No worse, I suppose, than, the obsession with Lord of the Rings that the authoritarian surveillance companies have. Palantir, Anduril. Then we have the not defense/surveillance ones: Mithril, Valar, Narya, Erebor
None, probably. Just saying Jalapeño is no worse than any other non-descriptive company name. Although at least Palantir and Anduril are aptly named for what they do. The VC firms less so.
Its also one of the most immediately visible degradations of user experience. The cursor is your agent to interact with the computer, an extension of your arm basically. It should be one of the most smooth and responsive pieces of an OS.
I remember a long time ago, early days of Gnome 3 when doing large file operations would hang the cursor. It made the whole system feel like complete garbage, totally unacceptable.
A cursor lagging (or any kind of GUI/user interaction stutters) should be a critical high priority bug, all hands on deck sort of thing. The entire experience of using the damn thing hinges on the responsiveness of the interface and pointing devices.
> For better or worse, those are hard sells in the countries you mentioned.
For good reasons, sometimes. The "all automation is good automation" sentiment on places like HN isn't shared as widely outside this tech bubble. There are very real concerns with historical precedent that only those at the top will benefit from the automation, which is overall bad for society (unless you're a hardcore capitalist and/or one of said capital owners).
For better or for worse, not all nations subscribe to the competition treadmill.
Because (collective) we don't own the tech. Frontier models are proprietary, their reasoning logic is hidden, and as seen with Fable the government giveth and taketh away on a whim.
Capabilities can be gated behind certification programs, or by money, or any other numerous corrupt and non-corrupt means. Model capabilities can be segregated by pricing tiers, creating an economic underclass that cannot afford access to frontier intelligence.
For humanity to benefit, the tech needs to be open and equally available to all.
I agree with this. Computing as a field is the way it is because there is a low barrier to entry. My dad gave me a Tandy 1000 and some programming books, and now I have a very lucrative career. I never took any classes. I never had to beg anyone for permission. I could just get started making things with the minimal investment of a cheap personal computer. (And eventually, an Internet connection. Working with other people is fun!)
In a world where everyone is a Claude controller (something I honestly enjoy!), that goes away. I use hundreds of dollars of tokens a month. Suddenly, the kid in her basement with an unloved computer can't get in on the ground floor. You have to be rich to even get started. That worries me deeply. It's a big change for our field, and I don't think it's a good one.
Did your dad give you a Tandy 1000 or a Cray X-MP/48? Do you really think you need the most top-of-the-line model to learn anything, or will a locally run gemma4 (or whatever it turns into) still get you going just the same as when you were a child?
That's true, local models are good. The Tandy 1000 was really only good for a little bit QBASIC. Still fun!
The other is that computing in general feels more accessible? While some models are free, you still can't easily make your own model. But I see the argument where you can't really just build your own computer anymore (no one person knows how to make a modern CPU, and you can't do it at home). You are always beholden to society, nothing truly starts in your basement at home. And it didn't in the nostalgia era that I remember either.
Your "concentration of power" is just two labs making models that most people prefer the last couple of months. Neither has more access to capital and resources than Google, more ability to pivot quickly than Xai, more access to labor than all of the Chinese labs, etc. How do you keep from a "concentration of power" without just forcing subsets of the population to use a known lesser model, or purposely kneecapping Research and Development at the labs that currently have the best models?
Do you hate all lessons from humanity's past or just the most important ones? If it takes work from a specific subset of the population and isn't compensated, then my friend, what you advocate for is slavery...
Torvalds hasn't coded in years and lives off the achievements of others. The amount of people that tonguebathe his asshole is astounding. He brings very little to the Linux project, and actually hinders it.
None of them were compelled, and nobody is stopping you from running your own LLM generously provided by others. Doesn't mean when linux came out people nationalized Apple and Microsoft.
The risk I'm talking about isn't nationalization of companies, its corporate monopolization of frontier intelligence capabilities through capital consolidation and regulatory capture.
"Just run your own LLM" ignores the asymmetry of frontier intelligence. You can build an operating system in your garage with just time and cheap hardware. You cannot go build GPT-5. And that's the problem with keeping it proprietary. If the primary cognitive engines of human progress are consolidated within just a handful of closed, proprietary cartels that can gate, alter, and revoke capabilities at will it creates a permanent economic underclass.
The foundational infrastructure of our collective future shouldn't be entirely walled off. Fair compensation for a commercial product doesn't mean monopolization of foundational capabilities.
Nothing, and integration in a chat app would be better served being model agnostic. Anthropic's slack bot here is also at a disadvantage being slack only. 90% of F500 companies are on Teams, not slack. If their only goal is tech companies and startups, fine, but if they intend to grow usage beyond that it needs to be chat app agnostic.
To go after the non-developer side though they need to do a ton more work on governance & RBAC. It's sorely lacking for anything more than a tech company/startup team. You can't even selectively enable or disable Cowork & Claude Code per member on the team plan, it's all or nothing for everyone in the team.
I agree their products are super sloppy, but they are capturing the biz user market. They have the best brand and can clean up later. What other realistic options are there that the CTO can click-ops their access to a great model and put per-person billing limits on? (wouldn't matter, they asked for Claude) We've disabled code for them all, our devs can use their claude enterprise from the CLI if they want.
At my work we rolled out Cowork to all the non-technical staff. People are using a ton, wired up for read access to M365, Confluence, etc. as sort of a psuedo enterprise RAG + all the document creation/file management it can do.
I know my users would actually like Claude Tag, but unfortunately we are in Teams, not Slack, as are most other non-tech companies.
Cowork/Claude Desktop itself is also quite a frustrating product. There's no native audit log unless you basically wire up your own with the API & a log aggregator. You can't selectively enable Claude Code access per team member, it's all or nothing. Some of the MCP connections (like QuickBooks Online) don't do RBAC at all, it's all or nothing for every user in the team.
Maybe enterprise isn't their target market, but they do keep making features that make it seem like they want that market. But if they do, they really need to step up work on governance features & RBAC for specific features and settings per member in the team.
If they don't, Microsoft will eat their lunch for enterprise non-programming use.
Or even Cowork, aim it at non-technical roles. Back and forth chat within a team to collaborate on documents, files, excel sheets, etc.
Although I suppose the problem with doing it for Cowork is this is a slack plugin, and that is not where most non-tech companies are. Teams is, at 320+ million active users vs. ~50 million.
Everyone hates Teams, but like or not that is where enterprise work happens, not slack. Anthropic would do well to make their Microsoft 365/Teams integration story better and go after enterprise before OpenAI does, or before Microsoft catches up (if they ever do) with Copilot.
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