Yeah, and the author is obviously lying. Ever since mid-2025 it has been a winning move for AI users to categorically deny all allegations & reap the labor rewards of generated content.
I read the suggestion as being that the world’s poor aren’t paying for AI tokens (or subscriptions) to generate software from prompts, and that sharing the _output_ is more beneficial to people. The reduction in energy waste is secondary, and benefits _everyone_.
Have you run a system in production? There are a multitude of reasons that a system can go down. There's no indication so far from Anthropic that this was merely compute limitations.
> There are a multitude of reasons that a system can go down.
Start doing post mortems then!
At the very least, them using any off the shelf service that's shitting the bed would inform others to stay away from it - like an IAM solution, or maybe a particular DB in a specific configuration backing whatever they've written, or a given architecture for a given scale.
Right now it's completely like a black box that sometimes goes down and we don't get much information about why it's so much less stable than other options (hey, if they just came out and said "We're growing 10x faster than we anticipated and system X, Y and Z are not architected for that." that'd also be useful signal).
Or, who knows, maybe it's just bad deploys - seems like it's back for me and claude.ai UI looks a bit different hmmm.
I have no inside knowledge of Anthropic. But having done a lot of postmortems in general, one of the key dynamics that routinely comes up is "we know we keep shipping breakages, and we know these new procedures would prevent many of them, but then we wouldn't be able to deliver new stuff so quickly". Given where Anthropic is at and what they believe about the future of software development, that's a tradeoff that they may very well be intentionally not making.
Yeah, this is not just inference. First thing for me was an MCP I use went down in Claude Code, models still worked. Now "API Error: 529 Authentication service is temporarily unavailable."
HN is for anything that gratifies intellectual curiosity: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Historical and/or unexpected materials are welcome here! Having them on the site is a long tradition. (As is the "why is this on HN" comment, of course.)
It sounds like you know your Orwell - want to share something about that?
Hacker News Guidelines
What to Submit
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Haven't read the book, but points two and three definitely struck some bells in the back clocktowers of my mind.
More generally, reading a bit of Orwell was inescapable in my schooling, but I sought out 1984 myself. I discovered I had kind of a thing for both utopias and dystopias.
And as I contemplate things I might write or compose, I do note that outrage towards this regime is very much in the mix of my motivations.
if it does so happen that the crash originates from a browser exploit, you should expect to be more at risk due to the absence of a crash on an older version, not less
Best to treat it with some emotional distance. It's not like the optimization process feels it.
Whether be it human dullards, scripted botfarms, or even maleficence -- none of them experience shame. If they do see it at all, it would be as one of many factors to boost engagement.
There is an ever-dwindling minority of people who think "fuck boosting engagement" is a valid strategy in this era. Online, engagement is everything. We have all, through social media and feed algorithms, been reduced to acting out the most insipid style of court-jester antics to try and garner attention; the SNR is just too high for good content to thrive.
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