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It's interesting how much (some) people are adopting AI-isms in writing even when not using AI.
It makes sense that people would fall into the same patterns after seeing them everywhere, but it's still very weird to, live, watch someone who never used to write like this, write out something that's full of "It's not X, it's Y", etc.
If you actually read it, it's a little too well reasoned and doesn't have enough nonsense phrases to be AI writing but, superficially, it's very AI-coded writing.
Yossi has this post, https://yosefk.com/blog/people-can-read-their-managers-mind.html, where he uses the term "insane employee" to describe someone who fixes problems they're not incentivized to.
In his parlance, if you want to be able to buy a car designed to keep you safe or a CPU designed to not crash, you would need an "insane company".
There were more of those when competition was less cutthroat and the market was less efficient. Overall, I'd take what we can get today over what we could get then, but there were some nice bits.
I guess this shouldn't be surprising for reasons discussed in https://danluu.com/nothing-works/, https://danluu.com/car-safety/, etc.
There's *maybe* one car company that tries to do more than the bare minimum on structural safety, but their software quality is horrendous, so ADAS, etc., are untrusthworthy (https://mastodon.social/@danluu/109667147825098339) (and software controls brakes (https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/volvo-recall-urgent-brake-failure-warning-select-vehicles), etc.), because why would the market provide a safe car or non-crashing CPU? Those more to make and you can't charge more.
With CPUs, the problem is that, you really need the company to go the extra mile if you don't want random crashes.
I'm not sure there's a company you can reasonably buy a standalone CPU from that will do that. AMD has always had issues (coincidentally, the last AMD machine I owned regularly crashed due to what turned out to be a CPU bug), Intel has favored velocity over quality since getting spooked by ARM. When I was at IBM (over two decades ago), they were dismantling their culture, etc.
Sure, there are the companies that were on fire as hypergrowth startups that grow into companies with ok quality, but none of those (that I know of) are in the same quality league as companies that ship really high quality products.
The worst startups that survive fix the issues that are a threat to the business, but if the company culture is to severely cut corners, it seems very difficult, bordering on impossible, to move the culture to one that goes the extra mile on quality.
I was thinking about this prediction that we were going to see a lot more CPU bugs, danluu.com/cpu-bugs/, as yet another Intel CPU bug story is on the front page of HN.
At the time, Intel threw quality under the bus in the name of velocity. I've seen this happen quite a few times now, sometimes with the stated intention of improving quality later. I'm sure it's ever happened, but I don't think I've ever seen a company do this and then ship very high quality products later.
@hyperpape BTW, thanks for the link. I haven't really been reading social media for years (including HN) and, in general, have no idea what people are saying. I started reading social media bit again recently. Everybody is talking about AI now and most of what I see floating around seems wrong.
I guess that's always been the case, but I mean even more than before :-). AI seems to have become a partisan issue, with a lot of people doing the kind of thing you mentioned?
@hyperpape From that thread, a related question I have is, is there an actually decent (public) benchmark for coding models? Someone cites DeepSeek 3 being 90% as good as SOTA models with 4 on the way.
A cheap retired friend of mine often uses DS models to save money. Something I can do in 0-15 minutes of my time often takes him hours and still fails to work. Everyone I've personally talked to who's tried DS has seen the same gap. I don't know what the public benchmarks are measuring.
@codinghorror That article citing Julien Garran is the kind of thing I'm talking about. In 10/25, he argued AI hit a wall & wouldn't improve significantly. Since then, coding agents (whether it's model or harness) have massively improved.
Despite the huge price increase of GPT 5.5 over 5.4, 5.4 over 5.3 (per token, per wall clock time) and analogous for Anthropic, people are paying the higher price for the newer model. Garran and others were completely wrong and continue to say the same thing.
@DRMacIver It seems like inference could be massively profitable. Whether or not training costs offset is a tuning knob like Uber had.
Given how much OpenAI and Anthropic have jacked up prices recently (if you want their latest models), and how there's no real competitor (I try Gemini every once in a while and it's never been in the same league for coding, though it is better at some things), it doesn't seem like OAI and Antropic are competing on price, which leaves room for a lot of profit.