The big frontier model providers are all moving towards an Enterprise-first approach to their products, gradually nerfing the 'value' lines and eliminating any subsidization paid plans may have previously (and currently) have. The free ride of investment subsidy couldn't have continued much longer and allow the companies to remain solvent.

This is just a part of that: super special tools and models will be kept amongst a small subset of enterprise companies and governments at a high premium, and they will gradually trickle out subsets of those capabilities with nerfing to others.

In the next 6-12 months we can expect coding plans, initially used to hook companies and build mindshare, to gradually become more expensive per-unit-of-utility. Claude Max is easily 1/2 as capable today as it was at Claude 4.6 or even 4.5 launch due to shortened quotas. Expect OpenAI and others to start doing the same thing, if they haven't already.

What you're trying to say is that it was created by the NSA, and that it's a honeypot.

They define 133-400k "family of 3" as "upper middle class".

Which is just patent bullshit.

All it is, is they keep the same old income brackets for "middle class" while inflation pushes wages and COL higher. There are actually far fewer people able to maintain a 1990s "middle class" lifestyle, and I'd argue most of these "upper middle class" people are living month to month. "Middle class" used to mean you were financially secure and had investments and retirement. That's a joke for most people under 50.

They're defining upper middle class as " family of three earning $133,000 to $400,000 per year". So that's 2 middle aged adults + an adult child as the upper barrier.

What's that mean for your typical "family of 2"? Do they normalize on 3 incomes and play funny with the figures, using extrapolation for the third?

Because the cost of living has increased. $133k is going to just barely buy you a house in most of the country. Is starter home ownership "upper middle class"?

Absolutely not.

This is just inflation, and a disingenuous bullshit article in the NYT (as you can expect, at best). The middle class is markedly smaller, not larger, and they're just using old income brackets to define "upper middle class".

Pretty much exactly my point.

The fact that every dev seems to just install the latest whatever from npm doesn't help. There's really no "staging", "stable", or "security" branches, and effectively zero vetting outside what the package developer did. That's a lot of trust.

I never said they were new. I, instead, inferred that they're the kind of problems which shouldn't exist, because it's a mindset out of the 90s when the Internet was still comparably high-trust. They're inexcusably negligent.

You can experience over 40 years of UI design differences in Windows still, today: UI dialog panels from 3.1 days still exist in the latest Windows builds, and everything in between.

I don't think you can honestly say Windows has more polish. It has more bloat - yes. But that's not the same thing.

Meanwhile, Windows games (newer titles!) run better on Linux and Mac, emulated and passed through additional translation libraries, than on Windows.

You also grossly misunderstand how prefetch/caching works, both on Linux and on Windows. It does not change the baseline experience, or that the start bar can quickly eat up 10GB+ of memory due to memory leaks and perform worse than a Windows 95 machine deep into swap.

"Overall experience" is also nonsense - most people don't have the capability or wherewithal to switch. They use what is given to them, and have only mild preference in that they want it to work for what they're doing. Nowadays, that means "a web browser" for well over 50% of all users being the primary requirement, if not the exclusive one.

The baseline computers on the shelves have always been under spec'd for whatever Windows requires, and the experience will be poor. This is why so many people are buying Macs.

This is likely a paid advertisement, brought to you by the same people who are trying to avoid the continued fracturing and disillusionment of the remaining non-professional Windows users who aren't hardcore gamers. It's right in line with the "make Windows better again" agenda (I'd argue, propaganda campaign - there's zero chance of it happening) out of Redmond.

Windows hasn't been usable on less than 16GB of RAM since the tail end of the hard drive era (around Windows 7 SP2/3). Windows Vista was never usable with less than 8GB. Since the tail end of W7 around 2010, after W10 was released, things have only gotten worse: slower, more bloated, and more faulty. There are bugs in Explorer which will balloon memory use to 10s of GB just sitting idle for just that process (and many others).

npm is a problem. It's this massive, unvetted self-publishing repository without any easy way to verify the origin of packages, and the packages largely get installed directly to production on billions of sites every day without any vetting or review.

It's crazy, like something out of the 90s.

Yes, supply attacks like those carried out against npm are pretty common in general, at the state actor level. There've been a couple fun ones in recent years. But the openness and lack of basic precautions surrounding npm in conjunctions with common development practice just makes it a recipe for disaster.

"lossy compression"

Yes, just like human memory.

If I read a bunch of books from a series and extrapolate based on them to form something similar, it's not plagiarism.

If I read your book, then write a book using a similar voice, style, and plot, and do it in a different language - it's not plagiarism if I offer citation. Likewise, if I do so with a verbatim copy in another language. It's an independent effort.

Ultimately, it boils down to what you can get away with. Considering how trivial it is now to re-implement things, I'd say the chance of license enforcement is close to zero for anything open source except in extremely rare situations where there's a lot of money involved.

If you can substantially distinguish how tokenized abstraction is any different than natural learning, I'd buy it. But as it's not, I don't think that's a meaningful argument.

You realize that's extremely easy to do with AI, right?

If I can run software, I can run run function/system tracing and introspection on it. Simply that. The difference between this and looking at the code is almost negligible, except in terms of scope of difficulty.

And with AI, I can automate the entire process.

I'm sure there are techniques which will be readily implemented in at least one of a half dozen different agent platforms - assuming there's any merit in it. It's too stupidly easy to build things now to really keep anything "unique" private. People will figure it out and do as they will to get things they want to use.

I personally have an agent framework that's a combination of capabilities of different agent platforms that does things the way I want to. I haven't shared it, though judging by the quality and utility of some of these other platforms, I just might once I iron out a couple little bugs...

Yes, it was miserable nonsense.

Antrhopic seems to be spiraling of late, doing a lot of things which are shooting themselves in the foot.

- This "accidental" code release (I'm not convinced it was an accident and not a fancy PR stunt)
- The complete nerfing to useless of Claude Max plans (less usage, heavily throttled to the point where even getting close to quota has been impossible, and waiting 30m+ for a simple prompt response often takes longer than doing it myelf)
- Consistent API outages for the past several weeks during US business hours.

In this specific case, the only reasonable response to the leak was to embrace it: "our client is now open source, I guess". Put it in a repo and control it. They'd have gotten a lot of community involvement, as it's the forefront client, and would've effectively nix'd many moving to opencode, codex, or hermes agent. Sure, there are a lot of features in there which make them look not-so-benevolent, but it is what it is.

Now they've got a PR nightmare to contend with.