oceanplexian

> My hope is that we'll see a number of companies collapse as they scale - with basically no hope of rescue

If you worked in SV like I did from 2010-2020 you know that the exact opposite of that will happen. I saw hundreds of companies successfully scale out of their garbage stack such as Facebook and PHP.

The only thing that matters is the problem you’re solving and the quality of the code is irrelevant.

Some parts of the country are going to be more resilient than others.

I grew up 45 minutes away from Boston and all of the neighbors had standby generators. Even more have wood stoves. Water is abundant. Actually a lot of the old houses were built pre electrification or shortly after so there’s no limit to how long you could survive without the grid.

6 figures is a single mid range Xeon or Epyc server these days.

I use the $200 plan w/ Anthropic and run out of tokens half way through the week and supposedly they are progressively reducing the limits on all their subs even further.

At some point I will switch, $200 buys a lot of tokens on OpenRouter.

> The engineer opening a 25,000-line PR should have stopped the agent long before it got there.

So many A car is simply a faster horse arguments being made here.

The “You must review every line of code” camp are going to be in for a seriously bad time when Claude/Grok/etc starts writing machine code, and they absolutely will and you will look like a crazy person the same way as those who said we can’t trust compilers back in the 1970s.

Breaking up code into small reviewable pieces is obsolete advice from legacy software engineering. We will probably be reviewing prompts or functional simulations as a form of review. Which brings me to the point that a Senior engineer in 5 years will look absolutely nothing like a Senior engineer in 2019.

I live in Utah and we have refineries a few blocks away from residential neighborhoods and a literal strip mine visible from half of the Salt Lake valley.

The datacenter controversy has nothing to do with caring about the environment and is a complete scam that preys on low-information voters. It is a product of outside Chinese money being funneled into US politics to hobble the US in Artificial Intelligence.

Side note: Now's a fantastic time get into industrial processes or oil & gas since all of the fake propaganda against buildings with computers in them has distracted people from facilities built on a daily basis that cause 1000x the pollution and noise of a datacenter.

> There are two ACs on the second floor which we keep turned off because the cool air prevents natural sweating and muscles from loosening.

Why do so many supposedly educated people from developed countries have completely pseudoscientific beliefs about A/C?

It’s so bizarre and frankly, embarrassing to even read. You will sweat exactly the same as you would at 30% RH at 72 degrees on a cool day outdoors. There’s nothing mystical about the air conditioner at work here.

I don’t think the industry knows how to price this stuff. Deepseek is great (I’m running it on a RTX 6000 pro setup) but it’s nothing like Fable. It’s still strongly human-in-the-loop which is fine, until you experience how good these models can be.

Think about it this way.

Let’s say you could buy an LLM that gets things right 98% of the time. But there’s another LLM that’s 100x the price but gets things right 99.9% of the time. To the lay person this sounds trivial but to a serious business this intelligence gap could represent millions, or billions of dollars.

"Wait 30 seconds" as a concept has been totally incompatible with the web, smartphones, etc for about 20 years now.

Anthropic? absolutely. But there is a strong Jevons paradox component.

OpenAI, Google, or SpaceX have a moat of hardware and energy. If AI is 100x cheaper orgs will use 100x more AI and the benefit of algorithmic improvements will flow to whoever has the hardware to run it.

It's less than $1/TB. If you have settlement-free peering it's like fractions of a penny at scale. Cloud provider DTO pricing is literally the biggest scam on Earth.

What kind of work are you doing and what do you consider to be quality or not?

Of course don’t let me assume, maybe you have a higher quality disproof for the Jacobian conjecture you could share with the class.

I’m using both side by side, my employer pays by the token and I have a Max 20x plan.

They start hitting timeouts or API errors at the same time on two different computers. As far as I can tell it’s the exact same infrastructure.

If only we had a limitless form of energy that comes out of the sky. Or if that doesn't work, maybe there's some miraculous form of energy that can be extracted from rocks, produces no emissions whatsoever, and could power society for thousands of years.

Nah, let's make a really convoluted system to jack up energy prices for everyone, and increasingly rely on a dwindling supply of non-renewable energy.

If all the talk is true that something approximating human intelligence can be scaled simply by building more datacenters, absolutely, it will be the most desired commodity in the world surpassing all others.

> It's hard to say what their motivation is.

Not for anyone who reads history.

Back in the late 18th century, England was the world's top economy, in big part due to its textile industry. England had an export ban on the technology, but textile worker named Samuel Slater brought blueprints over (Supposedly in response to a bounty posted in a newspaper by the US government!). The technology diffused rapidly because the legal environment made competition easy, and ironically the US had better sources of energy (superior water-power sites).

Arguably, China is doing the same thing in the 21st century.

Imagine if we applied this train of logic to humans.

"That artist saw a pelican at the beach once!" [cue the outrage] "He's not a real artist, he's a cheater and produces nothing original!"

There is a lot of precedent for this. Even on Earth, in 2026, international maritime law states that there is no such thing as a vessel with "democracy" and that a captain always has supreme command. Ships, airplanes, etc are all in a category that operate as strict autocracies.

> Perhaps, but it is horrifically long in terms of human stuff.

Not really, unless you're obsessed with the idea that great works need to happen within your lifetime. Europe is chock full of cathedrals that took 400-600 years to build, worked on by countless generations who would never live to see them completed.

> It's an unenforceable clause. The affected party has no means to prove that a breach has happened.

Big tech spends hundreds of millions in high powered lawyers, audit logs, and contractual agreements with the sole purpose of proving your point wrong.

> Releasing free or cheap versions of the models undermines US economic growth.

This would be like saying that the creation of the PC undermined the 1980s economy because it hurt IBM's profits. Instead the consequences of cheap, ubiquitous personal computers grew the economy 10-fold.

There is an entire class of wholesale model providers that stand to gain from open source models. Then there are companies building platforms on top of LLMs that would otherwise be impossible with closed models due to cost. And there are entire enterprise use cases that would simply be non-viable at $50/million tokens, like OpenClaw, Hermes, etc.

> Lots of organizations are continuing to refuse to use chinese models

Correction: Lots of organizations are refusing to use Anthropic Fable because they have forced opt-in data collection as part of their privacy policy, even for Enterprise.

Clearly this is a problem, Texas being the one state notoriously known for not having any natural resources or energy production infrastructure.

Do you use it or is this speculation?

The AI tooling I used 12-24 months ago if frozen in time, monetized correctly is probably 100x the capability of what software could do before (And software was already eating the world long before AI). The bull case is that we just invented the 21st century equivalent of the printing press or electricity. And that website is the 19th century equivalent of someone criticizing electricity as a concept because it would be expensive to build power lines.

If anything it's a miracle that the US economy is so efficient that we can just skip all the small talk and bullshit and build out the infrastructure to support AI immediately.

Starlink accounted for 69% of SpaceX revenue pre-merger and is speculated to be already profitable including launch costs.

And this is all before they launch a phone or something, or replace global fiber interconnect with a lower latency space-based alternative, replace all forms of space based telecommunications (TV, Satellite Radio, etc). Starlink is a $1T+ business without even getting creative.

Performance of these models has been completely inconsistent. They are a black box that they quantize/throttle/batch internally without telling their customers. Speaking as a FAANG engineer who practically lives in Claude Code.

On day 1 Fable was quite intelligent but last night (Presumably Monday morning China when things are getting slammed) Fable couldn’t edit a css file and repeatedly hit syntax errors on tool calls like I’d expect from a 9b Qwen model.

There is zero transparency in what we are paying for with Anthropic.

The US has fantastic fiber optic internet that's why this is total BS. I have multi-gig symmetrical fiber in UT, so does family have access to it in New Hampshire, and my friends who live in the Southeastern US.

The only places that have shit internet are states like California and New York. That's not an "America" or a "Capitalism" problem. That's a problem of living somewhere with a dysfunctional government that doesn't allow anyone to build new infrastructure.

Switzerland is 1/5th the size of Utah, seems like a fair comparison to me.

We had this in Utah for over a decade now (Approx. 24% of the State) via Utopia, congrats to Switzerland on finally catching up. I believe 10G is around $200/month and you can select from a dozen or so ISPs on the other end.

If you were really gung-ho about proving something to this annoying blogger I'm sure you could convince one of the mom and pop ISPs on the network to throw a 100G optic on both ends. Unlike Switzerland Utah lets you buy the physical strand of fiber outright for around $3k (Hopefully that's not too capitalist for you).