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.
This doesnt fix the systemic issue. Most people put their money in a target fund and leave it alone. Those target funds are at risk of being forced to buy these over-inflated assets. The incentive to do this is there because those target funds and naive investors exist.
The diverse investment is the reason that funds will be forced to buy these worthless stocks. It's a direct transfer of money from the working class to the extreme capital class.
If you're good with that, I'll send you my PayPal so you can get me my 5 bucks. It's a tiny fraction of your overall cash flow, whats the big deal?
When you destroy pensions by crushing organized labor, create 401k incentives, and place your new captive audience by default into a certain investment class, a whole lot of people are going to leave it there. Whether the provider forces anyone to do anything is irrelevant, it creates second order impacts that ultimately lead to what is perhaps the greatest attempted fleecing in market history
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.
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.
The thing is that if step 2 isn't proprietary, but rather more open source code, then it's not "extinguish" it's just garden variety open source competition.
I have gone on websites that stop me from usint Firefox or Safari and tell me to install Chrome instead. Its definitely “proprietary” with make up on it. A lot of official Google webapps have done this over the years too. Its ridiculous.
Even then you can't seem to use RCS from outside of the Apple and Google walled gardens so it probably still counts as some sort of merged extinguish effort.
Hello! I'm a USian, so my telecom situation might be really weird when compared to the rest of the world, IDK.
> It’s better than SMS...
If it guarantees timely and in-order delivery, then yes, it's better than SMS. If it doesn't, no matter what else it does it's just as bad.
> ...and is the new industry standard.
Odd. The only RCS messages I receive are spam. Literally zero legitimate entities send me RCS messages.
Plus, I heard that Google's shipping this "Feed us more metadata about who you're calling and when!" service that's billed as a "Ensure the caller calling you is actually on an Android(TM) or iPhone(TM) phone!" "safety" feature. No thanks.
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.
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.
on what? Who the fuck would go full transparency of what's in their black box in this hostile culture of AI hatred? None of us can put a number on what code we've used in our services that was written by humans and long may it last.
They literally can’t go full-transparency. I know a high-level insider, and the fact is that even the folks implementing things don’t actually know how it works, only that it does, and how to get it to generally behave.
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.
I never said they were doomed. Where did you get that idea? I said they aren't ready for this world. That means they screwed up and need to get ready. They let the Mythos hype get to their heads while the world changed beneath them.
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.
Algorithms are also improving. I believe it's very unlikely for these two improvements together to not result in one to two orders of magnitude cheaper cost per "intelligence". Of course, that might just make use cases that are too expensive today viable and thereby increase usage further.
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.
Costs will plummet as better hardware becomes available and priced reasonable so that people can more easily run their own open models locally. But that won't help Antropic/OpenAI make more money, quite the opposite.
A lot of the new hardware requires retrofitting existing datacenters for appropriate cooling, or is waiting to be installed because the new datacenters haven't been built yet. By the time they're installed it's likely a lot of Blackwell GPUs are going to be very out of date. Newer hardware is turning into huge capex bills along with the corresponding depreciation costs. Basically, it's not the same as plugging a new GPU into your desktop, the upfront investment is extremely expensive and all the numbers I'm seeing suggest that the newer GPUs are costing more to run, not less.
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.
That is really about as undesirable a behavior as possible considering how many programs humans kill every day.
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