Most experienced folks would be very careful in predicting or stating something with certainty, they would be cautious about their reputation/credibility and will always add riders on the possibilities.
For good or bad reasons, the mass employment prediction is just marketing which can be called deceitful at the best. When you have so much money riding then you are not an individual anymore, you are just an human face/extension of the money which is working for itself
If you think your company is directly contributing to the cause of mass unemployment and the associated suffering inherent within, you should stop your company working in that direction or you should quit.
There is no defence of morality behind which AIbros can hide.
The only reason anthropic doesn't want the US military to have humans out of the loop is because they know their product hallucinates so often that it will have disastrous effects on their PR when it inevitably makes the wrong call and commits some war crime or atrocity.
Technology advances have inevitably produced unemployment. Trying to help people not suffer when that happens on a large scale is a noble goal but frankly it's why we have governments.
Also, the genie is well and truly out of the bottle, if anthropic shutdown tomorrow and lit everything they had produced on fire, amazon, microsoft, china, everyone would continue where they left off.
Privatise the gains and socialise the losses. How very typical. I hope you feel the same way in the bread lines alongside everyone else.
I'm suggesting your realpolitik of "others doing it too" is incompatible with a moral position. I know none of these ghouls will stop burning the world. I'm sick of them virtue signalling about how righteous they are while doing it.
At least with Altman you know the guy just wants money, with Amodei you get this grandstanding and 6 more months fear mongering every 6 months and it is insufferable. Worst person in the AI space BY FAR. Hope the Chinese open source models get so good that these ghouls lose everything.
The product is actually good though, I could pay for it if Amodei just shut up but by principle I won't now and just stick with codex.
Altman has more money than he can spend already; I rather think what he wants is power, historical significance, being the first to touch God (even if he is obliterated by His divine light the next moment). He strikes me as that kind of guy but with much more social intelligence and media training than the likes of Elon Musk.
> I mean, part of this is just math. If a government spends more, it’s literally injecting money into the economy, so of course you get more jobs and growth in the short term.
Thats not necessarily true. During Bill Clinton's presidency he cut the deficits and the debt and yet the economy saw very strong job growth.
And Clinton (mostly Gore as VP) cut the federal civilian workforce by about 20%, while following the both the letter and spirit of the law, and not causing chaos.
If you live near a community bio lab see if you can join up and take some classes to learn some basic lab techniques. And some sort of intro bio class via mooc/textbook/local college class whatever if you can but community lab is honestly a great place to start if you have one.
The main thing to keep in mind is that all the stuff that involves analogies between software and biology is almost universally a bullshit oversimplification that you can safely ignore. It's just that software is so profitable and there's so much vc money in it that there's a ton of pressure to be like "oh we can program biology like we program computers." We can't - we invented computers but didn't invent biology. Biology is the end result of 4 billion years of unchecked entropy - it's a chaos system, non deterministic in the wildest ways, impossibly complicated, and yet something we are getting astonishingly good at understanding and engineering.
Basically, all the biologists that started companies that were like "we can program biology like we can program computers" are bankrupt now.
On the other hand, the computer scientists that respected the nature of biology and pushed the limits of computing to develop Alphafold - giant models trained on the full complexity of biological data - finally created computer systems that could handle biological systems like protein folding at an extraordinary level of capability. They won a nobel.
Follow up question (Not OP), would alphafold more be used to experiment with an already-defined theory that you have, or could you also make some toy projects (e.g. how people make projects around trading engines).
I'm wondering if I could find a fun weekend project in alphafold just to see what it's like.
Possibly not what you're asking for, but I wrote a generally-accessible intro to why it can be tricky to assemble many DNA fragments with "Golden Gate Assembly", a mainstream method which relies on short sequence overhangs. The Sidewinder method discussed in this thread aims to solve that "short overhang" problem.
Sadly we are going to get more ads (Apple Maps is next). If it goes much further people will start questioning whether Apple products are worth the premium price.
I have used Apple products for over 20 years, because I felt like a customer instead of the product. Apple’s services strategy has changed this perception. I question Apple’s competitive advantage when they shift to a Google-like business model. They are actively throwing away the very thing that made them a unique and valuable player in the industry, and for what? A couple extra percent profit in the short term?
Steve Jobs always said he wanted to make insanely great products for customers. Products they’d be proud to recommend to their family. It feels like Cook lost his way, spending too much time focusing on the stock, instead of letting great products drive adoption, and letting the stock follow.
If the rumors are true that Apple is preparing for a change at the top, I how we see a dramatic change in the services strategy and Apple can get back to making great products that people actually want to use.
DuckDB is on our radar. In practice each database still needs some engine-specific work to feel good, so a fully generic plugin system is harder than it sounds. We are thinking about how to do this in a scalable way.
"Help me develop a MacOS app that blurs my screen the closer my mouse is to the top of the monitor"
That was my PoC to see if there's APIs Claude could find that would make this easy to do. Once I proved that worked, I asked it to instead help me devise a way to adjust that blur based on my posture. It suggested the vision framework and measuring head height.
Just kept iterating, one step at a time. Any toil I experienced, I asked it to remove or automate.
This is going to sound very basic, but did you do it in a blank repo or did you use the cloned integration in Xcode, or a third thing I'm not thinking of?
I have had good success with using xcodegen and only a project.yml checked in. Claude can get tripped up on managing the xcode project xml.
However, before that, i set up a blank project in xcode, used the xcode github integration to create a new repo on github, set up one xcode cloud workflow and use it to push one build to testflight. That way, you get all the automatic config of app ids, profiles etc, and xcode cloud can not be enabled other way. Then tell claude to migrate to xcodegen and to run it in CI automatically.
I've started to develop iOS apps from scratch using only claude code web (no mac), by setting up a "Branch Build" workflow in xcode cloud, and a skill that teaches claude how to check builds and fetch logs.
Along with a workflow that pushes any merge on main to internal TestFlight, the dream of developing iPhone apps on the iPhone finally lives. I've tried most options for this over the years and they never stuck.
These are simple apps that build in 1-5 min on xcode cloud. For larger builds it probably won't work so well.
Not the OP, but I’ve had success starting with a blank app created by Xcode with the appropriate language/frameworks (ie something that will already run but does nothing). You then ask Claude to start from that point.
The only issue I’ve had is sometimes Xcode not ‘seeing’ new files that Claude has created along the way, and needing to add these manually into the Xcode project. (A Google around suggests this shouldn’t happen if you create the project in the right way, and yet it still sometimes does.)
I’ve either been involved with or adjacent to dozens of Accenture projects at 5 companies over the last 20 years, and not a single one had a satisfactory outcome.
I’ve never heard a single story of “Accenture came in, and we got what we wanted, on time and on budget.” Cases of “we got a minimum viable solution for $100m instead of $30m, and it was four years late” seem more typical.
Just like IBM, they are big enough that no one ever got fired for buying them.
I've also found they do a good job of getting cadre of executives that float between companies hiring them when they move between companies while they get wined and dined.
It's just that they're only seeing money to build and a place to make excuses on being late.
If you hire your own people you can make them feel how well the business is doing and get features out the door tomorrow and build to the larger thing over time.
I've seen some mess-ups in my life, but they started sticking out like a sore thumb long, long, long, long before anywhere close to $30 million was spent on it.
Teams of consultants on site, some remote, and many offshore. Tons of documents are created and many environments and DevOps pipelines are stood up. First code release is when the people who push buttons touch the system for the first time. It is crap. Several more code releases attempt to make the system usable. Eventually another consultant or two are brought to evaluate the project and they say the project violated every best practice and common sense rule. Most egregiously the internal stakeholders who voiced serious concerns at the beginning of the project were dismissed or forced out etc.
So much the same as what I've seen before, except instead of abandoning ship when the mess was clear and present, doubling down to see how far of a hole one can dig? Sunk cost must be one hell of a drug for the aforementioned CTO.
"A $30 million mess-up" can look like (at least) two things. It can be $30 million was spent on a project that earned $0 revenue and was ultimately canceled, or it can look like $x was spent on a project to win a $30 million contract but a competitor won the contract instead.
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