321–330 of 783 posts
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What if LLMs are optimizing the average office worker's productivity but the work itself simply has no discernable economic value? This is argued at length in Grebber's Bullshit Jobs essay and book.
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I am confident that Anthropic make revenue from that $20 than the electricity and server costs needed to serve that customer. Claude Code has rate limits for a reason: I expect they are carefully designed to ensure that the average user doesn't end up losing Anthropic money, and that even extreme heavy users don't cause big enough losses for it to be a problem. Everything I've heard makes me believe the margins on in…
>make revenue from that $20 than the electricity and server costs needed to serve that customer Seems like a pretty dumb take. It’s like saying it only takes $X in electricity and raw materials to produce a widget that I sell for $Y. Since $Y is bigger than $X, I’m making money! Just ignore that I have to pay people to work the lines. Ignore that I had to pay huge amounts to build the factory. Ignore every other cost…
Gross profit = revenues - cost of goods sold
Operating profit = Gross profit - operating expenses including depreciation & amortisation
Net profit = Operating profit - net interest expense - taxes
Personally I have noticed strange effects, where I previously would have reached for a software package to make something or solve an issue, its now often faster for me to write a specific program just for my use case. Just this weekend I needed a reel with a specific look to post on instagram but instead of trying to use something like after effects, i could quickly cobble together a program that was using css transforms that outputted a series of images I could tie together with ffmpeg.
About a month ago I was unhappy with the commercial ticketing systems, they were both expensive and opaque so I made my own. Obviously for a case like that you need discipline and testing when you take peoples money, so there was a lot of focus on end to end testing.
I have a few more examples like this, but to make this work you need to approach using LLMs with a certain amount of rigour. The hardest part is to prevent drift in the model. There are a certain number things you can do to make the model grounded in reality.
When the tool doesn’t have a reproducer, it’ll happily invent a story and you’ll debug the story. If you ground the root cause in for example a test, the model can get context enough to actually solve the problem.
Another issue is that you need to read and understand code quickly, but its no real difference from working with other developers. When tests are passing I usually do a PR to myself and then review as I usually would do.
A prerequisite is that you need tight specs, but those can also be generated if you are experienced enough. You need enough domain intuition to know what ‘done’ means and what to measure.
Personally I think the bottleneck will go from trying to get into a flow state to write solutions to analyze the problem space and verification.
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> And I don’t recall it calling sales bullshit. It says stuff like why can’t a customer just order from an online form? The employee who helps them doesn’t do anything except make them feel better. Must be a bullshit job. It talks specifically about my employees filling internal roles like this. > advertising I understand the arms race argument, but it’s really hard to see what an alternative looks like. People can s…
It's an important function in a capitalist economy. Socialist economies are like "adblock for your life". That said, some advertising can be useful to inform consumers that a good exists, but convincing them they need it by synthesizing desires or fighting off competitors? Useless and socially detrimental.
Ever actually lived in anything approaching one? Yeah, if the stores are empty, it does not make sense to produce ads for stuff that isn't there ...
... but we still had ads on TV, surprisingly, even for stuff that was in shortage (= almost everything). Why? Because the Plan said so, and disrespecting the Plan too openly would stray dangerously close to the crime of sabotage.
You have no idea.
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What if LLMs are optimizing the average office worker's productivity but the work itself simply has no discernable economic value? This is argued at length in Grebber's Bullshit Jobs essay and book.
> but the work itself simply has no discernable economic value? This is argued at length in Grebber's Bullshit Jobs essay and book. That book was very different than what I expected from all of the internet comment takes about it. The premise was really thin and did't actually support the idea that the jobs don't generate value. It was comparing to a hypothetical world where everything is perfectly organized, everyon…
But he states that expressis verbis, so your discovery is not that spectacular.
Although he gives examples of jobs, or some aspects of jobs, that don't help to deliver what specific institutions aim to deliver. Example would be bureaucratization of academia.
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Nobody questions that Anthropic makes revenue from a $20 subscription. The opposite would be very strange.
A lot of people believe that Anthropic lose money selling tokens to customers because they are subsidizing it for growth.
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Not a phase, I’d argue that 90% of modern jobs are bullshit to keep cattle occupied and economy rolling.
> Not a phase, I’d argue that 90% of modern jobs are bullshit to keep cattle occupied and economy rolling. Cattle? You actually think that about other people?
I think the deluge on projects on show HN points to something real, its possible today to ship projects as a one man shop that looks like something that just a year or so would have required a team. Personally I have noticed strange effects, where I previously would have reached for a software package to make something or solve an issue, its now often faster for me to write a specific program just for my use case. Ju…
Lots of these project have a lifespan of a week and will never ever be maintained. When you pour blood and sweat in a projet you get attached to it, when you vibe code it in an afternoon and it's not and instant hit you move on to the next one.
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> Not a phase, I’d argue that 90% of modern jobs are bullshit to keep cattle occupied and economy rolling. Cattle? You actually think that about other people?
I think what he meant was that the top 1% ruling class is keeping those bullshit jobs around to keep the poor people (their cattle) occupied so they won't have time and energy to think and revolt.