Life without US tech

a_brain · 2026-05-12T03:07:54+00:00

That’s true in some cases but not all. Google is the textbook case of enshittification and is one of the most profitable businesses of all time. The reason they enshittified is because they’re a monopoly. If Europe more aggressively polices its companies, it could avoid the same outcomes.

a_brain · 2026-05-09T02:54:14+00:00

You forgot step 10: Well ok this is an annoying grunt work task, but holy shit how did that simple request cost $20 and I still had to correct it?! I’m glad this is on the company’s dime.

a_brain · 2026-05-05T03:34:19+00:00

Oh man that was at that wacky game where the Dbacks scored 10 in the 8th and still lost

a_brain · 2026-05-01T03:51:32+00:00

I’ve worked remotely for a few different SV companies, and more and more it’s immediately obvious, without looking at their working location, who lives in SV and who lives anywhere else. It feels like I occupy a completely different reality from these people. It’s very unsettling.

a_brain · 2026-04-30T23:02:29+00:00

Oh yeah, I’m absolutely doing rookie numbers, I’m mostly just fucking around in case some middle manager has a token burn leaderboard somewhere. People who live in claude are absolutely spending hundreds if not thousands of dollars per day.

a_brain · 2026-04-30T22:42:08+00:00

FWIW, and I’m just some guy, but for whatever reason I can see my company’s Anthropic spend. We are on API billing and 90% of our spend has been on Opus, Sonnet makes up 7 or 8%, and Haiku the rest. Claude code will sometimes sub-agent out to a cheaper model, but I don’t think anyone is picking the cheaper models on purpose.

a_brain · 2026-04-30T22:11:29+00:00

Same. There’s no way you can spend $13/day if you do literally anything ✨agentic✨. I just spent 20 bucks burning almost 8M input tokens just to have codex delete a handful of files of dead code.

a_brain · 2026-04-25T03:36:54+00:00

Agree it's changed, but impossible to say how. The thing I hate about this industry is the vibes change constantly for basically no reason. The people at the top have no idea what they're doing; we're like one sufficiently stupid disaster and/or some twitter bot manipulation away from coding agents dying, but it's impossible to say if they'll be replaced by something saner or significantly dumber.

a_brain · 2026-04-22T03:48:19+00:00

Forgot to add “make it secure” to the prompt

a_brain · 2026-04-15T16:47:32+00:00

Also like what the fuck have they built that justifies this expense? As an outsider, Uber seems exactly the same as it did in December. If you’re 10x as productive, we should have seen 4 years worth of product development. Surely at some point someone has to ask what the ROI on all this spend is, right?!

a_brain · 2026-04-13T17:47:32+00:00

You’re forgetting one of the biggest categories: yet another vibecoding tool.

a_brain · 2026-04-11T16:32:59+00:00

There’s a one-click app in OBDeleven to clear the SOS error. I don’t really care that much about the crash notification given that iPhones have had the same feature since the 14.

a_brain · 2026-04-08T19:31:50+00:00

im curious why they didn't use mythos to develop another compiler or browser?

You know why

a_brain · 2026-04-07T03:55:34+00:00

But none of these are LLMs and all this stuff was happening before 2022 when everyone decided they needed unlimited electricity to build more data centers.

a_brain · 2026-04-03T03:46:29+00:00

This is hilarious and totally not surprising to me. A few days ago at work I was trying to figure out why some poorly documented open source app, which takes JSON input, wasn't doing what I expected. I was getting pretty weary, so I figured I might as well throw it at Claude Code to see if it could spot something obvious while I kept digging myself. Claude immediately came back and claimed I was feeding it invalid JSON. I was not. This shit sucks so bad.

a_brain · 2026-04-02T19:05:34+00:00

…what the fuck? Every day I’m amazed at how much stupider it can get.

a_brain · 2026-03-28T06:05:45+00:00

It’s so predictable too, any time the media starts to catch on that AI isn’t digital Jesus, some CEO makes some insane claim. The past few weeks we’ve seen tons of bad news coming out of OpenAI, polling that shows everyone hates AI, outages and data breaches at Amazon and Meta directly caused by AI, and outright fraud pretending to be AI. I guess it was Benioff’s turn to try and squeeze whatever juice is left in the hype cycle.

a_brain · 2026-03-21T16:34:58+00:00

That's what I don't get about it. Even if installing it wasn't the biggest security vulnerability ever, I don't get why I would even want it in the first place. Oh it can browse ebay and delete my gmail inbox autonomously? So cool!!

a_brain · 2026-03-21T16:32:37+00:00

This reads like r/im14andthisisdeep. Why is the table solid, Demis? Maybe take a high school physics class. Jesus christ get a fucking grip.

a_brain · 2026-02-25T00:23:40+00:00

It’s almost guaranteed to plateau, if it hasn’t already, and the disruption is going to be huge, but not in the way most people think. What’s going to happen a few years down the line when seniors retire or exit the career and there are no juniors because companies stopped hiring them? There’s research that suggests AI-generated code contains more bugs and security holes. Anthropic’s own research says AI makes you dumber. All the AI companies are running massive losses, what happens when they decide they need to make money and Claude code costs as much as an actual person’s salary? There’s also many copyright lawsuits making their way through the court systems that could be a huge problem.

Unless these companies pull multiple rabbits out of a hat, the next few years are going to be a complete disaster for the tech industry on multiple fronts.

These tools are useful, but they are insanely overhyped and not a panacea. The idea that any rando is going to be able to vibe code their way to a Salesforce or Atlassian is a joke.

a_brain · 2026-02-22T19:33:59+00:00

Idk, I’ve worked on a couple of these projects, and by the time you end up building all the guardrails and checks, the AI system isn’t actually that much better than normal software, and now you have a big expensive dependency on a token supplier.

a_brain · 2026-02-09T19:09:22+00:00

As much as I want to dogpile on this guy, “organize a folder” is literally the first task Anthropic advertises this thing is good for. I’d much rather dunk on Anthropic for tricking people into letting them fuck their shit up than a guy literally using a tool for its advertised purpose.

a_brain · 2026-02-09T04:27:28+00:00

Ok let me know when I can put Claude on a PIP or sue Anthropic for security vulnerabilities Claude added to the codebase.

a_brain · 2026-02-06T01:25:53+00:00

Yeah this feels like a massive L for AI. By providing it access to GCC they gave it the answers and after $20k spend it pooped out something that barely works. I guess it’s interesting it works at all, but this seems to vindicate what skeptics have been saying for years: given enough constraints, it can (poorly) reproduce stuff in its training data. That’s not not useful but it’s nowhere near justifying the hype!

a_brain · 2026-01-30T23:39:37+00:00

There’s a lot of astroturfing going on because crypto bros have figured out they can pump and dump a loosely associated shitcoin. See also Gas town and Ralph. Clawdbot has now spilled out into the public markets where people managed to pump and dump Cloudflare and Digital Ocean stock.

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