Imagine you're about to get on a rocket ship, betting that this famous maverick rocket pilot can take you to Mars in 2 days. He already made it to the moon in 12 hours, record time. And he invented the ship, too. Then the pilot gets caught having an affair with the stewardess, gets fired before the trip, and they bring in a normal airline pilot who's never been on this ship before, never even flown a rocket ship, and who starts talking about good old fashioned normal speeds, and making it to Mars in a few years' time or so. Or, you know what, maybe just orbiting the Earth a few times instead.

You might be tempted to pass on the trip, no? And you wouldn't be the only one. Suddenly this rocket trip which had lots of passengers is completely empty, with no one to fund the trip. This so-called stabilizing force has killed the trip.

Many people could just say the exact opposite of your sentence, i.e. "not a disqualification" and "can still be trusted". Furthermore, These people could supply many historical examples of leaders who did similar things and went on to remain great/effective leaders of the things they were charged to lead.

It's never going to work like that, and you don't need any dastardly, sinister, or conspiratorial explanations for why. It's a natural side effect of the market being competitive.

When tools and technology make people more efficient, some people take that to mean they can work fewer hours and get the same job done. Which is true. But other people take that to mean they can work the same amount of hours, and get way more done. This is also true.

In a market in which two companies are competitors, and one takes the former approach and one takes the latter, which company do you think will still be around in ten or twenty years? Obviously the latter. And that pressures people in the former group to demand more output and stable working hours so they can remain competitive.

I don't know, I'm old enough to have seen a lot of public outrage against lots of stuff. It seems like it was substantive, but actually turned out to just be a trend. Obviously, it's not a strict dichotomy. It doesn't have to be either or. There can be elements of both.

But there are thousands of data centers in the world. And to my knowledge, very few people complained about them over the last twenty years. Now we're adding more, and of course again, there could be legitimate reasons for concern, but the outcry seems to be about 1000x higher, for a few hundred extra data centers, than the outcry for the first thousand extra data centers.

And that, to me, is evidence of trendiness.

It reminds me of how in 2012, so many people I knew were up in arms about Joseph Kony. And their outrage was legitimate. But by 2014, no one talked about it anymore. And if I asked them today, they probably wouldn't even remember him.

Even the story you linked about the water supply, it was wastewater not drinking water. I'm not saying that it's good or even okay for wastewater to have bacteria in it. But if people en masse are against data centers because they "could pollute the entire town’s water supply," based on a singular case of one data center's wastewater having some bacteria, that gives me pause. This seems more like a trendy issue than a practical one for most people.

2. Lots of people are used to Claude Code's interface/commands/etc. and don't feel like paying the cost of learning something new. The benefits would have to outweigh those switching costs, and it's unclear that they do.

3. Claude Code already works with your Claude MAX subscription[0], which gives you an incredible amount of usage of the top-tier models for cheap, which can't be matched by any open-source options. And most people won't exhaust this usage, so they have no real need to use open-source models.

4. Although it's hard to 100% confirm this, there's reason to believe that Claude itself works better with Claude Code than with other harnesses.

5. There's no real lock-in. If tomorrow you decide you don't want to use Claude Code, you can just switch to something else ezpz. So there's no reason to worry that you're digging a hole and locking yourself in. Thus, there's no urgency to switch away.

[0] Yes, open-source harnesses can use your Claude MAX subscription, but does this "benefit" of open-source harnesses really outweigh the costs of #1, #2, and #4 above?

And Meta Muse

I'm guessing mostly because they subsidize a lot of the costs

Also, this idea that it's bad or weird to anonymously discuss customers is strange. I've known cops, doctors, dentists, and all sorts of other people who routinely share stories about weird things that happen with people and customers at work, anonymously. This is the norm in the world and always has been.

It's also the norm for the companies who own your data to look at it, when asked to. What do you think customer support even is?

It's only really a small corner of the tech world that treats these things as strange and sacrilege.

1. Product decisions require far more knowledge than coding and architecture decisions, and that knowledge is harder to come by. It often requires research, talking to customers, understanding the organization of the company, the company's mission, the company's employees, their performance, stakeholders, the competitive landscape, funding, growth/sales/marketing strategies and budgets, customer buying patterns, company strategy, etc. Not to mention the code, the coding backlog, etc. Companies have to compete in a hostile, competitive, capitalistic market, which means they're trying to beat other companies, which means a seemingly very good product decision can actually be bad solely because other people are doing it better. Imagine if your perfectly functional code failed to compile simply by nature of the fact that better programmers exist.

2. Product design requires taste, and taste is partly a function of novelty, but there aren't that many LLMs, so everyone's using the same few LLMs, therefore everyone's getting the same designs, therefore the designs look like clones of each other rather than novel thoughtful design, therefore they fail the taste bar. In addition, LLMs simply weren't trained on good vs. bad visual or product design nearly as much as they've been trained on good vs. bad, functional vs. non-functional code.

Obviously there are upsides to that too. It leads to more accountability. But there are downsides which include having a world with less innovation, less technology, and more expensive technology. Generally, the mass is when, when there's more businesses competing to create ever better and cheaper products. So there's a tradeoff there. And it's very difficult to draw the line at the perfect point.

There are countless cases of executives going to jail when they've crossed that line, beyond reckless experimentation and into willful negligence or harm. Still, I think we would mostly all agree that the line has been pushed too far in the other direction.People are incentivized, if they're running corporations, to lobby and try to push this line as far as possible in order to provide cover for themselves, and that's the problem with money playing such a big role in politics.

But still, it's a bit silly to be comparing this to your own personal responsibilities with your car. There's pretty much no societal benefit to creating laws that protect people from being reckless with their own possessions.

Also, for what it's worth, LLM research is hardly the first scientific research to have accidents with negative external consequences.

(Yes, there will be individual exceptions to this, just like with everything else in life.)