In the coin collecting universe, which has had a world of third party grading for close to 50 years now, there's a saying "buy the coin, not the holder". But at the same time, there's also a sub-market of people explicitly buying the holder. People will pay a comical premium to hold the "finest ever graded" (or conversely, the "lowest ever graded") example of the same basic date-and-variety.
The difference is that the coin market evolved this ecosystem somewhat organically. The services originally started more towards "proving a rare date prone to counterfeiting is authentic" and "providing a neutral third-party since grading can be imprecise and subjective". People didn't start considering the holder for quite a while.
I think part of the ickniness is that this smells like it was designed to puff up the legitimacy of the grading service as much as anything. It's not like taking something that's understood as broadly rare-- some one-off prototype or widely known scarce item (like the World Championship cartridges). Instead, they're taking something very common and trying to focus on "peripheral" rarity factors-- a sub-variety (some particular early packaging) and a condition rarity (most units are no longer untouched and sealed). This has a smell of "you too could turn a fairly typical item into something life-changing by sending it in for professional certification!"
We get that stuff in the coin collecting world, but it usually doesn't make as much hay as you'd expect. People still get way more excited about the simple "1804 dollar" than the probably rarer "1817/4 half dollar, Overton 102 variety, top grade"
On the one hand, it's nice that Epson provided a Linux package.
On the other, it's a pain in the arse that it's specific to a handful of distributions.
I had a V33, and I use Void. At one point I was able to get it shimmed together, there was a wrapper package for the vendor-specific modules, but eventually it stopped working, so I went to the Goodwill and came home with a Canon LIDE 100 that Just Worked with SANE.
I'm not sure what I'd do if I had to buy new. It feels like the entire consumer scanner market is sort of dead. I can recall when you could go into any computer/electronic big-box shop and see a bunch of cheap little flatbed parallel (or eventually USB) scanners for like USD50 or less. They were a common sweetener in the name-brand PC bundles of the late 1990s/early 2000s. Now there's virtually nothing under USD100. It feels like it's a solved problem, too-- most home users don't need ever-increasing resolution or scan speed, so they could just keep cranking out 20 year old already-amortized designs.
"Profitable on inference". Isn't that exactly the same a physical business saying "our widgets have a marginal cost of 95 cents to make, and we can sell for a dollar, so we're profitable, as long as you forget we have a $92 kajillion loan on the factory that has to be serviced."
It raises a chain of interesting questions: what if we pulled the plug on the expensive part (the training and associated infrastructure) in pursuit of making it economically viable?
- How much of the audience is using it based on the long-term promise? "It's still imperfect and annoying, but I want to be ready for when it finally turns into Lieutenant Commander Data." If the vendors said "this is what you actually get once the honeymoon ends", would customers still be satisfied with the product and pricing?
- How do you stop the game of economic chicken? If Anthropic said "Fable is the last model we can offer (until we can pay down the costs to get there)", any competitor with a dime of runway left, will spend a cent of it on training and 9 cents advertising "do you want to be stuck with old tech?"
> "Profitable on inference". Isn't that exactly the same a physical business saying "our widgets have a marginal cost of 95 cents to make, and we can sell for a dollar, so we're profitable, as long as you forget we have a $92 kajillion loan on the factory that has to be serviced."
Yes, that's called an investment. That money's already spent. Look at the marginal revenue of many business. What's going to happen? They'll raise prices because legacy costs? And then the people distilling these models will come in w/out the baggage. Cars for instance have a huge up front cost in design and manufacturing capacity and they only sell for 5-20% more than it costs them to make that one unit. It's a competitive industry
My point is that you can't cherry pick a profitable business unit if you don't have a story for how the entire business can operate profitably.
Cars have low margins, but they generally don't rely on an ongoing infusion of investor money to balance the books. The overall venture still has to turn a profit. Nobody is walking into Hyundai HQ and saying "We are going to sell Sonatas for $6,750 each, because if we can do it long enough, some magic will happen and we'll end up back in the green."
TBH, I'm not quite sure what the "some magic will happen" angle is for AI.
Compute gets cheaper, but I suspect the training arms race is running up costs faster still.
We're already seeing hints of price balking (definitely heard people at work saying they're hesitant about Fable due to the costs) so it's unclear if there's headroom there.
TBH, the best answer I can figure right now is that many players are hoping for a competitor's flameout-- the dream of being the last man standing, and then able to dictate market terms.
Sometimes you want the machine to be an advisor and sanity check your suggestions.
Sometimes you just want it to do the boilerplate you have in mind without trying to reason everything from first principles.
I told you to check fields "foo" and "bar" for values "baz" and "quux". You don't need to go diving through the entire source tree to discover where and how this is set.
I guess maybe it's helpful for the vibe-coded audience-- if it tries to over-process everything, there's a better chance it will work on a single shot, but I'm taking the Crazy Taxi approach: you get points if you drop me off within 20 metres of where I wanted to go, and I can correct it if I specified the wrong response message in the original approach.
Take that "sort of newspaper for breakfast reading" description and multiply that by 20 million MAU and you have the yahoo.com front page circa 1999, or the opening screen of the Reddit app circa 2020.
There are going to be a lot of tasks where if someone wired up some tools to do it for personal consumption, you'd call it agentic. Since there are a lot of overlapping interests, the obvious route is to have a handful of specialists building the tools and selling them as a packaged service to a broader consumer-type audience. While this will move away from the "a agent following your specific directives" narrative, since all you'll get is a few tunable knobs, it will also offer instant gratification and probably fewer footguns than trying to build your own.
This bodes poorly for a certain type of dev though. I suspect every shop of a certain size or larger now has at least one AI evnagelist building a bespoke "agentic" workflow that converts inbound support tickets to outbound CVEs. When you've got a brace of vendors all offering that as a COTS product, do you still want him? Firms like Atlassian and Github/lab might be in privileged positions for that storyline, because they already know all the secrets of the systems they're trying to instrument, and could potentially build API extensions to suit their needs.
That feels like a market failure though. For a tool to be a useful extension of the user, it should work in the way a user expects it, without a huge amount of having to realign and repackage your normal process.
Maybe that's something we can hope for in a next-generation of LLM product. Right now, the race seems to be all about performance and capability, but maybe when we get to a plateau of performance, vendors can start differentiating by building tools with clearer voices and expectations-- focused system prompts and training, maybe. If you know DeepSeek will follow your requests fairly literally, while Qwen will start adding best-effort tweaks, you can decide which one is the right choice for a given task.
I asked Claude to read two logs and assemble them in a single table for easy reading the other day. It takes me like 30 seconds to pull and toggle between the logs normally, but I figured it would be nice to have a skill to let the machine crunch it all onto a single page. After 5 minutes, it spat up a ball of Markdown with half the content truncated and summarized it in a way I didn't ask for and had no interest in.
If I had asked a human to do it, there's no way it would come to that conclusion because doing the wrong thing is literally more effort. Maybe the model did those things because "typical" requests want summarization so it's the implicit default, but IT SHOULDN'T BE MY RESPONSIBILITY TO GUESS THIS.
You're just expecting too much. If a task takes you 30 seconds to do you're almost certainly better off doing it yourself than getting an LLM to do it. If it's a recurring task it might make sense to create a skill for it, and this is exactly the use case for skills. Give precise instructions so it does the task correctly, and save them for later so you can do it again easily.
I don't really get how you guys can be so demanding - this technology is magic. It's doing things that 5 years ago we could only dream of. It still blows my mind every time I paste a screenshot of some vague issue along with a quick and dirty prompt and it just gets it and gives me the right answer immediately.
In the hands of a competent user these things are absolutely incredible, I can develop solutions faster, with higher quality and less effort. So honestly man all you guys complaining that they aren't good enough? I can't help but think you guys must really not be very competent. Complaining about problems while the solution is staring you in the face.
> I don't really get how you guys can be so demanding - this technology is magic
That could be the problem. I suspect a lot of developers have spent years developing workflows and understandings based on the idea the machine is precise, repeatable, and does exactly as it's told. "Magic" is a very poor match for that strategy.
> Complaining about problems while the solution is staring you in the face.
Not quite sure what the "solution" is here. Am I supposed to try to restyle the prompt to be "quick and dirty" to give Claude more room to stretch and hopefully hit my desired goal? Or am I supposed to iterate repeatedly on the skill to add a harness of "don't truncate that, don't add a summary, etc" until it behaves how I want?
I'm not saying you're wrong. I think it's almost more like the difference between programming languages. If you come into writing FORTRAN with a TCL/Tk mindset, you're going to have a hard time getting what you want, but the industry understood that and made environments for both. I suspect right now, since the big market is outside the hardcore programmer market, they're going to focus on the "it does magic with vague prompts" version before the "it's reliable and precise with specific prompts" one.
That value for advertising goes negative on a marginal basis.
The first time (or few times) you saw an advert, you were informed of the product's existence. I now know the Hyundai Elantra exists and could potentially be suitable for my vehicle needs. Mission accomplished.
The next 10,000 times it's just fighting over share of a finite market. I am not expecting to buy another car for another few years, so reminding me that I can choose an Elantra instead of a Corolla at all times is just vapourising cash. In fact, there's a chance that you do something obnoxious in your ad and actively burn brand reputation.
You could argue it's a take on the "everyone uses a different 5% of the features" problem-- that advertisement is going to be within the first "informational" window for someone, but maybe there are more efficient ways to not blast it at uninterested audiences.
One other angle might be asking if we still need some markets to be competitive in the first place. You don't need ads if it's a "when you need X, you'll know where to find it" sort of product. If we nationalized the insurance industry alone, we'd probably eliminate a detectable percentage of ad volume.
There was sort of a conceptual firewall between "using the computer" and "programming the computer" for a lot of systems.
Some (various LISP and Smalltalk environments) had a much narrower wall between the two, but I could see the case for being able to say "Your secretary never has to know about programming" even if it left flexibility and value on the table.
In the US there were some experiments on delivering high-volume content by broadcasting, say, a 30-second spot which flashed dozens or hundreds of images and you were supposed to record it on videotape and play it back frame-by-frame.
There was one local channel here which pointed a camera at a fishtank while idle; if you wanted a specific data package, you called a number to request it. I think the high-water mark for the concept was a few national ads where they said "we'll broadcast the entire Chevrolet catalogue at the top of the hour, have your VCR ready." The problem being, you had to run a second advertisement to get the audience ready for the first one!
The difference is that the coin market evolved this ecosystem somewhat organically. The services originally started more towards "proving a rare date prone to counterfeiting is authentic" and "providing a neutral third-party since grading can be imprecise and subjective". People didn't start considering the holder for quite a while.
I think part of the ickniness is that this smells like it was designed to puff up the legitimacy of the grading service as much as anything. It's not like taking something that's understood as broadly rare-- some one-off prototype or widely known scarce item (like the World Championship cartridges). Instead, they're taking something very common and trying to focus on "peripheral" rarity factors-- a sub-variety (some particular early packaging) and a condition rarity (most units are no longer untouched and sealed). This has a smell of "you too could turn a fairly typical item into something life-changing by sending it in for professional certification!"
We get that stuff in the coin collecting world, but it usually doesn't make as much hay as you'd expect. People still get way more excited about the simple "1804 dollar" than the probably rarer "1817/4 half dollar, Overton 102 variety, top grade"
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