Even if maintainance is just a Claude/ChatGPT session away we know that the cost of that session could be 1-2 hours of attention going to a supporting tool. And what if suddently is down? now your software team is having an incident about an in house tool instead if an incident about your paying customers.
Moreso while a custom build software just for you is a great fit for your own processes you are loosing innovation and what you could benefit from using a software where someone is trying to innovate and bring out better things that you might not know even to ask for in a prompt as that is not your own domain of expertise or better said you are too expert in your own process that you cannot see what else is out there. And to overcome this you have to try to put in resources for this tool.
Also EU does not have a government. There are 3 powers lets say:
- EU Council which represents the countries governments
- The EU Commission representing EU interests
- The EU Parliament representing citizens
We go back to what I said: when introducing a new level of abstraction we got a new governing power. But lets never forget that except the EU Parliament all the others are formed by people proposed by countries governments.
Thus as EU citizen one:
- influences EU direct by voting the EU parliament
- influences EU indirect by voting who rules their countries which will then send people to EU Council and Commission
As you notice the countries governments have more power (2 out of 3) than the EU parliament even if they are different kind of powers.
Still in the end each citizen that goes to vote is deciding the direction of EU in three ways (one direct citizen to EU and two indirect citizen to country to EU). Want more federalization then vote parties that go that way. Want more nationalism then vote that way. But nobody (or few people) really think then consequences of what they vote in their own countries and how that affects everybody in EU.
I dont disagree. But I am also limited in seeing practical solutions to make EU better in this sense for people to feel represented at all levels directly. Please note the practical thing here cause idealist solutions I have plenty. It is just that countries are too nationalistic.
Why I find it hard: EU is another abstraction on top of what we already have: local, regional, national. EU is not just an alliance but a real governing body with legislative and executive branches.
Having an average (as in normal) citizen of a country have to think about their local interests, regional (as in around their local cities), national and global interests is too prone to manipulation. As we saw with Brexit and other campaigns. Too many of us are too focused on self interest and locality to be able to dedicate enough time to global matters.
I dont understand this line of reasoning about EU:
Ministers are appointed by people we vote. In most democracies the entire government is appointed and maybe indirect voted as a whole (by parliament and maybe directly by citizens).
What I am trying to say is people who proposed this are representatives of those countries (even if indirect their citizens votes vor the party that appointed them).
So representation is not the problem. The problem is citizens (at large) voting only on personal interest and not thinking or not understanding the second order effects. If you don't like what Council did here make sure next round of elections the party that proposed those ministers will not get elected in your country an should not have the power to form a government.
We seem to expect country officials to be even better when playing at EU level and think about yet a greater good than they are doing in their own countries.
I would assume the actual reality of what can be done that is also respecting individual country needs and the EU ad a whole is at least an extra level of complexity than the reduction of those agreements.
Add to that the risk that every diminishing level of comfort for a population in EU seems to bring new percentages for extremist parties.
The second order and third order effects of any decision are too big and almost everyone posting EU should do <insert here a single simple thing> is most probably wrong in ways they dont even know about. That does not mean we should not debate but we should slow down a bit the extreme choices and try to be a bit more understanding of various details.
It feels to me that you are really trying hard to brainstorm root causes for their failures.
Could be a hardware issue, could be a datacenter issue. Could be anything. So it could also be a software issue right?
This is not ideology. This is talking about root causes and I replied to someone that started saying this is not because of them promoting and using LLMs to the maximum. Could be it is not because of that. But it could be because of LLMs.
Keeping a company accountable when they try to sell a service that will replace engineers is not ideology. Ideology will be to not use any company that uses LLMs. But pointing out the disconnect between the public discourse and the status.claude.com is a simple idea.
Can you tell me that all those red lines there are infra?
> Why can't it be simply the case that Anthropic is struggling by their own accord?
They can and it is normal. I have said it is normal for scaleups specifically at a similarity growth rate.
What we (or at least I) critique here is coming out in the world and announcing that coding is done while having a product that has a status page full with red stripes. Yes, could be infrastructure, could be third party integrations could be a lot. But a lot of what is there is software. And yes, some parts is hardware. Unless the root cause is culture. In that case as I mentioned in another comment there I give them that: LLMs cannot solve culture.
Again the difference here is that the other scale-ups with similar _scaling_ issues are not talking about how we should all just use LLMs for everything and that learning to code is not required anymore.
So I am not saying the real issue is not infra or integration with third parties. What I am pointing at is: "don't talk that you don't need engineering while you - yourself - have engineering problems that need engineering solutions and still have not solve them".
Also you are getting out of your way to brainstorm possible root causes that will let them get away with this cognitive dissonance (or is there a better them in communication). Let them do the explanation and defend their position as they are the ones attacking the computer science engineering.
No. We dont need metaphors like that with veganism (which touches ideologies also) when talking about engineering and a company that promotes out loud that engineering is done.
I have not stated anything. I just replied to a metaphor which is not needed cause here we talk about engineering problems handled by engineers in a tech company. I give you something else where this line of thought could be wrong: culture beats (and destroys) engineering practices unless regulated by law.
In this case yes this is not because of LLMs but because of company culture.
Still hard to know where the line draws because Anthropic talks about solving computer science for good as in humans need not apply.
Engineering practices or best practices are much more than writing code.
So not sure what we are debating here: I see first hand companies jumping full on using LLM for _everything_ for the last 6 months (of course Anthropic longer) and without guardrails and good engineering practices the number of incidents, downtime is increasing.
Look at status.claude.com - Anthropic could at any point come out and say all those are due to third party providers.
I am also not saying here Anthropic is worse than other scaleups. But they do something different: they come in front of us and tell us they have better engineering practices.
This is literally they saying they are letting their LLM run wild(ish) and seeing the status.claude.com we can see the result.
This is a case where the outcome is the direct result of the engineering practices like the ones they describe.
PS: Yes I use Claude, Coded, Amp and Cursor agents every day so I am not saying here LLMs are not valuable.
LE: They did not made claims that "AI is good" they made claims that developers/computer engineers are not needed anymore in the near future. Thats is a stronger claim and has a direct relation with a product they have which needs computer engineering (yes infra counts too) and which seems to be down more than we expect as a good quality bar.
Whenever there is a discussion about EU there are very similar arguments against EU:
- Too much birocracy
- Too many taxes
- Too much regulation that protects workers
And I have to remind myself that people writing this are having a bias: they believe that in a system with few taxes (so less public health care, public eduction, less support for unemployment ...) they are on top, they are the ones with money, they are the ones that win the game.
But when they are without money and in a precarious situation they too might vote an extremist that will promise to distribute wealth via the state => more taxes. You have a real example happening these years in a country that proudly promote itself as the best one in the world: low taxes, no healthcare, no free education, little regulations - the most amazing place to start a business.
I am not saying everybody is like this, but it is very important to question yourself about where are you seeing yourself: as the one on top winning from the system or the one that has some needs. And second question: how many people will be on one side or the other?
Regarding birocracy: this comes exactly from the fact that EU is not a federation so each state needs to have their voice heard and so a lot of regulations/law are complex => more birocracy.
Of course EU has a lot of things to improve and a lot of regulations to rewrite and can and should do more for business. But let's not put those two in an antagonist system: you can support businesses while not punishing the people, the consumers, the users and the labor market.
Living in EU so I am biased but I agree with this. You have to clean your debt or real people suffer.
Here is a real example: open a company, buy a small piece of land, section it in smaller pieces, promise you build houses, get people downpayments in cash, syphon all money to other companies with having contracts just a bit bigger than average market price, declare bankruptcy, then start again. You of course have smaller stakes in those other companies.
Not sure how to phrase this and it matters where are you living - in Europe or elsewhere - but I think when looking at things like EU or other military or economical alliances we should not use terms "it is already too late". You dont know that until the current era is over so I think if you want to think deeply about this you should use longer threads with more nuances.
There is almost nobody in startup world that will put the failure of a product/startup to choosing a dynamic language. Probably there are some exceptions where it matters but very few to count and in those cases yes use the most performant strongly typed, with string tools for static analysis and performance optimisations.
The real truth is that language preference (typed or dynamic) are more of a fashion choice in most companies where I was present than a pure technical consideration.
if you build your product by accumulating technical debt without any focus and effort toward simplicity and trying to make it do anything then the solution after many years is rewriting. But if you have the same culture and keep the same customers you will be in the sample place where you have started but now having different category of problems (eg network latency vs N+1s).
Maybe this is the "way of the startup" but lets not pretend that types can fix culture, engineering practices or product vision and good customer management.
The thing about Innovator's Dilemma is that even if you know about it you mostly cannot escape your own company culture and norms.
If there is a "crack" there you might be able to get out of it, or it will let a disruptive idea to grow, but my way of thinking about innovator's dilemma is that is it a "culture bias": knowing about it give you some small advantage but it needs a real change to maybe have a chance to escape/act on it and the most important part is that under pressure it will quickly and imperceptible run the entire process or decision making.
I keep reading this idea and I think something is missing.
Lets take this to the extreme:
only 2 people remain with capital and AI all the rest are replaced.
Now these two people how do they make money? they pay each other so there is no extra value created thus the amount of money as value symbol remains constant.
But here is an even more interesting question: As their AI can create anything why would they pay each other? So why do they need money?
I assume you are here talking about political choices, social media influences, life style choices and so on.
While all those are true they are not reflecting the level of intelligence of people: intelligent people take personal stupid decisions because while intelligence is a function of let's say the more "abstract brain", decisions are emotionally driven and influenced by the "ancient, threat focused, pleasure driven brain".
Here is a quick way to think about this: some intelligent people are obease, some others don't exercise, and others don't take their health seriously while also working on the most amazing problems we ever solved. You know what's the biggest paradox here: they all have the capacity to understand fully the impact of their lifestyle on their health but still making a life style change is hard due to not being driven by knowledge and logic.
One one side you have big companies paying huge amounts of money to super smart people to get teens hooked on their products.
On the other side you have parents who on average dont understand how social media algorithm works or in some (too many cases) they cannot follow the logic to a second order effect.
Even here we have comments saying something like "be smarter and teach your kid to be smarter than big social media companies" not understanding that addiction cannot always be defended by improved IQ. Geniuses can have addictions too.
Moreso while a custom build software just for you is a great fit for your own processes you are loosing innovation and what you could benefit from using a software where someone is trying to innovate and bring out better things that you might not know even to ask for in a prompt as that is not your own domain of expertise or better said you are too expert in your own process that you cannot see what else is out there. And to overcome this you have to try to put in resources for this tool.