Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does the military pay $200m per month?
As the parent stated, the Claude Pro plan is $200 per year, not per month.
Gotcha, mixed it up with the Max plan.
Statement on the comments from Secretary of War Pete Hegseth
311–320 of 392 posts
Re: Statement on the comments from Secretary of War Pete Hegseth
#312Earlier quoted context omitted.
How much of your U.S. paycheck goes towards healthcare premiums? How about much is daycare in the U.S. for 3 children? Conservative estimates put that at $4-$5,000 per month, and that's after tax . Is there a reason your comment omits these key differences when comparing a SWE's quality of life living in the United States vs. Canada?
I don't get free daycare in Canada either. I'm not American, but I pay a few hundred dollars a year for the premium health insurance plan at my company. I also pay tens of thousands of dollars more in taxes to grant me the ability to wait for 72 hours in an ER hallway whenever I can't wait weeks for an appointment because urgent care isn't a thing. My take home would triple if I lived in the USA as a new graduate bec…
My apologies. I thought $10/day daycare was universal in Canada. I guess my broader point was the difference in disposable income between U.S. workers vs. other countries becomes a lot more nuanced when things like healthcare, childcare, retirement, and taxes are taken into account.
> I'm sure the $80,000 extra dollars is enough to pay for the healthcare premiums and daycare.
You're probably right. That said, SWE compensation in the U.S. has been quite an anomaly compared to the vast majority of American labor, especially in the last 5-10 years. I don't think those who are comfortable right now are thinking far enough ahead about what they'll do if that changes, or perhaps when that changes. If this AI hype has taught me anything it's that those with capital cannot wait to start trimming their pesky engineers with those high salaries. And maybe that's always been the case, but seeing them go full mask off hits different.
Unrelated, I like your website. It's simple and the color scheme is aesthetically pleasing.
Re: Statement on the comments from Secretary of War Pete Hegseth
#313Re: Statement on the comments from Secretary of War Pete Hegseth
#314Earlier quoted context omitted.
> ...the financial fallout from losing the government contracts will pale in comparison to the goodwill from consumers. In fact, a friend heard about this and immediately signed up for a $200/year Claude Pro plan. This is someone who has been only a very occasional user of ChatGPT and never used Claude before. I told my friend "You could just sign up for the free plan and upgrade after you try it out." "No, I want to…
Still, you’d need a million people to do that to compensate the $200M military contract.
Not all that many people
Re: Statement on the comments from Secretary of War Pete Hegseth
#315Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't get free daycare in Canada either. I'm not American, but I pay a few hundred dollars a year for the premium health insurance plan at my company. I also pay tens of thousands of dollars more in taxes to grant me the ability to wait for 72 hours in an ER hallway whenever I can't wait weeks for an appointment because urgent care isn't a thing. My take home would triple if I lived in the USA as a new graduate bec…
My apologies. I thought $10/day daycare was universal in Canada. I guess my broader point was the difference in disposable income between U.S. workers vs. other countries becomes a lot more nuanced when things like healthcare, childcare, retirement, and taxes are taken into account. > I'm sure the $80,000 extra dollars is enough to pay for the healthcare premiums and daycare. You're probably right. That said, SWE com…
> My apologies. I thought $10/day daycare was universal in Canada.
In my understanding, it exists but it's vaporware and not really accessible.
> That said, SWE compensation in the U.S. has been quite an anomaly compared to the vast majority of American labor, especially in the last 5-10 years.
The discrepancy isn't an anomaly for Canadians in high-income fields, like law, medicine, or finance. As a rule of thumb, the USA pays twice as much but expects more productivity and less stability. I'm entitled to minimum vacation, I can't be fired at will without huge severance packages, I get lengthy parental leave, etc.
> If this AI hype has taught me anything it's that those with capital cannot wait to start trimming their pesky engineers with those high salaries.
This is the goal, but I see the opposite.
The engineers with the capacity to use AI to replace many others are extremely rare at my company since it requires breadth of knowledge to step in when you realize an LLM can't solve a problem itself, reading comprehension to understand the copious amounts of code/English the AI wants you to review, and extreme paranoia because these things lie constantly.
Otherwise, you end up in an AI delusion loop. The AI tells you it is fixing the problem but due to some fundamental misunderstanding it is unable to accomplish the task and lies to you about its ability. This ends when you are sufficiently fooled to approve the code or when you give up.
I think we're seeing signs of this as companies start replacing SaaS products.
> Unrelated, I like your website. It's simple and the color scheme is aesthetically pleasing.
Thank you! I'm attempting a blog with simple interactive components to ensure people use the site instead of summarizing it with AI.
Re: Statement on the comments from Secretary of War Pete Hegseth
#316Earlier quoted context omitted.
My lived experience with tech companies is that principles are easy when they're free - i.e., when you're telling others what to do, or taking principled stances when a competitor is not breathing down your neck. So, with all respect, when someone tells me that the people they worked with were well-intentioned and driven by values, I take it with a grain of salt. Been there, said the same things, and then when the co…
I think it's definitely true that you should never count on a company to do principled things forever. But that doesn't mean that nothing is real or good. Like Google's support for the open web: They very sincerely did support it, they did a lot of good things for it. And then later, they decided that they didn't care as much. It was wrong to put your faith in them forever, but also wrong to treat that earlier sincer…
Google's support for the open week is a great example because it was obviously a good thing but also obviously built into their business model that they'd take that position. That made them a much more trustworthy company in those days, because abandoning that position would have required not just losing money for a while but changing their internal structure.
Re: Statement on the comments from Secretary of War Pete Hegseth
#317Earlier quoted context omitted.
> What's the problem? Think. The problem is that being branded a "supply chain risk" prohibits vast chunks of the US corporate landscape from doing business with Anthropic. The problem is that the government is attempting to destroy a company rather than simply terminate their contract.
Isn't it a literal supply chain risk, though? They want their products to not be used for some purposes. That's fine, that is their right. But that doesn't just stop at direct purchases. If the US buys from a defense contractor who bought from abthropic, that really isn't that different from buying direct. The moral hazard is still there and the risk that anthropic will try to prevent their product from being used in…
> If the US buys from a defense contractor who bought from abthropic, that really isn't that different from buying direct. The moral hazard is still there and the risk that anthropic will try to prevent their product from being used in that fashion is still there.
You need to look closer at how the government is trying to use the 'supply chain risk' designation. Hegseth said this:
> Effective immediately, no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic.
It remains to be seen whether they'll actually be able to enforce this. But it clearly goes far beyond what would be justified by the kind of supply chain risk you are describing.
Re: Statement on the comments from Secretary of War Pete Hegseth
#318Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is no evidence that this was a condition of the deal for working with the government on this. PRC already is a Total Surveillance state. The claim made by Anthropic is very specific, and it's that they feel that the law has not caught up to how AI can be used to aggregate very large amounts of data that can be obtained without a warrant through data brokers. The government already does this . Maybe you agree wi…
Okay but then why is that also seemingly a red line must have for the Department of War? Isn't it just a tool of domestic surveillance and counterinsurgency for them? Seems like a distraction from any real U.S. national security objectives.
It’s not, the memo that set all this off says nothing about the Terminator or Big Brother. The real objective in this case is that if Anthropic sells the United States a weapon then the United States’ elected leadership gets to decide how to use it. It is not more complicated than this.
Re: Statement on the comments from Secretary of War Pete Hegseth
#319Earlier quoted context omitted.
> What's the problem? Think. The problem is that being branded a "supply chain risk" prohibits vast chunks of the US corporate landscape from doing business with Anthropic. The problem is that the government is attempting to destroy a company rather than simply terminate their contract.
Isn't it a literal supply chain risk, though? They want their products to not be used for some purposes. That's fine, that is their right. But that doesn't just stop at direct purchases. If the US buys from a defense contractor who bought from abthropic, that really isn't that different from buying direct. The moral hazard is still there and the risk that anthropic will try to prevent their product from being used in…
> I think anthropic wants their cake and to eat it too. You can't take a principled stand against something and then be shocked the thing you are taking a principled stand against might think you are a risk.
Is it a principled stand or not? In your first comment, you said 'anthropic's "moral" stances are bullshit', their actions here are merely (or at least primarily) a successful marketing exercise, and the result is "a win for both sides". Are you now acknowledging that it's a costly, risky action on Anthropic's part? Because you haven't said anything to refute that; you've just changed the subject.
Re: Statement on the comments from Secretary of War Pete Hegseth
#320I used to work at Anthropic, and I wrote a comment on a thread earlier this week about Anthropic's first response and the RSP update [1][2]. I think many people on HN have a cynical reaction to Anthropic's actions due to of their own lived experiences with tech companies. Sometimes, that holds: my part of the company looked like Meta or Stripe, and it's hard not to regress to the mean as you scale. But not every patt…
My lived experience with tech companies is that principles are easy when they're free - i.e., when you're telling others what to do, or taking principled stances when a competitor is not breathing down your neck. So, with all respect, when someone tells me that the people they worked with were well-intentioned and driven by values, I take it with a grain of salt. Been there, said the same things, and then when the co…
How much value is there in individual values?
Many of us remember that OpenAI was also started by people with strong personal values. Their charter said that they would not monetize after reaching AGI, their fiduciary duty is to humanity, and the non-profit board would curtail the ambitions of the for-profit incentives. Was this not also believed by a sizeable portion of the employees there at the time? And what is left of these values after the financial incentives grew?
The market forces from the huge economic upside of AI devalues individual values in two ways. It rewards those that choose whatever accelerates AI the most over any individuals who are more careful and act on individual values--the latter simply loses power in the long run until their virtue has no influence. As Anthropic says in their mission statements, it is not of much use to humanity to be virtuous if you are irrelevant. The latter, as is true for many technologies, is that economic prosperity is deeply linked to human welfare. And slowing or limiting progress leads to real immediate harm to the human population. And thus any government regulations which are against AI progress will always be unpopular, because those values which are arguing future harm of AIs is fighting against the values of saving people from diseases and starvation today.