dangus

Maybe some of these companies will learn to stop appointing awful leadership then.

Having a sleazy CEO like Sam Altman or Elon Musk is a business risk. Many potential customers don’t like these people and they say abrasive and alienating things publicly.

Rolling over to the DoD’s desire for fully automated weaponry is more bad marketing. How many people switched from OpenAI to Anthropic over that? I sure did. Anthropic’s willingness to burn that bridge over an ethical stance said a lot about the company to me.

I’m not going to use OpenAI products for these reasons among others.

I’m also not going to use Cursor as xAI plans to acquire Cursor.

Maybe it’s foolish of me to avoid those companies for such petty reasons, but that’s not my problem. That’s their problem.

It takes years to build trust and hours to burn that trust to the ground. Customers can hold grudges for a lifetime.

This is especially true in a market with almost zero product differentiation.

Opus 4.7 is not the current version of Opus.

I’ve seen comments on other threads on this subject the general idea that these article headlines are overstating the pullback from AI.

In other words, the news cycle is looking for an AI story that lands with readers, and that the example of Uber blowing through its AI budget and Microsoft discontinuing use of Claude internally are not good indicators.

I agree that those aren’t good indicators.

However, at some point we have to remember that CEOs and boards of directors are just regular morons who read the news the same way everyone else does.

At some point, if a lot of corporate leaders associate AI with mediocre results, high costs, and public backlash, they might just start saying “this juice isn’t worth the squeeze.”

I think the US is still a crazy outlier regardless of how much oil they produce.

They use double the oil of the entire EU despite having half the population.

Triple the usage of ASEAN despite having a little less than half the population.

Five times the usage of India despite India having four times the population.

I believe personal transportation is something like half of all oil use globally last I checked.

I don’t even think it’s about getting rid of your car entirely, it’s about a wild amount of dependence and a crazy economic incentive system where a 20mpg work truck has been the most popular vehicle in the country for decades. 100% of trips taken per week needing a car is a big consumption difference than 70% of trips taken per week needing a car.

20 miles to work = 40 mile round trip.

The average American commute time is something like 20-25 minutes and if that involves highway travel, 20 miles isn’t a crazy assumption.

Japan can package up all the snacks they want, they still use far less oil per capita than the USA.

Japan: Approximately 28% of all passenger kilometers are traveled by rail

United States: Rail travel accounts for only about 0.25% of passenger kilometers

Remember: when you drive your 30mpg car to work, 20 miles down the freeway, alone in your vehicle by yourself, you are burning over a gallon of refined petroleum product every single day. You can make a loooooot of plastic bags with that much oil.

Something like 95% of Americans get to work via automobile.

We all know why they keep it on.

I’m just kind of surprised that it works to convert people.

Or…maybe it doesn’t?

Some of these things that we have are just common practices that owners of websites do that are seemingly done automatically without much thought to the experience.

In my case, I don’t have access to the APIs nor does my company’s ancient trash timesheet app have any ability to bulk upload.

That’s what’s so great about these programs, really, is that you can just do the thing out of plain language.

I explained poorly. What I mean is that if you accept the free trial, you’ll be billed if you forget to cancel.

That’s fine and normal, but what’s not as normal is that there’s no way to turn off auto-renew and keep your trial period. You either decide to cancel now and lose the rest of the trial or you’ve got to set a reminder to cancel.

The thing is, at different points Apple has offered free subscriptions between 3-12 months depending on their promotion. So it’s a pretty enticing trial depending on what’s being offered.

When you buy a new Apple device it comes with a trial for Apple subscription services. My iPhone 17 Pro came with a News+ trial.

If I didn’t cancel it it would charge me.

There was no way to turn off auto-renew without forfeiting the remaining trial period, which is a dark pattern to encourage accidental payments.

Mac devices also encourage things like documents in iCloud directly in settings which encourage migration to paid services.

By default, Apple apps like Music have notifications for subscriptions.

It’s not at the level of Windows 11 but it’s there when you’re really looking for it. Notifications in the system settings are not always critical update type of stuff, they are often semi-promotional.

Let’s not forget that Apple advertises paid subscriptions in notifications and settings pane alerts when you first buy the computer.

They offer free trials which you can’t cancel without immediately ending the trial. (E.g., you can’t turn off auto-renewing without forfeiting the trial)

A device that has ads and/or behavioral pushes to subscription services and costs $500 doesn’t really cost $500.

I think that there’s a little bit of pointlessness in comparing the Framework 12 to essentially the best laptop value of all time, a laptop that was basically unthinkable by the industry as a whole 6 months ago.

The framework 12 is also oriented toward the kind of person who will not be happy with macOS. At least for the 13, over half of framework’s customers use Linux. More of their users are on Linux than on Windows.

macOS is a commercial operating system that advertises paid subscriptions for you. Even my Apple TV started opening the TV app recently upon wake up which is new behavior. Apple is starting their subscription enshittification just like Windows 11. They see the end of hardware profitability and they like serving and and subscriptions more than building innovative hardware.

Framed this way, the framework 12 is perhaps the best convertible Linux laptop in its price range. And in that sense, it’s not hard to justify.

That said, framework’s clearly most competitive piece of hardware is the 13 Pro.

I have no idea what you’re talking about. Maybe some context would help. Is this a cofounder who currently works there?

I don’t think this is directly relevant.

If there’s an open source alternative to Claude desktop that has a similar amount of extensibility with connectors specifically I’d be very interested to know about it. I’m very much not deep into this space.

While I agree with you on open models getting better, I have been starting to see how the value, the reason you pay for Claude, isn’t in the models.

For example, I just hooked Claude desktop up to my outlook to build a report for my timesheet then I used the chrome extension to fill it out automatically with that data. It could read Jira tickets if that’s where the information was.

A local model can’t do that for me because I have to get the rest of the integration software somewhere.

I also think this is why OpenAI is the worst positioned of the group of AI giants. Anthropic is trying to make a productivity operating system, while ChatGPT is basically just a website until recently.

> Neither are trustworthy.

Since we’ve all forgotten media literacy, what makes Wikipedia trustworthy is that sources are cited and you can inspect those sources yourself to make a judgement call on the topic at hand.

There was never any such thing as blind trust. We learned in grade school how to evaluate sources and what types of sources are out there (primary and secondary sources, etc).

There is some level of trust in being open, transparent, and without a profit motive. But we recognize as educated people that truth is a matter of perspective, and we can build a complete picture by compiling different perspectives.

But then people like you roll in tossing casual accusations around and I guess your intention is to steer people to far less trustworthy sources than Wikipedia.

I’m talking about used on eBay, obviously.

Or do a search for “mini PC” on aliexpress.

And how big was that black market for incandescent light bulbs?

What would have happened to it when supply of incandescent bulbs dried up as manufacturers stopped making them?

Were there any homebrew incandescent lightbulbs?

You’re actually demonstrating my point here: when you ban or regulate something, there are a lot of things that go into whether a significant amount of people try to circumvent that ban. It’s not an automatic free for all thriving black market.

One reason not to circumvent a regulation is when it results in improvement of the status quo or when better alternatives to the banned item already existed.

Performance per watt is nice but I’d be more inclined to talk about “problems being solved per dollar.”

If you don’t specifically have a project where you need the GPIO pins built in, I struggle to understand the use case proposition of a raspberry pi compared to a typical x86 mini PC or even just grabbing a think client desktop like a ThinkCentre.

Almost everything that is unique to a Pi compared to an x86 mini PC seems like it makes more sense with an ESP device.

When the Raspberry Pi was $35 and it ran a desktop OS and the cheapest alternative that did that was 5x the price that use case made sense.

This is a nuance-free take.

There’s zero demand for products that are hiding safety issues that nobody was seeking out (e.g., toys with lead paint, batteries that explode)

Demand for illegal things isn’t in a vacuum. It’s hard to enact prohibition on alcohol or cannabis (extremely easy to produce) versus prohibiting something more complicated to make, difficult to smuggle, or less desirable to buy.

If my government bans Crocs am I going to go through the engineering effort to make them myself? Plus, if I go outside the cops will see my illegal Crocs very quickly. I have plenty of alternatives to Crocs and most of them are better. Most likely, I won’t even think about the ban.

We have a good example with incandescent light bulbs. I don’t know anyone who has attempted to violate the ban on home incandescent light bulbs.

The whole “everything should be legal anyway because there will always be a black market” philosophy is not a universal truth and we need to stop assuming that it makes sense.

Apple Silicon is not really the simultaneously silent and quiet and cool system it was in the M1 days.

If you get a MacBook Air it will get quite toasty at throttling limits. After all, it has no fan.

MacBook Pro models and Apple computers in general tend to favor quiet operation over keeping the laptop surface cool.

Many PC gaming laptops go out of their way to keep warm air off the keyboard deck with a high willingness to use fan noise to accomplish that since the assumption is that you’re resting your hands on the computer for an extended period and you have headphones on for your game anyway.

This is a good life lesson to OP of the freedoms they have in these situations.

An interviewer can choose to ask whatever question they want (within legal boundaries).

You can also choose to answer however you want. The interviewer asked you to mentally drain yourself recounting trauma. You didn’t have to give them that.

“I appreciate your approach in asking about the most challenging day of my life. However, I’ll keep my answers in the scope of the workplace moving forward.”

I’m so done reading articles like this.

Beyond the issue of AI serfdom, I just don’t want so much of my workflow to depend on “some other company.”

This whole setup is basically setting you up to have all your projects in a Claude SaaS lock-in.

I also think if AI was actually smart it wouldn’t need so much handholding. I don’t want to spend my time developing skills and writing markdown files to try to get this dumb thing to write code for me. Why isn’t the AI reading the codebase and understanding what to do?

Because it’s artificial, that’s why.

I think most of the previous trends were less widespread and some of them (like kubernetes[1]) are sensible default options.

We are seeing shoe companies pivot to AI. They didn’t do that with Hadoop or NoSQL.

[1] Even some homelab folks sometimes go straight to kubernetes even though it’s technically overkill.

Yeah, and that would disrupt Uber badly in the area.

In the article it mentions that this is a union of 70,000 independent contractors. I imagine that it would be very bad for Uber if they all decided not to drive simultaneously.

With collective organization, the union has a better chance to coordinate strikes and other collective action, as well as bargain for pay collectively rather than in a one to many relationship.

I knew they were stupid, I just didn’t know it got way down to this level

I really don’t understand on the customer side of B2B why so many companies actively encouraged AI tooling costs.

I can understand it from the side of the companies selling tokens and AI hardware. I don’t understand the race to spend more on internal tools.

I’ve been sitting around waiting for my company to buy a number of necessary bits of tools. They cheap out on every solution imaginable. Datadog is too expensive, let’s buy a cheap solution that costs us months of setup time. Configuration management is too expensive, let’s use the free version with no audit trail or dashboard.

But everyone…in the entire company…gets multiple AI tool subscriptions.

I don’t remember investors being this stupid at any other point. I don’t recall investors pressuring my company to use blockchain or NFTs.

Because its AI slop. It’s not a designed website.

AI Slop

And conversely, if New Orleans was not sinking it would still face the same issues as the sea level is still rising. It would just be a little slower.