For the same reason there were more bank branches after the cost-per-branch was reduced.
Right now, software is really expensive; so 1) economics tends to favor large pieces of software which solve many different kinds of problems, and 2) loads of things that should be automatable simply aren't being automated with software.
With the cost of software dropping, it makes more sense to have software targeted towards specific niches. Companies will do more in-house development, more things will be automated than were being automated before.
Of course nobody knows what will happen; but it's entirely possible that the demand for people capable of driving Claude Code to produce useful software will explode.
> > But it is also hard to be with someone and is very hard to take care of kids and family and such. And it is waaay harder to be with wrong person.
> I don't know what "being with the wrong person" means. There is no "right" or "wrong" person as the world doesn't revolve around you.
Ho boy. Listen, I was married for 6 years, separated / divorced for 5 years, and now have been married for 10 years. You have no idea what kind of hell those last few years of the first marriage were. I had no idea until I'd been separated for a year, and gotten back to some sense of normalcy. I can't even describe to you what it's like to live in a house where you're emotionally wounded continually, or to realize the best you can hope from an attempt at a "date" is "it didn't explode".
One of the problems my ex and I had getting help was that people just couldn't seem to understand how bad it was. We'd describe something, people would say, "Oh yeah, marriage is hard, it will get better." Well no; our marriage was way worse, and it never got better.
The second marriage is so different. It's the kind of hard you're talking about -- we put in effort, it pays off. We argue, then we sort things out. We're not like some movie romance, but we're fundamentally a team. Some part of it is certainly "I learned something"; but a big part of it was definitely "It wasn't all me".
ETA: And, apparently, my ex has now been married to someone else for 11 years. Again, I'm sure she learned something from the disaster of our marriage that helped her in her second one. But I can't help but think there was something more than that: something difference in personality between myself and her current husband, such that she and I couldn't work things out but the two of them can.
> It’s patently clear2 that the license allows this, and it surprises me that this is rarely brought up in debates about GPL-3.0-only and GPL-3.0-or-later.
It's an interesting avenue, but the ultimate problem is that people die and/or lose interest in projects. What happens to this particular project if Runxi dies, or decides to make furniture out of wood instead? That basically becomes "GPL-3.0-only" again.
When a copyright holder dies, their copy rights pass on to their heirs. Depending on the state, this means it can go to cousins or twelfth cousins twice removed if that's all that is alive. Failing that, it goes to the state. Any/all of these could potentially sue if there is money in it.
They could, which is why I said when the copyright holder loses the ability to sue, not when the creator dies.
When it's a twelfth cousin they won't even know they have the copyright. Because it's an implicit right, they don't enumerate all your copyrights and tell your heir about them. The heir has to know.
You enter an "unclear title" scenario which may mean that individuals are fine using it, but no company wants to get involved because of the risks.
Similar things happen with physical property, where a title cannot be cleared and either people just live with it or they go to court to get it "reset".
OK, so a while back I set up a workflow to do language tagging. There were 6-8 stages in the pipeline where it would go out to an LLM and come back. Each one has its own prompt that has to be tweaked to get it to give decent results. I was only doing it for a smallish batch (150 short conversations) and only for private use; but I definitely wouldn't switch models without doing another informal round of quality assessment and prompt tweaking. If this were something I was using in production there would be a whole different level of testing and quality required before switching to a different model.
The big providers are gonna deprecate old models after a new one comes out. They can't make money off giant models sitting on GPUs that aren't taking constant batch jobs. If you wanna avoid re-tweaking, open weights are the way. Lots of companies host open weights, and they're dirt cheap. Tune your prompts on those, and if one provider stops supporting it, another will, or worst case you could run it yourself. Open weights are now consistently at SOTA-level at only a month or two behind the big providers. But if they're short, simple prompts, even older, smaller models work fine.
> "..am I alone in finding the expression 'it turns out' to be incredibly useful? It allows you to make swift, succinct, and authoritative connections between otherwise randomly unconnected statements without the trouble of explaining what your source or authority actually is. It's great. It's hugely better than its predecessors 'I read somewhere that...' or the craven 'they say that...' because it suggests not only that whatever flimsy bit of urban mythology you are passing on is actually based on brand new, ground breaking research, but that it's research in which you yourself were intimately involved. But again, with no actual authority anywhere in sight."
It kinda reminds me of replying to a statement with "So...it's come to this..."
My friends and I use to do this all the time for no particular reason except to turn an otherwise ordinary conversation into challenge that can only be resolved by mortal combat.
Of course, we did it jokingly with each other. But when someone we didn't know heard us do this they were genuinely confused with what we were so offended by, which was half the fun.
> the article doesn't include any facts that indicate this.
It does include two facts:
1. That the reporter's bio on the webpage changed "...is a reporter at Ars" to "...was a reporter at Ars". On the one hand, that's pretty thin sauce. On the other hand, that's not exactly the sort of change that gets made randomly.
2. They reached out to the various people involved, and although nobody has confirmed it, it's also the case that nobody has denied it.
I mean fired and resigned when it became clear you'd be fired are the same thing really.
We're not actually entitled to know the exact details of someone's job ending. They worked there. Now they don't. That much is the bit we're entitled to.
For public misconduct like this, we should get to know if he was fired (or asked to resign) as opposed to his making the independent decision to find work elsewhere or retire or whatever. We should get to know if he left because the company wanted him gone or because he wanted to be gone.
> OpenAI acceded to demands that the US Government can do whatever it wants that it claims is legal.
FTFY. The administration threw a fit and tried to retroactively demote a retired military officer for making a video saying, "Troops, you should disobey unlawful orders". Over 4000 times has been told, "No, that's not what the law regarding detaining undocumented aliens means", and continues doing it. Their first response to the Supreme Court saying, "the President can't impose tarriffs" was "The Hell I can't!".
It's 100% clear that Trump thinks "what the law allows" and "what I want to do" are the same thing.
Rule of law requires that the majority of people in the system are committed to the rule of law, and refuse to go along with violations of it. Anthropic is being a good citizen here; OpenAI is not.
FWIW I've never seen a correlation between a small company's website and the quality of their product. Slick website? Maybe they care for their craft, maybe they're all marketing and no content. Website stuck in 1998? Maybe they're sloppy and don't care; maybe they care about their core product, not a slick marketing brochure. I don't see any reason AI would be different in that regard.
That’s true. I think it’s more of a problem of getting someone in the door. Anecdotally going to art festivals I’m much more likely to enter the booth of someone who has handcrafted marketing over the person who has generated marketing.
Basic marketing theory says that spending extra to make your ads signals (term of art) to your potential customers that (1) you are successful, since you can afford it and (2) you are confident your product is superior, since you’re effectively paying people to try it, and expect doing this will generate revenue in return.
Much like the star bellied sneetches, when the quality of some ad format becomes untethered from the cost of production and placement, then marketers will flock to some alternative.
YouTube influencers fill[ed] that niche for a while because content milling SEO spam and fake reviews is a lot more expensive if you present the results in video form with good production values. (Not sure how long that will be true, since AI is getting better at short-term video).
> 1. Think of Amazon as a search engine for products. 2. Amazon wants its site to be the lowest-price destination for products. 3. If Amazon finds your product on another website for lower than its own website, it'll just hide your listing from the search -- this is meant to be pro-consumer (when you go to Amazon you'll get the lowest price).
Stockholm syndrome at its finest -- reinterpreting "punishing a seller if an item is cheaper anywhere else on the internet, even a site they don't directly control" as "pro-consumer".
If Amazon really were a search engine for their own products, they should just give an accurate answer for their own site. If they really wanted to be pro-consumer, they'd say "Available cheaper here: ..."
ETA: Showing competitor's prices could still be a strategic win for Amazon. It conditions users to always first check Amazon; and most of the time if it's cheaper, the ease of one-click ordering and/or batching deliveries should make it worth ordering from Amazon even if it's a few dollars cheaper elsewhere.
It's not done for either of those reasons. It's done to remove the decision point around believing you need to comparison shop on impulse purchases, by pretending that a price will be matched later should you find one. However, the terms are usually such that they will never be honoured.
Wise does (did?) that. I was doing large international money transfer a couple years ago and they advertized in app the rates of other companies in the space. At the amounts I was transferring it was cheaper for me to transfer with OFX so I did that. They are more expensive at small sums though, not to mention Wise card makes foreign payments much easier.
Nobody, because no company is actually pro-customer. Which is fine, the customer and the company's goals don't align beyond "want product" and "supplies product".
The problem is that Amazon abuses it's market position as being the search engine for customer products to unfairly prevent anyone from competing with them. Being "better than Amazon" as a seller in the margins is completely impossible, because Amazon demands sellers price match them.
Let's say you're a seller who wants to make 7$ from each sale as revenue (your actual margins from making the product aren't relevant to this estimate). If you list this product on the Amazon store, Amazon is going to take your listed price and apply their own price cut on top of this (although it's usually framed the other way around, so you list the final sale price and Amazon then says how much they take). For simplicity's sake, we'll go with a 30% cut, so they list it for 10$. Now let's say there's a second storefront you want to sell to, we'll call it Bamazon. Bamazon has a lower cut than Amazon does, let's say it's 10%. So the final product would then be listed for 8$ (taking into account customer psychology on price listings), making Bamazon the better seller, right? The smart customer gets a better deal, Amazon is incentivized to improve their margins if they don't want to lose market share and everybody's happy.
Wrong. What happens instead is that Bamazon will now also list the product for 10$ (because if it's listed lower, Amazon screws the seller by delisting them from Amazon, which is unacceptable for the seller because Amazon is the one with the monopoly position, so the seller then can sell absolutely nothing), making the product equally expensive for the customer and making Bamazon's deal only an improvement for the seller, who now gets higher profits from their sales, screwing the customer. Meanwhile Bamazon is rendered unable to compete with Amazon on their better margins since Amazon is the assumed default. Any benefit of a different store having better margins is fully masked by this approach, only benefiting Amazon.
It's a Most Favored Nations clause and their use on online platforms is both ubiquitous, scummy and makes things more expensive for the customer while also entrenching Amazon's monopoly position. This crap is usually couched as pro-customer rethoric, but it really isn't. It mostly serves to entrench monopolies not on their quality, but through their existing market share. (Valve also famously does this by the way.)
Just a heads up, since no company is pro-consumer, and I assume you know what it is to be pro-consumer, if you started a truly pro-consumer business, you would put all the others out of business.
Just think about that.
Ironically, a large part of Amazon's rise was on the back of their very pro-consumer policies. Not many companies would tolerate large scale GPU return fraud (among other items) for those many years for example.
That's a very simplistic take because it assumes full transparency for all consumers - all while advertising, one of the biggest industries in our society, explicitly allows companies to turn the money they make from consumer-hostile behavior into additional reach, and even worse: all while large companies and VCs keep buying up pro-consumer businesses and enshittifying them.
Some companies have good intent. Public benefit corporations are a thing. They aren't really relevant, because unscrupulous companies outcompete them.
Your assertion that pro-consumer companies would outcompete unscrupulous ones depends on consumers and regulators holding them accountable. So why are you arguing against being suspicious of companies?
Obviously the best strategy for companies is to appear to be pro-consumer, but "cheat" (meaning price fixing but also things like advertising and buying up competitors) as much as possible. In that context, "all companies are anti-consumer" is a decent shorthand for "you should assume every company is anti-consumer because the regulatory environment favors it, even if there are exceptions."
And why would they want to be pro-consumer anyway? We want them to be pro-consumer because we are consumers. But they are Amazon. They are going to be pro-Amazon.
I mean, their very first Leadership Principle is "Customer Obsession", so they do at least ostensibly want to be pro-consumer. Though yes, obviously those "principles" are only in service to making money.
The interests of customers and the business are aligned the vast majority of the time, but in those cases the phrase "pro-consumer" is meaningless because no choice had to be made. In the more unusual cases where they do not align, then that's a different matter.
The assumption everyone seems to have is that the customer is the average consumer purchasing items and services on Amazon’s website. That hasn’t been true in more than a decade.
The real customer are the third party sellers and those using Amazon platforms.
The elephant in the room is that Amazon keeps increasing their fees.
So if someone needs to adjust the price to accommodate Amazon fees, on Amazon, they're penalized.
Not to mention increasing ad costs, which at this point is another fee.
It's not for the benefit of the consumer, it's for the benefit of Amazon: Amazon wants people to buy on Amazon at the lowest cost for the consumer and at the highest margin for Amazon - they won't sacrifice their fees.
Hell, even something as simple as their sorting/filtering is so broken/clunky as to be anti-consumer. Try sorting lowest-to-highest and seeing how hard it is to actually understand the final price of everything that pops up (amidst all the sponsored trash).
Right now, software is really expensive; so 1) economics tends to favor large pieces of software which solve many different kinds of problems, and 2) loads of things that should be automatable simply aren't being automated with software.
With the cost of software dropping, it makes more sense to have software targeted towards specific niches. Companies will do more in-house development, more things will be automated than were being automated before.
Of course nobody knows what will happen; but it's entirely possible that the demand for people capable of driving Claude Code to produce useful software will explode.
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