Not OP, but my understanding is that voting for politicians who prioritize more sustainable policies and advocating for industry regulation to cut down on things like single-use plastics (or promoting EV use/infrastructure build outs) has a much bigger impact than recycling or not flying.
I (unfortunately) just don't think it's pragmatic/reasonable to expect enough people to make personal sacrifices/reduce QOL to make a dent. It's a tragedy of the commons, and we need some form of reasonable regulation to cut down on the worst offenders (probably carbon taxes) while we invest heavily in improving the technology so it makes financial sense to switch.
Renewables have come so far in the past decade and are now competitive with fossil fuels in terms of pricing. As the technology continues to become more efficient and cheaper, we'll likely start to see significant drops in emissions in addition to cheaper energy.*
*Assuming the US elects a rational adult to the presidency in 2028.
Any documentation regarding the claim about breaking their contract?
Haven't heard that. Regardless, as someone who works with these models daily (as well as company leadership that loves AI more than they understand it) - Anthropic is absolutely right to say that the military shouldn't be allowed to use it for lethal, autonomous force.
I think it's really dependent on the software. And frankly, with the current rate of development, I feel like this continues to shift.
No, a non-engineer can't just spin up the next great app. Even with the newest models and a great prompting/testing system, I don't think you can just spit out high quality, maintainable, reliable code. But as a generalist - I'm absolutely able to ship software and tools that solve our business problems.
Right now, my company identified an expensive software platform that was set to cost us around $250k/year. People in the industry are raving about it.
I've spent 1-2 weeks recreating the core functionality (with a significantly enhanced integration into our CRM and internal analytics) in both a web app and mobile application. And it's gone far smoother than I expected. It's not done - and maybe we'll run into some blocker. But this would have taken me 6 months, at least, to build half as well.
I was an AI skeptic for most of last year. It provided value, sure, but it felt like we were plateauing. Slowing down.
I'd hoped we might be slowing down to some sort of invisible ceiling. I was faster than ever - but it very much required a level of experience that felt reasonable and fair.
It feels different now.
I'd say ~70% of my Claude Opus results just work. I tweak the UI and refactor when possible. And it runs into issues I have to solve occasionally. But otherwise? If I'm specific, if I have it brainstorm, then plan, and then implement - then it usually just works.
That's assuming you won't need anyone to manage the purchased software platform and its integrations and that you need a full time engineer to maintain your version.
> No, a non-engineer can't just spin up the next great app. Even with the newest models and a great prompting/testing system, I don't think you can just spit out high quality, maintainable, reliable code
I think most engineers vastly overestimate how important high quality, maintainable, reliable code is to product success. Yes, you need an experienced engineer to steer Claude into making good high-quality code. But your customer doesn't see your code, they don't see how many servers you need or how often an on-call engineer is woken up. They just see how well the app meets their needs
I predict we will see a lot of domain experts without engineering background spin up incredibly successful apps. Just like the Tea app many of them will crash and burn from poor engineering. But there will also be enough people who've grown wise to this and after reaching some success with their app spend the resources to have others mitigate all the unknown-to-them issues
> I predict we will see a lot of domain experts without engineering background spin up incredibly successful apps. Just like the Tea app many of them will crash and burn from poor engineering.
This rollercoaster is going to be wild to ride over the next decade. I've done a few experiments where I've intentionally "vibe coded" either a few features for an existing project of mine or for a few completely clean-sheet ideas.
I completely agree with you. There are going to be a lot of domain experts who do successfully spin stuff up.
> But there will also be enough people who've grown wise to this and after reaching some success with their app spend the resources to have others mitigate all the unknown-to-them issues
Here's the part that shocked me when I tried this... it did not take long for the no-engineering-guidance codebases to turn into complete disasters. Like... in an afternoon I had a pretty functional application that filled a gap for me. It was also... I don't think it'd remain even remotely maintainable for more than a week based on the direction it was going.
> I think most engineers vastly overestimate how important high quality, maintainable, reliable code is to product success.
I agree, the only thing I can’t get past is the black box approach. For the majority of business stakeholders, they can’t/ don’t want to read the code that Opus, or any other agent produces. It will most likely work, but if it doesn’t, they have to rely on the agent to find & patch.
I’m with you though, it’s getting incredibly good at doing that, but that concept of “It works but I don’t know why” seems very dangerous at scale.
That last mile for apps isn’t trivial imo; to take them from “it’s cool and does exactly what I want”, to a scenario where all employees at our company can use it.
But who knows I might just be a naive dev lol, this stuff is changing too quickly.
> I think most engineers vastly overestimate how important high quality, maintainable, reliable code is to product success.
Rather: Many software developers overestimate how important high quality, maintainable, reliable code is to initial product success.
Once the product is highly successful, a high quality, maintainable, reliable code pays huge dividends - and I have a strong feeling that most business people vastly underestimate this dividend.
Vibecoding to production and $1mil ARR (random number) now proves out the application basics and market value which pays for it to be redone correctly :)
There won't be a re-do, there will be a feature request pipeline. Correct is a term of art and unlikely to come into it. If you start losing customers because of reliability, they'll ask Claude to fix it. If that doesn't work you're gonna be in trouble, because you won't have people.
> I think most engineers vastly overestimate how important high quality, maintainable, reliable code is to product success. Yes, you need an experienced engineer to steer Claude into making good high-quality code. But your customer doesn't see your code, they don't see how many servers you need or how often an on-call engineer is woken up. They just see how well the app meets their needs
Your customers definitely see the quality of code, just by proxy. When features take forever to ship, and things fall over all the time, those are code quality and design problems.
Honestly, code quality is somewhat more important right now, because use common and clear patterns will help AI make better changes, and using a more resilient architecture will you hand more off without worry things will fall over.
But when was the last time our "democratic values" were under attack by a foreign country and actually needed defending?
9/11? Pearl Harbor?
Maybe I'm missing something. We have a giant military and a tendency to use it. On occasion, against democratically elected leaders in other countries.
You're right; freedom isn't free. But foreign countries aren't exactly the biggest threats to American democracy at the moment.
You have the causality at least partially backwards. Why has it been so long and infrequent that the US has been in direct conflict with authoritarian adversaries? Because we have a giant military and a willingness to use it. Pacifism and isolationism do not work as defensive strategies.
Station Eleven is so beautiful and human. Great pick. Highly recommend The Leftovers if you liked that one. Its exploration of life and grief and humanity following a secular rapture is stunning, and the performances are outstanding.
I have (re)watched everything Patrick Somerville has worked on because of Station Eleven :) I rewatched The Leftovers last month. Maniac last week (this time I noticed a funny reference by Sally Field's character pitching something on the phone about a guy with special hugging powers).
None of that was my type of thing before, now it's all I want. I think the genre might be called absurdist fiction, but I'm not sure that covers the full vibe.
Dan Romer is an excellent composer too, I listen to his stuff a lot. I have the Station Eleven soundtrack in my car, now my kid randomly sings Wandering Under The Moon, and it's one of my favorite things in the world.
I'm not an Elon fan at all, and I'm highly skeptical of Tesla's robotaxi efforts in general, but the context here is that only one of these seems like a true crash?
I'm curious how crashes are reported for humans, because it sounds like 3 of the 5 examples listed happened at like 1-4 mph, and the fourth probably wasn't Tesla's fault (it was stationary at the time). The most damning one was a collision with a fixed object at a whopping 17 mph.
To be fair, the article calls that out specifically at the end:
> What makes this especially frustrating is the lack of transparency. Every other ADS company in the NHTSA database, Waymo, Zoox, Aurora, Nuro, provides detailed narratives explaining what happened in each crash. Tesla redacts everything. We cannot independently assess whether Tesla’s system was at fault, whether the safety monitor failed to intervene in time, or *whether these were unavoidable situations caused by other road users*. Tesla wants us to trust its safety record while making it impossible to verify.
This is with safety drivers. So at this point you can't really make any conclusions about how good the Robotaxi is at avoiding major crashes since those should ideally be handled by the safety drivers. Without the actual data around all driver interventions you cannot make any positive conclusions about safety here.
My suspicion is that these kinds of minor crashes are simply harder to catch for safety drivers, or maybe the safety drivers did intervene here and slow down the car before the crashes. I don't know if that would show in this data.
Agreed. The "Tesla backed into objects, one into a pole or tree at 1 mph and another into a fixed object at 2 mph" stood out to me in specific. There is no way that any human driver is going to report backing into something at 1 or 2 mph.
While I was living in NYC I saw collisions of that nature all the time. People put a "bumper buddy" on their car because the street parallel parking is so tight and folks "bump" the car behind them while trying to get out.
My guess is that at least 3 of those "collisions" are things that would never be reported with a human driver.
Low mph does not automatically imply that crashes are not serious. It does not say anything about speed of other vehicles. Tesla could be creeping at 2mph into flow of traffic, or it could come at a complete stop after doing that and still be the reason of an accident.
I'd be interested in more details about the 17mph collision as well. Was it a dead-center collision with a pole after hard braking? Was it a mirror clip or a curb clip or something similar? There seem to be a wide range of possibilities.
For my company, being able to view the user journey throughout the site in the analytics is pretty valuable.
We don't care who the specific users are - but the tracking gives us an idea of how many people use the site? do they have a good experience? are they giving us money? do we have a bug somewhere we're missing? etc.
Back in the day we used to track user activity via a "hit id" (basically a random string) that was generated on the backend that added a "post" request to every page.
I definitely think you're onto something. Also, we're inherently psychologically biased toward negative content because all the monkeys who ignored the scary things died.
We're naturally wired to engage with negative content - and that's a must-use recipe for success in an economy that increasingly relies on grabbing your attention.
It's no wonder that depression and anxiety rates are higher than ever, despite our world being much, much safer than it was 100-200 years ago.
Even being aware of this doesn't help all that much.
Trump did a new, unbelievably dumb thing that's going to ruin people's lives? Instant click from me.
Malaria rates down 20% over the past 10 years in the DRC?* I'm still scrolling.
I (unfortunately) just don't think it's pragmatic/reasonable to expect enough people to make personal sacrifices/reduce QOL to make a dent. It's a tragedy of the commons, and we need some form of reasonable regulation to cut down on the worst offenders (probably carbon taxes) while we invest heavily in improving the technology so it makes financial sense to switch.
Renewables have come so far in the past decade and are now competitive with fossil fuels in terms of pricing. As the technology continues to become more efficient and cheaper, we'll likely start to see significant drops in emissions in addition to cheaper energy.*
*Assuming the US elects a rational adult to the presidency in 2028.
reply