Just wish they'd give the FW16 the same treatment, at least in terms of the build. You shouldn't choose a laptop based on looks but thats hitting exactly what I want, minus the 16" screen

This is addressed, though not quantified (I suppose because theres no central repository for that), in the introduction. To use your analogy, the author heard EV sales were through the roof, couldnt find any evidence that more EV's were actually on the road, so looked at tire sales to see if the answer was in there.

I'm not sure I understand the title, does looming help you think or something? I don't really have much inherent interest in looming, but I would have a lot of interest in that

Creative thinking, patterns and mental focus.

Once you get the hang of it, it’s the sort of task you can do and run deep mental processes in the background.

> If no one self-writes code anymore anyway, at least use a language that isn't a clusterfuck of bad design decisions

I can get behind the idea that LLM's probably don't need a language designed for humans if humans arent writing it, but the rest of this is just daft. Pythons popularity isn't just pure luck, in fact its only been in recent years that the tooling has caught up to the point where its as easy to setup as it is to write, which should really tell you something if people persevered with it anyway.

I'm sorry your favourite language doesnt have the recognition it so rightfully deserves, but reducing python to just "stupid language for stupid people" is, well, stupid

Python is the blub language now.

Keep in mind that when Graham coined that term Java and C++ were considered blub languages.

Speaking as a grey beard myself, I think its safe to say that the grey beards among us will always deride those who didn't have to work as hard as they did.

And Python is four years older than Java.

> A huge number of people are convinced that OpenAI and Anthropic are selling inference tokens at a loss despite the fact that there's no evidence this is true

Theres quite a lot of evidence, no proof I'd agree, but then there's no absolute proof I'm aware to the contrary either, so I don't know where you're getting this from.

The two pieces of evidence I'm aware of is that 1) Anthropic doesn't want their subsidised plans being used outside of CC, which would imply that the money their making off it isn't enough, and 2) last time I checked, API spending is capped at $5000 a month

Like I say, neither of these are proof, you can come up with reasonable arguments against them, but once again the same could be said for evidence on the contrary

> which would imply that the money their making off it isn't enough

I don't think this logically follows. An unlimited buffet doesn't let you resell all of the food out the backdoor. At some level of usage any fixed price plan becomes unprofitable.

I agree the 5k cap is interesting as evidence although as you said I suspect there are other reasons for it.

As for evidence against it: The Information reported that OpenAI and Anthropic are 30%+ gross margins for the last few years. Sam Altman and Dario have both claimed inference is profitable in various scattered interviews. Other experts seem to generally agree too. A quick search found a tweet from former PyTorch team member Horace He: https://x.com/typedfemale/status/1961197802169798775 and a response to it in agreement from Anish Tondwalkar former researcher at OpenAI and Google Brain.

I get the other things, but believing Altmans's words is not high on the list of things to be considered evidence.

Nor Dario's frankly, I was supposed to be out of a job by now according to his predictions over the years. I can totally buy that inference is possible, but not because they said it is

> 1) Anthropic doesn't want their subsidised plans being used outside of CC, which would imply that the money their making off it isn't enough, a

Claude Code use-cases also differ somewhat from general API use, where the former is engineered for high cache utilization. We know from overall API costs (both Anthropic and OpenRouter) that cached inputs cost an order of magnitude less than uncached inputs, but OpenCode/pi/OpenClaw don't necessarily have the same kind of aggressive cache-use optimizations.

Vertically integrated stacks might also be able to have a first layer of globally shared KV cache for the system prompts, if the preamble is not user specific and changes rarely.

> 2) last time I checked, API spending is capped at $5000 a month

Per https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/api/rate-limits, that seems to only be true for general credit-funded accounts. If you contact Anthropic's sales team and set up monthly invoicing, there's evidently no fixed spending limit.

> If you contact Anthropic's sales team and set up monthly invoicing, there's evidently no fixed spending limit.

I don't think thats a smoking gun either, for a start we don't know if the pricing would be the same as you'd get credit-funded, but also a monthly invoicing agreement is closer to their fixed plans (you spend X per month, regardless of usage) than pay-per-use API credits, which may not be profitable.

Not that thats a smoking gun either, I can see it both ways

But a simple assumption that Anthropic runs a normal large MoE LLM (which it almost certainly does) suggests that the actual price of running it (mostly energy) is pretty small.

If there were truly no other choice, CCP without a doubt. At least they claim to have good intentions, whether that's true or not

Absolutely agree, I do use notebooks but like you say I dont think I need to at all, for some reason I just have some natural drive to write things down (plus I like notebooks). But I've often had experiences of reading through old notebooks and finding that the things I care about in there I instantly remembered without having to read the page, and the things I'd forgotten about I didn't care about anymore.

Its the classic interrogation technique; "we're not here to debate whether your guilty or innocent, we have all the evidence we need to prove your guilt, we just want to know why". Not sure if it makes it any different though that the interrogator knows they are lying

I haven't worked at FAANG so maybe I'm out the loop, but flyers on bathroom stalls seems bizarre, like almost less of a corporate action and more of a personal one (like you might get for unionisation), but with all the messaging of corporate, like something you'd see in a company memo.

Like I say, maybe everyone else is accustomed to this idea, but if you have any pictures of them I think a lot of people would be interested in seeing it, unless I'm misunderstand what it is

It started as Testing on the Toilet, which was an effort to get people to actually care about unit-testing their code and software quality and writing maintainable code that doesn't break in 6 months. Later was expanded to Learning on the Loo, general tips and tricks, and then Testing on the Toilet became Tech on the Toilet. It's been going on for a good 20 years now, so that's about 1000 articles (they change them out weekly) and there aren't really 1000 articles you can write about unit testing.

The insight is actually pretty similar to Google's core business model: when you're going to the bathroom, there isn't a whole lot else you're doing, so it's the perfect time to put up a 2-3 minute read to reinforce a message that you want people to hear but might not get attention for otherwise.

Actually, that is also a way to surrepticiously abuse you: not even your toilet time should be "yours".

I was in a fraternity in college, 20 years ago. We put weekly bathroom notes on the inside of the stall doors. Something interesting, something funny, upcoming news. The elected fraternity secretary was responsible for making those weekly, among many other things.

If they were a day late the amount of pestering they would get until the did that weekly job was hilarious. We all got a kick out of them.

Your toilet time can be yours, just don’t fucking read them lol. Back then razr phones were the hotness, nobody sat on a smartphone and had ads blasted at them while they took a shit.

I guess, if you equate "influence" with "abuse". An awful lot pillars of our society would become abuse then. Ask any parent of a toddler whether their toilet time is actually "theirs".

Employers should not be treating employees like toddlers and try to brainwash them on the goddamn toilet

My point is the opposite actually: if you are the parent of a toddler, you'll know that your toilet time is not actually yours, because your toddler will try every effort to get your attention and influence you, up to and including crawling into your lap while you are doing your business; tantrumming on the bathroom floor; tantrumming outside the bathroom door; cutting up the mail you really need to file; spilling food all over the floor; unlatching childproofing; moving furniture; and enlisting their siblings.

I play chess on the toilet at work.

It's not really a FAANG thing. I bet you've seen the memes about X days without a serious accident, or without stopping the production line. It's the equivalent in a restroom or a urinal: A place you can make sure people see key information. You can find this in many industrial sites. A call center might have reminders of core principles for how to close calls quickly, or when to escalate. A lab might have safety tips. A restaurant will remind you of hand washing. An industrial site of some important safety tip or two.

While I've not seen this in every single place I've worked, it's very common.

I can say at Google we usually just had engineering tip posters in the washrooms they were usually very insightful and just written by other engineers at the company.

Stuff like how to reduce nesting logic, how to restructure APIs for better testing, etc.

People usually like them. I can't say I've seen what the parent post described so I imagine it's "the other" FAANG mentioned here.

Yep, I frankly thought Testing On The Toilet was pretty great.

That and nice washing toilets.

You're right that it was just other employees who decided what to print there. But I don't think that absolves the company (Facebook) really... Everything a company does is just things that its people do! Nothing about the flyer was outside the parameters of the job of its maker. Their job was to make the company money by helping advertisers maximize ad revenue, and that's exactly what they were doing.

Facebook had a serious internal propaganda arm when I was there. Couldn't manage to get floor length stall walls in most of the bathrooms, but every stall had a weekly newsletter about whatever product stuff.

Every high traffic flat space on the wall would be covered with a poster, most of them with designs lifted from US WWII propaganda, many hard to tell if satire or not. I was surprised there was never one about carpooling with der füher.

On the face of it, this or at least acting as a code reviewer from an experienced point of view seems like the solution, the problem is that we all naturally get lazy and complacent. I actually think AI was at its best for coding a year or so ago, when it could kind of do part of the work but theres no way you could ever ship it. Code that works today but breaks in 6 months is far more insidious.