Wowfunhappy

> They have made a pragmatic decision already to cut loose a whole swathe of users so they can pursue areas higher up the value chain. that was essentially the original decision they made when they went after software engineering instead of general users.

...I don't think I agree that this happened. Claude Cowork exists, as does Claude Design.

My read of Anthropic's strategy is to focus on coding as a means of achieving capability in other domains, via writing code. I would say that's paying off: see Claude Opus 5.5 creating a music video, via building animations in Javascript. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CS8ro03rJOM

By writing bits of code, Claude can organize your calendar, create vector graphics, organize your tasks, and so on.

If what you mean is that newer Claude models are worse at creative writing—okay, but to what extent were LLMs ever seriously useful for this, beyond generating slop no one actually wants to read? Opus 3 is still available in claude.ai if you want to use it.

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Now, separately, I do think that Anthropic is internally obsessed with "existential risk", to the point where they will cut off users. I do think this is genuine based on everything we've heard from Anthropic employees.

And of course, this safety culture likely persists in part because it's also useful to the company's overall strategy, in the same way Apple's focus on user privacy, while likely genuine, conveniently lets them maintain control of the App Store.

Right, but that means there must be some PCs that take > 8 seconds. Has... anyone ever seen one? In the past two decades? (I'm time bounding the question only because I know nascent PCs did lots of weird stuff.)

It's not like there are that many PC SKUs out there (or motherboard SKUs for custom stuff). And even if there are two weird models, how useful is only that data?

But that doesn't explain where the dumps are coming from.

> What further complicates matters is that Chen details how the kernel dumps created after pressing the power button for 8 seconds do, in fact, get sent to Microsoft once the computer turns on again. In fact, he is one of the people who gets to see these dumps and respond to them, so obviously they are indeed rolling in.

Appropriately for halloween, this seems somewhat spooky.

Yes, the article mentions this:

> This glaze is used on jelly beans, Milk Duds, Junior Mints, Whoppers, Lemonheads, and Sugar Babies, to name a few.

I think you're seriously underestimating how expensive software decoding AV1 is!

I'm not even entirely sure whether a NUC could decode 4K AV1 in software in real-time.

> but I guess because no one at Apple was willing to maintain it and it apparently is a frozen API that doesn't support newer than TLS 1.2 (!)

Well yeah, so not really curl's fault here.

More importantly, IIRC Apple's curl actually stopped using SecureTransport before upstream dropped it.

> CLI tools are not to be feared or considered somehow hacky.

I agree, you're on a *nix OS, calling a CLI tool should be a perfectly valid way to do something.

IMO the real issue is that Apple's built-in CLI tools aren't properly integrated with the rest of the system. Apple's curl used to use the same certificate store as the rest of the OS, then Apple changed it.

No. But I'd certainly put in the cost of a router.

I don't think the limit changed per se, but Opus 5.5 consumes a lot less usage than 5.0 did, so it goes further.

> PDFs are executables, that's why it's hard. They support running code

I don't think Apple's PDF renderer supports e.g. running JS, you'd need real Acrobat for that. Or are you talking about something else?

> they support decoding images which themselves have their own custom compressors that are also basically code themselves.

But this is fundamentally true for anything that displays images, right? Or are the PDF formats particularly bad for some reason?

Is this not your work? If it's not yours, you should email the mods (footer contact link) so they can remove Show HN from the title. This is a great submission, just not a Show HN.

One thing that occurs to me is this project is a way to get a fully jailbroken iOS. You can tweak the kernel and go nuts. Can't do that on an iPhone.

Apple's own design guidelines originally said not to do the thing they did (and which they are now once again saying not to do).

Couldn't Apple have just, like, talked to the people who originally wrote the guidelines? Why do they need to re-invent the wheel? Will Apple forget again in another 15 years and need to re-run the experiment, taking us all along as test subjects?

I can see how peas might solve the first and last problems on your list, but wouldn't the others remain?

> There is no form of surveillance that does more good than harm in the long run.

...how far do you take this maxim? Should we have any police on the street to enforce speed limits, since they're surveilling the speed of drivers?

Seems like a good time to get a third Claude to hear the cases of the first two Claudes and break the tie.

Again, this is really not the point I'm trying to make! If your prediction is that we'd end up in some apocalyptic dystopia, I'll concede the possibility.

But there still wouldn't be any jobs cleaning toilets, because the people who still had toilets to clean would have robots to do it.

That's not really the point I'm trying to make.

In the future, do bathrooms need to be cleaned? If yes, is it cheaper for that to be done by a person or by a robot?

Obviously, it is in the interest of the robot manufacturers to make the robot just a tiny bit cheaper than the person, so you'll buy the robot and the company makes the maximum amount of profit.

Now, if society breaks down and there's no one to consider buying the robot—well, that's not good for anybody, which is why I suspect society will find some way of working this out even if it's not ideal. But whatever, I don't particularly want to argue this point.

What I do want to argue is that there probably isn't a universe in which all white collar work goes away but blue collar work is still around.

Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that AI truly is able to automate away basically all software development. Any oversight currently performed by humans can itself be done by agents.

...don't you think the ability to create virtually unlimited amounts of software, at virtually no cost, is going to lead to major advances in robotics? I realize there's a lot of very hard problems involved in e.g. robotic hands (to take one example), but once software development is practically free, I'd expect a lot of seemingly-impossible problems to get resolved by the sheer quantity of what we can create and experiment with.

It's far from the only annoying false positive.

Here's a real world case I've run into a bunch of times. Parents send children to school with Airtags in their backpacks. (The children are young and don't themselves have phones.) Class goes on a field trip. Boom, tons of notifications.

If I had a pseudo random number generator that somehow kept outputting winning lottery numbers a reasonable percentage of the time, I would use it to enter the lottery. Even if it seemed completely impossible and despite studying the algorithm, I did not understand how it worked—I would still use it.

That's basically how I feel about LLMs right now. I have no idea how any of this is possible but somehow it seems to be working.

...if you are told in writing (say over email) to ignore a part of the contract, can you do that? Does that part no longer apply?

I don't understand how you're getting from "open weight model providers are forced to compete on price" → "nVidia is forced to compete on price".

Yes nVidia is not the only game in town, but that's no more or less true regardless of whether there are a bunch of competing providers.

> If it becomes a commodity business with frontier open models, NVIDIA won't be able to get away with such a crazy markup.

Of course they would. You need hardware to run the model. nVidia sets the floor.

This was great, but honestly, I would have enjoyed a non-joke take on this. Like, but with a cinematic story around it.

Right, and I'm coming to the point where I think the AI companies might be correct! But under that scenario, I'm not really sure what career advice to give anyone about anything. Unless maybe you're interested in becoming a plumber, and even that might not save you.

No matter what happens, I think there will be as much demand for programmers as anything else.

Well that's why I said I think there's two possible outcomes. If the AI is so good that you don't need to think about the code or architecture at all (which isn't quite the same thing as whether you looked at the code or not) I think most work goes away in general. In this case there may be less demand for software because there will be little to use software for in the first place.

> The hiring for those roles might be closer to "knows our domain well" than "knows the tech stack"

This does seem likely to me, no matter what. But:

> Will software developers be the ones making it, or will it be the experts in the relevant domain?

In World #1, I imagine there will be someone whose job it is to produce the software, yes, and they'll probably do a much better job if they have a strong conception of how software and computers work.

I really have trouble imagining a world in which a drastic decrease in the cost of software development doesn't lead to a drastic increase in demand for custom software.

I remember when I worked at a design agency, we spent so much time trying to select project management software, but nothing ever really fit our specific needs. We never considered trying to get something custom made, because a decade ago, that just would have been totally nuts for a 20 person company. Nowadays I absolutely think we would have just made something in house.

I was a teacher at a K-12 school last year. The admin team was trying to find some good curriculum mapping software--software that lets you see what kids are learning across different grades and subjects, at different levels of granularity as needed. The standard solutions for this all suck. The admin eventually decided to just create something custom, using AI.

I suspect that every company is going to want bespoke systems which are perfectly tuned to their needs, once it becomes financially viable to do so.

I really think there are two possibilities here.

Either we'll still need humans with an understanding of the code to oversee the agents and guide the overall architecture

or

Agents will be able to do the oversight as well, and humans will truly need to do almost nothing. But if LLMs are capable of that, they will also be capable of virtually any other job, and the entire way we think about the economy and work is going to fundamentally change.

I don't really see a middle ground where AIs can take over every aspect of software development but not other fields. Maybe blue collar work will remain, assuming the ability to create virtually infinite amounts of software doesn't lead to major advances in robotics. Either way, there is no reason for software engineers to be uniquely worried, at least over the long term.