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farazyashar.com
From the article, it looks like ads are separate from answers in a clearly delineated way. It's not quite as nefarious as what you're suggesting. Frankly, I'm surprised.
This is only round one however, and I could see a future where they offer more "intimate" experiences. At least that's not today.
JavaScript is dynamic and supports live reload which means iterations are far faster than would be in a compiled language--even for LLMs.
This is especially useful when you're trying to evaluate behaviors while changing state surgically.
It's the exact same playbook Silicon Valley uses. Subsizide, lose piles of money, capture market share, recoup investment.
They've done this in other industries like solar panels, chips, and EVs. This is no different.
We will suffer from not knowing how to add. You could still argue "so what?"
Systems aren't a single addition. They are compounded operations with sprawling complexity. What happens when you can't reason through the system? What happens when you start asking for the wrong things? What happens when saying "fix it" on loop stops working?
If you didn't participate in it, what are you hedging?
The FDE is really the consolidation of two existing roles: solutions architect and engineer.
In the old days, sales would close a client with the help of someone in technical sales and a solutions architect that would come up with a high level spec for a solution. That spec would be fleshed out post sales and then given to an engineer to develop.
Today the FDE often does both.
The difference between Palantir and pure consulting is that Palantir has a core software platform that they customize per client. The business model is more akin to IBM or SAP products.
You're introducing a moral claim that this site does not make.
I'm not sure I follow what one step means exactly. Aren't all models some f(x) = y? Is the suggestion instead that we should be doing f(x) = g(h(x)) = y?
What would the difference be?
Of course they did: they could have just chosen to not publish apps which would have crippled iOS. The only reason it feels existential is because developers made a Faustian bargain from the beginnning.
Developers walked into their walled garden with joy. It's no where near what this article describes.
I have them talk to each other via tmux to great effect on complex changes. Its great for auditing changes as work is done.
It's 1 trillion over a number of years. There's a discount factor you're forgetting.
This is specific to a narrow band of industry:
these are the firms that spend on multiple models and use the most advanced and productivity-enhancing products available (coding agents and APIs as opposed to simple chat subscriptions)
who funded you is a better predictor of AI adoption than the sector you’re in
My bet is that these companies are either:
1. In the business of trying to automate other jobs. The number of startups in this space is stupefying, so I'm sure more established companies with VC cash want a slice.
2. Leveraging AI to accelerate growth as much as possible because that's their mandate.
What's scary is that hiring across the rest of adopters (most employment) has remained stagnant. So what happens during the next recession?
I'm not convinced raw costs matter:
1. Compute costs collapsed since the advent of Cloud and yet hyperscalers still have fat margins.
2. Many open source office suites exist yet none compete with the ubiquity of gsuite or office. GitHub, Slack are similar examples.
3. Both Windows and macOS dominate the home desktop space despite free alternatives existing for a long time.
4. Many formerly open source infrastructure components like Redis and Elastic Search have Apache equivalents, but they still command healthy margins.
I understand the arguments for a margin collapse, but I don't see any historical analogues. It seems that enterprises will pay top dollar for service guarantees, integration, and someone they can sue.
It's nobody gets fired for buying IBM all over again.
Can you explain what you find useful about ultracode? I've become wary of agent swarms since the early days and now just prefer to have a single agent spin for hours at time. Parallelism never got me anywhere worthwhile.
"Or any LLM" on your machine.
For work, EC2. For play, the cheapest VM I could find: https://vpshostingservice.co/
They have specials every now and then.
AI is a junior to mid-level engineer. If you treat it as such, you get the best of both vibe coding and rigorous engineering without all this paranoia.
Since the very beginning I've ran Claude from an isolated VM on yolo mode. This is just like giving an engineer their own laptop. Claude works on a feature up to a PR worthy point. I review the diff, just like I would with another engineer, and massage it to get it in the right shape and move on.
Inexperienced engineers make the same mistakes described I've even seen rm -rf albeit not from root! I would have lost my mind micromanaging someone with all permissions denied.
Security has always been and always will be a game of cat and mouse.
We all need cyborg cats to hunt cyborg mice. There's no other compromise unless you want a rat infestation.
This was already discovered during the source map leak.
This is not a malicious feature, but it is a weird choice for a developer tool that asks for trust.
They already tell you they scan for malicious prompts, and they have no ZDR guarantees for consumers. Why do signatures like this matter at all?
Forget your DeepSeek workflows. The "US government" coughexecutivebranchcough can now pick corporate winners and losers too.
You absolutely cannot unit test for taste.
I had this experience doing a port from Big Query to Postgres using Opus. I had unit tests to guarantee parity with the original code, and Opus insisted on building this bespoke query builder (e.g. `def _where(very_complicated_params)`) on top of sqlglot.
Even with the original code being straightforward and legible and repeated instructions to match, I had to fight with it to get close.
In the end, I ended up doing things the "old fashion way" where I copied chunks code into Claude proper and gave explicit instructions for each piece.
I clearly had externalized the requirements, and yet that wasn't sufficient. The only way to unit test further would be to use an AST to evaluate the output against metrics I couldn't even encode.
Distillation may not be an attack, but it is a ToS violation and could be seen as IP theft.
Any reasonable company would be pissed if a competitor, especially at Ali Baba's size, leveraged that company's R&D to compete. It is in this sense, a corporate attack.
If you want to roll your eyes at distillation concerns, you might need to excuse Anthropic for originally using pirated material to train their models.
It's sad we're resorting to philanthropy to solve problems like this. $500M is chump change.
NASA spent something like $300B in today's money on the Apollo program, and Artemis has exceeded $90B already.
I'm much more keen on never getting sick than prepping for Mars.
The unit economics might be just fine. We'll know more after IPO.
The drug dealer analogy has a darker side to it, however.
Once your dependent, they can drive up the price just because. It doesn't need to be for existential reasons.
The RAM requirements are still pretty painful.
libcef is the Chromium embedded framework[0], so your build isn't using a webview or maybe its using both. I just tried it on my mac, and I can't keep libcef out even with `--backend webview`.
Live reload. GUI development in compiled languages is a pain compared to web development.
You can't blame Adams for delinquent payments. He dramatically expanded housing vouchers (the source of the budget crisis) which in theory should have reduced delinquency.
Moreover rents for affordable housing haven't kept up with inflation while benefits have.
Arm chair speculation like what's in the article won't suffice. People need to be surveyed and interviewed to get to the bottom of this.
Before everyone wants to throw a rock at another CEO...
Only about 5% of denied in-network claims were turned down because the care was deemed not medically necessary. The rest were administrative, for an excluded service, for a missing referral or prior authorization, or for a reason the insurer never specified.
I worked in health tech for a while, and I can tell you the muck around a lot with ICD/CPT codes to maximize billing along with other shenanigans. There was actually a project at an innovation center at a well-known medical center which leveraged ML to maximize the amount of codes they could bill for without being rejected. The same kind of thing is often done by physicians who want to juice insurance.
Be mad--very mad--at hospitals and drug cos. As providers, they present themselves as patient advocates, but they're responsible for the outrageous healthcare costs. The dollar amount paid out by US insurance companies is maybe 2x that of other OECD countries, but the healthcare we get back from providers is trash (and extortive) by comparison.