What does block do?
Yeah, this is terrifying.
Probably because they’re the only firm they’ve used so far, and it’s easier if Anthropic relents vs striking a new deal I would guess.
Yeah, that’s a real issue here. Altman is already complaining about the energy needs of humans. I know this film is supposed to represent some exaggerated dystopia, but I suspect that boredom and free gym memberships may be be an optimistic estimate of what these folks actually have planned for us.
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Or that they can cook up if given the opportunity.
I had to look them up. They used to be Square. Then I had to look up what Square did
Square is the U.S. market leader in point-of-sale systems, processing $241 billion in payments annually. So I guess Square Inc is now Block Inc, and Block Inc owns Square as well as Cash App and Tidal, which is Jay-Z’s old streaming service
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AIUI Anthropic has done a bunch of work to get Claude cleared for use in classified contexts, and the other models can’t really be used for a lot of purposes until they do the same
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The billionaires are offering us utopia if we do what they say. In the movie, the machines offer utopia as long as we do what they say. And they have the nukes, which they can and do use, to force us to do what they say. It’s a pretty good movie. Underappreciated, imo.
Familar with square. Forgot jack owned all that. I am sure cutting 40% of all employees will make everything run smooth.
The small business subreddit is full of people who have been royally screwed by square and the other fintech payment processors. If the algorithm sees something it doesn’t like they just shut down your accounts and keep your money for months and months, if they ever return it at all.
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Yeah this is my biggest fear of AI. That companies will put it in the decision loop because they can afford to lose a few good customers if they don’t have to have a human looking into each and every fraud case. Which basically happened to me with Amazon KDP publishing.
We absolutely need some kind of law that you get to talk to a live human being before some company cuts off your access to their monopoly marketplace. Hopefully the EU will lead the way, because it’s not happening here.
I see people getting accounts closed on those apps for memo fields that are jokes between friends. It’s crazy.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in an interview with CNBC on Friday morning that it’s important for companies to work with the Pentagon, “as long as it is going to comply with legal protections” and “the few red lines” that OpenAI and many in the AI industry have when it comes to AI use in the military.
“For all the differences I have with Anthropic, I mostly trust them as a company, and I think they really do care about safety, and I’ve been happy that they’ve been supporting our war fighters,” Altman continued. “I’m not sure where this is going to go.”
I’m sure this is his strong moral code talking and has nothing to do with the positive publicity Anthropic was getting
I officially became an AI doomer yesterday, at least wrt to my job. Square is the first company that I actually believe their layoffs are AI-driven. Between that and the news that CNN is going to get the CBS treatment, I’m not feeling sunny right now.
I swear before Grue’s post here, everything I read on HackerNews was either vibe coders saying how awesome AI is, or real programmers saying how it’s mostly slop and will be a mess to maintain. But ever since, most posts are acknowledging that with the right prompts, workflow, and .md files – it works.
The tools will also get better and start codifying in the best practices that programmers are figuring out on their own right now. The agents.md file will be generated by some wizard that asks about your coding style. Workflows like plan-rewiew-iterate and having different engines review each other will become baked-into Claude/Copilot, if they’re not already.
For now you still need programmers in the loop to audit the code and steer it in the right direction. It might take a while – newspapers and magazines held on for a decade or so after the handwriting was on the wall – but I can see a day where all you need is a rock-solid spec, which can be used to generate exhaustive tests, which can be used to generate TDD-driven code. Eventually you’ll only need the spec writers, who won’t even know how to look under the hood.
Like organic systems, there will be weird, hard-to-replicate bugs. But for most apps those will be tolerable. Real programmers will still be needed for anything involving money or life and death.
Ultimately programming is just high-level pattern-matching to produce a well-defined expected outcome. Seems like any job that matches that description will be solved by AI.
When I was 10, I sat next to a salesman on a plane who said he used be an aeronautical engineer “until the bottom dropped out of the job market.” I always said I’d never take the demand for my job for granted. Although when we survived the dotcom bubble with barely a blip, it did start to seem like the need for software developers would be eternal. But now it looks like we’re Paul Bunyan trying to outrace the chainsaw.
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Dunno if you’re also not familiar with the software flag system…when you run software from the command line there are flags that give it some directions or values for some variables or whatever. You might have a “start” command that runs something, but you could have “start --safe-mode” to start something in what you call “safe-mode” or, in this case, run the software while telling it to ignore the geneva conventions. Or maybe you knew all that and didn’t see the news about Anthropic and the War Department.
I know the software company I got laid off from uses it not to produce code all on its lonesome without any programmer, but so that one person (a principle) can get more done - requiring fewer programmers (employees). Now, if you work for a big company the princples aren’t programmers, but same thing applies. Either somehow they need more programming done (who knows? there never seemed to be a good correlation between how much programming the world needs and how much is actually done) or fewer programmers.
Until the tools are good enough to write all the code from a spec w/o supervision.
So it’s just a matter of time. Great.
I didn’t know any of it.
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