everforward

My phrasing of it is that democracy is underpinned by a shared belief in a collective destiny. If we all vote well, we all do well together and if we vote poorly then we all do poorly together, on average.

Thus it feels like breaking that contract to have a substantial block of voters who will not only be recipients of increased benefits without ever having to pay more, but can run benefits programs into the ground and kill them without worry because they’ll die before that happens.

They don’t have any skin in the game. They stand to benefit, but never really lose.

I’ve not really worked that into a functional idea, though. The gist of my thought process is that you shouldn’t be able to vote on things where the delay on systemic issues occurring is beyond your life expectancy. So I could vote to change social security today, but probably not when I retire.

I have no idea how to quantify that delay in any reasonably objective way, though, and that’s where my idea falls apart.

It seems likely to become another political dog and pony show where the parties try to get arbitrary age cutoffs to get a demographic advantage. The idea that it would force parties to cater to younger voters more is interesting but I’m not sure a net positive. The impacts are too wide for me to gauge any kind of third order effects.

Not really, because converting resources into power required other humans.

A huge pile of gold isn’t inherently powerful, you need someone willing to accept gold to do what you want. They would also generally be intimately involved in doing the thing, so you paid premiums for dangerous or unpalatable work.

These days technology lets you turn resources into planes, tanks, drones, etc in a way where 100 soldiers with limitless resources probably beat 1000 with a constrained supply line pretty consistently.

You see the same with domestic conflict. Once upon a time, finding and tracking down revolutionaries was a tedious, labor-intensive process that usually resulted in failure. Now those resources can be converted into surveillance that is much more effective, and much less reliant on another human being willing to help.

It’s basically the same thing as AI generated art, whichever side of that you fall on.

I do IT, I can’t make any kind of art to save my own life. The art the AI generates is neat to me because I get to feel in control of making something beyond my own skills.

The flip side is equally true, though. The things I make are derivative, and not particularly neat to other people (and actively irritate actual artists).

AI software is a lot like that. I’m happy people who aren’t software engineers can make their own thing and be totally in control of that. I’ve also yet to see much AI software that blows existing stuff out of the water. Most of is derivative of something that already exists, if not an outright clone with a slightly different emphasis (think Jira but for a very specific workflow).

I think bacteria will convert it to ammonia nitrate, but I could be wrong. I do some hydro and the guidance is not to do it with hydro because the bacteria don’t grow as well so they won’t convert it into something plants can eat.

> we store and use lots of toxic pressurized liquids all the time. Lots of people run all their energy needs off propane tanks, after all.

That’s stored at rest, not being pumped through pipes. We could probably store it locally and send people to collect it, that might be cheaper than power lines.

I would be surprised if maintaining pipes to transport pressurized liquid or gas was cheaper than power lines. Power lines aren’t free, but super cheap relative to pipes that can leak everywhere.

I don’t think this is true, but it’s not my forte.

Pure ammonia is toxic to animals. At normal outdoor temperatures it also only becomes a liquid at ~100 PSI (it’s like 150 at 80F). The boiling point at STP is like -27F.

I’m doubtful running a power transmission line to these places is harder than maintaining pipes that transport either a toxic gas, or a toxic pressurized liquid.

If you could turn it into ammonium nitrate, that’s a solid at room temp and easier to transport. It’s explosive but insensitive so it shouldn’t without another explosion first. Even if it does, this sounds remote enough that it shouldn’t matter and ammonium nitrate is a no -toxic fertilizer. Wildlife shouldn’t even notice.

Then you have 1,000 separate ammonia generation systems that need upkeep, repairs, etc. It is doing chemical reactions under pressure to produce presumably ammonium nitrate which is explosive. The engineers you would need probably aren’t cheap, and storing large quantities of ammonium nitrate all year is sort of sketchy. Timothy McVeigh took out an entire federal building with about 4800 pounds of the stuff mixed with car fuel.

It’s usually a lot cheaper and safer to condense all that demand into a purpose-built facility where they can hire an engineer to look after all the generation, have centralized container storage, backup parts, etc.

None of that prevents putting the panels or windmills on farmer land, though. You could imagine some sort of “get a discount on ammonia if we can put a solar panel in your field” scheme. Or, even more simply, put up your own panels, sell the power back to the grid, use that money to buy fertilizer from the factory buying your power off the grid.

The median home age ranges from 26 to 63 depending on state, and 100 amp service was common into the 90s. 100A service is probably more common than you think, I'd bet we teeter around them being equally common.

My home still has 100 amp service (as does almost the whole city, most of it is a historic district), but it was built in 1910 so that's not shocking.

> A electrician can plop in a electric car charger for instance, that is a 40-50 amp circuit.

Oh yeah, I was mostly talking about having to upgrade the service to the house from the pole. A new circuit with a single outlet isn't horribly expensive, but needing to upgrade service is pretty rough.

> We export more goods than services [1].

We do, we export almost twice the amount of goods. The margins on services are so much better that the majority of the profit from exports is from services. I can’t find a study that has traced export revenue to export profit, but the services sector floats around 50% margins and manufacturing is around 15%. That would ballpark goods export profit around $30B and services around $50B.

> America is the second-largest manufacturer in the world by a long shot.

America is the third most populous country in the world. Normalize by population and we’re pretty middling; America is 53rd in merchandise exports per capita (63rd in overall exports per capita). South Korea exports over double our manufacturing per capita.

> Where are most of these?

The most companies, or where the most tokens are going? If you mean “where are the most tokens going?” it’s probably not the US.

The best data I can think of is OpenRouters usage leaderboards, which probably don’t include enterprise customers, and that’s dire.

You don’t hit a US model until #7 and it’s Nemotron which Nvidia is serving for free. The first US model that actually charges is Opus 4.8 at #9 and it handles about a sixth the traffic of the top model (Mimo-V2.5).

There’s really not a ton keeping inference in the US on a moderate time horizon imo. Tencent has Hy3 up for free right now, all Chinese inference, and it’s doing double the tokens Nemotron and Opus 4.8 are doing combined. For free, via the API.

It might not be China, but their aggressive investments in power generation and green energy make it seem likely. They just need GPUs and they seem to be nearing the point where they can offer them based on the Hy3 inference.

That doesn’t super shock me. They claim to have sent over $150M to creators in 2017, which is probably several million transactions. I think they do video and image hosting as well, not sure. It’s probably way more now but that’s the most recent number I saw.

I wouldn’t be surprised if they were over a billion in revenue at this point.

I would imagine big chunks of the company also aren’t technology. They seem like they have a sizable PR and marketing presence, community liaisons (read: support), HR to support it all, legal for dealing with illicit content that ends up there instead of OnlyFans, etc.

The distills are almost certainly bad for the US economy.

AIs promise is undercutting knowledge work, which is our primary export. Manufacturing left ages ago.

In theory, if OpenAI/Anthropic win then the US still wins since they’re headquartered here.

If open or Chinese models succeed, it undercuts our knowledge work market and that money starts flowing out to inference providers instead of in to US companies and their employees.

I don’t even have to try to address whether models or conscious or not to point out the absurdity.

8.3% of US households had low food security at some point in 2024 (read: had to resort to less varied diets like rice and beans, or visit a food pantry).

5.4% had very low food security at some point in 2024 (at least one family member had to disrupt their eating patterns and skip meals or eat less due to food availability).

Those numbers don’t overlap, it’s 13.7% experienced some variety of food insecurity.

It’s worse in families with children, 18.4% experienced some form of food insecurity. Thankfully, even in most households with very low food security the adults bear the brunt and make sure the kids eat enough, but in 0.9% of households even the children have very low food security.

Talking about welfare for AI models is utterly insane while those numbers are above 0%. I do not give a single shit about model welfare when we have human children skipping meals. Frankly it’s the inverse and if Anthropic has money to piss away on this then we should increase their tax rate and feed some kids, fix some roads, do some good. They can go look at model welfare after they’ve chucked us into the post-scarcity universe they keep telling us is 2 model releases away.

I'm doubtful they can, based on current inference prices. An H100 draws about 50W while idling, which is ~$8/month at average US electricity prices. They also draw ~400W while active.

The electricity prices are relevant because if you paid $0 for your H100 and didn't use it a single time, you could buy millions of tokens in inference just on the electricity it draws while idling. If you can't keep that thing saturated through the night, you're probably underwater overnight. Likewise, it's too small to run even the frontier open source models so you need to be able to live with worse models.

Max power matters because you aren't going to run many of those H100s before you blow breakers in most houses. Newer houses in the US are 15A service to non-kitchen breakers, so 1650W (that might be peak rather than continuous, not sure). If you're plugging that into an existing run, you could maybe run 2 before you start blowing breakers? You can't just plug 4 H100s into the wall in a normal house.

Maybe I'm wrong, though. I'd be curious, it'd be neat to run my own inference for something more than what'll run on a 3080.

Land is finite but not meaningfully so at this point. If my early morning napkin math is right, we could give every person on earth about 6.4 acres of land.

Land where people want to live is scarce. Obviously a variety of factors but one of them is that land is bifurcating the way income is. Small amounts are growing in value rapidly and the rest is declining (or growing more slowly). Urban property is skyrocketing, rural property in coal country is struggling.

For big commercial rental properties they probably don’t care because it doesn’t really push the property value.

I don’t think it really changes the property value because those interior walls are usually cosmetic and not load bearing. If the bank has to foreclose, the next buyer will be well aware they can strip those walls out for nothing relative to the cost of buying the building.

I’m doubtful it pushes the tax revenue for the same reason, everyone is already evaluating based on what it could be.

Smaller units are probably just not worth the effort to manage. It’s a lot of over head to start auditing old duplexes where the owner has a property or two and isn’t a giant company with a whole compliance department.

Oh, I also don’t think I’ve ever seen that but I’m not surprised. Even if you could steal a huge amount of storage, filling it with data would take ages and the cat and mouse game of moving the data as hacks get uncovered would be untenable.

I have seen things get hacked for bandwidth, back in the days before you could rent a gbps uplink from the cloud for $0.12. Some scene release groups would hack into universities or companies to do the initial seeding over their super fast links. It used storage, but that wasn’t really the goal.

YMMV but I wouldn’t personally reach for either. They’re both out of band so you have to deal with pulling input back into the context and what to do if one side won’t communicate right.

File edits are just tool calls under the hood. If you’re using a decent agent then you should be able to override or extend the filesystem tools. If you’re on ACP, file reads/writes get proxied to your ACP client and you can inject your hooks there.

It’s pretty trivial to implement, this is well within the bounds of things most agents implement (for open source agents anyways, no idea how to extend Claude Code or Codex these days).

Huh, that is odd. Working backwards, that would be ~ $0.40 originally. Wonder if that’s also flat out wrong or if they’re doing some kind of currency handling that breaks when you start dealing with huge multipliers.

Storage-based billing is huge, unless you mean something other than “places that make you pay for storage separately”.

Also many places I’ve worked, storage is a huge part of the spend but that depends a lot on what you do. e-commerce doesn’t use a ton of it, but if you handle user-generated content or do any kind of training (LLM, computer vision, etc) then you can very much end up in a place where storage becomes a top line number for infra spend.

GitHub pre-Copilot was probably like that. They host a shitload of data, most of which is just at rest the majority of the time. Storage and networking are probably the majority of their infra costs.

Yeah, this one is bad because it’s off by so much I’m shocked it wasn’t caught by tests, alerts about unusual changes in the billing system, or even accounting. Like surely the P&L reports look all kinds of wrong right now, they have to be showing like 6M% profit margins and revenue measured in quadrillions.

I’m also a little surprised this didn’t trip a circuit breaker. For something as non-real-time as billing, I’m surprised they don’t have an automated kill switch that pauses the billing system and fires a page if variance in bills spikes. Naively some kind of “if the standard deviation of customer bills for this year changes by more than 50%, pause the billing system”. At that number of customers, those numbers should be pretty stable beyond internal billing changes they could normalize for.

Someone said the numbers are all off by 2^30 because they screwed up and are charging the per GB price for each byte.

It’s probably an artifact of them all being currency multiples of 2^30

This seems like an odd request to me, but maybe I'm misunderstanding what you want or what Juggler does.

To my understanding, Juggler is a frontend to your agent and would replace your editor. That's the selling point I got, a better UI than text for orchestrating your agents.

ACP servers are agents (like if you look at the spec you have to implement an entire agent's worth of endpoints, from creating sessions and sending messages to handling starting MCP servers the client specifies).

I don't get the sense that the point of Juggler is to make the world's best agent (rather it's to make the world's best interface to agents), but OP would know way better than me.

What you're describing sounds like an ACP proxy, which probably exists but is a different class of thing.

If you just want to drive OpenCode via Juggler rather than your text editor, you also want Juggler to be an ACP client (it can be both an HTTP server and ACP client, I have some stuff at home that does that).

You can drive agents via ACP these days, which I think is the layer you would want for what you’re talking about.

The API is basically what you see as a user of Claude Code or Pi or whatever. You can make new sessions, send messages to sessions, configure which MCPs get started, etc.

I’ve been poking at something similar to what you’re talking about via that route. My client prompts the agent to do a thing, and then afterwards launches deterministic things to check it which can either re-prompt the original session or start a new session.

Eg it automatically runs the tests afterwards, and will send a new prompt in the original chat to fix them if they fail. I also briefly poked at a security analyzer that gets changed files via git and makes a new session to check whether there are security issues and propose a fix that then gets sent to the original session.

If you want a circular loop where the LLM can adjust its own workflow while keeping it deterministic, you can let the agent modify the ACP client that drives it.

ACP support would be a big deal and would make this a real contender for me. It looks super nice, but the idea of re-writing my Pi plugins is a real blocker.

I’m generally happy with my agent and want to keep that, but I do think the UI could be better and this looks like a neat step that way.

Those things are less static than you seem to believe. Eg recurring prescriptions; at least once a year my insurance gets mad about my scripts and requires a pre authorization that occasionally contains a stipulation that I try their “preferred” (read: cheaper for them) alternatives.

My planning is now wrong. Likewise I can only do FSA for planned procedures if I know close to a year ahead of time, which isn’t super likely. What portion of procedures are serious enough that insurance won’t call them elective, but also tame enough that you can put it off for a year for your FSA?

I don’t think I’ve ever had my FSA be completely correct. I’m always either over-stocked and losing money, or under-stocked and paying with post-tax dollars when I don’t have to.

It seems hard to cure because a lot of this is stuff that just probably shouldn’t be done. Ie the structure of the products veers so close to anti-competitive practices that it’s just untenable in the face of regulatory enforcement.

Google runs the dominant search engine, which they control the rankings of and sells ads on, while also competing against companies that buy ads from them and fight to maintain a spot on the index is almost immediately suspicious. The potential for abuse is incredibly high, and at one point would probably have been concerning enough to invoke regulators without even acting on the potential for misconduct.

It’s like taking the babysitter out to a fancy dinner alone. It could be something totally normal, but it looks bad enough that you probably wouldn’t do it.

The real answer is that Google would probably need to sell off that arm. There is no configuration where Google retains the control or benefits of the Shopping product without being locked in conflicts of interest around the index. It’s always going to look like the way Standard Oil was setup, because it is set up the way Standard Oil was. They own infrastructure, and they compete upstream against other companies forced to use that infrastructure. There’s no way to resolve that conflict of interest.

If they’re bigger folks or starving and someone doesn’t want bone-in chicken, I could see it. 3 large 4 piece combos is $55.50 in Miami, and I think there are other things in that range (eg a 5 pc tender meal if someone hates bone-in chicken so they can’t get a family meal).

The family meals are substantially cheaper than individual meals, if you can get everyone to agree on bone-in chicken and the same 2 sides.

A 20% tip would push that up to something like $66.

I do think it’s a step function improvement, as someone that enjoys those crappy but infinitely-useful tools.

Those tools tend to suck in the sense that they were written for a single person, so the tool assumes that you wrote it and have the context of the author. Help text output often sucks, the UI often sucks or doesn’t exist, it might require 15 packages to be installed that no one has documented because it was never meant to be distributed.

I like it as an MVP thing to trial whether other people would use it and I need to write a “real” version of it, or if I’m the only one that will use it and I can just vibe-code the hell out of it permanently.

You used to have to decide that pretty early on, which meant a lot of talking to other people but also trying to prevent it spinning into a whole project with a PM that will never actually be done.

Dunno, ymmv, I like it a lot in the domain of “stuff that doesn’t have an oncall rotation”. I do find it super useful in that space. Still useful but much less so if the code is something I could be paged for.

I was thinking of studies like https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adh2586 I may have misremembered the domain, or I may have neglected to remember the publishers. This time around I explicitly excluded any AI-tied sources (I don’t trust Anthropic to have an accurate study of productivity boosts).

> While I don't think OpenAI and Anthropic will capture all of the potential upside, I do suspect they will do much better than other players despite the competition

We may have a fundamental disagreement here because I think you see reasons for businesses to prefer LLMs beyond price, but my point was that I think a substantial portion of that top line number will be eaten up by needing to be cheaper than humans.

Like 30% cheaper than humans for the same task isn’t an unreasonable demand for onboarding, and that would lower the addressable market to .75-1.25 trillion. That’s also revenue, not profit. Their best case is probably 30-50% margins (even that might be high, I suspect it will become low margin as models are commoditized), so $600 billion-ish in profit spread across all the players and that feels pretty generous to me.

I suspect a lot of general knowledge work tasks could be done with fairly dumb local models. The small Qwens could probably respond to my Slack and emails for me.

> Typically yes, but there are reasons companies may be willing to pay the same amount or even more, such as "AI doesn't need sleep, holidays, insurance, or benefits" and "AI is easier to procure and replace than humans."

It’s also an enormous supply-side risk. Your AI provider could charge basically anything they want and you have to pay it, for the same reason people still pay bonkers Oracle licenses: too hard to migrate away.

Unless companies maintain their ability to swap providers, but then I can’t see why prices for inference don’t crash down to the cost of GPU time and electricity. If Claude doesn’t have some secret sauce that keeps me locked in, I don’t see why I wouldn’t use Deepseek or Qwen or one of the other dirt-cheap inference providers.

I just haven’t seen anything that seems to keep people locked in so far. Even the non-tech people I know that like AI are rotating providers to find their ideal price:performance ratio, many are finding success outside of Anthropic/OAI. I do know a couple holdouts that refuse to use anything Chinese. They mostly stick with OAI or Anthropic, though they do moan about paying more.

They can be impeached, though the efficacy of that is questionable these days.

> I'm thinking the future of this tech will likely be better tooling with better IDE integrations rather than "Claude plz make me a SaaS kthx"

I think this sort of thinking is a trap, because it presumes that all software has the same constraints.

There's a spectrum of requirements between "chuck this over the wall at Claude, it only has to work once" and "this is a literal rocket ship, formally verify the whole thing".

I've made some things with Claude I don't understand and don't control. It's fine, they're still useful to me. Things for the house that I wasn't going to build manually, some dashboarding stuff and scripts for work, stuff that can crash and burn and I'll be fine.

They won't justify trillions in investment, but they are useful.

Equally, I do agree with you on some things. Sometimes I hand-hold the LLM or forgo it entirely because I want to be 100% sure I know how something works, and can justify a decision if it causes a production outage.

I think the future is probably multiple different tools with different goals. Better IDE integration for some uses, an entirely separate "LLM herd controller" kind of thing for when you're okay with vibe-coding, and the most interesting is something in the middle where you're more in the loop than pure vibe-coding, but don't see the full context like in an IDE. Something where it surfaces changes to key components, but hides things like test changes.