At least for myself personally: Opus 5 Ultra spreading out hundreds of subagents on specific tasks can gobble tokens like mad. Recently I did a custom OCR pipeline in a day and some Revit automation, extremely large datasets, but I definitely spent good money to make it happen so fast.
I almost certainly wasted tokens, but right now things are subsidized, so it works.
I guess to each their own, as I find the GUIs to be clunky and a net negative to my workflow. Admittedly, I should give them another chance, and see how they have matured lately.
I wear headphones about 80% of my waking day. Super comfy, wireless, noise-cancelling ones. The funny thing is, I rarely play anything through them, and am almost always just listening to silence.
I try and listen to other things, podcasts or music, sadly nothing compares to that golden silence.
I have already begun winding down my spend on claude and OAI to make room for infra budget. Anecdotal, but I have no doubt a lot of others are doing the same, I very much agree the US players have major issues looming. What an exciting time to be alive!
It is crazy that I do not trust a multi-trillion dollar company who has forced labor in their supply chain to have my best interests in mind? It is crazy to me you would think they do not understand the concept of lip service.
These companies are liars. I do not trust liars. It has served me well.
I do. Citizens United. It is a pay-to-play system we have going on here and it is working exactly as designed. Bribery? Why no, that is simply a donation. With enough money and moral bankruptcy you can accomplish all sorts of silly things that are in direct violation of the constitution, the law, and even common decency.
Completely agree. Once I can reliably get open models doing what I am on Fable ultra I imagine I will switch for good. I am fortunate to have access to a decent bit of local RAM, 192GB of DDR5 at an OK speed. It is not enough and costs are well past absurd. In a few years time I envisage a setup that is sub $10k which can accomplish such tasks. The pace so far has been breakneck. That is all I personally need. That may change, but until true AGI I do think there will be a ceiling to how much I will pay for something frontier if it is only marginally better.
Yep, at those prices points I am most certainly just going to do whatever is in my power to run local. And to be honest, I think in the near future, we will get to a point where local models will be just good enough that it will not matter.
Pray tell, how would stepping closer to a dystopian hellscape help the internet from eating itself? Somehow, having omnipotent watchers is going to make the internet... more fun and welcoming?
Dang man, C & H taught me so much as a young lad. Unconditional love, amor fati, the importance of being yourself. I think the way he left it all was perfect. We were robbed of future delights but in the end it could not have been more in character. I hope Mr. Watterson is enjoying his final sebatical.
Me as well. I was struggling to make a pixel bot for, erm, research! It did not like this and kept insisting I was breaking some arcane TOS rule. I started just breaking the tasks down, something benign. Kept iterating and it could never get a holistic grasp of the task at hand.
Good for them. I stopped using it abruptly once I joined the claude cli + vim train but I am sure they will be happy to cash out. I think a lot of other devs stopped using it too so good timing.
Could not agree more. I am honestly confused by the need for more than what FF/Librewolf offers and have been actively doing frontend for a long time. Plus no hassle with uBlock. And their Focus mobile browser is nice. I have the same complaints about their leadership as most but at least I feel I have some autonomy with their browser.
Ya, while the tools are really solid and have seen huge leaps these past two years, in no way will an LLM be able to do any of it unguided in two years. Just a humble opinion that I would love to see be wrong.
So in my case this is partially correct, yes. They did not want access to the actual accounts but it was heavily implied that they would be using my personality, my identity, my Upwork profile (and my PayPal to receive payment). I would do it all for the most part. I think the Upwork jobs were just a front but I can only suspect. They explained it as wanting an endpoint while I did the client facing stuff. It was all strange and vague but you make a great point.
While they were never outward about the end goal it was a mix of money laundering and identity laundering. No joke I stopped using Upwork after the novelty wore off and it was a regular occurrence. Also of note, they almost always said something about how they were Chinese and wanted to do this because they could not get legit work with their identity or some other BS. This was not one time but at least half a dozen. Would love to hear from someone who took them up on these offers.
edit: will add that I speak some Chinese, I had Zoom calls with them on one occasion. I was able to glean that maybe they were not being aboveboard about their nationality and also that there were a bunch of people in the background running the same script. All so bizarre. Best guess? They use compromised PayPals to pay people out without a care what happens, launder some of the money because why not? And then they get access to a Stateside identity with an endpoint they can do god only knows what with.
Yep! They are rampant on Upwork. You could probably find a cell of them in a day if you wanted, just go looking for jobs with the 'crypto' tag, haha. They have offered me serious sums of money to "simply install RDP and give us access to your network". I imagine people desperate enough take them up on it too.
Why the special rules for SpaceX though? I still do not understand why the world’s richest man and one of the most valuable companies needs an exemption? Genuinely confused.
Ya I still have mad love for TPB. My ISP was blocking my private tracker recently and while I would usually just run things through a seedbox it made me happy I could still turn to my trusty ol' friend.
In this vein, I have a system level memory for Claude to push back and give me direct feedback when possible. So far a success as it helps cut through the sycophancy.
Modernity is soulless for the most part. Social media, the 24/7 news cycle, unaccountable mega-corps, the list goes on. I suspect people are tired of the constant psychic damage you endure for just trying to exist in 2026.
Ya haha, I was going to say, land destruction is not particularly fun for anyone but the pilot. Never heard of someone getting Wastelanded or Stone Rained over and over with a smile on their face. Lands used to be such a cool deck, too. Loam plus the occasional Marit Lage was such a badass concept.
I just want to add that they are a gorgeous set of books and I am so happy he did this. While a good chunk of the content is above my pay grade it is still enjoyable to flip through them and read about things like MIX. Gorgeous typesetting. And his writing is so very engaging for such a dense topic.