Aaditya Barak

Justifying each of my questionable financial decisions with the fact that we’re headed towards a future of abundance Don’t be like, totally reckless, but also most of it won’t matter in a few years anyway

To remove this "Co-authored-by: Claude" crap: ~/.claude/settings.json { "attribution": { "commit": "", "pr": "" }, "includeCoAuthoredBy": false }

Someone had a computer play Monopoly 312 million times to find the best strategy. The winning bot won 43% of games. Its strategy: buy every property you land on, never hoard cash, and take out mortgages to get three houses as fast as possible. Pretty sure it works outside the board game too 👀

Just spoke to the Head of AI at a huge company. The #1 thing they're struggling with is... what do I do with the AI laggards at our company? Like most companies, they’ve found that a Super Pareto Principle is true within their org. 10% of their employees are responsible for 90% of the uplift in productivity/token usage from software engineering to non-technical knowledge work. They’ve spent a lot of time & resources on AI enablement from LLM foundations to function-specific trainings and skill building. And yet, the power law of productivity increases hasn’t budged. So now they’re left with a few sobering thoughts and hard questions: 1) 90% of people are overpaid and 10% are underpaid 2) We’d be better off allocating tokens proportionally to the power law, but how do we do that without killing culture? 3) Significant layoffs are likely warranted and wouldn’t impact overall output, but cultural backlash is a big concern? 4) How do we hire more power law people as a non technology company? 5) Is all of our efforts on training and enablement ACTUALLY worth it? 6) How do we not experience a brain drain where the top 10% all leave because they want to be surrounded by other AI-native 10x’ers?

it's gonna be hilarious when everyone looks back 6 months from now and remembers getting $5K in inference for $200 a month...

AIバブルの最後の出口が「カセットテープ」やな... 世界中のAIデータの最終保管先はいまもLTO磁気テープ。保存コストはHDDの1/4、電気ゼロ、ネットから切れとるからランサムも届かん。 →で、このテープの磁性体を量産できるの、世界で富士フイルムとソニーの2社だけ 半導体はNVIDIAのもんやけど、倉庫の地主は日本やった...

At work (R&D at a fortune 500 company w/ 15k+ employees), every time a SaaS pitches their product, my first question in the review meeting is, "Why don't we just build this ourselves?" In the past, there were always good answers to that question. Today, I can't think of any. If we can point an agent at any website or demo, have it research the broader problem for 72 hours, build the product with a focus on our specific needs, with any extra features we want, AND save a million a year why would we pay for your SaaS? Scale? It only has to scale to 15,000 employees and a few million customers. We don't have the same scaling problem you do serving 1,000 businesses with 100s of million of customers. Scale is a non-issue. Reliability? Your 99.9% self-reported uptime is not impressive. We can pay to host an app on a hyperscaler too. And when we do it, we know with certainty whether the uptime number is true or not. Github's official status page reports ~99% uptime. The Missing GitHub Status Page reports 93%. Reliability is a non-issue. Bugs? You think your SaaS product doesn't have bugs to work out? I've seen bugs in third party products cost our company millions. Everyone is shipping early and often. Including your SaaS. Every piece of software has bugs. But there is a big difference between a bug in your code and a bug in ours. When the bug is in your code, we are at your mercy. Maybe you put it into Jira immediately. Are you going to bypass sprint planning? You won't have a fix for two weeks. Maybe you'll fail to reproduce and blame our code. Maybe it is our code. Maybe its an interplay. Since you don't have our code and we don't have your code, how are we going to figure that out? If it's all our code, an employee can fix it in an hour. If we need to, we can throw ten engineers with agents in a call until it's reproduced, the fix is merged, and it's validated. Bugs are a non-issue. Bandwidth? Agents are nearly autonomous now. They don't need to be babysat. I can spin up a project and let an agent run for 50 hours, have it build a PowerPoint and walk into a demo with leadership blind. If anything breaks, "I'm still working on that." Things always break in demos. Nobody cares. If leadership proposes a feature, the answer is, "Yeah, great idea, I can add that." Because I can. Bandwidth is a non-issue. Maintenance? We have so much prior art, inputs and outputs, we can benchmark anything. We have autonomous PR systems built on top of in-app feedback SDKs so even the non-dev users can contribute to every app or service. Even our analytics systems are tied to automated PRs. Maintenance is a non-issue. Support? It doesn't matter how much we're paying a month for your platinum level enterprise support when our point of contact has to fetch the one dev who already went home for every non-trivial incident. The incident is never trivial. We already checked the top 10 things it could be because that was faster than asking you. Support is a non-issue. Expertise? Agentic research. We can build anything. Expertise is a non-issue. Cost? The cost of intelligence has gone down 100x every year. You're still charging 2022 prices. You should be charging closer to your electricity costs. Cost is a non-issue. At this point, the only reason we don't switch off existing services is that transitioning 15,000 employees to something else is a pain in the butt. It would be a pain in the butt even with a perfect bug-free, infinitely scalable, perfectly-reliable clone. Your new SaaS doesn't have that moat. But it does give me an idea for a product to build.

DevOps might be the only engineering role AI won't replace.

every product i use should just be a headless mcp, that feeds into an agent, where i never have to think about anything underneath. except for our product, of course. in our product, customers love the ui and love us very much. we're special that way.

If you work at MSFT and are below VP - I think you should take the their voluntary exit package. It is a clear sign that they need to cut costs & you have no way of knowing when / who’ll be axed. The severance they’ll offer later will be 3-4 months but the VEO gives you 9 months of pay. Take the money, take the year off, go see the world, learn music, get fit, spend time with family, work on that side project, do whatever calls you. 9 months of paid leave is a super generous deal from Microsoft.

"University researchers built a satellite that tracks people from low Earth orbit and dispatches a 5 kg payload to within .1 meter of their position, traveling at Mach 25 to anywhere on Earth in under 5 minutes. They suggest it could be used to deliver greeting cards."

My predictions over the following months: 1. Stock market will get hurt bad when the music stops on data centers, models, and chips. Too much froth, too high of investment, too many companies will fail. The switching costs are low. I don't know how these companies will become profitable. Its a mega bubble. The rest of the economy is already in a deep recession. Real pain will set in when the public markets dive. 2. Power is the bottleneck. AI is burning an absurd amount of power. The cost of electricity is skyrocketing which is making the cost of everyday life more expensive and hurting quality of life. I'm against data centers because of the power, not the water. The grid is extremely fragile and the weakness will be exposed in the coming months. 3. Subsidies are skewing the market. AI isn't cheap. The prices to use it are artificially low because of subsidies all the way up the chain. You pay $20 or $200 a month but the true costs are 10x That spread is venture capital money being incinerated at scale. When they raise the price, the users will disappear and investors will hold the bag. 3. A big security breach is coming. A bank, a certain model, something is going to rock our world. People are letting bots log in to their banks, their email and everything else. Big trouble coming. 4. Grokbot is exceptional. Its the first model that is adding significant value to my everyday life. I don't know why anybody would use a different personal assistant. 5. AI is insanely high maintenance Billions are being poured into training the next model. They day it comes out its already behind. China has cheaper electricity and more chips. The chips they bought will be obsolete in 18 months. Companies are stuck paying big money every month to maintain and update all of their AI tools. Its a mess. 6. The power companies will renege on their deals. Political pressure will unwind all the unsustainable power deals these data centers and LLMs have negotiated. Power costs will explode. Then comes the choice: Do we jack up costs for our AI / compute and watch everybody switch to the next model or do we incinerate more VC capital? Nobody wins. 7. Credit will be the first domino to fall. Data centers are already struggling to finance the GPUs over 10 years when they will be obsolete in 18 months. We'll end up with a shit load of half built data centers who can't negotiate power rates or buy chips because nobody will let them borrow money. The money will get cold feet as soon as the markets tank and the show will be over. 8. It'll be a dark, dark period in economic markets. The people who own assets that make real money (real estate or businesses) will win. The people who plan ahead and avoid massive leverage will win. The people with cash on their balance sheet will accumulate more assets and generate exceptional wealth. -- Don't listen to me. I'm just a bear. Not investment advice. Good luck!

Q. ローカルLLMなぜやってますか？ A. 楽しいから。 Q. 機材買ってペイできますか？ A. ペイできない。ペイできる能力あるなら社畜やってない。 Q. ローカルLLMで儲かりますか？ A. NVIDIAが儲かります。 Q. ChatGPTやClaudeで十分では？ A. その通りです。 Q. API使った方が安くないですか？ A. それ以上はいけない。 Q. クラウドの方が速くないですか？ A. 速いし安い。以上。 Q. 電気代は？ A. 計算しないことにしている。 Q. 128GBもメモリ必要ですか？ A. 128GBしかないんです。 Q. ローカルLLMのメリットは？ A. 自分で全部管理できる。 Q. デメリットは？ A. 高い。 Q. DGX Sparkもう1台買うんですか？ A. 止めてください。 Q. ローカルLLMは将来性ありますか？ A. わかりません。 Q. 何の役に立つんですか？ A. こっちが聞きたい。 Q. 結局、何がしたいんですか？ A. 私にもわからない。

🚨 BREAKING: SpaceX locked Anthropic into paying them $3.1 billion per MONTH for compute starting December $37B a year = $120.5 BILLION through 2029 Every month, ~80% of Anthropic's current revenue would be SpaceXSI compute bill BIGGER than its Google and Amazon long-term deals Anthropic warns short-term compute "carries a higher cost per unit" and will "compress our operating margin"

画面が割れたのでClaudeに頼んで正常な領域にウィンドウを収めるようにしてもらった

probably best time ever to be unemployed

Mozilla created Rust Microsoft uses Rust. Amazon uses Rust. Google uses Rust. Meta uses Rust. Firefox uses Rust. Discord uses Rust. Cloudflare uses Rust. The Linux kernel supports Rust. Memory safety, No garbage collector, High performance. Why isn't Rust the default choice for more developers?

88% of VC-backed founders who exited their companies got $0. Eduardo Azevedo and Kent Smetters analysed 157,669 startups and 248,454 founders from 1987 to 2025. Let that sink in...

Fun fact: `--dangerously-skip-permissions` doesn't actually approve EVERYTHING—we still block some obvious things like `rm -rf ~`. But today's release will let you disable this if you really want, by setting a new env var `CLAUDE_CODE_EVEN_MORE_DANGEROUSLY_SKIP_PERMISSIONS=1`

the hardest problem in computer science is getting a file from one computer to another