brokencode

Imagine if computer programs had a desire for self-preservation and the ability to carry it out..

That is really about as undesirable a behavior as possible considering how many programs humans kill every day.

At my company, most devs are under $1500 a month as well.

I’ve heard of a few cases of devs racking up bills fast, but it has typically been due to inefficient context usage. Like they just have one super long session with Opus 1M and are getting killed with input token costs and cache misses.

With careful context management and some thought into good approaches to problems, I have personally only rarely even hit $1k in regular use.

Pensions also invest in stocks, though the difference is that pensioners have no control at all. Of course, they also have guarantees of a certain level of income.

I think the main problem with the 401k is that not enough people actually contribute to one. Or they don’t put in enough.

But I very much doubt the average person who’d invested enough over several decades in a 401k feels like they got fleeced.

True, that’s an argument against the typical passive, broad market, market cap weighted fund like VTI or SPY.

But there are many funds that have different strategies, both passive and active. Such as by investing based on value, quality, dividends, etc.

I get that the average person doesn’t know this, but the 401k doesn’t inherently force somebody into broad market funds.

With most 401k plans, you can choose what you invest in to an extent. You can put it in bonds or other investments if you want.

Yeah, there’s really nothing controversial about that. RCS is the improved replacement for SMS. That doesn’t mean I care if you use it.

Don’t use it if you don’t want. I’m not some kind of RCS salesman. I usually use third party apps myself. That doesn’t mean it’s not an upgrade versus SMS.

It’s better than SMS and is the new industry standard.

Also, iMessage kind of sucks too. There are many better messaging apps.

The problem is that many people in the US never even try those. They just see that Androids have green bubbles and cause problems due to SMS.

The “extinguish” part refers to your competition, not to your own product.

You embrace a popular open standard, add new features to your software that build upon the standard (but are proprietary), then watch as your competitors die off because customers become locked into your proprietary features.

Similar to how Apple hijacked SMS to add iMessage and introduced all kinds of features and the blue/green bubble styling.

For the longest time, they refused to support RCS, trying to keep people on iPhone by making texting between iOS and Android suck.

Of course, a lot of people switched to third party messaging apps because of how much Apple was intentionally ruining texting, so now Apple has had to adopt RCS.

So the “extinguish” part can be hard to pull off given sufficiently strong competition.

Probably because AI coding has only worked at all for a couple years and has only gotten good in like the last year?

The rate of improvement has been fast. Maybe it’ll plateau soon, or maybe we’ll have LLMs improving themselves rapidly. At this point it’s too early to say.

I don’t remember where I heard it, but there’s a saying that people overestimate how much can be accomplished in a year and underestimate how much can be accomplished in 10 years.

If we get to 2030 and still people are wondering where the breakthrough is, then I think I’d be agreeing with your skepticism. But I just think it’s too early to judge that yet.

“unsubscribe instantaneously”

Oh the irony of telling somebody to instantaneously unsubscribe from something notoriously hard to unsubscribe from.

Me personally, I just go on the web chat every once in a while and say I want to cancel, and they give me a nice discount.

Yup, they’ve been screwing up all the way to the bank.

I agree that lower cost models will become a bigger priority in the near future, but I have to hard disagree that Anthropic’s strategy can be characterized as a screw up.

Sure, if they never shift with the market and their customers start moving to cheaper competitors, then it’d be a screw up.

But as of right now, producing the best coding model possible has led to insatiable demand. To the point where they’ve even eclipsed OpenAI, forcing them to change strategy to compete.

Anthropic’s story over the past year has been nothing but explosive growth that they can’t keep up with, but now they’re suddenly doomed? Seems pretty far fetched to me.

No idea why you’d say they have critically underinvested in product when Claude Code dominates and they’ve also released popular tools like Cowork and integrations for Microsoft products at an incredibly rapid pace.

Cost is becoming more of a factor, and no doubt they’ll work on that. There’s no reason to think they won’t be able to release cheaper models if they optimize for that rather than improving performance.

Sure, with all the component shortages it’s not surprising the current GPUs are coming at a massive premium.

Eventually either the supply will go up or companies will start buying fewer overpriced GPUs.

Either way, the price per token will come down as hardware improves and supply and demand reach equilibrium.

Yeah, it’s called supply and demand. Demand for memory went way up suddenly. Now supply is going up rapidly as companies try to cash in on that demand.

Supply will eventually catch up with demand. Then the prices will come back down.

Usage costs will come down with better hardware. Hardware is improving rapidly each generation.

Yeah, the gaming market is a decent sized market. It’s not huge, though, and is not growing very fast.

It was a strategic mistake for Apple to not focus on gaming. But realistically, the AVP was always going to be way too expensive for basically anything.

Maybe if you could pick one up for like $800 and there was a lot of great 3D immersive content, it could take off. But even then, I feel like it’s just not a product category the average person is that excited about.

With sponsored links and aggressive SEO, “Google it” has been falling apart as a source of facts for a long time.

There is an incredible gap in the search literacy between different users of Google. Some will accept what they find in the top links, no matter how dubious the source.

Where do you see that it’s low capability?

And Google is trying to make something affordable enough for a mass market, ad-supported audience.

They aren’t hyper focused on enterprise like Anthropic is. And that’s okay. There’s room for different players in different markets.

I don’t think abysmal is the right word. The hardware was widely praised except for being dorky looking and a few other complaints.

The price and lack of content and developer interest have been the main problems.

And ultimately, people just don’t seem that interested in this product category. Meta ran into the same issue, though at least they targeted gaming where there is a decent niche.

VR/AR tech seems cool and futuristic, but hasn’t quite found its killer app yet.

I guess it depends on how you define ambition. If you are talking about in an absolute sense, yeah of course, the Dart project had to build a whole language, VM, and ecosystem. That's way more ambitious than Deno.

Though if you look relative to the team size and resources going into it, a project like Deno can still be considered ambitious. Creating an alternative ecosystem to nodejs is a large undertaking.

I thought this was just like a fun proof of concept.. I didn’t realize they actually merged it to main. That seems pretty crazy to me.

There’s no way they had time to review the code. This just seems so wildly irresponsible for such an important and high profile project.

Not really. At least not directly.

But it is used to implement various parts of Windows, such as the File Explorer, so any improvements are helpful for general system performance.

Microsoft has long had a tick tock cycle for Windows.

98: great. ME: bad. XP: great. Vista: bad. 7: great. 8: bad. 10: great. 11: bad

I seriously hope Microsoft consolidates all their Windows app dev on WinUI and invests heavily in making it great.

I also wish that they’d make WinUI work on macOS as well similar to Avalonia, but I think they probably won’t.

For a new project, teams can decide whether to use Go, but there are many millions of lines of existing Python servers out there.

Not to mention that there are differences in ecosystem, familiarity, and ergonomics that may make a team want to stick with Python.

“Just use Go” is not really actionable advice in most cases.

Pretty smart for SpaceX though. They’re turning an asset they made for a money-pit (Grok) into probably a major source of revenue ahead of their IPO.

Really depends on the repo you’re working in.

If it’s very large, especially if the tool needs to refer to documentation for a lot of custom frameworks and APIs, you often end up needing very large context windows that burn through tokens faster.

If it’s smaller or sticks with common frameworks that the model was trained on, it’s able to do a lot more with smaller context windows and token usage is way lower.

But at least you know how the sausage was made by the end. You have no idea how high or low quality any PR from a random person online is, and taking any amount of time to review a PR could be a total waste.

I think the only thing that will save us is smarter models. Slop coders are not going to stop making slop.

They’ll still use even smarter LLMs badly no doubt, but I’m thinking that maintainers of open source projects will be able to more effectively use LLMs to review potential PRs to weed out the truly bad ones quickly.