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Comment by applfanboysbgon

5 hours ago

I had never heard of Stainless, but it is deeply concerning that Anthropic are able to use monopoly money to kill software at their whim. First Bun, and now this. It's one thing for a corporation to do it with their own money, because at some point the board will ask them why they're wasting money. But Anthropic isn't even profitable. They're doing this with billions of dollars of borrowed money. Same thing with OpenAI committing to purchasing an unholy amount of RAM supply and directly causing the 5x price jump, with money they don't have.

I don't understand how investors continue to fund this nonsense. Anthropic wasting money on this should be an overwhelmingly strong signal that the AGI hype is blatant fraud and that software engineers are clearly not being replaced by Anthropic's software if they have to buy more engineers for some tertiary, fifth-order concern so far removed from their main line of business. Yet they just keep getting more and more money dumped on them.

[EDIT: I'm an idiot, sorry, completely misread your comment. I agree on all counts]

  • Monopoly money is a figurative expression for "fake money", deriving from the board game "Monopoly", wherein players use fake bills as game pieces. I suppose it was ambiguous because I did not capitalize "Monopoly", my mistake there.

    • Okay, sorry, that was obvious in retrospect, I definitely feel kinda stupid now that I see it. In fact, I agree with your comment on almost all counts—I just see a lot of misuse of the term "monopoly" online, and I think I was led down a garden path by one of my sibling commenter's mention of Lina Kahn. No fault of yours, and I'm gonna delete my comment if I can :)

> but it is deeply concerning that Anthropic are able to use monopoly money to kill software at their whim. First Bun, and now this.

It almost sounds like you want Lina Khan back :-D

in what sense did Anthropic “kill” Bun?

  • Rewriting the entire codebase into 1m loc that has never been read by a human is an obvious recipe for software that cannot be maintained. Anthropic is all-in on marketing the concept that humans will not be needed anymore, even as they hire more humans. Bun is dying for the sake of hyping up investors and consumers with misleading claims about the real capabilities of their models.

    Fun fact: Jarred has been promising a blog post about the Rust rewrite, but has missed his target dates for publishing it. In other words, that blog post has now taken longer to write than generating and merging 1m loc. Go figure :)