atomicnumber3

So we get to fight sexism AND bring back cool anachronistic language? I'm in.

Unsloth studio, on a server that I built in 2024 that was, at the time, ludicrously oversized, but is now just ok-sized to run the q4 quant of qwen flash next. (128GB ram, 16GB vram).

I really want to build something less scuffed, but, yknow. So I'm making do atm.

"trillion dollar businesses, built on commodities"

Which ones? I'm looking at the list of companies with > $1T market cap and none of them have commoditized markets. Instead, they all have huge network effects (Apple), enormous legacy lockin (Broadcom), a religious monarchy (...), or are some of the only people on the planet who can do what they do (nvidia, tsmc).

Mind you, there's lots of _billion_ dollar businesses in commoditized or partially commoditized markets. But Anthropic as a billion dollar business is sunk.

I know I'm just one person, but I absolutely detest all of the rhetoric coming from these companies and what it means for software freedom - the FSF kind. I ABHOR the idea that free software developers have to either use the hosted (controlled) service, or go way slower than proprietary software devs.

So I'm doing what I can - I only use local models for 100% of my personal coding. (And their capability is amazing! Qwen 3.8 Flash Next leaves me wanting for nothing at this point.)

And I know open weights aren't enough. I'm ready to support open training if/when we get around to that. I hope once hardware prices ease, we can see homelabbers building small AI hosts (small by homelab standards yknow. So let's say 512GB host ram and 1-2 32GB cards, though i hope we also start to see AI cards with lots of vram but less compute cores). Then maybe we can do folding@home style distributed training.

In a time when software freedom is perhaps more threatened than ever, I'm happy to see that information still WANTS to be free, perhaps even more than ever. Look at how easy it is to distill claude! Despite, presumably, anthropic working very hard to prevent it.

I'm done waiting 6 months. Just let me know the night before when I don't have to come in to work tomorrow.

>explains why the Chinese

I think it's less that they want to encourage deflationary economics - because I think this has a tremendous chance of backfiring given that is not how massive productivity/efficiency gains have turned out in the past.

I think they genuinely want to prevent the rise of yet ANOTHER Western bigtech monolith in Anthropic and/or OpenAI. They want to make sure they have no moat. That keeps the value out of the nascent bigtech and instead in people who can run the models.

People who live longer support their offspring better and they're more likely to survive - providing selective pressure for living longer.

I agree, but Nintendo greatly damaged opposition efforts to timelining by... endorsing one. In an artbook, of all places.

If we're going for a "better for society" angle, I have so many other things that are far more impactful for society and less damaging to the individuals that we will never get around to messing with evicting pensioners so younger families can use their spot to get to school.

IME, local models (so far) cannot do anything resembling "vibe coding" or what I call "high ambiguity prompting."

Ex:

Won't be good at it: "make a web app where you can download files with background jobs"

Much better at: "make a new dbmate migration to create a table with this schema, then write REST-style CRUD methods for it: [pseudocode table definition, you can gesture at types and indexes]"

So, they don't demo oneshots as well, but for actual "LLM-augmented software engineering tasks" they do super well.

I tire of all of this discourse at this point because people who don't need to hear it are reading it and nodding, and the people who DO need to hear it are busy making everything worse, earning leadership accolades (or are the ones handing them out), and are completely closed to any criticism or input.

Anyone with intellectual curiosity and any sense of subtlety or balance is operating in a separate reality from people who are so AI-pilled and very proud of it and there's basically no possible cross talk (usually because the AI-pilled people are the ones who own all the shares).

I say this as someone who really likes LLMs and what roles they'll play in software engineering in the future (and already are, right now).

I can't wait until the AI craze is in the same spot that the crypto craze is currently. People are still using and building with crypto, but the sale of ape PNGs has mostly stopped, and now if I have a problem that a blockchain could solve, I could actually talk about it instead of accidentally picking up a battle standard in the middle of a trench war.

I had wine from the niagara peninsula - it was either cabernet or a cab/merlot red blend. I enjoyed it as much as I enjoy most dry reds (which is a lot). It wasn't exactly the rival of France's appellations (high bar) but still very good.

I consider 99% of my "defense of the architecture" strategy to be teaching my team why the architecture is important, how to think about it, and invite they commentary on it as we own and evolve it together. And of course if they are doing something and want input or are uncertain, then my door is open.

If PRs are a notable part of my architecture defense, I'm going to work on investing in the team instead of reviewing PRs.

If only one person knows the code, then PR time isn't going to save you.

I'm tech lead and I basically don't review PRs, and I tell people this, with a caveat - if you can tell me what you specifically want me to review, for what specific purpose, I'm happy to!

So "can you review this bit for race conditions" is great, love it. This forces people to actually think about what in their code they should be suspicious of, if anything.

"Can you review this" [link to PR] is getting a rubber stamp because humans have never been good enough at "just spotting bugs" to make this worth it and now any LLM is better than a human.

And for the purpose of understanding - PR time is too late. I have not reviewed a PR ("for real") in a long time and yet I could tell you how every system my people have built works down to a very fine level of detail. And it's because _we talk to each other!_ We don't just chill in the same slack channel and code independently, we all value each others brains and want each others inputs because we know it will improve our product and we value what perspectives others will bring.

Trying to learn via PR is a sad substitute for real collaboration and teamwork.

Cars feels like a bit of an odd one out because there's basically no low end. If you have the money to produce even a single car from a Camry to a hummer, you are probably going to not try to pinch pennies on marketing because a single car sale pays the salary of a designer for a year.

More like 100ms or less as their visual field coincidentally sweeps over wherever the ad is posted in the physical world. In this regard, it's even more important to use something people subconsciously associate with your thing.

It sure seems like, while LLMs and diffusion models won't completely eradicate the middle class, the bar has now risen significantly to actually contribute in a lot of areas.

For programmers, sure SV startups and actual software-first shops are probably only augments with LLMs and not replacing. But what % of software engineers are employed in such shops? Well, from my graduating class in CS, approximately 30% of grads all went to the same contracting shop whose business model seems to be, take the bottom 30% of each CS class, underpay the fuck out of them, bootcamp them into something vaguely usable + teach the house style of CRUD/LOB app framework, then throw them at clients. And this seems to still be a step above "offshore to barely baseline capable (or worse) body shop for extremely dubious results."

That entire bottom 50% is probably about to be eviscerated. The "offshore + pray" approach is probably going to be completely zapped, much easier to just vibe code for probably better (or at least not worse) results. And the onshore-but-cheaper contracting shops are probably going to need a lot fewer people whose main contribution is translating low-ambiguity tickets into syntactically valid java spring code.

Similarly, for artists, disney is probably not going to use AI in a way that substantially speeds them up because they won't tolerate the quality loss at all. But how many artists work for disney? And how many make anime waifus for the gacha apps? The latter of which I can only assume has already switched substantially to AI assets.

This works for nerds, but not for grandma who can't even describe what she's doing without using the word "google".

This is cool until Google doesn't load in your free browser.

The point the other poster is making, though, is that there's no actual intent. They do not have a conceptualization of a goal like a person does. Their "focus" on a goal is an unstable equilibrium and they're going to fall off the horse, and since they have no concept of goal, they won't even try to get back on.

This is a subtle distinction; I'm not surprised many miss this, especially people who can't _not_ anthropomorphize the LLMs.

I don't know what to say except that this has not been the case for me. Claude is a different person for every single prompt and has absolutely no core sense of what our goals are, or even who the "our" is that's having goals.

While my coworkers are very stable personalities of a consistent work drive, sense of pragmatism, things that they find more and less interesting, career aspirations, etc. they're not all the exact same, and I depend on that as I fit tasks and ownership to people.

In a sense yes. I trust that my coworkers will be accountable for their outcomes and accomplish them with the high quality bar I know they intrinsically hold themselves to. And that they understand our shared goals and if they don't, they will work to become aligned.

And if I can't say that for a coworker, well, that's performance feedback.

Because this is MARKETING, not research. You are viewing marketing copy for anthropic.

What is their methodology by which they determined ANY of these numbers? This is pure marketing fluff, just like every single other thing this company does that's not releasing models and infringing on copyright.

It makes me happy because it means that these misanthropic technofascists have no moat. They can spend trillions of dollars only for it to be largely copied in short order.

Even if they weren't political adversaries of freedom, I would still feel 0% bad given all their training is already on data they got for free.

Information continues to want to be free. To the benefit of us all.

But what's the point of real assets if you can't do anything with them? No point in holding real estate if nobody can afford to rent/buy your houses or go do whatever money-spending thing you put on your commercial lots.

I call this "brand mining." Take a brand previously known for quality, start selling shite, and then you get to pocket the delta until the market catches on. The brand is now worthless (you've "mined" it out) but hey look at all the money you made.

Basically every 90s brand has had this happen. Typically involves PE.

"There aren’t a lot of ways a website can be invisibly broken."

??? Have you never debugged weird react state before??? Have you never used a nontrivial SPA before? Even the most simple react SPA has about a trillion states.

I don't really know how to respond to your statement than "no, they can definitely be invisibly broken."

"Note I’m not saying there are zero risks: the agent could mess up accessibility, it could cause an infinite loop that blocks users, etc. But in general, frontend code is a lot more ephemeral and replaceable than other types of code. So I expect many AI coders will feel comfortable just letting their agent handle it unsupervised (for better or worse)."

This is a weirdly reductive take on frontend correctness. Just for the record, I'm a backend dev. So I don't have much stake in this game.

This idea is, of course, not uncommon. "If the backend has to treat the frontend as adversarial anyway, and has all this cool stuff (constraints etc) for guaranteeing consistency of the system, then the frontend can just do whatever, right?" It plays into a lot of biases around typical frontend devs, typical backend devs, language stereotypes, etc. So it _sounds_ good.

Let me tell you for a moment about one of the spookiest bugs I've seen. It was an app for sorting personal photos. You'd upload pics/vids off your phone, they appear in the UI, you click a folder for them to go into (or click delete to discard), etc. Simple app, right?

Well, naturally, pics from even vaguely modern phones are regularly 5MB or more. Not really something you want to sling around while a user is browsing and their main activity is going to be looking at said pic to decide what folder it goes in (or if it gets deleted). So we thumbnail. And the main app only ever shows the user the thumbnails. The backend organized things quite simply: it gets a list of images from the frontend, it assigns each of them a zero-based index, and generates a thumbnail you'll also access via index. Imagine a URL scheme like `images/0` and `images/0/thumbnail` serving the real assets and the thumbnail.

Well, this app had a bug at one point. The backend was indexing by the arbitrary order the user uploaded them in. The frontend was mostly doing this too. Unfortunately the logic for thumbnails was incorrectly indexing by the "taken time" (which was a post-upload timestamp constructed by looking at basically every available timestamp and picking the "best" one. i.e. hopefully the one the iOS camera app adds, but obviously pics come from other places too and you never know what a user will upload). The end result being users would upload pics, see a thumbnail of an accidental pic they took of their shoe, hit delete. But actually they were deleting a pic of their baby or similar.

Literally none of the testing caught this for 2 main reasons: headless tests don't look at images, and you can't write an assertion like ("does this image look like a downscale of this other image") (at least not easily... i guess image models could do it now? but probabilistic? not a word i like in my unit tests? I digress, this predated the current crop of "AI").

Now let me generalize: your frontend isn't just a weird way to call RPCs on your backend. It's part of the application. I don't think you can just hand-wave. And as we saw above, you can't even say "well the frontend is stateless! any bug is 1 deploy away from fixing!" - deploying the frontend didn't get anyone their baby pictures back.

"loyalty"? weird word choice.

Devs switch because all of the magic of "AI" is LLMs + we stole the entire written output of the entire human species, with some remaining % coming from various tricks we've learned over the last 3 years like thinking and agent-toolcall loops, which weren't hard for literally everyone to copy. One of the consequences of this is that the only thing that really distinguishes anthropic from kimi is that they have the entire US VC market funding them because they promised to finally put white collar labor in its place.

"and does not possess any real intelligence or critical thought whatsoever."

unfortunately in most companies this is literally wrongthink and will get you shut down as being a scared luddite.