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In the context of knowledge workers, It is really about Claude Cowork against Microsoft Copilot suite for all their applications, which is what the OP is referencing ?

Github Copilot can use Claude APIs and has its own problems and challenges.

Microsoft AI performance is primarily not being affected by Github - while significant is much much smaller part of the enterprise revenue stream and their DAU compared to their Office suite apps.

Same for their PR exposure. It is lot more likely to here about Copilot in the office context than Github outside of small niche's like this forum.


First I thought they were AWS lambda functions, perhaps possible if they are over-provisioned for very concurrency or something similar $25k/month is in realm of possibility.

But no, the the post is talking about just RPC calls on k8s pods running docker images, for saving $300k/year, their compute bill should be well above $100M/year.

Perhaps if it was Google scale of events for billions of users daily, paired with the poorest/inefficient processing engine, using zero caching layer and very badly written rules, maybe it is possible.

Feels like it is just an SEO article designed to catch reader's attention.


Well there is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford%27s_law .

All digits do not appear in equal frequency in real world in the first place.


Perhaps not, However Gamification of fitness is huge motivation for many people to keep exercising and maintaining the rhythm which in fitness is quite important.

Such social sharing + gamification systems are no different than Github contribution streak or StackOverflow awards for streaks etc. Those streak award only benefited the platform, while awarding us fake points and badges, the fitness streak rewards and social sharing benefits the users health so arguably has a stronger case for being gamified.

We can argue all day that people should want to do fitness to be healthy, not on how they look or other people see them or their fitness, but reality is that the social component of fitness is a big part for many people be it at the gym or in an app.


Logging is one thing, syncing it to the cloud is unnecessary and shouldn’t even be the default; making any of the location data available publicly is just terrible. If you want to share an individual workout map so you can say you circumnavigated Manhattan or whatever, fine! Share that one workout with your friends! (And ideally as a freaking screenshot rather than some database) Anything else is far too risky.

Risky for what? It's just a bit of fun. Most of us aren't being pursued by stalkers or assassins.

It doesn't need to be anything nearly that dramatic as assassins, because economies of scale both lower the bar and make most attacks impersonal. Consider how odd it would be for someone in 2025 to say: "Computer security?I haven't done anything to personally offend a genius hacker."

Imagine this data going to a burglar, who has a digital dashboard of nearby one-person properties and when the owner is likely to be out, able to act with confidence they can leave before the victim could return.

Sure, sophisticated international hitmen won't have any interest in catching you in ambush... but that doesn't make you safe from a local rapist of opportunity.


What a weird comment. The type of low-end criminal who commits home burglaries aren't sophisticated enough to do that level of research.

They are. A related example is criminal gangs tageting gun owners in France after the dataleak at the sport shooting federation. This one has been well covered. There have been a few hundred targeted robberies (on old people mostly) and one or two deaths (predictably).

In Western Europe there are also foreign burglar gangs that go on sprees for a few weeks. They're well organised but don't have time to do the stalking. They use publicly available data as much as they can.


They'd buy access from someone on the dark web for $5 a day.

do you have any evidence to back your claim? gangs employing teams of underage burglars assisted by risk averse adults with skills for entry and targeting are a thing. everyone has a mobile phone.

I'd recommend reading 'Confessions of a Master Jewel Thief' -- normal dude, just decides to spend a career stealing shit for fun.

Low-end criminals fish based on data leaks all the time. More data, especially cross-referencable data, will make this ever easier.

With the new crop of agentic coding tools, you can whip up such an app in a few hours for all burglar buddies to use.

> Most of us aren't being pursued by stalkers or assassins.

Most of us, but for those that are...

However, in the world we live in today, the various LEOs are using this type of data to find people they do not like. It's getting to the point that I pine for the days of good ol' 1985 where you could just be another anonymous person in public with no tracking of your every move.


To be fair it is not the city/elected officials who wants to retain the parking lots. The downtown redevelopment would probably make the city a lot of money.

It is the businesses around downtown who are pushing the save downtown campaign. I imagine the businesses contribute a fair chunk of revenue to the city now and have some influence .

Relative to say parts of Redwood City, or Palo Alto. Menlo park has a fair amount of student-ish 4 Unit lots, so it not all zoned SFU.


TBF a lot of the complaints are coming from businesses that are _probably_ renting. There is absolutely the chance that their business will go under due to construction disruptions before they can benefit from the increased foot traffic once the development is complete.

And, of course, once the development is complete, and the value of their land goes up, so too does their rent....


It is just not rent that will go up.

Menlo Park today has free and ample parking downtown. RWC is paid parking anywhere within few blocks of downtown, all the garages are paid, the garage on Jefferson Av charges more on Sundays. Same thing in San Mateo downtown.


> size of the heart

Size of one heart has restrictions that are determined by diminishing return of physics. That doesn't mean engineering a larger system is impossible or even that very difficult. Same as any other pump system. i.e. there is no reason not to have 2 or 10 hearts.

We do this to move any fluid like water or concrete up to steep terrain or maintain pressure in everything from sewage to oil or gas pipes over long enough distribution systems.

Romanticizing in popular culture not withstanding, heart is just a pump[2] and today can be replaced by (albeit for short duration) entirely by a machine or replaced in a transplant.

We are not talking about say the brain or the central nervous systems[1]. That would be like going to multi-master from single node - lot more fundamental complex rebuild and rethink of the core architecture.

[1]We are not even remotely close to fully understanding let alone attempting to replace.

[2 Amazingly well designed, very efficient, something today we probably could not (yet) build synthetically with similar reliability and durability but it is still a pump nonetheless.


> We are not talking about say the brain or the central nervous systems. That would be like going to multi-master from single node - lot more fundamental complex rebuild and rethink of the core architecture.

The central nervous system already is “multi-core”, with tiny logic handling such things as the patellar reflex. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patellar_reflex#Mechanism: “This produces a signal which travels back to the spinal cord and synapses (without interneurons) at the level of L3 or L4 in the spinal cord, completely independent of higher centres”

Other examples at https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Reflex

These tend to be actions that need fast feedback loops.


It is not limited to graphics, better packaged products, better dressed / good looking well spoken person and so on. Celebrity endorsements depend on this thesis.

There has always been a bias towards form over function.


Once good form becomes commoditized, hopefully function starts taking priority


The way I am handing this - investing heavily in static and dynamic analysis aspects.

- A lot more linting rules than ever before, also custom rule sets that do more org and project level validations.

- Harder types enforcement in type optional languages , Stronger and deeper typing in all of them .

- beyond unit tests - test quality coverage tooling like mutation testing(stryker) and property based testing (quickcheck) if you can go that precise

- much more dx scripts and build harnesses that are specific to org and repo practices that usually junior/new devs learn over time

- On dynamic side , per pull requests environments with e2e tests that agents can validate against and iterate when things don’t work.

- documentation generation and skill curation. After doing a batch of pull requests reviews I will spend time in seeing where the gaps are in repo skills and agents.

All this becomes pre-commit heavy, and laptops cannot keep up in monorepos, so we ended up doing more remote containers on beefy machines and investing and also task caching (nx/turborepo have this )

Reviews (agentic or human) have their uses , but doing this with reviews is just high latency, inefficient and also tends to miss things and we become the bottleneck.

Earlier the coder(human or agent) gets repeatable consistent feedback it is better


That would be the Catholic Church.

Other churches have varying degrees of requirements to become a priest.


>civilized facade of mutual cooperation

>Dirty tricks and underhanded tactics

As long the tactics are legal ( i.e. not corporate espionage, bribes etc), the no holds barred full free market competition is the best thing for the market and the consumers.


> As long the tactics are legal ( i.e. not corporate espionage, bribes etc), the no holds barred full free market competition is the best thing for the market and the consumers.

The implicit assumption here is that we have constructed our laws so skillfully that the only path to win a free market competition is by producing a better product, or that all efforts will be spent doing so. This is never the case. It should be self-evident from this that there is a more productive way for companies to compete and our laws are not sufficient to create the conditions.


The consumers are getting huge wins.

Model costs continue to collapse while capability improves.

Competition is fantastic.


> The consumers are getting huge wins.

However, the investors currently subsidizing those wins to below cost may be getting huge losses.


Yes, but that's the nature of the game, and they know it.


> Model costs continue to collapse

And yet RAM prices are still sky high. Game consoles are getting more expensive, not cheaper, as a result. When will competition benefit those consumers? Or consumers of desktop RAM?


The free market has simply decided these consumers are not as relevant as the others.


Maybe the free market is wrong.


It can’t be. Those uses are suboptimal, hence the users aren’t willing to pay the new prices.


Not really. Investors with hundreds of billions of dollars have decided it. The process by which capital has been allocated the way it has isn't some mathematically natural or optimal thing. Our market is far from free.


Saying "investors with hundreds of billions decided it" makes it sound like a few people just chose the outcome, when in reality prices and capital move because millions of consumers, companies, workers, and smaller investors keep making choices every day. Big investors only make money if their decisions match what people actually want; they can't just command success. If they guess wrong, others profit by allocating money better, so having influence isn't the same as having control.

The system isn't mathematically perfect, but that doesn't make it arbitrary. It works through an evolutionary process: bad bets lose money, better ones gain more resources.

Any claim that the outcome is suboptimal only really means something if the claimant can point to a specific alternative that would reliably do better under the same conditions. Otherwise critics are mostly just expressing personal frustration with the outcome.


Sure, it can be beneficial. But don't forget that externalities are a thing.


in the short term maybe, in the long term it depends how many winners you have. If only two, the market will be a duopoly. Customers will get better AI but will have zero power over the way the AI is produced or consumed (i.e. cO2 emission, ethics, etc will be burnt)


> how many winners ... duopoly

There aren't any insurmountable large moats, plenty of open weight models that perform close enough.

> CO₂ emissions

Different industry that could also benefit from more competition ? Clean(er) energy is not even more expensive than dirty sources on pure $/kWh, we still do need dirty sources for workloads like base demand, peakers etc that the cheap clean sources cannot service today.


Yes, but not cutthroat competition that implies unsustainable, detrimental competition that kills off the industry.


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