Like what would happen to individuals ten years from now who are trying to live if AI suddenly became inaccessible

Of course we all know most humans are useless and unable to survive outside our culture, but the difference is that I'm trying to picture is the individual trying the reason through challenges. The version of this that has been obvious to me up to now is that the individual didn't have the knowledge to look after themselves. But I guess it feels different to conceive of them not having the ability to fully reason on their own...?

To not just lack the objects of intelligence, but the very process of it...

"On the other hand, a missile with a man or two within, controlling flight by graphitics, would be lighter, more mobile, more intelligent. It would give us a lead that might well mean the margin of victory. Besides which, gentlemen, the exigencies of war compel us to remember one thing. A man is much more dispensable than a computer. Manned missiles could be launched in numbers and under circumstances that no good general would care to undertake as far as computer-directed missiles are concerned . . ."

Missiles and ammo are too expensive, so they send people to run at the enemy, revealing their firing positions. Then they drone the people who revealed themselves.

If I was an AI, I would reason that a T-800 is far more valuable than a man soldier who I must feed and clothe and heat. Use the disposable soldiers first and save the robots for later.

sloppy (that is, negligent) writing. Something is either (in)dispensable, or is not. Either use something that can take degrees of comparison, like valuable (A man is less valuable etc) or reword it: A computer is indispensable, a man is not.

> “There is no such adjective,” Scalia said. “I know we have used it, but there is no such adjective as choate. There is inchoate, but the opposite of inchoate is not choate.”

https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/justice_scalia_deliv...

Hence - the man is much more dispensable...

---

The water in my water bottle is much more dispensable than the toothpaste in my toothpaste tube. But both can be dispensed (in both meanings - distributed or replaced).

A self driving car crashes into his barn.

Out comes out a tech bro, “Yo OG programmer bro, it’s all busted bro, could you like make it unbusted bro.”

Then again with social security set to go bankrupt it’s not like we’ll be able to retire

What if the twist is that he’s writing spaghetti code that only he knows how to maintain.

Worse, it’s in a language that his llc charges licensing fees to use!

I don't know about you, but my notion that my social security check is all I will need to survive my retirement years died when my father started drafting his own social security in the 2010s, and it was literal peanuts after being a small business owner his entire life (restaurants) and paying more than his fair share in taxes. Do the average folk still have this notion that social security = retirement? Hopefully not, it's certainly misguided now, but it was misguided then, too.

The issue then is getting a visa.

Social security has a low maximum, if your dad was used to clearing 15k a month and then social security only paid him 3500$, that’s rough.

For the typical person only making around 4500$ , it’s an adjustment, but doable

That is why you should use current money to become less dependent on future money. That former developer on his farm had the right idea, he bought a farm. So did I, with many hectares of forest which I use to build, heat and can also use to hunt should that become necessary.

How far are you from the closet hospital.

The nearest hospital is around 45 km to the north, there's another one at about the same distance to the south. There are roads here and there are helicopters for when it is urgent - one of those landed a few kilometres from us a few years ago when a 'neighbour' had heart problems. I'm in the countryside but that does not equate to 'the middle of nowhere'.

Which doesn't seem like it. The ideal is to keep removing couplings. But in practice, I find that focusing on the statefulness, the distribution-specificness, these "accidentals", is how you actually get leverage.

The obvious social consequence is now the tendency towards centralization, tyranny, "you people can't think for yourselves, not because you have some kind of 'inherent intelligence defect', but because the world is so complicated and interconnected that only coherent systems thinking (conveniently administered from one central point) is what can save you". In the Enlightenment world, the ideal was that every man could in principle, think for themselves.

A good ending might be that everybody benefits each other by distributing intelligence, but in practice centralization always seems to win.

some weeks ago, we changed the billed credit card - something went wrong on their end we were unable to use it for ~8-9 days.

Some pepople during this period said to certain tasks: "I will care about that if Claude is available again"

So, we are already there

I dare companies to gamble on running their businesses on absolute skeleton crews long term

I wager that's mostly due to the Jevons paradox, though; it's so much cheaper and easier to build out systems with cloud than on-prem that you end up building way more systems than you would have without it, resulting in an overall headcount increase.

Now we know they won’t even be able to read and write. But maybe Claude sonnet 12817 can maintain the operating system. It’ll be 17,000 dependencies in and mostly written in JavaScript, but it’ll work.

If people are spending less time bent over monitors or at desks under the dictates of corporate imperative, they will probably be spending more time doing actually interesting things. Reasoning is innately human. What we call "knowledge work" is not and is often anything but. People who are naturally curious will still discover things, even if irrelevant (from a market perspective) when the AI is on, for their own satisfaction.

If such an event were to occur, they would be called upon. It's really little different from what would happen today if suddenly the power grid or supply lines were down for a sustained period of time.

Also I disagree with the permise. People learned how to make technology that never existed once already, they can learn to do it again if needed. It will take time, which we'll have plenty of because your phone won't be working.

Most humans aren't useless by any measure of most or usefulness. Our culture is our tools, dying due to a lack of antibiotics doesn't mean you didn't have anything to contribute, it means you didn't have access to the tool you needed. This is the problem we need to guard against.

No one is going to lose the ability to reason! This is accepting the most extreme version of the marketing presented by frontier labs, don't do it. People may lose fluency or familiarity or access to training on specific skills. We should put some care into making sure that can't be a catastrophe, for sure.

If we practiced for these Armageddon scenarios what would a highly prepared group of 20 be able to accomplish in a year. How fast could they get humanity back to the bronze age?

The titular Pump Six breaks down and basically there's nobody left in the world who knows how to even reason about the steps needed to fix it. There's just some log dump and nobody understands what it means. Humans are no longer capable of complex reasoning, they just live in the moment and hump.

On project gutenberg: first story in this anthology, https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/72890

PDF of just the story: https://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~koehl/Teaching/ECS188/PDF_files/...

What this misanthropic/Anthropic-boosting bait is missing is that all of these pieces falling together doesn’t make sense.

1. We are so accustomed to not-even-thinking means that we are legitimately freed from labor and cared for. (The dystopic version of being freed from your labor means that you still have to constantly think to survive. But not in any “economically useful” ways. Surviving for yourself and your family outside of the robot economy)

2. At the same time as point 1, we voluntarily, with all of our leisure time, just don’t think at all. Where is the self-actualization? Where is the spontainety? The drive? Did this in all of these years not come back after being a rat racer/wage slave?

Curiously, the “hacker ethos” here is to create. Not to just “consume”. And that is taken as an intrinsic thing, not just a way to get rich. But that’s not how “people” are?

Other people are mostly like you. But maybe those here who spent their careers implementing Entertaining Ourselves To Death maws genuinely think that “people” (not them though) would genuinely, when left to their own devices and having beeng catered to every need, would just “consume” mindlessly onto death.

Sorry to Goomba anyone here.

> Of course we all know most humans are useless and unable to survive outside our culture,

All. Take away the “habitat” from an animal and they are helpless, useless, impotent.

https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/2819368-pump-six-and-...

Both Pump 6 and The Machine Stops have examined precisely this in detail.

8k diffs PR is incredible, is it even sane for a human to comprehend that much?

There has to be a name for such scenario were the handoff from Agent to Developer is so difficult, its not even worth pursuing but to instead wait until the Agent comes back online.

No matter how good of a developer you are, we are still constrained to our minds working memory. Lots of people I have spoken to are aware of this. Agents produce lots of diffs in a fast pace, our minds don't get the time to grasp the changed logic. And then, we an Agent is unavailable all of the sudden, say in the case of it being an outage or usage limit reached, the human now have to go through massive amounts of changes. They cannot continue as usual, there is a spike, they have to learn the new changes and grasp everything before they can continue towards the goal.

Other than trivial PRs; everything I do with Opus/Fable gets reviewed by Astra; and everything I do with Astra gets reviewed by Opus/Fable.

Using only models from a single vendor, is like testing your website/webapp only on Chrome.

It's just feelings.

Could you share a bit more about how you do it?

After claude or codex finishes a commit, I switch console tabs and ask the other to review it; with the commit ID. I often find it helpful to inject a bit of human knowledge, and callout any areas of attention I see from a quick skim. (But that could just be me wanting to not abstract myself away from software engineering that much :)

Sometimes, I do ask Codex to read my ~/.claude/; and vice-versa. But, generally, I try to keep as much knowledge (e.g. investigations, reports, deep dives) inside the git tree as possible; so that is not necessary.

I don't use skills, but I do have ~/.codex/AGENTS.md and ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md. These are high-level instructions for what (1) I consider readable, maintainable code and patterns, and (2) workarounds for empirically observed model behavior IOdon't like, such as Astra being a bit of a "over-correct over-validation nit-picker". I keep these human-authored, and update regularly based on what I find annoying.

I do all of this before I submit a PR; but of course, for trivial stuff (e.g. CSS changes, copy/string changes, etc), I don't bother.

My practices and workflows do change over time. Back in the ~Opus 4.5 days I'd often define a rubric/criteria in a markdown file, iterate with AI to improve it, and that's the "spec". I've stopped doing that since GPT 5.6; partly because models have gotten a lot better at understanding high level intent from the context; and partly because nearly all models these days feel 'gradermaxxed' when working like that.

Finally, consumer $100/$200mo subs get you _so_ far, I get a lot of value from both. I used to have multiple Claude subs for a while, but trying to 'get full value' made me work on projects just for the sake of it; so 2x$200/mo is my cap :)

Opus isn’t even allowed to decrypt thinking blocks from Fable if you switch models mid-conversation.

https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/build-with-claude/preser...

PRs shouldn't really be reaching 8k diffs no matter who authors them.

There's an ocean between what "should" happen and what actually happens in tech today.

(but yes if AI is going to propagate, they need to fix their uptimes)

Not sure how long the latter will remain true – centralization is well underway there; try not to think of Cloudflare too much...

We already got used to "internal going down globally" when AWS was the main cloud provider. Now its 3, AWS, GCP, Cloudflare, but "portion of internet that you care about is down for the entire world" is a casual thing to happen now.

As somebody in need of a doctor, on a plane etc. I'd definitely consider it much worse if all hospitals, air traffic controllers etc. stopped working at the same time instead of just a local subset.

Isn't that a good news!

Likewise while at Google, they didn't let us put Google Voice numbers down as our oncall phone number. Some folks even had multiple phones on different networks as backups.

I'm sure they have either other SOTA models or open source models around to help if things to completely pear shaped.

Isn't the answer that you just wait a few hours?

If the AI is giving you huge productivity gains these should more than compensate for time lost here. And there's probably other useful things to be done in that time anyway.

I don't know, what is all that code that needs to be merged so quickly doing anyway, I guess is my point. We keep hearing about these sorts of scenarios in hypothetical terms but where is all the amazing new software out on the market? Where are the products being built in a week that are awesome and genuinely solve a new problem and work?

I don't mean to be dismissive but it doesn't seem like outages like this are really a huge deal in the sense that they stop anything really important happening in the world, if only because when the systems are up not that much new important stuff seems to be being done in the world.

For whatever reasons, customers just buy trash nowadays, put up with trash, ignore horrifying contract terms, buy more trash, grumble about the trash, and then invest more in the trash.

It will be the death of us.

This is not true for vibecoded stuff.

It's everyones.

Everyone must code alone

Anthropic today: We don't really have AI agents, they are glorified versions of automation scripts and one has broken today. But tomorrow we will have perfect AI agents, so still value us at $100 Trillion.

Had to shift+tab into other modes and manually approve permissions like a cave man

I hate it when companies declare victory when there is still a fire around them.

If you listen closely, you may hear them squawking in annoyance after each announcement.

The Samsara of AI subscriptions.

At this point downdetector is more reliable than any of these "status" pages. And it does show reports starting 9:30ish AM EST.

Am I looking at somebody else's usage?

Would be interesting to see how OpenAI and Anthropic would respond to being "accidentally" hacked by their respective Frankenstein monsters.

Previous: GitHub outage

https://status.claude.com/ says:

Elevated errors on claude.ai, Claude Code, Claude Cowork and the Claude API Subscribe Update - We are investigating reports of degraded performance affecting claude.ai, platform.claude.com, the Claude API, Claude Code, and Claude Cowork. We will provide an update as soon as possible. Sep 29, 2026 - 14:30 UTC Update - We are investigating elevated error rates affecting Claude.ai (including the desktop and mobile apps), Claude Code and Claude Cowork. Some requests to the Claude API are also returning errors. We will provide an update as soon as possible. Sep 29, 2026 - 14:28 UTC Investigating - We are investigating elevated error rates affecting Claude.ai (including the desktop and mobile apps), Claude Code and Claude Cowork. Users may see failed requests, errors loading or sending conversations, or be asked to sign in again; retrying may succeed. We will provide an update as soon as possible. Sep 29, 2026 - 14:21 UTC

Posted 1 minute ago. Sep 29, 2026 - 14:30 UTC Update We are investigating elevated error rates ... We will provide an update as soon as possible.

Posted 2 minutes ago. Sep 29, 2026 - 14:28 UTC Investigating We are investigating elevated error rates affecting Claude.ai ... We will provide an update as soon as possible."

just a hunch, but i think they might just provide an update as soon as possible.