Every time I read these titles, I wonder if people are for some reason pushing the narrative that Claude is way smarter than it really is, or if I'm using it wrong.
They want me to code AI-first, and the amount of hallucinations and weird bugs and inconsistencies that Claude produces is massive.
Lots of code that it pushes would NOT have passed a human/human code review 6 months ago.
Apart from obvious PR (if you would need to lean into AI wave a bit this of all places is it) and fanboyism which is just part of human nature, why can't both be true?
It can properly excel in some things while being less than helpful in others. These are computers from the beginning, 1000x rehashed and now with an extra twist.
It's always the inconsistencies which amaze me, from the article:
> I have so many bugs in the Linux kernel that I can’t report because I haven’t validated them yet
You have "so many?" Are they uncountable for some reason? You "haven't validated" them? How long does that take?
> found a total of five Linux vulnerabilities
And how much did it cost you in compute time to find those 5?
These articles are always fantastically light on the details which would make their case for them. Instead it's always breathless prognostication. I'm deeply suspicious of this.
>And how much did it cost you in compute time to find those 5?
This is the last thing I'd worry about if the bug is serious in any way. You have attackers like nation states that will have huge budgets to rip your software apart with AI and exploit your users.
Also there have been a number of detailed articles about AI security findings recently.
Yeah, this was one of my first thoughts too. It’s impossible to know but I wonder how many of these “unknown exploits” have been in use by government agencies for years already. Or decades, apparently.
You are suspicious because you probably haven't worked anywhere that's AI-first. Anyone that's worked at a modern tech company will find this absolutely believable.
Like what, you expect Nicholas to test each vuln when he has more important work to do (ie his actual job?)
Not OC, but I tried OpenCode with Gemini, Claude and Kimi, and all of them were completely unable to solve any non-trivial problems which are not easily solved with some existing algorithm.
I understand how people use those tools if all they do is build CRUD endpoints and UIs for those endpoints (which is admittedly what most programmers probably do for their job). But for anything that requires any sort of problem solving skills, I don't understand how people use them. I feel like I live in a completely different world from some of the people who push agentic coding.
I don't get the outrage. Our system needs incentives to get people to do great work. If you do one-of-a-kind work, shouldn't you get rewarded proportionally?
There is 1 Amazon. It's not easy to create Amazon from scratch.
Who should decide what's proportional, though? Should there be a committee that says, Bezos is capped at X billions, and any money he makes after that gets confiscated?
Taxes are not a punishment, a person earning exponentially more than the average person can also afford to pay more taxes, and it will not even begin to affect their quality of life. How is that so hard to understand?
If you don't want to pay taxes i take it you don't want to live in a civilized society, then you are welcome to leave.
I don't know, but societies seem to determine these kinds of things just fine through democratic processes, usually - why is the tax system where I live structured such that everything below 100k is taxed at 40% but everything above is at 60%? How is that any different? These are just numbers we came up with.
And yeah, I don't have the answer to what the number is for people like Bezos. Maybe there isn't one - maybe he can own whatever amount of money he likes, but every person with wealth above 1BN is banned forever for making politican donations, either personally or through proxies. Enjoy your life with your hard earned money, do whatever you like - but don't use it to influence politics.
Again, I'm not seriously suggesting this - just saying that as societies we determine many things which are right for the greater whole already, why not this? And I really want the answer to be "because we haven't sat down to think about it yet" and not "because Mr Bezos gave us 100M last year for our campaign we so won't be looking into it".
Sure, so influencing politics with money should be outlawed (or perhaps it is already..?). Why not.
That's not the type of conversations I hear, though (including from you). People always seem to focus on punishing people that are more successful. And that can only happen by force, where somebody has to decide what you can and cannot do and then steal whatever you lawfully earned.
What is proportional? Shall we crown him god? Allow him to keep slaves? Put him on a pedestal? Do you even know how much is it: a billion? If you strip him off 95% of his wealth, he’ll still have more than you can achieve in your 10 lives. He is disproportionately well compensated.
How much he worked has nothing to do with what he is earning - there are people working three jobs out there who barely make ends meet. The page illustrates the absurd level of inequality our society has reached, a level that pure numbers are useless at illutrating.
Sure, but let me ask you this - do you think there should be any limit to how much wealth can one person own? Like, to take it to the extreme - say Bezos owned every single media corporation, evey factory and every farm in the US, buying it with his "hard earned" money - would that be fine? Like, he started one of the world's largest companies, why shouldn't be allowed to own everything, right? What if he(completely legally) starts giving hundreds of millions of dollars to politicans so they just start doing what he wants instead of what their constituents want? Is that ok too?
I think we can both agree that hard work and one of a kind achievement like this should be rewarded. But I suspect we will disagree on whether the reward should have a limit or not. I don't want Bezos to give up his wealth and live on 50k/year. But I don't want him to be so wealthy he can influence politics both home and abroad.
No, there shouldn't be a limit. If there's a limit it means that somebody needs to decide what limit that is, and steal whatever is over the limit by force. I'm for freedom.
Should he be able to won every single media corporation? He shouldn't and he can't, because there are laws to protect against monopolies. Same thing for factories and farms.
Should he control politicians? No, but in theory people still control politicians since they can vote them out. If there's a problem where politicians are willing to get bribed, perhaps the solution would be to impose more transparency and harsher penalties for that.
>> If there's a problem where politicians are willing to get bribed
The problem is that bribery is completely legal in the United States, donating money to a PAC is completely legal and without a limit. I'm not talking about money under the table in a suitcase kind of thing - I'm talking about the situations like recent OpenAI donation of $25M to Trump's PAC - do you think after such donation he is more likely to do what OpenAI wants, or what his voters want? It's not even about Trump specifically - the entire American system is structured in such a way that this is allowed, billionaries from both sides donate to politicians to help them win and achieve their goals, this is the real power of the money they make and this is the problem I have with it.
>> I'm for freedom.
Someone already decides that you pay taxes on the money you make, and presumably will come and take it from you by force if you don't pay - the only difference is the percentage value. Or are you commenting from somewhere that doesn't have a functional tax system?
The answer is simple: By definition only about 100-300 people.
There's only 100 of the "worlds biggest companies" (assuming this refers to the top 100). And companies are usually started by 1-3 people.
Similarly: There's usually only 4 participants in the top 4 of a tournament bracket.
(The question is a bit: what does "can" even mean in this context and the answer im hinting at here: It's not individual skill that creates companies ex-nihilo. It's our economic system that produces companies.)
What exactly did he risk that justifies this reward?
> and worked hard
How hard exactly? How much harder than a doctor, firefighter, waiter, or just your average joe could he possibly have worked to justify earning a million times more.
> to start one of the world's biggest companies, he shouldn't be rewarded for that?
No, he really, really shouldn't. Not that much, not even remotely that much.
> I really don't get it.
It is absolute poison for society, for the whole of humanity, that a single person can own that much, hold that much power, with zero accountability.
He didn't "risk it all." He was never going to end up on the street in a tent if Amazon failed.
And a lot of what he did risk was other people's money.
Which is how Amazon works anyway. Everyone who relies on Amazon - the authors, the drop shippers, the small traders, the warehouse staff, the drivers, the white collar employees - can be rug-pulled at any moment for any random reason.
And Amazon lives off indirect government welfare. Pay at the low end is so miserly nearly a quarter of employees rely on SNAP.
Sure, all entrepreneurs risk it all. They quit their job to pursue something that can fail and make them bankrupt.
Was he lucky? He had an intuition that books could be sold on the internet because you don't need to test them out before buying. Luck might have been part of it, but I hadn't thought of that in 1990-something, I was playing AOE II all day instead.
Let us ignore the specific case of Jeff Bezos and Amazon, let us look at a generic founder starting a company that turns into a billion or trillion dollar company making the founder a billionaire.
The founder founded the company but the billions were earned by the thousands of employees working for the company. The founder alone would not have earned a single dollar without the employees and there would not be a company the be employed by without the founder.
If you start a business, you create a company to isolate the business risk from your personal risk, if the business does not work out, the company goes down, the founder should be fine. You will probably risk some of your personal money as a founder in many cases, but how much of a reward do you want for that? If you risk a million and make a billion, is that not more than enough? Did you really start a business where you expected to fail with more than ninety-nine point nine percent?
On the other hand, even if the founder would not get an oversized portion of the profit, because that money would get distributed to many employees or many sold products, the effect is relatively small, it would neither make all employees earn millions nor the product significantly cheaper. Bushiness owners making billions is just being in a position where you can take a little money from very many others and that adds up.
Also founders getting rich is capitalism not working as intended. The point of an economy is to provide goods and services that people want as efficiently as possible. Business making a lot of profit means that things are not as cheap as they could be and competition is supposed to correct that. Making a profit is a mean to an end, an incentive for the creation of businesses to satisfy demands, it is not the end itself.
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