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Even if we didn't have capitalism, people would still need energy, for everything. It's unfortunate that fossil fuels were the easiest thing to use to generate energy over the last couple of centuries, and that it continues today. Maybe capitalism makes it easy for fossil fuels to remain entrenched, but I doubt any other kind of system would make fossil fuels less pervasive if it were the dominant energy source for over a century.

Where I work, the CTO drank a whole bunch of AI kool-aid recently, so now we're expected to "10x" our output with AI. I don't think he realizes this also means 10x more problems of all kinds. But I fully expect him to double-down and when AI costs skyrocket, he'd lay off more developers to pay for more AI.

I am constantly looking for a new job, but all of them are also require AI coding experience.


I have no doubt that as AI gets more expensive, my employer would lay off more developers to pay for more AI tokens, until there are very few developers left. And the hilariously sad part is, the current developers keep training the AI to do their job. Eventually I expect they will lay off almost all the developers. It really feels like we're going to be stabbing each other in the back just to be the last one to get let go.

What are they doing to train AI to do their job?

Nobody writes any code any more at all. Nobody even writes Jira tickets anymore. They don't even review code, and I think we're lucky if they even test it. The AI does all of that.

A small group of developers at my company have set up volumes of skill.md and other instructions for the AI to write Jira tickets, then take action on those Jira tickets by writing the code. The AI submits a pull request. Then there's another AI to review the code. They've written the game plan for the AI to do all of this. All the human does now is click "approve" without even reading the PR, and then someone clicks "merge". There's no coding, no critical thinking by a human anymore except for telling the AI what to do... which really anyone at the company could do. I doubt I'll have a job at this company much longer after 8 years employed there.


>Apply the squint test to your work:

>Blur your eyes or step back >Can you still perceive hierarchy? >Is anything jumping out at you?

Telling an eyeless clanker to "blur your eyes" is just so ridiculous. "Is anything jumping out at you?" That's quite a thing for a machine to reason about, and reads like a waste of tokens. I'm not sure who is writing these things, but they seem rather clueless.

Does it work? Maybe. I'm just really skeptical after reading through that repo that any of this leads to actually better user interfaces.

I'm pretty sure I'd have better luck just telling the LLM explicitly what I want, because experience in UI/UX is still better than what an LLM would slop out on its own.


>Can evil also be interpreted as letting your government be impotent in protecting you?

When they rename "Department of Defense" to "Department of War", there can be no mistake about the intention of the government. They aren't "protecting" us, they are actively starting unnecessary wars, because cruelty has always been the point for them.


Did you just realize this now? The name "Department of Defense" has always been a euphemism. The last time we were in a defensive war was World War II--ironically, when the DoD was still called the "Department of War."

Nice whataboutism. This pointless internet interaction is over.

It’s not “whataboutism” because it’s relating to the same event, not a different event. In context of the facts, it seems like your complaint is that the name is being changed to accurately reflect what the DOD was already doing.

Nice whataboutism. This pointless internet interaction is over.

Is it over because making real arguments backed by facts are hard?

Nice whataboutism. This pointless internet interaction is over.

I don't know if it's "nicer". I've had some great conversations with Uber/Lyft drivers. Hilarious fun conversations. Not all of them, but enough to make me question if a riding in a clanker car is actually "nicer". I guess if someone is socially awkward, it might be nicer for them.

I can tell it's still early days - it's obvious. What they have today actually kind of sucks compared to what it could be. And I use it every day, and get frustrated every day because it could be so much better.

This is the entire business model of all AI companies. It costs far more to run the datacenters and build more capacity than they could ever hope to make back at current pricing models. I'm looking forward to pricing to catch up with reality and the resulting chaos that ensues.

Kind of how DeepSeek v4 dropped their pricing? I sense a shift which will hopefully bring lower and lower cost. Then again Qwen3.6 coding has been all I've needed for my projects and I'm perfectly fine with free.

Are you paying attention? These companies are trying to get market share without being anywhere close to making a profit - they are heavily subsidized. Many hundreds of billions have already been spent and will continue to be spent until the stupid fucking investors realize they will never get their money back. I have no doubt that day is coming.

The people actually working in this space will tell you that the cost of all of this continues to crater. Anthropic is already profitable minus its intentional forward-looking investments into R&D.

Only if you count the 2 months of discounted compute Musk gave them.

I'm amazed people still believe this narrative after all the clear evidence to the contrary

You're the one whose wrong here and you will not reap what you didn't sow.

That's fine but can you please post some facts, data or a view point rather than just you're wrong. We could value from your ideas.

"already profitable minus", so, not profitable?

Serious investors look 10 to 20 years in the future. Everyone used google and youtube in 2006, but youtube wasn't profitable til 2016. How could a business burning money by hosting video ever be profitable? Costs come down BUT THEY JUST ADDED 720p, cost comes down, BUT THEY ADDED 1080p, cost comes down, 4k! cost comes down.

IMO the data from chats alone is worth $200B to Google.


but they are trying to IPO with 2-trillion dollar valuations

The amount invested into AI companies is no where near anything we've ever seen before. It's apples to oranges.

Not really a comparison when the spend on YouTube was x10 smaller, and Googles core business has always been profitable beyond any hobby spending on YouTube.

The investors will get their money back on the IPO. They'll dump all their stocks in the market and run away, leaving retail with the bill.

"Productive junior" is vastly different than a productive software developer with a couple decades of experience. What they produce will differ in quality significantly, AI or no AI.

I can't wait for the moment Apple realizes that hardware makers will also get eaten by AI. Who needs a fancy and expensive macbook or iphone when all you'll really need is earbuds with an internet connection to talk to the AI that's hosted wherever, which will do everything you ever want it to just by saying so. No keyboard or screen required to get a result, no real local computing hardware necessary. If the result is visual just tell it to display it on your 65" hi-res television (which Apple doesn't make). Maybe the market for earbuds is going to sustain them in the future?

People want to host their own AI and it will become good enough so most will do that instead of paying for a subscription.

Voice-only input to a cloud model with just a screen to show you what it's doing sounds like a nightmare. Why not subscribe for the TV hardware as well as the subscription, take it up a notch on the own-nothing.


You are talking about maybe 0.005% of the whole population of the earth when you say the phrase "self hosting".

My wife is part of the other 99% and she's already talking to a chat prompt for 90% of her computing needs. The fancy laptop we bought her a year ago sits collecting dust. She is Apple's target market - not the nerds that get a boner about "self-hosting".


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