coding agents aren't enough to justify the amount of capital invested

My key realisation from playing with open weights models on my own laptop is that at least where text is concerned, the vast majority of what an average non-programmer consumer thinks AI does, my laptop can now do with the wifi disabled. And arguably where speech and audio is concerned, too.

There is, put simply, a huge, huge information gap about the uniqueness of these commercial services.

There's an open question about how open weights models will be funded when they can't be used in a war between these companies, but the reality is that the amount Apple is paying Google for the right to distill Gemini, for example, is strongly indicative of the total size of the consumer market. Because pretty soon everyone's phones will be doing what local models can do.

Global markets will ultimately learn that coding agents are, at a first approximation, the only source of revenue for this stuff over the medium term at least, and the value proposition for consumer AI in the long term (beyond being a feature of a phone) hasn't yet been invented, and any that might exist depend on micropayments architectures that don't exist.

anthropic is a private company, so i'm not sure which market you mean. their shares probably trade on secondary markets in low volumes but it would be strange for them to make decisions based on that trading.

it's remarkable how easy it is to identify websites built with the "frontend-design" skill in Claude

I managed to write one that at least didnt had the font and colors (using 4.5)

Yesterday, I prompted Fable to improve the frontend to make it look different from Claude style, gave detailed examples etc. 15 minutes and $32 dollars (!) later (used cursor lol) it gave me the shittiest more claudiest website ever, basically ignoring everything I asked

investors are driven by herding behavior. for people with enormous amounts of capital to invest, the worst thing would be for them to miss out on the next big thing. If that means losing on a bunch of bets that did not turn out to be the next big thing, that's fine, so long as you don't miss out on whatever that next big thing is. We're promised AI is the next big thing, and everyone else is throwing money at it. So that means I have to throw money at it, because otherwise I would miss out.

> open your repo to the public, and have a stream of code flow in from millions of contributors. More code than you could ever write in ten lifetimes, uploaded to your repository in a matter of days.

why would you want this. this sounds terrible

Just donate your tokens to the project. The actual team that’s actually leading the project can direct the prompts better and evaluate the LLM-generated code better for their project than random drive-by contributors can. That’s the whole point of their announcement.

You write "so much code that no one person could possibly understand it" as if it was a good thing. Surely, you're being sarcastic?

i can't speak for the project's maintainers and their motivation, but it is workable as a daily use OS if your hardware is supported and you are willing to use the still beta firefox port.

But compared to Linux, why would I want to use Haiku these days?

For one, it's not being actively targeted with new daily exploits.

To explore a different OS.

adding a button means osascript driven malware could approve itself and you might not even see it happen

Hmm, I don't think that's true. How is the osascript running without getting past Gatekeeper itself? Also, how is it using UI control without TCC approval?

zig is unmanaged memory. But rust also allows memory leaks, and they're not uncommon in large, complex programs. So this rewrite will not necessarily control for that.

What language doesn't allow memory leaks?

There are two kinds of memory leaks: forgotten manual freeing (all references are gone, but allocation is not) and forgetting to get rid of references that keeps an allocation alive. Both are a kind of logical error, but the first is mostly possible in languages with manual memory management. The second one is a universal logical error (only programmer knows which live references are really needed).

In the Haskell community I’ve seen the second kind called “space leaks.” I don’t see it used much outside that community but I like the term and use it when talking about other languages as well.

Rust allows reference-counting cycles, right?

I suppose all languages allow them, depending on how you define a memory leak. Garbage collected languages generally prevent them, since you never have to explicitly free memory, but if there are reference cycles, that memory can never be freed automatically. Rust has the same problem, but since rust uses lifetimes to understand when to drop things, many people expect that this will mean there can be no memory leaks, but leaks are not considered a correctness or safety issue (oom is a panic and panic is safe!). Not only explicitly possible (through Box::leak) but also possible by mistake (again, usually through reference cycles).

> but if there are reference cycles, that memory can never be freed automatically.

Many garbage collection algorithms can deal with cycles.

layoffs are winning in the short term. investors love them, and if you cut staff but keep revenue that’s profit.

this is an interesting idea and i might try it with something smaller. there are more than 15,000 commits to bun, so you’d have to have some sort of way to operate on groups of commits in one prompt to get that done without thousands and thousands of api requests