jm4

They're not a news publisher. Not exactly anyway. They are a huge conglomerate and Reuters is just one division - and a recent addition at that. TR is probably more known for legaltech, Westlaw and ancillary kind of stuff that ends up spilling over into other industries like tax and accounting. They also have a large government division, which presumably will take on this project. Their bread and butter is enterprise tech, consolidated public data and research tools. That's sort of where the news fits in. It's just another data source.

Probably because it consumes the same APIs originally developed for a web app and the same front end engineers likely created Claude Code. People assume Anthropic set out to create Code as a product and went through a normal design phase. I think it’s more likely it started as an internal tool or someone’s side project and blew up as a product when they released it to the public.

Am I the only one around here who’s sick and tired of the bitching and moaning on every post about how something was vibe coded or written by AI? Without fail, someone complains and it shoots up to the top of the comments. It’s gotten ridiculous and it’s off topic.

The easiest thing for you to do is just not engage with the post if you don’t like it. You people don’t need to pollute the comment section for anyone else who’s actually interested.

Just about everything is vibe coded or written with AI these days. Assume that’s the default. Comments pointing it out or complaining about it is just noise.

That assumes progress is linear, which it certainly is not. We’re also assuming Chinese companies are releasing their best stuff when our own government is dictating what American companies can and cannot release.

I don’t know for sure that they are weeks or months behind. I doubt anyone outside of 3 letter agencies knows that. The pace of AI is crazy fast and China is notoriously secretive. We could be comfortably ahead or China could have the top model by the end of the year.

I don’t think any of us have enough information to know what’s really going on, but I suspect it’s a very tight race.

70% is not unreasonable gross margin. What makes you think that’s a reason to ask that they lower prices? That 70% has to cover a lot of expenses.

The joke is that McDonald's spends hundreds of thousands of dollars to identify new locations - traffic studies, visibility, demographics, nearby traffic generators, site characteristics, drive-thru feasibility, etc. They have one of the most rigorous processes in the industry. Burger King's process is to open a location across the street.

That's not fair at all. I am not saying anything about too big to fail. My whole point is that most of the people who get punished by a corporate death penalty don't deserve it. And if you want to go around imposing that penalty then some things need to be structurally different to avoid all the collateral damage.

By all means, punish Zuckerberg and the executives who built the monster. Civil forfeiture is ok with me. Take their money, punish them, charge them with crimes if they broke the law. I don't care. I'm not going to advocate for them escaping accountability just because they are big. Force them to change their business model. Let them fail if they can't find a way to succeed legitimately. But understand that there's a difference between letting a business fail and killing it overnight.

That has far reaching unintended consequences. Thousands of people out of jobs, investors out of money, etc. We’re not just talking fat cat shareholders. There are institutional investors, pension plans, 401k’s. Killing a company like Meta has a financial impact on virtually everyone in the country when the people we’re actually trying to punish are the slimeball CEO and his inner circle of executives.

Our system can’t bear something like a corporate death penalty. Maybe that’s another problem in and of itself. You won’t ever catch me advocating for a company like Meta - they are among the worst - but the solution can’t be one with the potential to kick off a 2008-style financial crisis. The cure can't be as painful as the disease.

Good read. A studio can be both good and not good enough for Microsoft. They’ve never made a secret of the fact that they are in it for huge numbers. A studio can do well and still make little enough that it’s a management headache for Microsoft.

I agree with the mess part. I also feel like a reset is necessary and they are messing it up more right from the start. Fourteen layers of management? That's insane. But 3200 layoffs is a hell of a lot more than middle management cruft. Asha certainly has her hands full over there and the honeymoon period - if there even was one - is definitely over.

A few thoughts on the vibe coding… This is probably just one person and this project wouldn’t have seen the light of day if they weren’t able to vibe code it. A few years ago this would have to be a kickstarter that raised at least several hundred thousand- probably millions to have a shot at successfully getting off the ground. You’re talking software and hardware engineering, experts in multiple disciplines, a whole team of people pouring in many hours to develop a product, etc.

Vibe coding doesn’t always have to result in low quality. An experienced engineer with good systems design skills piloting an agent can be incredibly productive. Although I’m pretty rusty at writing code, I’m still good at systems design and I’m having success with coding agents.

Recently, I’ve built a system for myself because what I wanted didn’t exist. There’s no way I ever would have done it without AI. I wouldn’t be able to pull it off myself even with years of time and a budget to hire developers for my personal project is nonexistent. It’s the kind of thing I never would have thought to start prior to good coding agents.

My productivity has been insane. I feel like there’s 10 of me. The quality of output is shockingly good. I’m looking at this and it’s one of the most put together systems I’ve worked on at any point in my career. It’s beyond what I saw from much more senior developers than I and it’s beyond what I was ever capable of myself.

I get why people don’t like vibe coding. It does produce a lot of slop in the hands of someone unskilled in the use of their tools. It costs people their jobs. There are a hundred reasons not to like it. The flip side is we get cool projects like this one because a single person can build the thing they always wanted and never could until now.

For real. I've used 8B tokens in the past month and haven't hit my limits even once. In fact, I can't even get close except for the day I used Fable. I've barely stopped. Claude keeps reminding me to sleep.

It was already frustrating to use before. I wanted to review my own code for OWASP top 10 kind of stuff and it kept refusing. It repeatedly popped up scary warnings about how I was violating TOS. I had to go through quite a few iterations of that prompt. When I finally got it to work it burned through all my remaining usage on a single run.

I won’t even bother with it if they’ve made it even more frustrating. Instead, I’ve been using a combo of Opus 4.8, GLM 5.2 and DeepSeek v4 Pro. Then I have Opus synthesize and verify the reports from all 3 and make the fixes.

How many drivers with their own car live in a single family home? That 2/3 statistic is undoubtedly skewed by minors who don’t drive and live with their parents.

For the most part, but who is going to get on the highway to charge their car if they weren’t already headed that way? And 50 miles is a long way to go. It’s unreasonable to expect anyone to drive 100 miles to charge (and waste all that range). Just get a gas car at that point.

EV’s do well in parts of the U.S. with good charging infrastructure. One of the challenges is this country is huge and there are large numbers of people in places where infrastructure or other factors make it difficult to drive an EV. Probably half the people in this country live in rural areas and smaller towns where the charging infrastructure doesn’t exist and doesn’t make much sense because no one drives an EV. It’s a chicken and egg problem.

Housing is another complication that’s related to the charging situation. It’s only worthwhile to own an EV if you can charge at home. There are people who make it work with only public chargers, but it’s a major PITA. That usually means owning a home where you can install a charger. That requirement excludes a lot of people.

It’s not that everyone wants a gas guzzler. There are real challenges here.

That’s great. Definitely going to check it out. I usually use NASCAR for this. I’m out in 10 minutes like a baby going for a car ride.

A lot of it would go away if they just stopped consuming it. They consume it at least as much as anybody else. The only difference is the self loathing and belief that they need to be - and are qualified to be - the moral police.

What smart home features does Apple TV have? All I've ever used it for is to watch TV. To be fair, I pretty much dismissed Apple for anything smart home after they launched that ridiculously priced Pod thing.

I don't have faith in these companies. I don't know how they operate. I know how I operate.

My life already was uprooted by those exact decisions... A couple times... The first guy fucked up so badly that every last one of us lost our jobs, including him. He was an unqualified moron who weaseled his way into a position where his bad decisions had major consequences. It was extremely frustrating. It happens. It will happen again. That's life.

Lots of decisions impact lives. Some are literally life and death decisions. Sometimes the best decision possible with the information available at the time is going to turn out badly. Or maybe a bad decision achieves a good result.

That's why I'm saying to separate the process from the result when determining consequences. Someone who consistently exercises good judgment and who makes well-reasoned, thoughtful decisions is likely to achieve good results more often than someone who doesn't. But, event then, some things just don't work out and it impacts people's lives.

I would absolutely fire those idiots at Ford though. There's nothing wrong with trying to leverage AI. Personally, I like AI tools and I rely on them daily. But if someone lacks the judgment to figure out when a job should be performed by a human then they shouldn't be able to make decisions about how to use AI. These people are clearly out of their depth and just faking it. Clown show.

Not getting fired is not the same as isolation from consequences. People who make rational decisions and achieve results get opportunities to make more impactful decisions. People who don't get results don't get more opportunities - or maybe find themselves in a situation where the scope of their decisions (and blast radius) is limited. Firing is for misconduct or when someone has no value to offer. It's more of a spectrum than a binary thing.

I can't speak for how these particular executives were handled. I've never worked at a place where people were quickly fired for mistakes unless it was something extreme. It's usually based on track record rather than a single thing. Most employers understand that if they fired people for making mistakes they would run out of employees very fast. On the other hand, someone who learns from a mistake probably isn't going to do it again so you may have a better employee than a hypothetical replacement. It's also generally understood that people with a large scope of responsibilities have a large blast radius when things don't work out. It just comes with the territory and it's not exclusive to the executive suite.

Generally, you don’t want to punish people for making decisions. At least I don’t. I value people who are willing to try things and I generally believe any decision made in good faith is better than no decision. My litmus test is was it a reasonable decision given the information available at the time in service of a greater goal. I can live with the consequences of that. If it turns out to be a not so great decision then we can fix it. I’m not going to fire someone for the result when the process was sound.

That said, this application of AI was profoundly stupid from the outset. You don’t necessarily fire people for a bad result from a reasonable decision making process, but you do fire them for poor judgment and reasoning. There’s nothing that can fix that except for not letting those people make decisions anymore.

There’s a difference between violating a dozen obscure laws on a daily basis that never get enforced and operating an unlicensed radio broadcast. See what happens if you try it. The FCC does not mess around.

You would be breaking numerous laws, your transmitters would be removed quickly, you would be out thousands of dollars in equipment, and no one would be on your network anyway. You would almost certainly go to jail if you tried this.

And Google would probably say the same thing Microsoft used to say back in the day. Their customers aren't asking for the ability to manage profiles in Firefox. I wouldn't doubt for a second that it's true.

Almost nobody outside of the minority of internet users fighting against chromium hegemony cares about Firefox. Firefox lost its casual users years ago. Hell, even most of those people sticking with it out of principle are doing it while gritting their teeth. It's been a subpar browser for a long time and the Mozilla organization kinda sucks.

Why would any for-profit enterprise waste their time or money on Firefox?

It is a security feature. In a corporate environment, you generally don't want users installing their own software. If it's a remote access thing from a personal device, you still generally want to be able to establish some kind of baseline. I don't like Chrome - not even a little bit - but I will admit that they have a pretty damn good security track record. I'd rather my remote users be on there than some crusty Firefox installation with 40 extensions. Organizations have the right to make these decisions when they are the ones that own the data. For example, when I was still in that world, we required personal phones to be encrypted to access corporate email. This was when a lot of people would still walk around with devices without a pin. People complained, but it was non-negotiable.

I think there’s some truth to that. The reality is most companies are implementing AI badly. It’s not actually solving anything and feels more like a checkbox on a feature matrix. Bolt on a chatbot and the job’s done.

Here’s a perfect example. Square recently rolled out “managerbot”. I was like “oh, cool” because I actually wanted something like that. I asked it a few questions about the data in my system, most of which it couldn’t answer. On top of that, it was as slow as molasses. I could pull the report and get the information myself faster than that bot could do anything. Square isn’t the only one. Salesforce, Microsoft, Google, etc. They are all guilty of it.

Personally, I like using AI tools, but I’m experiencing the marketing fatigue too. Developers are putting it into everything, doing it badly and then pitching it as a central feature.

I guess it’s the natural cycle of things though. We are somewhere around the peak hype -> disillusionment part of the cycle.

That's good to know. Still, I'm stuck on that little instance. Scaling it means an exorbitant price increase. I would just leave for another provider at that point - and maybe that's what they're going for. They're not kicking people out immediately but making it uncomfortable to stay.

I would hypothesize that there's a lot more customer churn at the lower price points than there is in the higher tiers and when you get into dedicated servers. You're dealing with people who spin up a cheap VPS, mess around with it for a while and then delete it. Or maybe the kinds of customers whose payment card expires and they don't bother to update it because they're not using that $7 VPS for that little pet project they forgot about. Payments fail and then the VPS runs for a few more weeks before they finally have to delete it due to non-payment.

Higher prices filter out the unserious people who are a higher risk for churn. What they're left with is bigger customers with bigger footprints who lock in long term rates.

Of course, this is pure speculation on my part.