Exactly! THIS is what all the hype is really about (but is not well explained). Software, world wide, is almost a 1 trillion dollar business. AI *if it never did anything else useful - ever* can accelerate that trillion dollar business (slated to be 2.2 trillion within a decade) from profit margins of 60% to 90% or more. Hundreds of billions a year, just in the US, in additional revenues and profits. And accelerating over time as software gets cheaper, better, faster; and the AIs get cheaper, better, faster as well. And all we need to do to get that is build a few, several hundred billion dollar data centers? Basically a one time cost? Sign me up!

And on top of that, AI can speed drug development, basic materials research, provide cheap personal assistants for anyone that wants one, operate autonomous vehicles, improve agriculture, and operate autonomous robots that toil alongside us in factories.

And that's just what I can think of off the top of my head.

I also assume it is coding assistance. But $150K in tokens / year is the cost (not salary) of another engineer making about $110K. Assuming that LMB is paid roughly that, I would say that if he is doing the work of 3 people, the company is coming out WAY ahead on that deal.

If he is doing the work of 2, it's break even, if more than 3, the company is making bank with this arrangement.

In addition, there are other benefits too - more intangible. Like better morale - seeing stuff come together faster is very satisfying for a SW engineer. Faster, smoother implementation of features helps the 'flow' - leading to better software coming together faster. Better architecting - because AI is doing more of the low level coding and 'shoveling coal' as I call it - leads to more focus by the SW engineer on the overall design. That leads to finding and fixing the holes in that design faster.

Tough to measure, but adding to the benefits.

You seem to be asserting sovereign nations other than the US are in the wrong to control what is bought and sold in their countries.

I assume you think the US should also tariff up against Israel for failing to import more pork?

As a practical matter, more tariffs will chase EU customers off faster while punishing American companies. That's just giving them more object lessons in why the US is a dangerously unreliable partner while making sure business owners get their noses rubbed in it - a sure-fire way to convince an influential block of otherwise fairly small-c conservative voters the EU is doing the right thing.

It amazes me how many people seem to not understand very basic things about how people work. Inch-deep mile-wide grievance is a hell of a drug.

(And let's not even get in to however the fuck you think "recoup[ing] the funds" via tariffs would work. After Americans are taxed more on EU products, you think Google is going to get that money? How? What's the legal mechanism? And what does any of that have to do with an EU fine?)

That's the problem with winning. You become The Man.

That isn't just semantics. Your interests change - you become more (small-c) conservative, defensive measures become much more important, etc. because the next incremental customer is worth much less than keeping what you have. And the risk is real - everyone wants to be king.

In Apple's case, there's also that it is now a fully post-Jobs company, and Jobs was uniquely responsible for what Apple was. His remaining influence is in the heads of the graybeards who worked with him and is otherwise ceremonial. And Jobs was "counterculture", to some extent. It was more than PR - it was his personality. It is why for istance they yielded the enterprise market to Windows - he not only didn't give a shit about device management or directory service permissions or stuff like that, he considered that somewhere between distracting from and hostile to making "insanely great" devices. That was all tempered through business demands, but he really did refuse to do a lot of "normal" things that are considered table stakes today. Jobs was a strange CEO.

Cook is not. Cook is very good at his job, but he's not the type to "leave money on the table" by refusing to build something he doesn't personally care about. And at their size, it is harder for them to resist losing focus, especially without Job's unique mix of arrogance, talent, poker face, assholishness, focus and charisma.

I don't think it is possible to have a $trillion+ company that isn't exploitive. As they get bigger, they take the shape and characteristics of the system in which they're embedded.

You want non-shitty companies, grow them somewhere that doesn't reward them for doing shitty things.

Sounds a lot like remote-disable devices for cars, so the repo man has an easier job.

When those first came out, some of them allowed the car to drive, but would honk the horn to shame the driver, but now I think they all just disable the engine. Imagining the Apple version of that is entertaining... it could chose your emoji for you, blast Nickelback when it detects you're in church, or start sending your photos to random contacts until you pay up.

Sell me something and leave me alone is my preferred model.

They only time I can imagine renting something like a phone or computer is for a specific purpose, and only if there's an early out clause that would result in lower costs than a purchase. Like renting a phone for an international vacation to avoid the risk of brownshirts imaging your actual phone at the border. Otherwise it makes more sense to buy it outright and sell it afterwards.

But basically, if there is an option that doesn't result in a monthly payment or emails that I have to pay attention to, I will take that option. I guess I'm not a relationship kinda guy, at least when it comes to legal fictions.

I think the quote from the original Blade Runner said it best:
"You're either Cop, or you're little people"

Because of a draft policy that someone "not in the know" got hold of, informing the public. The immediate and widespread outcry then causes the policy to change back quietly before going into effect, driving the irate drafters back into dark spaces - convinced they are now going to have to wait almost a YEAR (the horror!) before trying to arm police drones again.

Darn meddling kids!

See what Naked Face-Eating Man can do to the interior of a MechaHitlerMobile before it can get cops to respond.

How long before someone leaves an alligator or python in one?

Partly true.

Completely correct about court decisions coupled with legislation mean that the US asserts data sovereignty but will not honor it.

But Europe only grumbled about that until the US selected a geriatric grifter for executive and started providing object lessons in why that wasn't just a theoretic risk.

Honestly, so far this is going easier than Europe could have hoped. I'm sure Piggie will notice at some point and start running his yap and throwing around more tariffs, providing more demonstration as to exactly why Europe has to migrate data somewhere safe. But he's incompetent and impulsive enough that they have a window in which to migrate before he takes his last dump and some more competent fascist ends up in charge.

So far, experiments have shown that one cannot expect people to remain as diligent after extended periods of LLM use.

This is absolutely a problem if you work in a shitty sweatshop that forces you to be a sin eater for robot code.

The way we do it is, the tools are available, but you're not required to use them in any specific way or really, at all if you don't want to. You do, of course, have to get your work done and be responsible for your code. We have a spectrum of use, from all-in cascades of agents through folks who use it as little more than a search engine.

We had a few incidents where people were caught out and couldn't explain why their code did what it did, but that seemed to be enough to warn the rest; that hasn't happened in a while. I don't see our "velocity" stats, so I don't know if/to what extent the robots are speeding us up, but knowing our bean counters we wouldn't be maintaining our spend at this point if there weren't a visible bottom-line result. I do see our bug and incident metrics, which haven't seen any impact from LLM use.

If you work in a shithole, yeah, they're going to burn you out. But that's about sociopathic management, not the robot. They'd wear you down a different way if LLMs didn't exist.

I just figured fleecing rubes was considered the retirement plan for this band of raiders and whores.

Dude's crime wasn't playing the inside, it was getting caught while not having enough dirt on the boss to make him care.

Exactly. Best put as "Life is pain. Anyone tells you different is trying to sell you something."

Who's testing intentional bias in OpenAI or Anthoropic?

Kudos Ledow! Nice! Just one piece of advice though - if you are thinking seriously about disconnecting from the Grid, please look into all the ramifications thoroughly. In many municipalities being Grid-tied is a requirement for a building to be considered "livable" - you don't want your home condemned on a technicality. And that's just one factor - there are others I'm sure I don't even know about.

I plan to do what you've done - probably more in a one-shot than grown over years - and I'll always keep a Grid tie regardless of how well energy independence works out - never hurts to have a Plan B (or C and D for that matter).