We didn't collectively decided, we've got this forced down our throats to apply a novel tool to any imaginable situation because the execs got antsy about being left behind.
A truly absurd amount of capital was deployed which triggered a cascade of reactions by the people in charge of capital at other places. They are extremely anxious that everything will change under their feet, and if they don't start using as much as humanly possible of it right about now they die.
That's it.
The tools have definitely found some use, there's more to learn on how else they can be used, and maybe over time smart people will settle on ways to wrangle it well. The messaging from the execs though, is not that, it is "you'll be measured on how much you use this, we don't know for what or how, it's for you to figure out but don't dare to not use it".
I do understand their anxiety, their job is to not let their companies die, and make the most money as they can in the process; a seemingly major shift on the foundations of their orgs will cause fear.
But we have not collectively decided that it was safe, and good, to run rampant with these tools without caring for all that was learnt since software was invented...
We had it forced down our throats by CEOs and CTOs who thought that it would improve our productivity. Nobody forced it down their throats, though. Instead, they were seduced. They went willingly.
In one gig I was on, a consultant showed up and started saying that the platform was not good because it didn't have any machine learning(this is pre-AI buzz words). So the executives asked me when can I fix the platform to have machine learning in it. They didn't have an answer when I simply asked "machine learning to do what?" and my explanation of what machine learning is or can be used for went to deaf ears. So yeah, definitely agree on seduced and then went willingly and blindly.
The whole industry is like a fashion show and has been for a long time. This is just exceptionally stupid compared to moderately stupid things before. I see it ore that everyone's wearing pink feathered chicken suits because it's in fashion. If you don't wear a pink feathered chicken suit then you're a luddite scumbag who doesn't deserve the respect of your peers.
However some of us still have enough self-respect not to be seen dead in a pink feathered chicken suit. I mean I'm still pissed off at half the other stuff we do in the industry. I haven't even really looked at the chicken suits yet.
If you work in a tech company with >5k employees it's extremely likely it's been forced down on you to wear the pink feathered chicken suit, and told to not complain about the pink feathered chicken suit because it is the inevitable future, and no one will be wearing anything that doesn't look like it ever again. Also, we are watching every straggler not in a pink feathered chicken suit, put yours on or leave the building.
Force is seeping in. Managements are expecting that LLM-driven prouctivity-enhancers will be deployed and give broad-based boosts. More are each week. Supposedly cheaper than people. Those that aren't yet might be soon.
When your performance review includes facility with and productivity with LLM tools, you are being forced.
my assessment of the situation: "we've spent so much money on AI's promise to give us 5x, 10x returns, that now we have to earn it back by foisting the burden on developers to make up the gains by working harder, at least enough to recoup the exec's decision to pour money into the boondoggle".
"Hey developers, we spent $x million on Claude, who promised 7x returns, so YOU better make it 7x more efficient so we don't look bad".
yea the real frightening thing about this is, if there is a clear failure to get roi on this stuff, the top-level people will be very reticent to walk it all back and admit it was a royal fuckup
This is a "monopolized sector." They absolutely forced it on you. In most cases, sure, not directly, but their influence is the only driving force. Absent this no one would have jumped on this flimsy bandwagon.
no. openclaw wasnt forced by ceo's. it was forced by the same people who though there was money to be made in crypto then ICO then NFT. a bunch of scammers that bring negative value to the world
And they make money. A scammer is the President of the United States.
At a certain point why blame people for trying to keep up? Why are scammers so successful? It seems to me we have a systemic failure at a societal level. Until we are honest about that it will only get worse. Until then maybe some rouge LLM botching some critical system will be the wake up call we need.
I am not sure what to make of critiques that seem to rest on notions of a small population of scammers preying upon the doe-eyed public. I think the situation is a bit closer to Carlin: garbage in, garbage out. A critique that holds up quite excellently in this AI age.
western society is a shelve of its former glory. it did not last long but there was an age were man was capable of greatness. the early internet kinda was the last stretch of this short run then money corrupted it. the underlying issue stems from abandoning cultural education as a Western value. Instead, we've opted to dispense raw ideology devoid of any thinking mechanism that we now seek so dearly to integrate to LLMs so that they can be more like us. This sloppening manifested in our lives through every medium.
We witnessed it when animation shifted to 3D, providing slop and poorly designed characters and stories. We witnessed it when video games all adopted the same game engines, look and feel and lack of narrative stakes, slopping ideology down players’ throats- no nuance, no wit, just mind-numbing dogma that punishes anyone who dares to criticize.Perhaps most damaging was Netflix's infiltration of our households that has accelerated our collective intellectual atrophy through relentless ideologically charged content parroting as entertainment. Meanwhile, our children's minds are being shaped not by family or tradition but by the algorithms of TikTok and Snapchat.The past decade and a half hasn't just prepared LLMs to replicate human abilities it has systematically stripped away human complexity, reshaping us into predictable patterns, not to raise LLMs to our level, but to reduce us to theirs, until the distinction no longer matters.
Countries reliant on oil coming through the strait will have to find other sources, pushing prices up, unless the USA implements price and export controls on producers in its own soil that will reflect in the USA's economy which is very reliant on oil.
Being in this industry for over 20 years probably jaded me a lot, I understand that's the plan but it's almost always the plan (or publicly stated as).
Only time will tell if it will not affect the ecosystem negatively, best of luck though, I really hope this time is different™.
I've been in the industry for similarly long, and I understand and sympathize with this view. All I can say is that _right now_, we're committed to maintaining our open-source tools with the same level of effort, care, and attention to detail as before. That does not change with this acquisition. No one can guarantee how motives, incentives, and decisions might change years down the line. But that's why we bake optionality into it with the tools being permissively licensed. That makes the worst-case scenarios have the shape of "fork and move on", and not "software disappears forever".
I personally get a lot of confidence in the permissive licensing (both in the current code quality, and the "backup plan" that I can keep using it in the event of an Astralnomical emergency); thank you for being open source!
> No one can guarantee how motives, incentives, and decisions might change years down the line. But that's why we bake optionality into it with the tools being permissively licensed. That makes the worst-case scenarios have the shape of "fork and move on", and not "software disappears forever".
70% of their revenue goes straight into paying royalties, always, if the music labels don't pay their artists enough due to predatory contracts shouldn't some of the flak be focused there? Even more: they've always fleeced artists, even when physical media sales were the only market.
This appears to only work for songs, this action does not work for podcasts or playlists. Wow! What bad engineering culture, likely only caring about what's in the ticket and not the feature overall. I guess this is what happens to a product after spending a decade only hiring people who can do leetcode.
If you want to understand the hidden cross-subsidies in the US healthcare financing system then a good place to start is the book "The Price We Pay: What Broke American Health Care--and How to Fix It" by Dr. Marty Makary.
Looked into a summary of the book, with notes by chapter and haven't found any mention of the American system subsidising pharma prices for other countries. It mentions a lot PBMs (like CVS, Cigna, etc.) as the culprit for high prices in the USA and talks about how when pharmacies are allowed to compete the prices do go down.
From the book it seems much more like the American public is being taken advantage of by the prescription fulfillment from pharmacy networks rather than subsidising anything for the rest of the world.
> Today, approximately 80% of Americans get their medications through a PBM.2 American businesses financing the coverage and the employees paying for their medications are usually oblivious to the price gouging. When people get frustrated that drug prices keep going up, they often point the finger at pharma bad boys like Martin Shkreli. More often, though, the price spikes are taking place right under their noses.
> If we could slash the spread, it would make a tremendous difference for thousands of businesses. According to a recent analysis in the journal Health Affairs, reducing generic reimbursement by $1 per prescription would lower health spending by $5.6 billion annually.
> Health insurance companies direct their business to their own PBMs, which increases their margins. For example, OptumRx, one of the big three PBMs, is owned by America’s largest health insurance company, UnitedHealth Group. Insurers may offer less expensive health insurance premiums. But then they use their PBM to achieve a greater profit margin.
> The PBM Express Scripts is now owned by the insurance company Cigna, and as I write this book, a merger between the PBM CVS Caremark and the insurer Aetna is being finalized. Together, the big three PBMs—OptumRx, Express Scripts, and CVS Caremark—control approximately 85% of the U.S. market and manage medication benefits for most people in the United States.
If you want the international perspective, see "The Price of Global Health" (Schoonveld) or "The Right Price: A Value-Based Prescription for Drug Costs" (Neumann, et al).
The short version is that the high price of drugs in the U.S. is the driving force in drug research.
Ideological idiocy, the dismantling of anything public turning into private hands is ideologically pure for libertarian-inclined folks, no matter how strategically stupid it might be.
Neoliberal capitalism is founded on absorbing parts of libertarian thinking. The "capitalism" moniker of today used by ideologues is coupled to the meaning of it given by neoliberals.
It's been coopted, not necessarily capitalism means "everything should be private", the current flavour of capitalist ideology wants that but other versions of capitalism don't put that as a foundational Ideological tenet.
They aren't pumping that much oil since Chavez, the expertise for extracting oil was lost during nationalisation. It needs a lot of work to restart extraction, it will take years.
> If the goal was to hurt China / BRICS and kneecap Iran it seems on point.
While also hurting Europe, South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, and many more. Very on point...
It will hurt everyone, Americans included, oil is a global market, fertilisers are a global market, those are basic inputs for probably every single thing produced in the world.
So now all of us around the globe have to pay the price for American Imperialism, compounded by the complete shattering of the USA's soft power as an ally, this will only create more animosity against the USA from all sides. Very on point.
But the USA oil industry can make a buck until everything buckles, or perhaps the USA admin will introduce price controls like in the 1970s, that worked very well too.
> It will hurt everyone, Americans included, oil is a global market, fertilisers are a global market, those are basic inputs for probably every single thing produced in the world.
Only because those countries choose for that to be the case. For example, Saudi Arabia and Russia don't do that. Local prices and export prices are different.
But the US, Canada, the Netherlands, and long list of other countries could make this crisis have zero effect on local prices. They choose to take every excuse to raise prices (in fact the Netherlands goes further: if sales tax on gas raises because prices raise, the amount of tax paid is kept constant if prices drop. So they artificially raise local gas prices. So if gas prices are low, tax on gas has at one point reached 72%), but it is fundamentally a government choice.
>But the US, Canada, the Netherlands, and long list of other countries could make this crisis have zero effect on local prices.
The US Government cannot force US companies to sell at a lower domestic price if they can get a higher price exporting. I know that God-Emperor Trump pretends that he can command the oil sector to make less money, but he can't.
>For example, Saudi Arabia and Russia don't do that
2 countries famous for being beacons of free-market capitalism.
A truly absurd amount of capital was deployed which triggered a cascade of reactions by the people in charge of capital at other places. They are extremely anxious that everything will change under their feet, and if they don't start using as much as humanly possible of it right about now they die.
That's it.
The tools have definitely found some use, there's more to learn on how else they can be used, and maybe over time smart people will settle on ways to wrangle it well. The messaging from the execs though, is not that, it is "you'll be measured on how much you use this, we don't know for what or how, it's for you to figure out but don't dare to not use it".
I do understand their anxiety, their job is to not let their companies die, and make the most money as they can in the process; a seemingly major shift on the foundations of their orgs will cause fear.
But we have not collectively decided that it was safe, and good, to run rampant with these tools without caring for all that was learnt since software was invented...
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