Eridrus

Not keen on outing myself by providing evidence, but I think we do generate more revenue by using AI. We launched new products with a small team and also optimized our outcome-pricing based product using AI several times. We also reduced costs by self-hosting more software.

But we're a tiny baby startup, so things like "spin up a new product with 1 engineer and get to $1m in revenue on it" or "reduce our IaaS bill by 300k/yr" is a meaningful contribution for us.

We're also building new AI-enabled software that was not possible before.

The big breakout hits have been AI Infra, but that makes sense from a technological perspective, Cisco made a lot of money well before Google did, but Cisco is not where the money concentrated in the end.

We don't really know what the equivalent of Google as an application business will be in the AI era, but there's a pretty big chance it's not actual Google. But Google still has to do it's best to hold on.

I think this is all fair, but somewhat just semantics.

Most engineers are working in "normal" engineering orgs, but can feel the ground underneath them shifting, and companies believe that if they are caught flat footed, they will be out competed in the marketplace, so they are all trying to make sure they are adopting it at least in a way that lets them keep pace if not accelerate revenue.

If you are not impacted by economic incentives, you can continue to not care about this transitional state, but most people do.

This has been the standard for a while now.

Kimi/GLM/etc basically all have this. They're not doing this out of the kindness of their own hearts.

I think it was obvious that more programmers would be necessary, but if you look at BLS forecasts from 1985, they expected +~250k programmers/computer analysts each over 10 years, which is basically what happened. Secretarial employment was 3m at the time and predicted to stay basically flat, which is basically what happened.

Typists and data entry work cratered, but overall admin support actually went up.

There are hundreds of millions of workers in the US, and about 5 million computing professionals right now. There are 3.5m workers in admin assistant roles.

The growth in computing employment is totally overshadowed by parts of the workforce. BLS' "Management, business and finance" grouping grew by 19m since the early 80s.

Nobody knows what the equivalent to this is going to be until the economy starts reorganizing itself.

> In past technological revolutions, it really wasn't that hard to see where the new jobs would come from.

I think this is an extremely pollyannaish view of how technological revolutions have happened. In fact, it is always the exact opposite, people always fail to predict where new jobs would come from.

Whether this idea is economically largely depends on how much utilization you can get and how much you can get GPUs for.

I feel like my takeaway here is that things that are not connecting software written by a wide group of people should not rely on the root CAs.

We often use TLS to connect software run by the same organization because it is convenient, but why are we giving random CAs the ability to issue certs for these cases?

Ok, but why were all these higher level services that are not zonal experiencing issues then?

Truly, the wilderness was the best part of the game.

I remember grinding away to a set of black armor, going right to the wilderness and getting immediately crushed and losing it immediately lol.

The "Doorman fallacy" is an argument that replacing them is impossible because of all the other things they do. The fact that the other things are not as valuable indicates that while they do a bunch of other things, the main thing is the main value they provide in most cases.

There will be cases where they stick around (luxury hotels, etc) where the ancillary benefits are the point, but there are many cases where the primary task is the economically valuable thing.

I am breezing past it because it is wrong. You can observe this by the fact that most buildings do not have them. They are, at this point, an NYC luxury oddity.

I live in an apartment without one and I would not pay $150/month for a dedicated doorman so that delivery people have an easier time with the intercom.

And honestly, you are undercounting the cost, you can't get away with 3 doormen for 24/7 coverage and the salary is not the all in cost. It's probably closer the $300/month for 145 apartments.

If you're already paying $10k/month for an apartment, sure, you don't care about the cost and are happy with the fringe benefits. This doesn't change the fact that the vast majority of people have an intercom because the main function is solved.

Yes, yes, yes, people say all this. And yet, doormen in apartment buildings are a dying breed because their main function has been replaced.

A substantial amount of NYC apartment buildings still have doormen, people claim to like it. I do not place enough value on a doorman that I would want to live in one where I need to pay for what can be done by an intercom.

Which is to say, it is sometimes a fallacy, but often, it is not. We have far more intercoms and automatic door openers than doormen.

I think the simple argument here is that the ad ecosystem should be rebuilt on the default assumption being that ad creatives should be an image and a link with no support for arbitrary rich content.

It would break the long tail of the ad ecosystem, but a bunch of people think the tradeoff is fine.

Given how much of online advertising is now in walled gardens rather than display ads, I think this shows this is more doable than the people who are part of the open ecosystem want it to be.

I don't even know if they were impacted at this point tbh.

I obviously deeply regret not getting a second opinion.

I went to a dentist 10 years ago because I had some pain eating candy, they told me I needed to get my wisdom teeth removed because there was a cavity forming from where the teeth were impacting..

I went to a surgeon and got them removed, due to which I developed a sinus infection that needed to be scraped out surgically under general anesthesia, after all that I went back to the original dentist and when they looked, they didn't see anything there...

I definitely wish I'd gotten a second opinion and saved myself a lot of pain and money.

Yeah, people are massively overreacting.

Single player PC games are a small fraction of the market these days, and once people have a job, they are generally happy to pay for the things they like.

I think the "clean room" Photoshop example is much more interesting because Photoshop is far more expensive and Adobe has a semi-antagonistic relationship with creatives.

Absolutely, Google lived in fear of that and so we basically needed someone with nothing to lose to break us out of that fear of the media.

I have no idea if this person brought 500k of incremental value to the org, they could have been actively destructive, but they certainly have enough leverage to easily pay for themselves many times over.

Often in nonprofits, the person in charge is mostly an exceptional fundraiser and so their contributions are easily visible in that realm. The corollary to that is they are often a bad manager of the org.

500k to the CEO of an organization bringing in $25m/yr in revenue isn't that crazy.

In hindsight, it doesn't look like they did a great job running it, but the comp package doesn't seem crazy at that scale.

If your event has historically gotten a lot of last minute (e.g. a month before the event) sign ups, your error bars for turnout are going to be really large until then.

Presumably when that happens you don't immediately cancel, but rather try some last ditch efforts with sponsors, and then you wind up 2 weeks out in a shitty situation.

You would need 864 pushes per merge for the Anthropic version to be operating at a higher scale.

Anyway, Anthropic seems able to do exactly one thing well: train a frontier model. Their other software seems like garbage. OpenAI seems to be following a similar trend lately too.

This is just not true.

Everyone who had stock (including common stock) at character.ai was bought out at the $2.6bn price: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/google-hires-charact...

The buyout included guaranteed payouts for people who had unvested stock for 2 years post-acquisition.

These transactions are opaque and confusing, but employees are generally not being fucked over here.

Cursor's blog on scaling Git makes me think that Anthropic just likes reinventing the wheel with their infinite token capacity: https://cursor.com/blog/git-at-any-scale

Cursor scaled git to way more writes/s than Anthropic did with their rewrite.

This is not true.

Assuming you're talking about the Trados Inc litigation, the situation was:

* Raised 52m

* Acquired for 52m

* 8m paid to exec team to stay in place

* Common stock got zero

The lawsuit determined that the board did have a fiduciary duty to the common stock, but that the common stock had no economic value, so they were not actually being harmed here, aka this is basically the best deal the company could have gotten, but it didn't clear the pref stack.

In the Groq/Character deals, they very obviously cleared the pref stack, so common stock deserves to get a piece of the licensing deal at the rate of the stock they held. It's annoying because its a dividend and doesn't benefit from QSBS, etc, but common stock is getting paid there.

Yes and no.

Google did a very good job on things that required longer research times and compute scale, note that Transformers, BERT & Scaling Laws came out of Google (though the latter were also worked on at OpenAI).

Conversely, Google is horrible at product, and without OpenAI, it probably would have taken many years longer to take off. I know this because Google had demos of this internally, but absolutely no stomach to release it, and they didn't believe in the API use case at all.

Which is to say, I think if Google was smaller, we probably would have gotten more SaaS, not more breakthrough research.

They haven't solved management and definitely don't keep things "on track" globally. However, they definitely don't have the problem that nobody does anything and nobody has any expertise.

It's also worth noting, Gemini 3.5 Pro never came out.

Having worked there (but only in a small part of it that eventually got absorbed into Gemini), it's some combination of:

* The eye of Sauron (management) can make specific spots (e.g. Gemini) push harder (and attract the motivated people at the company and be selective)

* They hire a lot better than average (Generally from the top 10%, hotter places in Google are more selective)

* They have a promo process that gives career motivated people a way to prove themselves (not always aligned with things being on the right track ofc, and not always non-political, but they definitely do something)

* Redundancy in teams causes them to compete (not necessarily productively)

Of course, there are other downsides not listed here (insane bureaucracy for launches, GDPR/BCID compliance, etc, etc), but a lot of what makes Google possible is the insane amounts of cash Search throws off.

They were likely paid out at the same time other investors were when Noam et al went to Google.

The fact that the legal entity has no money doesn't mean they didn't get paid.

You can figure out a bit about what likely happened by what is not happening. NVIDIA/Groq are being sued for leaving former employees out of the acquisition: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/10/05/nvidia-groq-deal-stockholder...

Which to me implies that in that case, at least current employees were taken care of, and the court will likely force the former employees to also be taken care of because Delaware law doesn't like it when you discriminate in ways that were not spelled out ahead of time.

> It sucks for the people left over

Not clear that this is true financially. Of course, it sucks to be at a sinking ship, but in most of these the people left behind are compensated as both employees and shareholders.

I feel like these things get waved around as gotchas without any sense for whether any real code is impacted.

It will be interesting to see if fixing this bug actually causes any crates to not compile.