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And when they have to pay the full costs of the compute plus the profit required to service this ungodly debt mountain?

At current pricing Anthropic is making money on their inference, with excellent margins. My work enterprise plan works at API pricing levels, no discount, and it's $25/month. It's the most profitable way Anthropic sells Claude and everybody's making money. Seems sustainable to me.

Excellent, now factor in every other cost they have.

IMO, scolding especially free / open source software developers for daring to touch AI is actively harmful. Microsoft is showing us how not to use or integrate AI (with Windows/Office) and now as the communities we have a stronger fighting chance with making/improving our own software alternatives.

Individual developers who are visible and honest about their AI use get the most vitriol, even by people on a social media using AI, on their browser using AI, on their OS using AI. Why develop for a community that wants you to conform or risk being thrown aside thanklessly (and with harassment)?

Peronally I wouldn’t be half as irritated if I didn’t expect most of AI use to be done because every company expects it to be a wonderful accountability sink when things will go wrong.

i mean I appreciate the desire to do that. Late stage capitalism fucking sucks, in many many ways. The theft of IP is gross, the environmental arguments against AI are quite reasonable. We need jobs to live. But just saying I won't ever use anything that touched AI doesn't seem realistic.

i won't be an apologist for the excesses of the AI bro revolution, but I am a pragmatist and a realist. We have to deal with the reality of the situation as it is, not just how we'd like it to be. It's my job to track software and I fucking love software developers and developer culture.

Even for the folks who want to shut it all down and put the genie back in the bottle, I’m not sure they’re fluent in the current state of the industry. Just having a clear-eyed look at where things stand is pretty clarifying. I’ve seen if shift people into harm reduction vs abolition.

your pain and feelings shouldn't be discounted. many devs are feeling grief right now, for lost craft and agency, while others are high as kites on LLM dopamine and stock options. but yeah, I don't want to leave the tech future to the fascists, so I feel like we kind of need to engage.