By sending some cash (and maybe some non-sensitive training data too) the way of labs creating open models? At work we have expensive Anthropic and OpenAI subscriptions but also have some in house workflows plugged into DeepSeek and GLM APIs.

Still a win. Claude loves to write code from scratch instead of searching the web and pulling in dependencies, so you’ll likely end up with fewer garbage tier plugins written by people whose average skill level is put to shame by bootcamp grads; those people don’t know what a reverse shell is either.

Any idiot can spend one minute now to acquire this amazing knowledge that you can just ask ChatGPT “I need a website”. If they don’t know now, sooner or later they’ll know from a short TikTok or something in the next couple of months/years. Not to mention AI companies are spending $$$ on ads to raise awareness; professionals already know they can create slides with LLMs, literally nothing’s different when it comes to most content websites. Yes, it’s an easy task any idiot can do. Head in sand, pretending it’s some sort of $10k for knowing where to hit situation isn’t going to reverse the trend.

You're not accounting for how deeply unpopular AI is with the general public. Would anyone be making those TikTok videos in the first place? Would OP's wife want to use AI if he wasn't there to advocate it?

Given that my nontechnical coworker has shared quite a few of these TikToks/Google Shorts with me, yes tons of people are making them. I don’t know what kind of alternative reality you live in, you can just go to any social media site and search for “create website with ChatGPT” etc. and check the view counts.

Plus the context here isn’t any random person, but people who intend to pay for website development for their businesses.

Feels like acquiring Docker Hub (just the hub, not even Docker Inc that controls Docker the software) in ~2018. AI craze valuations are truly out there.

NPM packages doesn’t take up that much disk space for me with standard pnpm deduplication. The much bigger offender for me is Rust target dir: when people talk about vibe coding in Rust for performance, what they don’t mention (at least I’ve hardly ever seen it mentioned) is every trivial little tool pushes 1GB on disk and anything slightly nontrivial easily racks up multi-GB. Which hurts when you have lots of vibed small tools. I wonder if anyone bothered to look into this problem.

Rust has the deadly combo of static linking, dependency unification and a feature flag system. That makes it hard to share cached dependencies between projects, and when your compiler is as complex as rustc the individual files will end up big.

It's definitely possible to optimize the rlib format, like representing generic types as a tree of short IDs instead of a string or separating them into an optional debug file. Or do it like Zig with a new IR designed to be compact and easy to assemble into final executables. Even a simple global cache for the times you get lucky and end up with the same hash could help.

The problem is no one on the core team has time to do it because they are always overworked from the amount of bugs that need fixing. They also have a culture of making sure all changes are perfect before they go stable as a overreaction to C++ shipping half baked proposals. I think these are the reasons everything is moving so slow.

Don't they have nightly for imperfect experiments like this?

It was the second most reported problem on the 2025 Rust survey, after compilation times.

I think the parent was referring to hosting the entire NPM registry, not having a project that uses NPM. In that case there's substantial duplication from version to version.

I was informed many eons ago that one of the hot features of Rational was that when one user made a change that required recompiling the headers, those headers were uploaded to the server so that other users didn't have to recompile them.

It had the nice effect that whoever caused the headers to need to be recompiled was the only one who had to pay the recompilation tax instead of everyone.

You may be cleaving the problem along the wrong plane if you're worried about sharing between multiple projects on the same machine versus across all of the members of a single team.

Artifactory is older than dirt. And its main feature isn't even saving bandwidth, it's ensuring that versioned libraries can never be overwritten in place with a different version potentially containing a trojan. And it can be set up not to download new versions until they've survived long enough for someone to hopefully notice a supply chain attack.

>user made a change that required recompiling the headers, those headers were uploaded to the server so that other users didn't have to recompile them.

This sounds like a security nightmare - there is a reason we have build servers (well there are many reasons, but build safety is one of them).

But I have to admit the idea is clever.

I think the idea was that the IDE trusted itself, the same way we trust the CI server. Ken Thompson's Trusting Trust holds pretty equally for both.

Generally agree with you. But for this specific project the goal was to host the _entire_ npm registry as a mirror on consumer grade hardware, not just the slice of it I personally used for local development.

It was part of the (now defunct) frea project: https://freajs.github.io/frea-website/

Use a cargo workspace. Helps with both compilation speed and disk usage.

Of course <arguably creepy thing> tends to be built by people who don’t find it creepy, not really changing anyone’s mind with that line of argument. And you just found plenty of people who consider it creepy and will complain today.

I did a bunch of Fable 5.1 xhigh review work on a bunch of critical components, ones with direct comparison from Fable 5 xhigh runs from two weeks ago. Token cost was 1.5-2x for each component.

Yeah, after some more testing, I think I'm going to pin it back to 5.

It feels like 5.1 is 5 that has higher reasoning threshold. I've been using fable as orchestrator anyway, so I see no reason to use 5.1.

This reads like someone took two conventional non-AI reports about (1) different teams’ conflicting viewpoints of the same data; (2) deterministic traceability that is hardly remarkable, and asked Claude to merge the two reports and shoehorn some disjoint AI narratives into it. And did a very bad job of it. What the hell is this incoherent nonsense? AI writing aggregate SQL queries (“what is this month’s revenue by entity?”) is completely reliable because every tx is traceable, but wouldn’t be reliable if every tx is not traceable, seriously?

I too have enjoyed vibing some random shit on the side and not having to beg people to build features I want anymore, but knowingly shipping subpar agentic code at work still kills me a little. (Well there’s no pressure on me to ship, but as a self-respecting guy, I hesitate to say I’ll need 5-10x time to really get to the quality I want when 1x time already gets something working, except for really critical components.)

> It also leaves out the $106 million-plus Google co-founder Sergey Brin has spent in California fighting a proposed wealth tax and other issues

Damn, I can't think of a better argument for wealth tax if one dude alone is willing to spend $100m to fight it. He clearly has too much.

The passing of Dolly Parton has really had me thinking how much good these unfathomably rich people and corporations could do. It enrages me to think of how many people $106 million could have helped.

Hear hear! I am a nonprofit tech professional, and a monthly call with ~40 similar folks yesterday started with a discussion of Dolly's passing. At first I thought it was just about loving her music and/or personality, but it was also the fact that several folks, at different nonprofits with varied missions, had received significant funding from the many foundations Dolly had set up over the years.

What's really interesting is when you look at how much good they could do without ever actually affecting their lifestyle at all. What actually is $100 million to a trillionaire? What could he do with 1,000,000,000,000 that he can't do with 999,900,000,000?

The problem with this logic is that it equally applies to someone who owns 999,900,000,000.

If someone is willing to spend money above some spendable threshold, then they will never become a trillionaire. Because they will start giving away sooner.

> then they will never become a trillionaire

Good!! No one needs or deserves to be a trillionaire!

I’m not seeing the problem you’re describing. It has a name: the marginal utility of money. $1,000 is worth a lot to someone who has nothing, less to someone who has a million, practically nothing to someone who has a billion.

So, yes, it applies equally at lower levels, until it doesn’t.

> It enrages me to think of how many people $106 million could have helped.

That money did go somewhere, so it probably did “help” quite a number of people less rich than Sergey Brin.

(That’s just a side comment, not an argument that any single person should own that much money.)

People and corporations? Come on.

The US has now in one decade nearly doubled its military budget from ~$630 Billion to ~$1.2 Trillion.

ICE alone has received tens of billions in funds in the past year.

We can walk and chew gum at the same time. The real world doesn't require us to negate the commentary that the ultra wealthy people/corporations could be doing a lot more good than they're currently doing on the basis that the government is spending money irresponsibly/against the greater good.