would bring a lot of good.
Putting too much power in any centralized authority - company or government - seems to lead to oppression and unhealthy culture.
Fair markets are the neatest trick we have. They put the freedom of choice in the hands of the individual and allow organic collaboration.
The framing should not be government vs company. But distributed vs centralized power. For both governance and commerce.
The entire world right now suffers from too much centralized power. That comes in the form of both corporate and government. Power tends to consolidate until the bureaucracy of the approach becomes too inefficient and collapses under its own weight. That process is painful, and it's not something I enjoy living through.
If you see through that lens, it has explaining power for the problems of both the EU countries and the US.
I'm not arguing for state capitalism. I consider the "company vs. government" framing as fundamentally flawed. I see it as "a few in power vs. Everyone gets exactly one vote".
I want things in society organized in a way that gives everyone agency, not just those adjacent to capital.
If a company employs me to extract value from my work, I want a vote in how that company operates. Not just one vote every four years in the hopes that policy will shift to benefit workers more over a few decades.
I want to be able to say no to doing a job without the existential threat of not getting another job offer ever, so I can base my decisions on my values, not my fear of not bein able to pay next month's rent.
Capitalism goes against that, because it centers profit hoarding and parasitic value extraction from the working class at the center of attention. It's an inhumane ideology at its core, and only even ever slightly successful in creating wealth because of all the socialist mechanisms wrapped around it to hold it together.
In essence: I want to abolish centralized power and class hierarchies.
reply