Lobbying is literally half of what representative democracy is. First, you elect representatives to office. Then, you try to get them to do what you want. The latter is lobbying.

Of course, when money becomes a significant portion of how the second one happens, things can get complicated.

I’m not so sure. First the representatives are selected to be elected.

A significant portion of both of your suggested halves are “complicated” by money.

You could break it down further if you like, yes.

Everything is complicated by money. I wish we were better about shielding politics from money. So much about society in general is about money, it ain’t easy.

It's not democracy when it's not the votes that determine what government does, but money.

Eventually it is the fault of voters to keep voting for the same people.

It's not democracy if one with the most money gets their way.

Well, money makes it a lot easier to get a message out to voters, and in a democracy voters are the ones ultimately in charge.

So in a democratic society where free speech exists there's only so much you can do to prevent that.

Isn't this post an announcement of time-based billing? Just in a kind of indirect way (not billing, rather than billing).

Also, my (extremely naive) understanding is that at the cutting edge, hardware is diverging for training vs inference. That might not be true for Anthropic though.

While it may not have “agency” it definitely doesn’t necessarily do what you tell it. I’d put it as “it may do what you let it.”

I really am quite in awe of Claude Code recently, so definitely not a naysayer, but this is a really important point. It’s so easy to create code, but am I shipping that much to prod than I used to? A bit.

Obviously this highly depends on your company and your setup and risk tolerance and what not.

I mean, Brooks' Mythical Man-Month says this explicitly: adding more programmers makes projects later because of coordination costs, which we haven't figured out (coordination isn't parallelization between agents, it's "oh we discovered this problem; we need to go back to design" and so on).

I’m a heavy user for about four months now, and it’s definitely getting better for me. How would you say it’s getting worse?

> They literally don’t have the cash to do it.

I don’t understand this? Amazon is a profitable company, on the scale of tens of billions of dollars per quarter. They very literally do have the cash.

Am I missing some subtlety in their financial reporting?

They have 86.8 B cash but are going to spend 200 B this year.

What is that spend compared against though? They already spend hundreds of billions of on various things in a year, but what is the marginal spend?

When you present these numbers alongside each other, you imply that they will go from making ~$20b/quarter to losing ~$30b/quarter, which is not plausible to me.

You can have a profitable business but be cash flow negative. Similar to how someone can have assets but have no cash.

Yes 100B in capex is unprecedented for Amazon (let alone 200). Last time they peaked Capex was at ~60B in 2021 when they decided to double their supply chain network.

So the marginal capex on gpus is likely 70-80% of their total capex

Yeah, a quick Google tells me that Amazon is holding 123 Billion in cash and marketable securities

Is this how comping actually works? I’ve never worked in a restaurant, but I assumed there was some system for it (if sometimes ill-defined) and not just employees stealing.

Thanks for this link. I’ve failed to find specifics on this for a while but this is pretty good, particularly the example about which lane to choose when cones are set up.

I think he would too, but they’re obviously not going to do that.

"OpenAI is exploring licensing models tied to customer outcomes, including pharma partnerships." [1]

"OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar sketched a future in which the company's business models evolve beyond subscriptions and could include royalty streams tied to customer results." [1]

"Speaking on a recent podcast, Friar floated the possibility of "licensing models" in which OpenAI would get paid when a customer's AI-enabled work produces measurable outcomes." [1]

$30 a month or whatever amount of $$ per token does not justify the valuation of these companies. But you know what does? 5% of revenue from your software that their AI helped you to create. I can see world in which you must state you've used their AI to write code and you must use specific licenses to that code, which allows them part of your revenue.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/openai-cfo-sarah-friar-futur...

This won’t happen with general software though, that ship has sailed, the space is too competitive.

I hope they try.

The top of the readme links to the accompanying paper, which explains very clearly why you would care: https://badrish.net/papers/bftree-vldb2024.pdf

I admit I’ll agree that that extra hop was a little confusing to me though. I guess people just like GitHub and don’t like PDFs.

That's on me, I thought it would receive the attention it deserves if people jump straight into the code (and see the "written in Rust btw").