You can bet your tushy that whichever middle-manager came up with the idea of spending all that money to reduce reliance on human workers, has already picked up a hefty bonus, used a golden parachute, and is now scamming their way through another giant corporate to repeat the same shit with a different idiotic idea.
Not really. Looks like exterior shell only - so it’s mainly useful for designing accessories.
And the underlying causes weren’t fixed.
Fascism rose a hundred years ago for precisely the same reason it does today.
The economy went to shit (Europe was in rags after WW1, with Germany, Austria and Hungary forced to pay restitution that led to reduced industrial and agricultural progress, meanwhile the US managed to jump from market crash to market crash to total global depression), and people felt like no matter what they did, there was no progress. Workers worked their arses off only to barely make ends meet, discontent was brewing, and elected officials were either intentionally blind to the issues or just completely castrated, unable to fix anything.
Which gave way to fascists. In the US, in the UK (which had a knock-on effect of mainland Europe being in the shitter economically, and the British Empire falling apart), in Germany, or Spain, or Italy, even in Russia. Fascists were able to pose as worker-friendly, national spirited solution-finders. Because that is what fascists do - cause complex problems, block any proper solutions, then come up with overly simplistic resolutions that the average people suck up (even if the experts say it’s obviously not going to work), grab onto power, and not let it go.
It’s literally the same shit happening again. All the issues of Europe - ineffective “progressive” leaders (in reality centrist pigs), US interventionism causing the immigrant crisis (not going to put blame on the individual immigrants, but one has to be blind to not see the knock-on effect of an already underperforming European market picking up tons of people who need shelter, food, amenities, and of course the ~30% tack-on economic migration and system abuse), all giving rise to fascism yet again.
Because again the altright is using the simplistic rhetoric of “if we get rid of [insert demonised minority here], all our problems will be gone”. without addressing the underlying core causes of the current economic depression. And people suck it up because it’s a simple answer, it plays into the tribalist spirit and shifts the need of critical thinking onto someone else.
And it’s all because their models are super under-optimised.
You’d think otherwise with how capable Opus and Fable are, but it’s just because the internal harness hides the thinking process, resulting in wildly improved output at the cost of 3-5x more compute being burned.
If they tossed one of the more capable open models in (looking at you, Qwen3.8/Qwen4), those costs would go down a lot.
I can still shoot the hookers after banging them, right? To get my money back?
Open source maintainers have enough trouble without trying to ban all AI generated code just to comply with a distributor.
AI code is inevitable. Even if you outright ban it, people will try to sneak it in. Lets say the change is literally just changing the order of calls to fix a bug - but the person who found and fixed the bug used AI to do so. Do you ban that? If it’s not disclosed, how would you know? After all the commit is literally just a line order swap. What if the committer actually hand wrote that fix but used AI for the PR body because they don’t speak English well and don’t want to appear dumb?
The best practice is to allow AI-generated code as long as the person providing the commit can properly reason about its function - meaning they understand what the code does and have done their due diligence. Good quality AI generated code isn’t the issue, it’s the skiddies who think prompting Claude with the most basic queries and blindly accepting the output until the one thing they wanted to achieve works, results in usable code. It results in unmaintainable slop. You need an actual engineer with experience to review it, but maintainers don’t have that capacity, so banning slop and requiring contributors to understand what they’re trying to get merged is the best way forward.
TBF I was going all out 😂but yeah the fact that my build essentially tripled in price is insane.
“And since you contributed to Claude Jr’s creation, you’re on the hook for child support. At the current rates, that will be 50% of all compute usage, so about $4.5bn… per week”
No, it’s not really closer to 60/40.
You can deliver the core of the product - the 80% - in the indicated 20% effort zone, aka a few days.
As for not knowing the code… I actually do read what’s being output. Just because I’m not familiar enough with the language or framework to write it myself with confidence, it doesn’t mean I don’t understand it.
Beyond that, the review loop I described above incorporates experts that are language/framework specific to spot issues. Static analysis can easily spot unused code paths - plus that gets covered by tests too, so any leftover is spotted. And even further, after each MVP cycle (which I use in place of sprints as sprints are for human effort cycles which LLMs don’t really have, so managing actual target goals instead of physical time periods makes more sense), I have a multi-model (as in, different models from different sources, not just e.g. “all Claude but using Sonnet, Opus and Fable”, but more like “Opus 5.5 and GPT 6.1 Sol and [insert currently best model for language]”) quorum of experts review the code, test it end to end, find unit/integration/e2e/UI test gaps, write up everything as big/chore tickets, and have another go of the main loop fix those. Same for documentation, it’s kept up to date in the same loops.
It’s the 80/20 principle.
Getting a piece of software done, the main work, the 80%, takes 20% of effort.
Refining the remaining 20% on the other hand takes 80% of all effort and time invested.
Another aspect is burnout. Sure, vibe coding means sped up development, but what I noticed was… I also lost interest in projects much quicker. Unless it directly delivers something I need - e.g. I’ve built a 3D printer stand for my new Bambu H2C - it’s going on the pile of “80% finished crap”.
And the thing is, you CAN build an AI setup that automates everything. I’ve put together a skill/agent/rule stack that is essentially an entire company’s engineering department. It works autonomously, only looping in the user for major decisions (and those decisions get a proper report the user can read to contextualise the decision itself). It creates initiatives, epics, then refines those into stories, then stories get planned with tasks, subtasks, etc., which then get the design-develop-test-verify loop (test here stands for test writing, while verify is the QA smoke test). Stories get the appropriate level of detail, with a BDD approach (so happy path, unhappy path, and edge case scenarios are defined before work begins), experts are created on-demand, the list goes on. All of this with 6-8-10 parallel teams.
It works incredibly effectively.
It also burns through tokens like there’s no tomorrow. I let it run over a weekend - Saturday morning to Sunday midnight. It correctly identified the project needs for a relatively small thing (something a sole developer would write over 2-3 months), created an appropriate enterprise approach, broke it down into 9 MVP stages, and in 2 days, delivered the first four of those.
At the cost of burning through an entire weekly allowance of Claude Max 20X tokens…
I guess I could pay another £150 for a secondary account and have it churn through my old projects to refine and finalise them, but it’s hardly worth the money.
And no, while I say that it’s a “full company”, it’s only because I am an actual software engineer, I understand the code being written, I understand the processes, the flows. It’s not something you can toss to a complete beginner and have them build a successful business on top.
Kotick, like many other CEOs, simply became too “big” to fail. I absolutely abhor that some people can become like this. They ruin everything their name touches and yet… they keep getting hired for big money.
in a fair world people like Kotick would be relegated to flipping burgers and mopping floors, because those are hard to screw up.
Fridge temperature sensors are super useful to notice if you accidentally left the door open.
Similarly, sensors in a coffee machine are useful to detect limescale buildup, water level, etc.
The issue isn’t the data but the fact that these “smart” devices aren’t local-first.
I built my PC in 2024. Okay specs - 7950X3D, 2x 48GB DDR5-6400, 4090, 1+4TB Samsung 990, all watercooled. About £4k total.
Today I could sell that PC for about 10-12k. RAM was originally £300, now it’s £1800 IF you can buy it. The storage also cost me around £400, today, easily £1500.
I really don’t get the sentiment.
I fully concur that the onus is on the parents first, not the platforms.
However I also think that there should be proper tools made available for parents to simplify managing what their kids can access.
No, not the Orwellian surveillance crap most politicians try to push. Those don’t help.
But having a proper parental control system that has pre-made filters and is straightforward to use would get us ahead quite a lot.
About ten years ago I had to be the “parent” for my youngest brother on a number of platforms because our parents speak no English and parental controls were all… only in English.
Just last year I did the same for my nieces. And let me tell you… in ten years there was exactly zero progress made in parental control systems at Google, Microsoft and Apple. No ways to make it easier to control what your kids can access, no improvements in UX, it’s still a hidden, tucked away, third or fourth thought menu.
Maybe start focusing on that instead of trying to use your incompetence to strongarm governments into handing you even more data? Just an idea.
Not when your system just booted and is idle.
It would probably run best with that really stripped down version of ChromeOS
350+? I’m seeing the M6 listed for £160-200!
For a little bit more than a fully fledged Orange/Radxa (and considerably under the price of a 16GB RasPi) you can buy e.g. the Morefine M6 - the size of an iPhone, works off of 12V USB-PD, 3-4W idle, 8-10W under heavy load, and with the newer N200 CPU you even get video codec goodies (perfect for e.g. running 3-4 fully local CCTV cameras with local face/object detection, which the Pi would struggle with).
Nah, the top (C-suite) rarely has original ideas. Their job isn’t to innovate or improve but to maintain the status quo. And they wouldn’t risk their position with an idea that can backfire so easily.
No, that’s reserved to the middle managers who have something to strive for - more money, more influence etc.