Claude says my token spend is $15k per week. I’m being charged $50.
They can only do that because of circular finance deals and other fraud. Those deals are also the reason a machine that’d run ~ Claude Opus 4.6 locally costs $5000 instead of the original $1400 MSRP.
For antitrust purposes below-cost pricing is not expressly illegal. It is only illegal if there is a “dangerous probability” that the firm in question will be able to recoup its losses after eliminating its competitors by taking away all their demand and then jacking up prices when they’re the only game in town. In the case of your Claude tokens, even if they’re being sold below cost, they’re being sold for more than anyone else is selling tokens. So it’s hard to argue that they’re going to drive everyone else out of the market with their pricing.
> It is only illegal if there is a “dangerous probability” that the firm in question will be able to recoup its losses after eliminating its competitors by taking away all their demand and then jacking up prices when they’re the only game in town.
Aren't the competitors in this instance the workers?
Not really, no. Anthropic sells tokens, not services. It's up to the user to turn those tokens into something useful.
There are also non-price reasons to switch from human labor to agentic labor. No sick days, no recruiting costs, no moral foibles, etc. It's like arguing that Ford competes with Uber - both are ultimately selling you a way to get from A to B, but they are doing it in radically different ways.
The law doesn't matter, it was not made for this. Let a judge make their own interpretation. If you talk about level playing fields, then you should act like it. Not allow VCs to make piles of money to put everybody else out of business.
> The law doesn't matter, it was not made for this.
Not sure I'm following. This appears to be a conversation about how the law applies to the situation.
> If this is not unfair competition, then what is?
Again, "unfair competition" has a specific legal definition. If you don't care about the specifics of the law, and are just expressing your own normative opinions about how you'd prefer for certain things to play out, what is the purpose of attempting to express those opinions using specific, already existing legal terminology?
Judges are supposed to make their interpretation on the law. The law wasn't made for this? Then you better pass something that is. The alternative is to abandon the rule of law. "Just once, just for this urgent problem" rarely remains confined just to this problem. Keep the rule of law; pass a new one if you need to.
> The problem with this approach is that the law will always be lagging behind. It is not fair to change the rules during the game.
Why is that a problem? Why would we want prescriptive rules to be formulated in advance of the reality to which they're meant to apply being fully understood?
> Therefore, the only solution is to ensure people act according to the spirit of the law, not the actual law.
Which is something our actual legal system already does fairly well, precisly because it doesn't overemphasise technical, instrumental details, and applies broad rules to intentional conduct in an often form-agnostic way. For example, anti-trust laws about collusion and price fixing wouldn't care about what specific communications medium was used to coordinate collusion, apart from validating the evidence that there was indeed collusion.
In this case, I think the mistake you're making is in thinking that restrictions on the introduction of new technologies based on the long-term effect they might have on demand for particular services in the overall economy is something that is within the spirit of the existing law. It isn't. It never has been.
People have certainly worried about how new technologies would impact people's earning power over time, dating back centuries to at least the era of steam engines and railroads, but that's never translated into any legal framework allowing for restraining the development of new technologies. Anti-trust law has nothing to do with it, and the spirit of the law behind it has always been aimed at protecting consumers against market manipulation, not protecting employees against reduced demand for their services.
Judges making their own interpretation is the entire problem with anti-trust law.
The law is very explicit: no mergers or acquisitions where the "effect may be substantially to lessen competition". Not "will" lessen competition, "may" lessen competition.
The law as written should prevent basically any merger between large competitors. Judges have watered that down with bullshit about customer harm that appears nowhere in the law.
Their margins are 90-95%. If I have a gym that charges $50 for an hour pass, but $100 for a month "subscription", would you feel the same way, that you got $36k of value?
That percentage is speculative for now, we don’t actually know their margin. What we know is that Anthropic said publicly they have 80% gross margin IFF they use their own adjusted EBIDTA metric, which ignores revenue sharing, training costs, and stock based compensation
We've all been raised in a world where we got to practice the 'art' of programming, and get paid extraordinarily well to do so, because the output of that art was useful for businesses to make more money.
If a programmer with an exoskeleton can produce more output that makes more money for the business, they will continue to be paid well. Those who refuse the exoskeleton because they are in it for the pure art will most likely trend towards earning the types of living that artists and musicians do today. The truly extraordinary will be able to create things that the machines can't and will be in high demand, the other 99% will be pursing an art no one is interested in paying top dollar for.
You’re forgetting that the “art” part of it is writing sound, scalable, performant code that can adapt and stand the test of time. That’s certainly more valuable in the long run than banging out some dogshit spaghetti code that “gets the job done” but will lead to all kinds of issues in the future.
My 9 year old can sit down with the Replit Agent and make a simple game that entertains her for hours.
She couldn't make a business application and go out and start selling subscriptions, but there are whole categories of tools that can be created that are ultra simple CRUD apps that bring specific value to one person. Code quality and/or understanding how it works is irrelevant for that use case.
How much is this saying when just a couple decades ago a 9 year old could imagine that a broomstick was a sword and that they were fighting knights on the battlefield?
A child can fill in tons of gaps with their animation (see: Rugrats). We're talking about "is AI good enough to enable a 100% non-technical user able to create software on the fly without the non-technical user losing patience?" This is the discussion.
There isn't a return for shareholders if the valuations are lower. The problem is not management holding the business hostage today, the problem was investing at unsustainable multiples a few years ago.
Now the only options are to either cash out at a lower valuation and not make any money, or wait and hope the business grows to the point where you can get a higher total valuation despite the lower multiple and see a return on your capital.
We have been running PlanetScale as our production database for about 6 months, migrated from Aurora Serverless. I love it, their query insights tool has been a game changer for us and has allowed us to optimize a ton of queries in our application. Their support is always available and highly technical.
For a sense of scale, we have ~150gb of data running around 5 trillion row reads + 500 million row writes per month
From what I understand your webserver and php implementation is stored on different servers from PlanetScale's DBs(?)
Just wonder: How are the DB queries from your php implementation to the Planetscale DBs affected by network latency (hops and length between servers) as well as bandwidth (query results returned by PlanetScale DBs)?
We moved from Aurora Serverless v1 to PlanetScale a couple months ago and love it so far. Tools like this are super helpful for someone like me who is a full stack developer with limited DB expertise to keep our platform running smoothly.
Their team is awesome, I requested a couple features in the CLI and they were there within a few hours. Support is responsive and the sales team was super helpful getting everything running and migrated.
PropFuel | Full Stack Software Engineer | Full Time | Remote USA
PropFuel, a Member Engagement platform for professional and trade associations, is looking to hire a software engineer with experience in PHP (Laravel) and Vue.js.
You will be working on a platform that sends 1m+ emails per month and we are looking to add SMS and on-website product lines this year. I am the technical co-founder and you would be working alongside me as the first dev hire as we build out the team. We just raised a round, currently have 9 employees, are about to hit 1m ARR.
I don't think "real" engineering is necessarily any better at estimating. Take a look at any large construction project and the norm is to be over time and over budget.
There are lots of reasons for that, which can fall outside of the scope of engineering, but the same is true for software.
I want to second this, I worked as a mechanical engineer and never had accurate time estimates there either. Estimates of how long the work will take will be wrong whenever there are new problems to be solved, which is all engineering worth the name.
