My personal photo backup S3 account, with a budget limit of $10, now going to cost me ....
$1,299,988,247,332.56!
That was a fun set of emails to wake up to, figured they had to be phishing for how outrageous of a number it was. But nope! Fun little incident they've got going over there.
You can pin it down to less than maybe half a dozen cases that made the newsun the UK. I suppose politics has always been reactionary like this and explains why somewhere like Australia which doesn't really have its own culture still has different laws in response to different outrages
Bitcoiners pivoted to AI so hard when they saw actual money to be made. Now AI is turning into as bad of a bet as Bitcoin, so not surprised that the "Bitcoin Policy Institute" would write something like this.
Don't ever let a Republican, and especially a Trump voter, complain about the current state of affairs.
They voted for this, and have been voting for this for decades.
They have two choices: own it and admit to themselves that they do in fact support fascism, or vow to never, ever again vote Republican or similar for the rest of their lives.
> Don't ever let a Republican, and especially a Trump voter, complain about the current state of affairs.
Likewise: Don't ever let a Democrat complain about the current state of affairs. They chose to run shit candidates that couldn't even win against a fool like Trump.
They voted for this (in the primaries), and have been voting for this for at least a decade.
They have two choices: own it and admit to themselves that they don't actually care that much about avoiding "fascism," or vow to never, ever again to vote for Democrats who can't win a "red" [1] state for the rest of their lives.
[1] "Red" states are actually not that red. They only seem so "red" because the Democrats stopped trying to represent them.
> They literally don't have any good candidates because it takes one of these to get to the top:
> 1. Extreme wealth
> 2. Extreme corruption
> 3. All of the above
OK. So which of those categories did Obama fall into?
I think yours is an over-cynical take that is in fact wrong.
> The system is broken, and the ones in power won't allow it to ever be fixed because it benefits them for it to stay broken.
The system is broken, but not in the way you describe. The partisan rank-and-file demand candidates that represent the partisan faithful, not an actual majority of the country [1]. They strongly prefer zealous evangelism fantasies and judgement over representation. It's stupid and foolish, and it's how we've gotten were were are. And a lot of Democrats have responded to Trump by getting worse, instead taking a reality check and snapping out of it.
[1] And I'm not talking about some milquetoast centrism.
> They chose to run shit candidates that couldn't even win against a fool like Trump.
Are we really still doing the blame-shifting game? The current state of Trump related affairs belong to Trump. But sure keep using his goto blame-shifting tactics to help them achieve their divisive agenda.
Also, voters don't choose to run anyone. Not in primaries and not after one has been selected from the primary pool. The pool to pick from is formed before voters give their input.
Or how he was mailed a box of Calvin and Hobbes plushies to try to get sign-off on the quality of the toys.
He mailed back a picture of the box on fire.
IMO Calvin and Hobbes will always be special because of Watterson's integrity. It says everything it needed to say, and those comics will almost always be relevant.
The danger of "more" is that it dilutes the purpose and voice of the original. "Cowboy Bebop" fits in this same realm, I think. It had a single season. They did a movie. They said everything they needed to say and left it at that.
Firefly is an interesting example of that. If it had not been cancelled so quickly, would anybody remember it these days? A lot of shows start out strong and then completely fall apart.
It wasn't so bad that I couldn't wait to stop watching it but... it wasn't good enough that I couldn't help but finish it. I still want to finish it...
So instead we ended up with the only Calvin and Hobbes items in the physical world being those vinyl bumper stickers of Calvin pissing on things, because those were cheap and easy for random unscrupulous printers to make. Some artistic vision. As someone born in the late 80s, I recall seeing those far more than the actual comics.
>So instead we ended up with the only Calvin and Hobbes items in the physical world being those vinyl bumper stickers of Calvin pissing on things...
... and, of course, all of the various collections of the comics in print form, up to and including the full box set, that everyone can check out from libraries or purchase and keep in perpetuity. Ya know, the actual thing, the meat of it, the heart, the soul - not tangential merchandise.
“For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows. ”
After a certain size, one of my favorite Civilization quotes kicks in:
"The bureaucracy is expanding to fill the needs of the expanding bureaucracy."
This burned me right out, and I don't plan on ever working for any Silicon Valley company again. I'm now happily employed in a small (10 person eng team) company where we are all doing meaningful work.
Agreed, but the small-company-doing-meaningful-work is also hard to find though.
Startups also often have their own perverse incentives built around the vagaries of venture investments or the whims and personalities of the founders.
ironically i posted the exact same quote before seeing your post. I've found that whatever work that can be counted as meaningful often also signifies a certain amount of agency that does not exist in a larger bureaucratic system.
> At Anthropic, we build AI to serve humanity’s long-term well-being.
If Anthropic actually cared about humans, they would have the best customer support (staffed by humans, for humans) and communications team (again, staffed by humans, for humans).
As both of these are actually on par with Silicon Valley standards (between medicore and atrociously bad), Anthropic cannot and should not be trusted with anything to do with AI, because whatever they do will not benefit humanity.
> If Anthropic actually cared about humans, they would have the best customer support (staffed by humans, for humans)
I know Anthropic support is slow from firsthand experience, but it has to be pretty difficult to scale support 10-80x per year. And even more so when you have a long-tail of very low revenue usage in the form of $20/month subscriptions.
There is basically no support to speak of. Scaling a zero is not hard. You can be paying 200 USD a month with barely any chance of ever hearing back. Your best chance of getting support from Anthropic is the same as with any other big tech company: have a Twitter following or know someone who works there.
Extremely cynical take, but they're probably being honest. They wanna serve humanity. But maybe they only consider a small part of the population to be relevant humans.
it's hard, but not THAT hard, to find a few dozen people who can deal with large volumes of support tickets every day. so for a company like anthropic, you'd use a customized claude to triage and then those few dozen people spend all day actually caring about solving users' problems. a contract with fin fka intercom (lol) to offload this is a step in the wrong direction imo, but then nobody pays for support so it's hard to turn it into a revenue stream.
I'm sorry but a few dozen people actually caring about the problems of a billion users is a fart in a windstorm. You might as well hire a half-dozen to care, or none, for all the work you'll do. You'd need a dozen people just to design a scheduler for handling tickets only to watch that catch fire too.
I don't get it. None of the hyperscalers have human support teams at scale because it's obviously infeasible. Why, just because it would be nice, do we take leave of the requirement that something actually be possible before demanding it.
oh i think i agree, with the economics tech companies (all companies, really) and their users currently accept/demand.
but if caring about and solving customer problems was an actual income driver for a company, it could be very different.
i don't think that's going to happen, because i think most users (like Anthropic's) will continue to refuse to pay >$0 for support -- or to claim that their subscription payment should somehow also cover support, which is ridiculous, since they can see with their own "eyes" how little support their "compute subscription" gets them -- and thus companies will continue to invest ~$0, if not less, in meaningful support models.
it still blows my mind that nobody is willing to try charging people an extra $20 a month for unlimited support calls. most customers are DESPERATE for people to talk to about their problems.
instead, they all just try to winnow the cost down as low as possible, and then point to the expense to explain the degradation of service.
also, remember that MOST of those "billion users" generally don't have problems that require product support expertise every day. if each of them were still paying a retainer for access to high-touch support, all kinds of crazy fun stuff would be possible.
That's just it. If they were prioritizing humans they'd have a product with a measely million users, charge more, and offer great support. Their game isn't a good product though, their game is scale because they think that's the only way to win, and winning is the only way to survive.
Wait, how would limiting a great tool to 0.1% of the TAM demonstrate caring for humans?
Are you picturing them running a lottery for who’s allowed to use it, or an auction?
And with the loss of scale economies, it would have to be much more expensive.
So you end up charging, what, $10,000/month and only making it available to the very wealthy?
I don’t see how this game plan is better for humans. And I’m honestly not being snarky. Have you thought through how your proposed limits would work? Am I missing something?
I mean look at how Apple prices their computers and phones, or how WSJ charges for subscriptions, or how "Linux" keeps its market small by being awful at marketing. The point is there are plenty of ways to scale sustainably and support your customer base in a long-term way that keeps them, and it doesn't seem like Anthropic is doing that.
I am really not convinced that Linux is intentionally bad at marketing so as to ensure that they aren’t overwhelmed with users, all in the name of providing great support.
Honestly I never thought about it that way, but I do think that's an exaggeration. I don't see any believable sign that Anthropic's goal was ever to "serve humanity." That said, how do you serve humanity properly? Do you scale a mediocre product to a billion people and treat them like shit or do you build it deliberately and support what you make, even if that costs more?
You sound like "AI" is something people deserve for free when clearly, if you look at the garbage energy footprint alone, it's going to have to cost. Supporting it is going to have even more.
P.S. How can you "serve humanity" if you literally don't support the humans who use your stuff?
With lower margins of course. Walmart, Indian Railways, major airlines etc all support massive user bases comparable to or bigger than the paid tiers of these apps. But of course the cult of Big Shareholder value creation means the CEO that does this, especially in the US will be fired.
I mean, the simplistic answer is that if a billion people are paying you, you should be able to hire a proportional number of support staff, because you're getting additional revenue from each customer.
I can imagine scaling may be difficult, but that should be a temporary problem.
It's funny how silicon valley bros always talk like making real world things is essentially impossible. I mean walmart or aldi are serving > 200 million customers a week, how do they manage that I can tell you that's much harder than customer support for an online product.
As a side note, how do you make up that billion user number? Claude has 10 million users.
$1,299,988,247,332.56!
That was a fun set of emails to wake up to, figured they had to be phishing for how outrageous of a number it was. But nope! Fun little incident they've got going over there.
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