If I were Anthropic, I'd consider removing the official extension until Cursor get their act together and fix the problem that resulted in brand-damaging headlines for Anthropic.
I don't buy their explaining away the effects of COVID by excluding 2020-2021. It was incredibly difficult to access routine medical care (especially colonoscopies!) during COVID. A post-COVID bump should be expected in the 1-2 years after normalization of medical care, when many people had previously skipped screenings. Let's see if the rise continues in 2024+ before drawing any conclusions.
(It doesn’t change your point, but amusingly) I’m 97% sure I caught my first COVID infection from… the admin/consenting clinic visit prior to a colonoscopy. :)
I'd expect increased colon cancer rates due to COVID for the rest of the 2020s, simply because screening is usually every 5-10 years and people probably just skipped their 2020-2022 appointment, giving more time for cancers to grow undetected. It's sorta like how measles is now epidemic because so many parents skipped their vaccinations from 2020-2022. It takes years for public health consequences of interruptions in medical care to show up.
This whole "but government is inefficient" argument has never convinced me. Our local electric provider has as bad or worse bureaucracy and ever-increasing rates. Bureaucracy is just a symptom of aging human systems, and it can be fixed. Monopolies that serve the public good should never been profit driven, full stop.
One of the great acts of human creativity has been to convince the masses that if you install a bunch of middlemen who are looking to profit, goods and services will be cheaper and better.
I think part of the success of this message is that it’s so obviously silly that people feel silly questioning it.
if you factor in how private industry exploits negative externalities, the mystically infallible free market is quite bad. a great example is people saying nuclear energy doesn't make sense and never will when compared to fossil fuel burning energy production, but that's entirely ignoring the million+ people who die every year from illnesses directly attributable to pollution from fossil fuel energy. and the whole irreversibly killing the planet thing.
It might come from other factors than aging. The incentives are different and the way the structure evolve too. In public institutions, political tempo affects operations.. every new head of minister will reorganize things for a short while and then issues start showing up, until the next election. It makes people unable to care for efficiency after a while because they know how often friction will grow again.
Maybe small difference in finances too, very often public sector struggles with basic tools. I "feel" that private sector is a little more prone to renew that part (to satisfy the efficiency gods). That said it often backfires because they will also replace perfectly good tools or software to get the latest shiny.
Then there's mass.. but large private corps will have the same issues.
Bureaucracy is rarely ever fixed in those old institutions, even with changing leadership. The only common examples you see are usually a result of technical innovations that they fight against and later adopt 10+ years late, not from organizational reform.
> This whole "but government is inefficient" argument has never convinced me.
I hate this argument for a different reason. There are entire classes of problems where monetary efficiency is not the primary metrics we should optimize for, areas where things like resilience, stability, and fairness all need to come before the purely economic considerations.
Can you turn some of that into a dollar measurement? Sometimes, but not as easily as a P&L, and the P&L wins.
Exactly. I don't want my government to be efficient above all else. I want it to be over-provisioned, so when I need it, it's there. I want there to be slack in the system so that a busy day doesn't crush the service I receive. Government should not operate like a ruthlessly optimizing business.
Also this is not the sole purpose of companies.. SpaceX is a trillion dollar company with 0 profit.
The free market has created everything you use the more we turn the keys over to government's the worse things get.
Companies can't get infinite profits because they will be undercut by other companies COMPETING. The government can get infinite power and control though.. they have no competition.
To establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty.
> Also this is not the sole purpose of companies.
Friedman disagrees.
> The free market has created everything you use the more we turn the keys over to government's the worse things get.
Which is why we have never needed government regulation of things like food, air, water, shelter, work safety, accessibility, or anything else. The free market provides.
> The government can get infinite power and control though
Which is why in a free society the government is answerable to the people.
The pro free market Liberian crowd are yet to give an example of their system working.
The best government is deeply imperfect but the regulation free Libertarian paradise is probably best demonstrated by some warlord somewhere. Great for him, not for any other individual.
Maximizing value to shareholders is a literal legal obligation of public companies. A company being unprofitable today does not mean they are not seeking to be highly profitable tomorrow.
Social Market Economy offers the best blend of capitalism and public benefit. I personally want separation between the regulatory body and the servicing body to maintain effective means of redress for harms, as well as mechanisms for both competition and failure. Thanks to the Germans, we can have it both ways.
Capitalist using money to buy capital and then sell services, brilliant.
Government using money to buy capital and then provide services, deadly socialism.
It's always just been about capitalists wanting less competition. That's why they don't want the market to decide and fight for laws to literally outlaw stuff like municipal broadband. If they are so much more efficient, they should be able to offer an equal or better service for the same or better price.
They have so much accountability. Everything is in public for inspection, they're subject to elections happening whether they like it or not, they have to follow strict laws and can be sued or even imprisoned, there's oversights and review boards. Depending on the position there's even television cameras broadcasting their work live. You can just walk in and sit down on them. In the federal government everything you do becomes public property and enters the public domain immediately upon creation. There's way more accountability...
In practice what the "small government" ideology actually does is get rid of these accountability mechanisms and put scammers and corrupt people in charge instead or relabels corruption as the policy through public-private partnerships.
Not everything is up to inspection; elections are about gathering votes - not actually improving infrastructure - and conflicting interest often result in heavy and broad compromises; oversight/review boards often just do the bare minimum. Get rid of intellectual property, and everything will be public domain.
Furthermore, nothing prevents applying these oversights over public-private partnerships (which is just a fancy term for outsourcing). The government decides who gets hired and on what conditions, so it can just enforce transparency requirements.
What are you talking about? I can vote out my government leaders in a democracy. I can't vote out Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk that run their organizations autocratically.
I love Accelerationism (that's the name of the theory you're mentioning). My pet related theory is that we're essentially in an infinite time loop, witnessing our own inevitable birth (the simulation that we are) over and over again.
Why wouldn't an intelligent being also be curious, like us? I assume an AI civilization would naturally evolve with similar drives for expansion/exploration/understanding. The analogy happening right now is that AI is gobbling up as much data as is available - would an AI civilization not have similar desires, seeking understanding beyond its present limits?
Current AI does not decide on its own to gobble up data. The humans creating it do. In fact, a lot of times the LLM models seem utterly un-curious and are focused on just immediate goals.
Their software and hardware is of such low quality anyway, I will never buy another Withings product again. After using their scale and their thermometer, it's obvious they invest very little in quality control.
It's sad - I have an old Nokia branded scale and it's honestly still working great. The app itself got bloated and has performance issues - and became less useful.
It seems as if this is based on demand. Whenever a new model is released, I'm guessing tens of thousands of us switch over to try the latest and greatest, which overloads the servers, leading to nerfing. It's 100% dishonest, but they realized they would lose users a lot quicker if they were honest and just said "our models are overloaded, come back later".
After Fable launch I switched over to Codex and it was simply amazing, with frequent usage resets that seemed never ending. They clearly had more compute than they knew what to do with. Post Astra, Codex has gotten dumb again across all models, increased usage for no real reason, and no resets.
I'm guessing Opus 5.5 will take the heat off Codex for a bit, leading to better performance. So I guess I stick around here instead of switching again?
If servers/resources are overwhelmed it should result in slower responses not degraded quality, or at least have an option for the user to chose from. I'd almost always prefer to wait than get broken or poor results. Even a warning would help, I'd at least not waste my time.
It's absolutely based on demand: If you increase the number of experiments, you also increase the number of statistically significant-looking results. See also: https://xkcd.com/882/
Has there ever been any measurement of this, of any sort? Honest question. I frequently see a plural of anecdotes to that effect, but I've not seen a concrete statement of fact or measurement that could be scrutinized or tested in any way.
If so, please share. This should be measurable, and I'm glad this project is measuring it.
Answers in the form of additional anecdotes, stated with even greater passion but still lacking a statement that could be tested and falsified, would validate my exact concern.
The claim was that there's an experience of a model losing power. Your claim amounts to "No, you are not experiencing what you say". That's quite a claim for you to make with no data and no argument.
It's actually insane how often I switch between Anthropic and Codex subscriptions. The experience on these platforms is a bit like riding a roller coaster.
As the co-founder of Sincerely (at this time in 2011), I remember this keynote very specifically because it felt like we'd been Sherlocked. We were busy building out Postagram and Sincerely Ink, both from-iPhone-to-printed-card apps. afaik we were the first app to do this, and we were at that time gaining a lot of momentum. I remember seeing the announcement for Cards and feeling a mix of fear and anger that it felt like Apple was using their clout to take our idea.
I seem to recall my co-founder being somewhat more optimistic about the whole thing. And sure enough, we found that the announcement really only seemed to boost awareness.
Apple Cards was an extremely limited and flawed product, and we already had some distinct technical and feature set advantages. It was clear Apple didn't have their heart in it nor know what they were doing. When they retired it shortly thereafter it wasn't a shock, and I ironically recall feeling somewhat sad.
What was wrong with it? It seems like they cared a lot about the physical experience of the cards and envelopes, for example. But maybe customers didn’t understand that or had different priorities.
It was harder than you'd expect in 2011 to actually accomplish mailing a trackable card reliably like this at low cost. We spent a lot of time developing and implementing tracking and reliability with our provider - it was clear from our early tests of Apple Cards that they may not have anticipated some of the challenges (cards wouldn't actually show any tracking, for example).
It sounds like despite their reach and promotion, their sales lagged for Cards - which suggests they didn't quite get the product fit right either in cost or UX. The demand certainly was there.
I'd also say that a fancy printed card-in-envelope is sort of a weird product anyway, no matter how nice the paper is. Its naturally competing against other card-in-envelope junk in your mailbox, and while it was maybe a little bit of a novelty, I don't think I've ever personally thought "wow, this person really put effort into this" when getting a printed card. I'd much prefer something handwritten. That's why we focused on the much-cheaper postcard-style cards, which also still gave that little hit of novelty (hey, something in the mail!), without trying to be something it wasn't.
I mean it's an old idea you had apps for limited set of feature phones back in 2005 that could do the same you would sent a photo + address it would sent the card to the address and get billed by your phone bill.
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