I tested this with Opus the day 4.6 came out and it failed then, still fails now. There were a lot of jokes I've seen related to some people getting a 'dumber' model, and while there's probably some grain of truth to that I pay for their highest subscription tier so at the very least I can tell you it's not a pay gate issue.
I would consider a lot of mobile apps to also be a 'micro-payment' type model. Clearly there's no issue with people paying for content, I think the real gap here is in the ability for the consumer to pay for the content. If I go to some random news site and it hits me with a paywall for a micro-payment there isn't a simple system by which I can actually give them money without directly signing up for a subscription to that specific site or some other service. If there was a type of wallet for this that I could just put money into and sites asked "would you like to pay X amount from your wallet to read this content?" I would be more amenable to it. It's the same idea with streaming sites and piracy. Companies have made content more expensive and more exclusive so why would I want to jump through the extra hurdles which was supposed to make consuming your content EASIER. It's always about ease of access to the consumer.
Based upon everything we know from Valve's corporate structure, they're basically their own self-contained YCombinator. They have a ton of internal 'startup' groups that are constantly trying new and boundary pushing ideas. Looking at it through this lens, it's not really a good company fit for any junior. Having juniors detracts from your seniors work, but the point is that you're supposed to get value from that when they eventually become mid-level or senior engineers themselves. But if you're constantly working in new complex environments it's hard to bring a junior up to speed and teach them the requisite skills to thrive, especially if that project they just spent 3 months getting up to speed on gets canned because the idea didn't actually pan out.
I was worried about this when I turned it on myself, but under the usage panel it shows that it limited my spending to just the $50 and that auto-reload is off, so it doesn't seem this would be the case.
I've been using Gas Town a decent bit since it was released. I'd agree with you that it's design is sub-optimal, but I believe that's more due to the way the actual agents/harnesses have been designed as opposed to optimal software design. The problem you often run into is that agents will sometimes hang thinking they need human input for a problem they are on, or they think they're at a natural stopping point. If you're trying to do fully orchestrated agentic coding where you don't look at the code at all (putting aside whether that's good or not for a second) then this is sub-optimal behavior, and so these extra roles have been designed to 'keep the machine going' as it were.
Often times if I'm only working on a single project or focus, then I'm not using most of those roles at all and it's as you describe, one agent divvying out tasks to other agents and compiling reports about them. But due to the fact that my velocity with this type of coding is now based on how fast I can tell that agent what I want, I'm often working on 3 or 4 projects simultaneously, and Gas Town provides the perfect orchestration framework for doing this.
This press piece is specifically about their client software for streaming. The actual host PC is likely a Windows PC specifically for these kinds of compatibility purposes I'd imagine.
I think that most of the anecdotal and research experiences I've seen for AI agent use so far tell us that you need at least a couple pass-throughs to converge upon a good solution, so even in your future vision where we have models 5x as good as now, I'll still need at least a few agents to ensure I arrive at a good solution. By this I specifically mean a working implementation of the design, not an incorrect assumption of the design which leads the AI off on the wrong path which I feel like is the main issue I keep hearing over and over. So coming back to your point, assuming we can have the 'perfect' design document which lays out everything, yeah we'll probably only need like 5 agents total to actually build it in a few years.
It's likely then that you are thinking too small. Sure for one off tasks and small implementations, a single prompt might save you 20-30 mins. But when you're building an entire library/service/software in 3 days that normally would have taken you by hand 30 days. Then the real limitation comes down to how fast you can get your design into a structured format. As this article describes.
Isn't this the case for almost every product ever? Company makes product -> markets as widely as possible -> only niche group become power users/find market fit. I don't see a problem with this. Marketing doesn't always have to tell the full story, sometimes the reality of your products capabilities and what the people giving you money want aren't always aligned.
This article is such a weird take in my opinion and I think it actively proves why our current media environment is harmful. It seems to be making the assertion that people are over reacting about microplastics due to the challenge made in the paper about the way these things were being measured. Note: no where does this paper challenge that microplastics are 'actually' harmful, only that we aren't measuring that properly. To then extrapolate that to "Our stance towards modern technology is toxic" is kind of wild considering we just came out of the lead gas era...
The biggest thing for me is I don't understand how people can sleep with these watches on, it's so uncomfortable to me personally which is why the different ring technologies appeal to me more. I just wish either Garmin made one or that there was one I didn't have to buy a subscription to use.
>does feel its back to might is right, and the last 80 years of relative peaceful times is sunsetting.
Depending on your perspective, 'might is right' never changed. The US has forced its policies on other nations through quiet force for a long time. I think the only thing that's changed is that Trump wants to say the quiet part out loud now which makes it way easier to push back on. Combine that with the fact that Trump has 0 political ambitions outside of just being in power and it becomes very easy to just ignore what you hear coming from the top. Often it clearly has no thought put behind it, seems vindictive in nature, and is forgotten the next day, like a child's tantrum. To circle back a little, now that the US in such a passive state due to this, a lot of other countries feel safer to push their influence on the world because they see no repercussions for what others are doing.
Well sure then let's break it down. Assume I have an open role for a small business and I get 500 applications to sort through. The first step is most businesses will use at least some sort of filtering for the basic requirements to determine good fit. So those are pretty easy to sort through. Let's assume I cut those applications down to 50 that actually fit my requirements.
Now am I supposed to bundle up all those 450 initial applications that got filtered out just to send them a nice polite email that their resumes didn't even fit the position they applied for? From a pure business perspective this is a straight waste of time. Especially as most businesses aren't going to have an automatic way to do this easily, and building that automation doesn't make my company money. But if I already happened to have some automation setup for it, then maybe sure. This part is the majority 'ghosted' applications. For the rest of the 50 I'd probably be more likely to actually send them a personalized email about the role because at least they actually fit what they applied for.
And that should be expected. Leverage in this situation doesn't mean you get the cream of the crop for nothing. In this sense it means that you get applications that fit your role. When the market was flipped you were hard pressed to find people that actually matched at least half of your role requirements. Now even your statement gives away how much that has changed that you're only looking at the 'top applicants'. Now, you have so many people that fit you're struggling because you want the perfect ones.
I can understand why you're saying this and my response here will be more of a general reply to your direct reply's as it seems like a lot of them are missing the key element of WHY you can act this way in the current market. The big 'L' word, Leverage. In the current market you have all the leverage in the world as the employer to find a perfect fit employee due to the overall supply of workers and declining job market. When the market swings back the other way eventually however, the shoe will be on the other foot so to speak, and you wont have such privilege.
It's amazing how short our memories are for all the companies 10 years ago bending over backwards to give those employees anything and everything they wanted.
A lot of my statement here is very generalizing but at the end of the day market forces really do dictate a lot of this. I keep seeing article after article from hiring managers about how they're FLOODED with applications. You can't be 'polite' to all those people, as most people don't have the attention span for all that. There are definitely 2 sides to this coin it just seems that from the side of the people wanting to be hired they just have no empathy for those doing the hiring.
Correct, a quote from the linked wiki article:
"Dodge is often misread or mistaught as setting a legal rule of shareholder wealth maximization. This was not and is not the law. Shareholder wealth maximization is a standard of conduct for officers and directors, not a legal mandate. The business judgment rule [which was also upheld in this decision] protects many decisions that deviate from this standard. This is one reading of Dodge. If this is all the case is about, however, it isn't that interesting."
— M. Todd Henderson
I think you're misunderstanding my argument, or maybe you have a rather radical point of view on compensation in the industry. My point was that compensation should be directly tied to your value to the company and not loosely correlated with your job title as it is currently. Determining how valuable you are to a company can be hard in itself though. I actually fully agree with you about companies under valuing front end positions, but I think that's more due to market forces (there's a larger supply of front-end web developers than any other type of developer) which is slightly outside the scope of my argument.
It's strange to me that you believe different disciplines should be compensated the same as no other industry would even consider that. Imagine I'm making a child's toy, should the CAD designer be compensated the same as my machinist just because they're working on the same project? In the same token why should the developer who is doing a completely different job from another developer be compensated exactly the same just because they're working on the same webapp and coding? It just doesn't make sense.
I think the true problem here lies in reconciling titles with responsibilities. In software engineering most of our titles are very generic and can span different disciplines entirely. A senior dev working on database and a senior dev working on front-end probably shouldn't be compensated the exact same because their disciplines are completely different so conversely the value they bring to the company can vary wildly, but they're still senior devs by title. But if the best mechanism by which we can 'reward' these people is by adjusting their title this comes with an implied difference of responsibilities. Instead I think we need to do away with the HR non-sense of correlating titles with value. If an engineer does something of value that should be rewarded, give them a raise or bonus, not a title change.
So I'll admit up front I don't know a lot about investing, but I at least understand a decent amount about business fundamentals. What I can't understand is why Tesla's stock hasn't tanked yet. They're losing business across every sector they sell in, they're trying to hard pivot to robotics technology and they have the most vocal egocentric CEO constantly trying to extract personal value from the company. If I owned TSLA stock one of these alone would spook me, but TSLA is still trading at all-time highs. None of it makes logical sense to me, genuinely is there something I'm missing here? Has TSLA just become a meme like Gamestop to the point where the business itself doesn't matter at all?
Just because they don't 'want' to, doesn't mean it's not a good solution. Clearly they're not getting me to pay for their whole site subscription so why not just sell me the article? The biggest issue with most of these services is the lack of consumer 'ease' by which the creator can actually get paid. It's the same reason why I'm seeing all my friends go back to piracy, it was nice when we had a consumer convenient place to consume our content. Just look at Steam, it's easier than ever to go pirate the majority of games, but my Steam library just keeps getting bigger. I'm not against buying things, I'm against shitty services.
All of these LLMs already have the ability to go fetch content themselves, I'd imagine they'd just skim your URLs then do it's own token-efficient fetching. When I use research mode with Claude it crawls over 600 web pages sometimes so imagine they've figured out a way to skim down a lot of the actual content on pages for token context.
This kind of self meta-analysis can be amusing to think about sometimes, but I think more often than not it's actually harmful to your own sense of progress or worth. In my opinion the two sides of this coin that are hard to reconcile are: "You shouldn't limit your own ability" and "It's important to be realistic". Comparing yourself to those around you is human nature, but here you're asking us to compare ourselves to what we imagine is the peak of ourselves in order to stay realistic. I guarantee you that the people around you who are actually making forward progress haven't given a single thought to whether or not they've "peaked".
So to put this another way, this is supposed to measure the avg absolute buying power of a worker and compares them by country? The part where I can see the disconnect here is a lot of European countries have their social programs baked into the wage (eg I expect to get paid less to work in Sweden as opposed to the US because I'm getting some of that 'back' through social services) however that isn't always the case for some countries. For example I'm not deducting healthcare costs from my salary in the US, but I'm still paying it after the fact which decreases my spending power.
There's too many specific variables to account for in this that I feel like the general comparison is almost hurtful at worst or doesn't tell the whole story at best.
The unspoken assumption here would be promoting to rook or bishop "instead of a queen" and as the post points out other than avoiding the stalemate situation there doesn't appear to be a logical reason for doing this.
Setting up secure boot on newer motherboards usually involves some resetting of the hardware security keys related to the TPM chip and other modules. Which if not done correctly, can 'soft-brick' the motherboard requiring a BIOS reflash.
You are correct, and it's important that we don't continue the game of telephone that seems to be destroying this country.
"We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and with everything they can to score political points from it."
This was his exact quote and he's 100% right. The entire admin had called out the "Radical left" as the perpetrators before we even had a photo of the shooter. Can we please go back towards the reality where we actually read and understand the words being said instead of having them all parroted to us by media headlines?