I have. Go to a car place, build a rapport and the guy will likely apply discounts to your order. Go to the same place, make sure they know you and they'll give you discounts or extras because they know you're a repeat customer.

Many retail workers have some discretion. They're the front line workers. If you tell a manager at McDonalds that he's gotta listen to you yell for 15m to make the company an extra $10, that's not a trade they're willing to make. Hell he would even take it out of his own wallet if he had to (I would).

The whole "businesses do everything for their bottom line" is just some MBA bs and not at all how real businesses work.

If you're in the US and you're making 100k a year, that's worth 5k or $416/m. So you can buy two of the most expensive plans on the frontier models.

This focus on cost optimization is insane. Just use the frontier models. Even a marginal bump is worth whatever the hell they're charging, at least for now.

Sorry but I'm skeptical.

What negative actions has Google Amazon and Nvidia done due to them prioritizing growth endlessly?

For Google, they didn't prioritize growth or they would have moved on AI a decade ago, but they were afraid of having tech journalists who hate them already write mean articles about how their AI is harmful.

Amazon just .. I don't know, keeps squeezing out operational efficiencies that get me next day delivery? Or developing AWS to enable other people to build apps?

Nvidia sells GPUs. Maybe you're a gamer and the push into AI means higher GPU prices?

I'm at a loss here. I don't think anyone is mad at these companies outside of a tiny vocal terminally online minority.

What are you balancing if not human growth? And how do you plan to do that?

Yes, that's called an investment. That money's already spent. Look at the marginal revenue of many business. What's going to happen? They'll raise prices because legacy costs? And then the people distilling these models will come in w/out the baggage. Cars for instance have a huge up front cost in design and manufacturing capacity and they only sell for 5-20% more than it costs them to make that one unit. It's a competitive industry

What's your point?

Anthropic revenue (annualized):

February 2026 $14 billion,

April 2026 $30 billion

May 2026 $47 billion

The market prices future revenue. What other company doubles revenue every few months? Where does it stop is the question. You need a few more doublings and things start making sense.

For instance:

> So the speculative discourse only works as long as investors subsidize the use of the technology. When that subsidy stops, these AI firms have to actually deliver value, or customers won’t buy it.

Are investors subsidizing the technology? There's upfront build out, but Anthropic is profitable and I believe the big labs are profitable on inference.

In comparison consider the real estate bubble in 2008. Why was real estate going up so much? Was there a surge of people coming into the country driving up demand? Were people using these houses? No it was purely inflationary driven by cheap money and financial engineering.

It also relies on arguments that this technology is all speculative, like one day we'll figure out how to use AI and demand will be high. But the demand is already there. Everybody is using AI, revenues are insane, it's the fastest growing product in history. It spans consumers and increasingly businesses.

The comparison to dot-com crash is also superficial. Was dot-com a bubble? I don't know, if you were transported to peak 2000 hype, would you argue "you guys are in a bubble, and the internet impact on the economy will be no greater than that of the fax machine"? No, of course not. In this case the supply outstripped demand. The build out and hype was early. But with AI you're seeing real usage.

It's not contagion. People are using this technology, not because it's cool and (apart from a few examples) because their bosses are forcing them to hit token metrics, but because it's actually useful and people are finding more uses every day.

It's just lazy. There is real risk that the build out is too much. But to make that argument you would have to say that the model intelligence would asymptote or become increasingly expensive such that its not worth it. Or that demand for broad intelligence is capped somehow. But saying we're in a bubble just because number goes up is not a strong argument.

Didn't Gawker publish an illegally obtained sex tape of Hogan and refused to take it down even after a court order?

Then you have a general workflow that has a set of skills (prompts) and tools. And that could be recursive.

So if you do something like "rename this file" you have to build up a workflow like:

[classifier]

what's the workflow -> rename

[rename workflow]

list files (tool call)

figure out relevant predicate (LLM)

convert predicate into a filter query give the context of the files (LLM)

figure out what you want the new name to be (LLM)

create the request body and hit the tool

approval workflow

formatting

It's a lot to manage and orchestrate and that's just one simple example. You'd like want to use the same building blocks to delete a file or move it. Even to know the right concepts is difficult as we're a bit deluded on whats going on in the background of these modern AI apps like Claude and GPT that do a lot of this stuff for you

Does the broad market care about sustainable materials? What does that even mean? Almost no one buys something because of sustainable.

For longer lasting devices, people like buying new phones. The iPhone has pretty much not changed in the last 5 years. People just like buying the new and best

Same thing w/ repairable parts. People just like buying new things. And it's not a conspiracy theory, it's just observed behavior.

So I'm glad they're trying something, because as much as you would like these other things, the broader market of consumers don't care. Yes profits are a useful proxy for value people place on your activities. Not perfect but in the long run if you provide a shitty experience you're likely to lose.

Yes its unlikely something bad would happen. It's also unlikely that you would get into a life threatening car accident. But you still wear a seatbelt. Why? Because it's the precautionary principle, pretty much common sense.

Yes in the past we let children wander, but if you asked those parents in the past if there was some very low cost way to afford additional security like knowing where your 10 year old is, they would obviously take it. But for some reason people take the wrong lessons from the past.

There are no dark GPUs. Compute translates directly to money for these frontier labs.

I think everyone is reading way too much into this. Sure there is some circular transactions that are sus, but this ain't it.

"Do whatever you want and things will work out because it worked out for me" is not a good (or honest) message for children.

[survivor-bias-airplane.jpg]

When your choices include terrorizing businesses and being a public nuisance to everyone else, then yes, government should prevent people from making those choices.

In retrospect? It's really not hard to determine before the fact that petty crime is not a road to good things.

We have ways to prevent people from going down this path. It's called enforcement. He was more or less allowed to steal and sleep in the parks. If there was strict enforcement, this wouldn't have been a medium term viable option. Doesn't have to be throw the person in prison for the rest of their life, but either accept help, go through the criminal justice system or figure out another way to contribute to society in a positive way. It sounds like the author at any point could have found some kind of employment, but chose this because it was viable. And society wasn't doing him any favors by looking the other way

That's an insane level of throughput. What's a good baseline? Prior to agentic coding, whats the typical number of PRs engineers were expected to push? Maybe a 2-10?

Do people feel the software has gotten better in the last 6 months? The number of engs is prob the same so we should expect maybe 5x faster cycle in major software apps, but I don't see it. The AI apps do change very fast but given its a very new field, I'd expect as much. But outside of that, I don't see it.