The site is currently running, yes. Don't forget it went down quite often immediately following the mass firing though. They seem to have fixed that.
There was certainly a ton of bloat to trim, but the haphazard "just pick 80% of the people and fire them" was incredibly stupid. Should have chosen whoever was producing the bloat, at least.
Pretty well if you don't mind some features being built twice or three times and appearing inconsistently at different screens, or users being able to bypass usage limits by pressing the back button on the usage limit sign...
I used it initially. It was great and useful but the api costs were pretty high..
Now, I use claude code directly on my machine with the remote control flag.. so its like open claw exactly. I can be outside and give commands to it via mobile app
(keep system from sleeping if plugged in, keep system from going idle even if not plugged in, for 2 hours, start claude code w/ remote control enabled, lock my mac w/ the keyboard shutcut)
I know right? On Linux for example GNOME needs an extension and only KDE seems to have a handy toggle available from the get go. It seems the normal is to NOT make a feature like this easily available.
I've been using it since about February, still using it. It's running on my old M1 MBP. I have a lot of automations on OpenClaw, things like "Every week summarize this data and send me a message about it" or "check when a new version of an NPM package comes out and submit a PR to update it."
It's quite expensive from a value per token perspective. It's quite cheap from a "send one message from my phone and it does something probably productive" perspective. No major security breaches yet.
All of the use cases I see seem like stuff that’s better performed by normal software. Dependabot will watch for new versions and submit a PR for free.
AI for developing software that runs predictably seems more useful than AI performing actions like a program would.
yeah i think the deterministic part (sending email, submit PR) is usually done by a normale script/software, agents are useful for summarizing text in a smart way, expecially if you need to aggregate text from multiple sources and it's natural language (not structured data)
This still feels like made up work. We are using AI to inflate a prompt in to a full email to send, and then the receiver is using AI to summarize it back down.
That definitely happens, but also many people are also using this stuff to get some amazing work done.
I think AI is an incredible competence magnifier. If someone knows what they are doing that competence can get magnified massively. If they do not know what they are doing, that gets magnified just as much. The tricky part is getting people with a low level but real degree of competence, which is all of us when we're starting out, to learn how to reliably magnify that.
in that particular scenario, is certanly a made up work. but sometimes you are aggregating text from lets say 5/10 different inputs, and summarizing those into a single email with AI is pretty niche and efficient.
obviously not everything needs an hammer to be solved
it has always been this way across every platform.
most people don't pay attention to anything that isn't controversial or extreme. Thats just how our brains work and thats the reason why MrBeast's advice on making it on youtube is the way it is.
X specifically changed the way they operate to financially reward people who post popular content. That led to an immediate downturn in the quality of the network as everyone sought to post the most controversial posts they could that would gain the most traffic.
>> The cost of that $15 per 30sec is NOT FINAL - you'll pretty much end up deciding you want another take - either due to some inconsistencies, non-physical movements, or anything else, which screams "that's fake".
Thats true for grok and other models. You need to generate endlessly and cut endlessly and stitch them up together.
but for seedance you pretty much get stellar output which is extremely consistent in a single shot. Like there is a very good chance you will like what you see.
This is just a Western cultural perception and baggage. That if you are good at chess, you are smart. If you can solve the Rubik's Cube quickly, you are a genius, etc.
Getting better at chess, the Rubik's Cube, etc. is a skill. The more you practice and the more passionate you are, the better you get at it. This is just like learning to play the piano or learning to swim. There is natural aptitude as well but its not as simple as being super smart and being able to strategize well using intelligence. That's just the narrative that seems to make sense. Being good at chess isn't evidence that someone is smart in general.
Please don't devolve into reactionary nonsense. I'm pretty sure that if you measure the average IQ of good (whatever your definition of good) chess players, you won't get 100.
Seems weird to dismiss stuff as "nonsense" just because you're "pretty sure". Hikaru Nakamura (who's been the world #2 in classical rating) did an IQ test on stream and ended up with 102. I've not seen any other results for top players.
You saved $500k to buy a beautiful home. You don't know how to build a home.
I do. I take the $500k from you and then pay $450k to a bunch of employees who put in 40 hours a week. I take home $50k. I earn $50k.
Now, you like the home so much you tell all your friends about it.
I hire more employees and I take $50k profit per house but I build 20k houses and make $1B. I earn $1B.
Market forces decide how much you "earn". There are plenty of blue collar workers who work 3 jobs and live paycheck to paycheck. There are SWEs who work 20 hours a week and make the bank.
>I hire more employees and I take $50k profit per house but I build 20k houses and make $1B. I earn $1B.
This is the "rock star" fantasy. You do something that becomes wildly popular and can then walk away while still making epic amounts of cash. You didn't earn that $1B through continuous effort. It was all made by your initial idea. It just takes time for the cash to be delivered in full.
Do you deserve to profit off a good idea? Yes, and few would contest that. Do you deserve to profit so much that you never have to work another day in your life? Should the system let people retire after having one good idea? That's going to seem like a sub-optimal system to many. However, its important to note that ideas take capital to implement, and it's much more typical for rock star rewards to go to those with the capital than those with the ideas. That's a system that many more will find to be flawed.
This sub optimal system is what has (at times) led to massive growth of disruptive technologies and platforms.
People got reasonably mad at Apple’s iron fisted control of the App Store and access to its platforms.
It got to the point that there was political will to force Apple to change. (Sort of, in some circumstances)
But during the golden age of the App Store, when Angry Birds came out—-it wasn’t something people were hemming and hawing about the fairness of distribution platforms it was more like: “wow! iPhone! Check out this game! Everyone is playing this thing, Jack White is playing it. You too can have this game for a few bucks, can you believe this?”
It is only after Apple had ridden the horse a good long while and reaped what came to be outsized profits and using the thing to control competition over an extended period that something really was done about it. (Sort of)
There are many other examples of this kind of thing.
Compensated creative expression has somewhat relied on it in the form of intellectual property, which has built in albeit relatively toothless expiration.
But even IP is under greater threat than ever with gen AI. Just look at what fans are doing with the Star Wars franchise on YouTube right now.
Anyhow, I agree with the system is flawed but I mean to point out that deciding a person or company has reaped enough for their thing is something we do on a case by case basis.
It is not easy to say when to say to someone or something has been compensated “enough.”
How much profit do they deserve exactly? How exactly is it calculated, and who decides how it is calculated? These questions aren't in bad faith, I'm genuinely curious how people with your world view would answer them.
I don't have an answer, but I don't think the framing should be about what they deserve or not. It should be around how much money an individual can have/control before it becomes detrimental to society.
> You didn't earn that $1B through continuous effort
Why does it have to be earned through continuous effort? It seems like you’re defending a sweeping assertion (that you can’t “earn” $1 billion), but retreating to a narrower position based on a very specific definition of “earn.”
Yes, you can’t become a billionaire performing fungible labor compensated on a periodic (hourly or annual) basis. But I don’t see why that’s the dividing line between “earned” and “unearned.” A lawyer charging hourly will never become a billionaire. But there’s been a couple of lawyers (Joe Jamail, Mark Lanier) who became billionaires by securing enormous verdicts for their clients. Are you saying lawyers “earn” their money only if they charge hourly, but not if they get a share of the money they recover for their client?
That seems to be a weird definition of “earned” versus “unearned.” Maybe you can say that money is unearned when it’s inherited. Or that it’s unearned when it’s just accrued interest. Or that it’s unearned if it’s through socially questionable activities like high frequency trading. But most billionaires didn’t get their money in those ways.
They are rewarded, yeah. And then they could retire, or they could take that money and put it towards more good ideas, like what Elon has done his entire life.
If we don't have a system for that, then how would you incentivize people to take on bigger risks, bigger projects, etc?
Also, should the lottery not be a thing? What exactly are you advocating by this line of reasoning?
Imagine that making a ground-breaking discovery in physics came with a prize of a billion dollars. One good idea, and you can retire. Would that not harm science? Many scientists would keep working after their first prize because it's what they love to do. Some would accuse them with being greedy after they've made a few more discoveries. "Hey, leave some money for the rest of us!"
What I'm trying to get at is that the rewards for certain things are badly out of whack with what is necessary to keep people both rewarded and motivated. At least, in terms of what is healthy for society and progress. In general, the closer people are to the money the more unreasonable the rewards are. Perhaps people who are further from the money but who contribute just as much (or more) to society are right to be concerned.
P.S. Musk bought companies with people who had a lot of good ideas and convinced governments (mainly the U.S. government) to pay for it. He's always been a capital guy, not an idea guy. He desperately wants to be in idea guy, but his ideas are things like re-branding Twitter to X and the Cybertruck.
> P.S. Musk bought companies with people who had a lot of good ideas and convinced governments (mainly the U.S. government) to pay for it. He's always been a capital guy, not an idea guy. He desperately wants to be in idea guy, but his ideas are things like re-branding Twitter to X and the Cybertruck.
Personally speaking, I am sympathetic to the idea that billionaires (especially Musk) are often created more by government policy than market forces. Although for some reason the push to stop governments minting billionaires by fiat seems rather weak, which makes me think a lot of people are being disingenuous on the topic. Or maybe just haven't thought about it much. There is a bizarre zeitgeist where first the government has to give a man billions of dollars because something needs to happen ASAP, then they have to take the billions away because nobody thought the thing needed to happen all that urgently.
There is an overlap in the vibe between the people who are unhappy that the government rewarded Musk and the people who, at the time, were clamouring that the rewards for things Musk was doing were too low. 10, 20 years ago it was all "there isn't enough funding for electric vehicles", "world is literally ending from climate change" and "who is going to put money into batteries".
I'm not saying capital guys have no place. Should they be rewarded to the tune of a trillion dollars though, especially if most of it ultimately came from government coffers? That seems extreme to me.
The people closest to the money are the people who have the most control over how and who its allotted to. We really ought to watch them more carefully.
So how much should they be rewarded? You suggest a cap? What prevents someone that's more poor than you deciding that you nobody needs to make more money than them, so now you should make less money?
Your narrative is self contradictory. In your own theory of what happened, Musk was the idea guy, not the capital guy! You said the government provided the capital. Why did the government provide the capital to Musk rather than GM or Boeing or Rockwell? Because he was the one who could actually develop what the government wanted to support.
It’s rewriting history to call Musk a “capital guy.” Tesla and SpaceX entered markets with huge, established competitors. Those companies had access to virtually unlimited capital. But EVs and commercial space travel were pipe dreams before Musk got involved. I graduated with a degree in aerospace engineering pre-SpaceX and the field was moribund. Your options were going to Boeing to make airliners 1% more efficient every decade or going to Lockheed or Rockwell to design better missiles for blowing up brown people. The idea that SpaceX was just about a “capital guy” coming in is 100% hindsight bullshit.
You’re also just completely factually wrong about “most of” anything “coming out of government coffers.” The government gave Tesla a $485 million loan that was fully repaid. SpaceX received about $500 million in grants. In both cases, that was a small fraction of the money invested into the companies. Tesla’s cumulative net loss was $6 billion before profitability. SpaceX’s cumulative net loss is $42 billion.
At most you have a fair argument that the government should take equity in companies instead of providing grants with no strings attached. But that would just mean that maybe the government should have a 10% share of SpaceX or whatever.
This is a great example of why you can't earn a billion dollars without doing something immoral.
First of all, you don't know how to build a house, you have some vague idea of it, maybe even some innovative one, and hire people who actually know how to implement that idea to do it for you, but you pocket some of the money because they don't know the exact worth, and because they need to live and no one else is paying them.
Then, what happens next is that some competitor springs up, and they want to poach your people by offering to pay them $475k and only keeping $25k in profits for themselves. You can't have that, so you start paying off government officials to deny or delay their building approvals, paying off mafia thugs to sabotage their construction or threaten workers who try to leave, you sue them for breaching worker non-competes or IP rights on the construction methods, etc.
All of these are part of how the construction industry actually operates, it is well known as one of the most corrupt industries around. Let's also not forget that the value of real estate is location location location - house and business prices are hugely determined by where the plot of land is, much more so than any differences in construction prowess, if we disregard the very top of the most complex projects ever made (of which there are way fewer than 20k).
None of the other workers know how to build a house. The electrician doesn't know how to build a house. The carpenter doesn't know how to build a house. The guy hanging drywall doesn't know how to build a house.
They know how to do one piece and finding and coordinating all those people (something else they don't know how to do) is work on its own that is valuable.
In this example, someone has come up with a way to build houses $50k more efficient than someone else. Otherwise, they wouldn't be at a competitive price that includes a $50k *profit* per house. (profit = the price of efficiency).
So a person figuring out how to scale their homebuilding methodology by teaching others and providing the *capital* with which they can implement that methodology isn't worth anything to you? I can't imagine a society that could work without these features -- we'd all be re-learning best practices every generation because there'd be no incentive to scale up ideas that work.
So if someone invents a cure for all cancer that costs $1 to make, and they sell it for $2, in your world the value created by the inventor is only the profit from the vaccines that person *personally* manufactures themself? That's an insane and backward world that I'm glad we don't live in.
They have places like that. It’s called my dad’s village in Bangladesh. The only way to make money is through labor, just like you want. But it turns out that, without capital, the only labor there is to do is farming rice.
At what level do you think a business stops experiencing market forces and starts dictating them, to the detriment of competition, consumers, and employees?
Because I don't think you can build a billion dollar home construction empire where you profit $50k per home in perpetuity. You will have to lower your margins, cut others in on your profits to stop them from competing with you, or manipulate markets to never make a loss on a project.
Of all the billionaires in the world, what percent of them did something like this, vs the percent who reached that number from investments (and by investments I mean assets they possessed which ballooned in value)?
I'm betting it is a tiny fraction. Most modern "wealth" is all based on investment games.
> I take the $500k from you and then pay $450k to a bunch of employees
Oh. You don’t know how to build a house. You know people that know how to build a house.
Picking a thing that you literally don’t know how to do as your example of a thing that you know how to do is amazing. You could’ve picked a blanket fort or a spreadsheet that tracks other people’s work or a LinkedIn post but those aren’t really things people pay for
I know doctors but I don’t go around posting that I know how to treat eczema lmao
At that time the predominant view was that LLMs were nothing but stochastic parrots, that they would plateau, and that hallucinations couldn't be fixed.
At this point I doubt there are any AI sceptics left. That ship has long sailed.
The only thing that matters is whether the estimates are accurate, and AI can improve on that too.
Even humans only estimate based on neurons firing in prior patterns.
It did not feel off at all. I read every single word and that is all that counts.
I think what you are getting wrong is thinking that the reader cares about your effort. The reader doesn't care about your effort. It doesn't matter if it took you 12 seconds or 5 days to write a piece of content.
The key thing is people reading the entirety of it. If it is AI slop, I just automatically skim to the end and nothing registers in my head. The combination of em dashes and the sentence structure just makes my mind tune it out.
So, your thesis is correct. If you put in the custom visualization and put in the effort, folks will read it. But not because they think you put in the effort. They don't care. But because right now AI produces generic fluff that's overly perfectly correct. That's why I skip most LinkedIn posts as well. Like, I personally don't care if it's AI or not. But mentally, I just automatically discount and skip it. So, your effort basically interrupts that automatic pattern recognition.
Ironically, being anti-science is pro-science. Skepticism of institutions and consensus is the scientific method.
The main reason being scientific consensus can lag reality significantly, especially when career incentives discourage dissent. The history of science includes many cases where consensus was wrong and critics were marginalized rather than engaged.
Deference to science as an authority is the opposite.
Feynman has a quote on this:
"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts. When someone says, 'Science teaches such and such,' he is using the word incorrectly. Science doesn't teach anything; experience teaches it. If they say to you, 'Science has shown such and such,' you might ask, 'How does science show it? How did the scientists find out? How? What? Where?' It should not be 'science has shown' but 'this experiment, this effect, has shown.' And you have as much right as anyone else, upon hearing about the experiments — but be patient and listen to all the evidence — to judge whether a sensible conclusion has been arrived at."
Somewhere there's a quote about how the old guard has to literally die out before certain new ideas can take root; even if the new idea is obviously correct.
I think we've been pampered by a few hundred years of rapid "scientific advancement" and now we're firmly in the area where things are not grade-school science fair easy to see or prove.
"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." - Max Planck
>Ironically, being anti-science is pro-science. Skepticism of institutions and consensus is the scientific method
skepticism is necessary, but not sufficient.
if they merely nay-say institutions and then go with their gut, it's certainly not.
only when someone attempts to rationally disprove a position, offering alternate testable theories and actually performing those tests is science done.
if you suspect an institution is wrong, that's fine, but it's just a hunch until someone does a test.
I was a witness of wrong prescribing medication by doctors many time. For example Novalgin for mother releasing from hospital after painful birth. This medicament is not suitable for breastfeeding mothers!
> Skepticism of institutions and consensus is the scientific method.
Which is why one of the core tenets of practicing Science is “trust, but verify”.
Science is based on the trust of what came before.
But the fallible, ego-driven, and dishonest nature of humanity means that trust alone cannot be relied upon. Hence the “but verify”. That is why replication studies and falsification tests exist - to cull that which cannot be reliably replicated.
Unfortunately, capitalism has stepped in and f*ked up even that, when for-profit universities who rely on public funding place “publish or die” mandates on researchers. This makes any repeat experiments untenable because it takes researchers away from publishing new data. So they just cite prior papers and chase the latest shiny -- because their continued employment is predicated upon publishing.
We have perverse incentives in place that have distorted science, sure. And almost all of these distortions come directly down to a violently coercive economic system that forces you to be profitable to someone else least you suffer homelessness, destitution, and even death.
But what else is there? Belief in an insane, evil, and omnicidal sky-daddy?
Sorry, but no. We should counteract the sources of distortions by crushing capitalism and the corrosive influence of money, not switching over to systems that have always proven themselves to be supremely untrustworthy.
Skepticism needs to be calibrated based on the weight of the evidence. There's a broad spectrum from being skeptical about the latest overhyped study in subfield X to being skeptical about quantum mechanics. If you want to challenge established science, you need to bring the receipts. To quote Carl Sagan, "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence".
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