great book!

just took lessons recently with Matt from Lucky Dog Surf School. super chill dude, lots of fun.

""Sometimes it lets me down, but sometimes it really surprises me," he said."

Lol. This is the perfect capture of exec level AI understanding. Amazing.

TBH, this seems to encapsulate a very typical developer perspective on this site as well.

Claude Code is hilarious because often it'll say stuff that's basically "that's too hard, here's a bandaid fix" and implement it lol

That is exactly what happens if they can enforce payments: "you don't get to be on our store if you're bypassing this"

But it isn't what is happening if they are staying on the platform's marketplaces and also bypassing payments. There is no "market" effect there.

Not saying I agree with the 30%, but third party app stores exist. That is the market avenue (and no one uses them).

When two entities control essentially the whole "market" for mobile OSes and associated app stores, and use their position to force their app stores on everyone, you no longer have a market. If we just forcibly split Google and Apple into smaller companies with separate app stores then maybe we could see what markets would do.

Third party app stores exist, and they work on android.

But the problem is that when everyone has gravitated to the two biggest app stores, there's no scope for market competition. The point is not just to have third-party app stores, it's to not have huge app stores that capture the whole user base.

"There is no market effect"? Why do the market effects disappear if some of the players don't play completely according to the desires of other players? Why couldn't it be that the optimum includes some amount of fee dodging?

The app store obviously gives value to the app developers. When you put your app on the store you agree to the 30%.

You didn't answer my question. Why can't the optimum include some fee dodging? I agree that the app stores provide value to the developers, but it's also true that apps provide value to Google and Apple. If no one developed any apps, no one would use iOS or Android. Therefore it's possible that Google and Apple benefit more from an app that dodges fees but brings in users than from neither having the app nor those users.

They created a market and they are charging to be on the market. If you're saying "I want to be on the market but by my own rules" that's not a free market effect, it's breaking a contract.

If you say "fine, I'll go on another app store" then that is a free market in action - but good luck getting anyone to download your game.

The Musk effect is pretty crazy. Or is there another explanation for why x can compete with Google?

Elon's Y Combinator interview was pretty good. He seemed more in his element back amongst the hacker crowd (rather than dirty politics), and seemed to be doing hackery things at X, like renting generators and mobile cooling vans and just putting them the car park outside a warehouse to train Grok, since there were no data centres available and he was told it would take 2 years to set it all up properly.

I think he's just good at attracting good talent, and letting them focus on the right things to move fast initially, while cutting the supporting infra down to zero until it's needed.

Are you talking about this:

https://futurism.com/elon-musk-memphis-illegal-generators

It's hackery but also kind of sociopathic to dump a bunch of loud, dirty generators in the middle of a low-income community. Go set your data center up on Martha's Vineyard and see how long the residents put up with it.

Thinking more cynically: political corruption and connections I'm guessing? Just a couple months ago Musk was treating the US government like his personal playground.

Because they started so late but somehow managed to make something close to SOTA?

Either way or people think Trump will just give Elon a 500B government contract...

They have a lot of compute already and Grok 4 was pretty strong?

they’ve managed to acquire compute remarkably quickly and i’m no Musk lover

Yes, totally. The model will not know about new versions of libraries, features recently deprecated, etc..

oh it's wild how many people are doing this.

Why?

That's where the research is going.

It's better-than-senior at a some things, but worse-than-junior at a lot of things.

It's more like better-than-senior 99% of the time. Makes mistakes 1% of the time. Most of the 'bad results' I've seen people struggle with ended up being the fault of the human, in the form of horrible context given to the AI or else ambiguous or otherwise flawed prompts.

Any skilled developer with a decade of experience can write prompts that return back precisely what we wanted almost every single time. I do it all day long. "Claude 4" rarely messes up.

Same!

Can you share the code?