BosunoB

I think it more likely reflects using bigger phones, where swiping across a while keyboard is quite slow, but also, I hate typing with two hands with any other app than Fleksy. You just have to hit within the general area of the key and it counts. I haven't had that kind of success with any other keyboard I've tried.

The thing is, with Fleksy, as long as you get within a few characters of the letter, it counts, and you also switch auto-correct choices by swiping up or swiping down, so you can fix them easily. It's a joy to type with 2 hands, honestly.

But none of us decide what our cage looks like, now. Our cage now is capitalism, wage labor, disease, death, suffering. We already are tossing the environment in the meat grinder, and many people already have very limited freedom of movement due to poverty, government choices, or circumstance.

You can argue that, at least for democratic countries, these are choices we've made of our own self-determination, but is that even fair to the millions or billions who have far less self-determination?

The cage imposed by nature or by the leaders of whatever country you're born in is just not a very good cage for a lot of people.

Is a human zoo such a bad outcome? We stake our identities on being in control and on top, but do we need to be? Clearly the author is invested in his image of us as rulers—this is an emotional appeal as much as a pragmatic one.

Say we solve the pragmatic argument of our extinction, and our AIs view us, as Geoffrey Hinton likes to say, how a mother views her baby? Then we give up our control to them, and in return we are given lives of leisure, luxury, with minimal suffering, the end of disease, etc. Is this such a horrible scenario?

I don't really get swiping. It's always going to be quicker and more efficient to type because you can use both hands, right? And you don't have to swipe your finger across the screen?

Still going strong with Fleksy even though you can't even download it anymore.

13 billion in revenue, 7.5 in cost of revenue. Can we finally put to bed the idea that inference is subsidized?

Fable was trying to verify a UI change in my game. I was working in another window and noticed a program opening on my task bar. Fable had opened the game through the CLI using a movie maker tool, recorded the output, took a frame from the end of it, and used that to verify the UI. When my game's welcome screen obstructed what it wanted to see, it created a temporary worktree, deleted the welcome screen, and ran the movie maker again.

I watched the whole thing thinking it could've just asked me for a screenshot and saved the tokens. But still, I couldn't help but be impressed. Opus never would've done that.

Very well said. People are making a lot of claims when very little knowledge of the financials is public. If you actually look at the numbers, there are plenty of ways in which API revenue and forgotten subs could more than make the difference for power users. Even if power users are getting 10-20x their sub fee in tokens, the math could still work out. Personally, I doubt more than 5% of Claude subs even approach max usage, because it requires having so many agents running all of the time.

I imagine we'll know in a few months when these companies go public.

They are losing money because they are training new models and building new data centers. The claim of the video is that they're losing money just serving current AI models. There's just no evidence of that.

Ahh yes, the "human dignity" of billions of people toiling away to make Americans cheap widgets. There never was dignity to capitalism. We can strive to replace it with something better.

If you paid attention to proponents of a wealth tax in the US, you would be aware that they only ever suggest it for vast wealths of like $10 million+.

Yeah the multi-agent workflow just hasn't been satisfying to me. The more chats I try to run at once, the more I got lost and overwhelmed. I trust Claude to implement a plan correctly after I've reviewed it, but if I don't review all of the plans, I will miss some small detail that it misunderstood and it'll be a pain to fix later.

I'm like a 1-2 chats at a time kind of guy. I just don't see how I could keep my exact vision for the project otherwise.

Yeah but the tech doesn't end here. Sure, it doesn't make anybody particularly happy that the tech started here. It's kind of a bummer to automate creative labor that gets social esteem so early on.

But that's not the point. Where the tech ends is human-level intelligence that can do any task as well as a human and more cheaply.

Speaking specifically about food insecurity and homelessness in the US, it's not simply greed, it's "just deserts" ideology. It's a belief in the lack of merit of the poor to receive help.

Speaking globally, there are many more barriers to feeding everybody than just abundance, like the other guy said.

That's not a very good analogy. When the mine closes, democracy doesn't save the town, because the town only has control over the economic activity inside of it.

AI or no AI, the US will still have control over the economic activity inside of it. America is not pitched to be a ghost town, but instead a vastly productive and wealthy economy driven by AI. A ghost town cannot redistribute wealth it does not have, but America will still have all of the wealth.

Exactly! The rich don't want to see mass starvation any more than the rest of us. We only permit homelessness and food insecurity now because of scarcity and a "just deserts" mentality where we blame people for their lot in life. When AI is doing the majority of labor, there will be no "just deserts" mentality, and there will be massive abundance.

Democracy is what allows regular people to have negotiating power vs the rich, and the majority of these battles are actually won through legislation, not union negotiation.

I understand that regular people have lost faith in democracy, and that they think rich people control the world and make every major decision, but that just doesn't ring true to me. Democracy is more or less giving us what we vote for, we just vote for dumb things. Ultimately, I have faith that if political and economic circumstances change enough, we might actually vote for the right things.

Counterpoint: Work sucks. Of the billions of workers on the planet, the number of them who love their job and would truly be doing it even if they didn't need to in order to survive is probably in the low single digits.

Hating work is good, wanting it to all be automated is good. It is a pro-human flourishing stance, whereas keeping the majority of humanity laboring in jobs they dislike just to survive is against human flourishing in favor of the status quo.

Exactly, and that's why this maxim about "understanding the code base" being the bottleneck is also somewhat misleading.

Claude is even better at helping you understand the code base then it is at writing code! It can look at a bunch of files and give you an accurate run down in ten minutes.

Thanks for the genuine response. When you put it like that, though, if all seems a little ambiguous. Like, Dario isn't necessarily lying, and there's no proof he is, and on the contrary, the company continues to get investment from people who, in theory, do get to see the actual numbers.

I guess I don't blame you or anybody for having a deal of cynicism, but these arguments just don't seem very concrete. Like, if Dario was lying or not, he probably wouldn't share the actual numbers, and he probably would propose a "model lifecycle" accounting. And if the business model had potential or not, there probably would still be vast investment in the next model. Zitron has had nothing but cynicism towards AI from the start, and it's his whole shtick, and so these arguments don't seem very credible coming from him, even though they seem reasonable coming from you.

We don't need AI in the same way we don't need washing machines and dryers. Like, sure, we don't need a machine to do our laundry, just like we don't need an AI to do our skilled labor, but it sure saves us a lot of time and energy.

Thanks for the link. There's not much of an argument here from Ed, though, besides that it's an unusual way to view or report margins.

But it's not that unusual, right? If I build a house this year and sell it next year, the house might still be profitable even if next year I'm building 3 more houses, so the company as a whole is still in the red on an annual basis.

I mean, I'm not a financial expert but that doesn't seem all that unusual to me.

Thanks for the link. I'll admit I'm not an expert on the business side of this, but is this really much of a response? He seems to just call it strange accounting and then he moves on.

It doesn't even feel like particularly strange accounting to me. Aren't there plenty of companies that spend a lot in one year and realize the gains in the next year? If I build a house this year and sell it next year, the house was still profitable, even if next year I'm building 3 more houses to sell in the year after.

Most small features take 80-150k tokens to implement, and most large features take 200-250k. For a hobbiest working like 10 hours a week, they can get stuff done but not nearly hit the weekly usage cap.

All subscription models are subsidized by users who don't use much. The fact that somebody on a $20 sub might get $50 in value isn't crazy if there are 3 people who only get $10 in value. This isn't some sign that the model is broken, it's the intended outcome.

Also, I didn't read this whole thing, but I have yet to see Zitron respond to the strongest AI financials claim, which is that the models themselves are profitable on a life-cycle basis, even if the companies are not profitable on an annual basis due to capital expenditure. Dario made this claim exactly, and it more or less blows all of Zitron's financials arguments up.

Their bigger incentive is to deliver the best product in the cheapest way, because there is tight competition with at least 2 other companies. I know we all love to hate on capitalism but it's actually functioning fine in this situation, and the token inflation is their attempt to provide a better product, not a worse one.

Meh I looked up the definition:

"having knowledge or perception of a situation or fact."

They do have knowledge of the info, but they don't have perception of it.

No, it has knowledge of what it is and how it is used.

I'm guessing you and the other guy are taking issue with the words "aware of" when I'm just saying it has knowledge of these things. Awareness doesn't have to imply a continual conscious state.

I didn't mean to imply that it was. But when you reply to it, if you just say "no" then it's aware that you could've just not responded, and that normally you would never respond to it unless you were asking for something more.

It just doesn't make any sense to respond no in this situation, and so it confuses the LLM and so it looks for more context.

The whole idea of just sending "no" to an LLM without additional context is kind of silly. It's smart enough to know that if you just didn't want it to proceed, you would just not respond to it.

The fact that you responded to it tells it that it should do something, and so it looks for additional context (for the build mode change) to decide what to do.