G. T. Waters

Challenging projects: Just because I'm lucky. Still, easy to get narrow focused. - (Lesson learned 🤞) So staying engaged... sometimes advising, contributing, mentoring, ... just absorbing perspectives, or going all in on the best plans. That keeps you alive..., and hopefully yields: experiences (always) 🎒, practical wisdom (mostly) 💡, ... and occasionally insights worth sharing (once in a while) ✨ If you’re here… I probably thought something fit the latter. If not… well, that’s on me.

For a couple of reasons, I've felt for a while that @windsurf has already given up (as sad as that is, maybe for understandable reasons). While it was my most-used, favorite choice even a year ago, it has felt like it's been struggling since the original team left. (Just a subjective perception, though.) Today's announcement about the details of the plan changes unfortunately confirms those fears. Switching to quota-based plans is itself reasonable, and just follows Claude, Anthropic, etc. conventions, but the plan structure and value proposition seem to marginalize them even further. The real problem is not having any offer between the $20(40) and the $200 plans is kind of like bailing out of the whole field for people who are not betting fully on Windsurf, with all eggs in a single basket. (Models like Opus 4.6 and GPT-5.4 are non-negotiable today, so I’m not even looking at the lower rows wit 'toy' models. Running out maybe even after 7 Opus (???) messages a day makes these base tiers pointless.) And subscribing to the $200 tier requires quite a commitment to Windsurf. Personally, I have countless subscriptions to Claude, Codex, ... and a dozen other AI services I use daily, so another $2400 a year just to open it a few times a week when it’s the right tool for the right task... It is sad, because the viable options are really narrowing down to a few giant players today. And monopolies always hit back in the end. (fingers crossed!) But it really feels today that the further you are from owning your own hardware farm, or at least having your own cutting-edge foundational models, the less likely you are to compete with reasonable offers. In a way, it confirms some of the pessimistic predictions about how the 'consolidating' markets will end... “You know the law, Highlander… There can be only one.”

Auto-generated branch names sometimes nail it... "romantic-heisenberg" Yes, I was just hesitating about auto accept... Now turns out uncertainty has never been so romantic. Although, ... I won't know until I observe it... is the code dead or alive?... the latter seems definitely less romantic though.

@AnthropicAI My fear is that if you just detected this, they made a good job hiding it. (I am 150% sure that this is going on ever since you exist. And also, all other providers of course.)

We’ve identified industrial-scale distillation attacks on our models by DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax. These labs created over 24,000 fraudulent accounts and generated over 16 million exchanges with Claude, extracting its capabilities to train and improve their own models.

Just leave social media for a few weeks or months... So many new friends when you are back. Few of them are carbon-based life form, though...

There is some irony in seeing the latest Sonnet keep adding unrequested estimates, forecasting 17 weeks for something I intend to get done between 3 PM and 6 PM with them.

The magic spell that sometimes sparks instant cooperation from rogue companies is like grpr request 'hereby I require you collect and share all data you store, use, ever collected about me, (including, but not restricted to any financial data, payment methods), 3rd parties ever shared with." (don't remember literally, stg. like this) Cheaper to delete you. Not a silver bullet though.

Sorry but this isn't acceptable Notion and a lot more apps that are making it impossible to cancel our subscriptions! ☹️ I don’t know if you’re aware, but I’ve been a loyal Notion user since 2020. Started using it to clip blog articles as a replacement for Evernote and Excel. I even pay for the monthly Business plan. I had the habit of opening Notion every day to draft and track my social media posts. The recent AI proofreading feature was super convenient. But this year my business is struggling, so I had to cut expenses. 😮‍💨 This month the bank blocked the Notion charge, and immediately my whole workspace got locked, completely unusable. So I decided to cancel. While exploring, I realized my OneDrive subscription already lets me do everything I need (with Copilot in OneNote and Word) for half the price🥹thanks Microsoft... Problem: it’s been a week and I still can’t find any clear button to cancel. Also discovered that canceling would mean losing access to all my notes inside Notion.😔 Luckily my most important stuff is already published on X and shared with you all. 😂 Tried contacting Notion support, of course only generic bot replies saying I’m “not the admin” 😠 and can’t cancel the Business plan. After paying them 25 euros every month for years, no human support at all. Now I’m stuck owing them another full month for an app I can’t even open. The worst part: until I magically find the cancel page, it feels like I’ll owe them money forever for something I no longer use, and they’re holding my digital notes hostage. This whole subscription model is starting to feel absurd. You pay loyally for years, then they treat you like dirt. At least when I canceled my OneDrive Business plan, a nice lady from the US called me here in France, answered everything, and handled it humanely. I respect companies that still treat people like humans, not these AI-obsessed tech giants who keep raising prices while making cancellation deliberately impossible. 😔 -Ex loyal Notion User

“Just cut me a Carney.” Some problems quietly solve others. Since my dark, dense hair started turning lighter, the barber's question was a struggle: “How do you want it?” Finally became a no-brainer: “Just cut me a Carney.” :-) Cool and iconic.

@kimmonismus On this aspect I still have some "Don't look up" feeling.

Prominent CEOs and AI researchers from Anthropic to Google to OpenAI to Jobloss: countless jobs will be lost. Sam Altman 2019: "I think this is something on the order of 70 to 80 percent of existing human jobs"

@kimmonismus Needless to say: 1. The real danger is that human police offer at least some hope of refusing inhuman commands beyond a limit. For robots, that moral block is optional. 2. No matter what, there is no way back-it's just a matter of time.

In shenzen robots are already on patrol with regular police

Well... I started drafting a few very similar posts several times, but never managed to express it that nicely.

@svpino You have the easiest marketing job I've ever seen then. Just take it and celebrate!

I tell companies I'll help them build secure, reliable, and extensible software. Nobody cares. They don't call me back. I tell them I'll help them build AI-first software. Everyone wants to talk to me. I don't even know what "AI-first" means. It's a bubble.

@kimmonismus Interesting discrepancy is you hear the guy talk, it sounds like he understands the landscape, dynamics, etc. Still, looking at the products... I see no trace of any consistent strategy beyond panic-shove. Something lost halfway.

CEO expresses strong dissatisfaction with Microsoft's copilot Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has assumed a hands-on product management role to urgently accelerate Copilot improvements, driven by frustration with the AI's technical flaws and eroding market share against competitors like Google and Cursor. He is now personally overseeing engineering and recruiting while delegating other executive duties, aiming to reverse slow enterprise adoption and ensure Microsoft maintains its position in the AI race.

The biggest benefit of LLMs for me - besides coding - is deep research reports. Every day. 💭By now, I can often tell "who" wrote it from a paragraph. 💡Still, the easiest tell is Gemini: whatever the topic, “that field is undergoing a fundamental transition.” 🎄

@haider1 GPT-3.5 seems a bit early positioned to beginning of 2022. It came very late that year, did it? (I may be wrong) Are these public release dates or some internal training timestamps?

since the latest METR result with opus 4.5, we've entered an era of almost-vertical progress all it will take is a few more jumps like this, and we could be heading into software-on-demand and RSI progress hasn't just matched METR's earlier 7-month doubling time; it's beaten it now it looks like 4-5 months. incredible

@abhitwt Objective-C

Programming language you learned once and never touched again?

Facebook seems to be in a downward spiral (subjective impression only) 1, Content keeps declining, ads increasing... so we check it less and less. 2, To still meet ad plans, desperate move: literally every second entry is 'sponsored'... Making me close page instantly. GoTo 1

@AJChadha A friend of mine just raged about it... not only because the "what is your actual problem?" question wasn't a conversation starter. But it never even came up later. At all. And three such heroes in a few days. :-(

The new dropshippers are people who want to transform your company with AI. The new marketing agency model. Zero capital. Just outreach. I don’t hate it because I started more than 15 years ago with that model. What I don’t like is the hopium. No real change. Just “AI”

@SebJohnsonUK @elevenlabs @bfl_ml That only means Europe does not start from absolute zero, but has more like seeds that may or may not grow, depending on the soil. Still, no guarantee of catching up. And relying on external hardware, chip manufacturing, and a hundred other factors still leaves us vulnerable.

Europe is LOSING the AI race and is absolutely COOKED. Ok. Why are so many of the leading models being built in Europe then? > ElevenLabs (@elevenlabs) is the leading text to speech model, which is 2x as good as OpenAI, its closest competitor. > Black Forest Labs (@bfl_ml) one of the leaders in text to image generation used by Meta, Adobe and Microsoft > Synthesia (@synthesiaIO) the leader in AI avatars which has developed its own incredibly powerful models Today another model in Europe has raised a huge round. This time its @MireloAI which has developed a leading text to sound model that creates accompanying sound for videos. It's just announced raising a $41m seed from @IndexVentures (@GeorgiaS_IV ) and @a16z (@appenz). The founders (CJ Simon-Gabriel and Florian Wenzel) behind the company are two absolutely CRACKED builders: >Both have PHDs in Machine Learning > Met each other while working as AI researchers at AWS Labs > Both also accomplished musicians These two combine contextual expertise, academic excellence and AI research to create an amazing founder combination. Europe needs more companies like this. Sure - Europe is behind on LLMs. But it's also the most capital intensive and competitive area to build models in. VERY bullish on European Models

@rohanpaul_ai The initial predictions of 10x per year were already "scary" 2-3 years ago. (100,000x for 5y?). Thinking of 390x is instant cognitive overflow. Most technical and architectural low-hanging fruits have been harvested though, curious if it keeps up.

OpenAI slashed costs by almost 400x in a year.. Human labor don’t exactly get 400x cheaper in a year — that’s not how humans scale. Think where we are going by 2030 at this rate.

@crea_tiffany Well, if that's the veterinarian's toolkit… I'd be a bit concerned.

People who can use these tools are the hottest.