robertneer

anyone else's claudecode keep trying to tell them it's time for bed? the cynic in me says, nice try Anthropic, trying to get me to not max out my max plan...

@toddsaunders Too many people will only internalize the first half of this post: "just build it already". And miss the second nested but most important part: "it's still an experiment". Learn faster but don't skip learning.

The token cost to build a production feature is now lower than the meeting cost to discuss building that feature. Let me rephrase. It is literally cheaper to build the thing and see if it works than to have a 30 minute planning meeting about whether you should build it. It’s wild when you think about it. This completely inverts how you should run a software organization. The planning layer becomes the bottleneck because the building layer is essentially free. The cost of code has dropped to essentially 0. The rational response is to eliminate planning for anything that can be tested empirically. Don’t debate whether a feature will work. Just build it in 2 hours, measure it with a group of customers, and then decide to kill or keep it. I saw a startup operating this way and their build velocity is up 20x. Decision quality is up because every decision is informed by a real prototype, not a slide deck and an expensive meeting. We went from “move fast and break things” to “move fast and build everything.” The planning industrial complex is dead. Thank god.

Overall, for my own use I have learned that AI writing often contains rhetorical scaffolding that can be removed without changing meaning. AI wrote most of this last one. It's pretty good!

The "framing sentence": The real question isn’t whether AI will change work. The question is how quickly. This is a presentation device used heavily in keynote speeches and essays and LLMs learned it well.

My evolving guide to spotting AI-slop. Some patterns that scream AI wrote this:

@chamath Losing a government contract is the consequence of Anthropic's stance. Being named a supply chain risk is the result of a government that feels entitled to punish entities that disagree with it.

In a democracy, it’s absolutely ok to define who can use the things you make and how. But it’s also absolutely ok for the Government to lose trust in you, tell you to fuck off and find an alternative. It’s also absolutely ok for you to nuke your own company in the process. The timing of this is not good for Anthropic and could be a potential boon to every other model that is exceeding expectations in their upcoming version (Grok, OAI, Gemini). More generally, I don’t see how this isn’t a slippery slope. What if a model maker updates their ToS that would block a use case that is legal but subjective? Agreeable in some states but not in others? What about in different countries with different governance or religions? It’s a huge can of worms. How can a government or company rely on a model that could have an ever-changing definition of what’s allowed without taking on major business/governance risk? They won’t. My hunch is that the company that embraces the “no holds barred” ToS will win because it’s the least risky to adopt wrt long term risk of getting rug-pulled.

There are generally 2 types of LLM users, those that use it to learn everything , and those that use it so they don’t have to learn anything.

My short but growing list of things we have let atrophy that AI is making us talk about like they are new: leading with intent, expressing vision, clarity on problems we are solving, insight centered development, meeting hygiene

Worth a read. You will see lots of comments poking at the holes, clinging to them as security blankets but principles are sound: 1) everything is going to change 2) don't be a victim 3) threats are tangible, opportunities are emergent, but also real

@SenWarren The year before he bought it $53.7M loss, likely to lose $100M next year. He then invested over $50M; by 2021 peaked digital subscriptions. Recent declines as their financial losses continued. We don't have state run media in America, @SenWarren what do you want to see here?

Jeff Bezos just fired hundreds of reporters at the Washington Post — including the Amazon reporter holding his OWN company accountable. Reminder: Jeff Bezos' net worth is nearly $250,000,000,000.

@elonmusk I spent time in one and my take is Cyber Truck design maps to Elon brain....from the outside: a little awkward, I don't quite get it, uh....no From the inside: on rails!, focused!!, dailed IN!!!! Top tier fun.

Cybertruck is the best vehicle Tesla has ever made so far

@PattyMurray ACA was a breakthrough and it allows me to be insured without regard for preexisting conditions and I need it. But it is NOT affordable as this whole debate over subsidies makes crystal clear. Stop making this about the ACA and start working across the aisle for a real solution

15 years after the ACA became law and Republicans STILL can’t come up with more than a “concept” of a plan.

@kristenmag I'm a deeply devoted Capitalist. But our ins mkt is perverted and opaque. If the govt does not provide ins, but instead we leave it to the market, providing insurance has to be an investable business. That's where your premiums go. To profit seekers in a very inefficient market..

My husband’s employer pays 100% of his health insurance premium, and 75% of our family’s. Our total monthly premium is $324. Our family deductible is $1000. Out of pocket max is $8000. Most services have a $20 copay. These are really good numbers. I get it…we’re lucky! But the reality is his company covers the remaining cost of our plan to a grand total of $1945/month. Why the heck does health insurance cost nearly $2000 a month for a very healthy family like mine?? We hardly use it. It’s absurd. The health insurance racket feels like the biggest scam in America. Where is all this money flowing and how do we fix this?

I wish conservatives got this straight: Without blue states, America would look like a failing country; patchy internet, collapsing schools, no tech, no medicine, no future. Red states cash the federal checks. Blue states write them. You don’t fund the nation. You bleed it dry. The math is simple: the places screaming the loudest bring the least to the table.

A BEST CASE SCENARIO FOR AI? The Doomer narratives were wrong. Predicated on a “rapid take-off” to AGI, they predicted that the leading AI model would use its intelligence to self-improve, leaving others in the dust, and quickly achieving a godlike superintelligence. Instead, we are seeing the opposite:  — the leading models are clustering around similar performance benchmarks; — model companies continue to leapfrog each other with their latest versions (which shouldn’t be possible if one achieves rapid take-off); — models are developing areas of competitive advantage, becoming increasingly specialized in personality, modes, coding and math as opposed to one model becoming all-knowing.  None of this is to gainsay the progress. We are seeing strong improvement in quality, usability, and price/performance across the top model companies. This is the stuff of great engineering and should be celebrated. It’s just not the stuff of apocalyptic pronouncements. Oppenheimer has left the building.  The AI race is highly dynamic so this could change. But right now the current situation is Goldilocks: — We have 5 major American companies vigorously competing on frontier models. This brings out the best in everyone and helps America win the AI race.  As @BalajiS has written: “We have many models from many factions that have all converged on similar capabilities, rather than a huge lead between the best model and the rest. So we should expect a balance of power between various human/AI fusions rather than a single dominant AGI that will turn us all into paperclips/pillars of salt.” — So far, we have avoided a monopolistic outcome that vests all power and control in a single entity. In my view, the most likely dystopian outcome with AI is a marriage of corporate and state power similar to what we saw exposed in the Twitter Files, where “Trust & Safety” gets weaponized into government censorship and control. At least when you have multiple strong private sector players, that gets harder. By contrast, winner-take-all dynamics are more likely to produce Orwellian outcomes. — There is likely to be a major role for open source. These models excel at providing 80-90% of the capability at 10-20% of the cost. This tradeoff will be highly attractive to customers who value customization, control, and cost over frontier capabilities. China has gone all-in on open source, so it would be good to see more American companies competing in this area, as OpenAI just did. (Meta also deserves credit.) — There is likely to be a division of labor between generalized foundation models and specific verticalized applications. Instead of a single superintelligence capturing all the value, we are likely to see numerous agentic applications solving “last mile” problems. This is great news for the startup ecosystem.  — There is also an increasingly clear division of labor between humans and AI. Despite all the wondrous progress, AI models are still at zero in terms of setting their own objective function. Models need context, they must be heavily prompted, the output must be verified, and this process must be repeated iteratively to achieve meaningful business value. This is why Balaji has said that AI is not end-to-end but middle-to-middle. This means that apocalyptic predictions of job loss are as overhyped as AGI itself. Instead, the truism that “you’re not going to lose your job to AI but to someone who uses AI better than you” is holding up well.  In summary, the latest releases of AI models show that model capabilities are more decentralized than many predicted. While there is no guarantee that this continues — there is always the potential for the market to accrete to a small number of players once the investment super-cycle ends — the current state of vigorous competition is healthy. It propels innovation forward, helps America win the AI race, and avoids centralized control. This is good news — that the Doomers did not expect.

@lexfridman Consider trying to chat with Karsten Wildberger, first Digital Minister for Germany.

Our goal is not to decouple from China, but to open markets and restore balance. We’ll continue trading with China, especially in non-strategic goods, and at lower tariff levels. At the same time, we’re focused on reshoring critical industries like medicine, semiconductors, and steel to protect U.S. national security interests.

Okay, I know this is dramatic -- but I'm really upset about all the Teslas being torched and vandalized nationwide. This is the worst look for the left: violent, angry, destructive... All this directed at a clean energy company, nonetheless... I'm so disappointed.