A great way to undermine government would be to get them locked on Lines of Report (LoR) pushed to congress each month.

Oh, no, this would be an amazing policy. Almost certainly a better use of their time and resources than whatever horror they would concoct otherwise

I think it would be very hard to convince someone to pay $100/mo to go back to Claude if they have a local model up and running, particularly now that model improvement has basically been stalled for the last 6 months. It’s so easy to set it up for yourself now too with things like LM studio. That said, there will always be unsophisticated users who can’t figure it out, so there will always be someone there to pay.

The person I was replying to specifically said that the Claude will "encode more knowledge" and that their problem was that they didn't like talking to Claude. It sounds like they think that Claude is at least slightly more functional. And the "not liking talking to it" is probably fixable. Someone for whom a local model works, and for whom the economics make sense, should absolutely run a local model and I wouldn't try to convince them otherwise. I'm sure it's the right choice for a lot of people. But not liking the personality of Claude is probably not a great reason on its own, given the minuscule amount of effort it takes to fix.

The third category are the occasional users that won’t have the hardware and won’t stomach a monthly fee for “unlimited” but are happy to pay-per-use.

I’d think the volume for that category would be low but LLMs aren’t just for coding.

I’m probably the third category. I like experimenting and trying different models and techniques. I want api access for my own apps and Claude subscriptions don’t have that.

Sure I could splash out a ton of money for a high ram Mac, but deepseek is so dirt cheap that I think depreciation on a high end machine costs more than my api spend.

Example of what I’m using it for: building a semantic database of podcast content (podcast discoverability sucks on an episode level). I need a cheap LLM, an embedder, a transcriber, none of which Claude will do.

My api costs for coding agents plus running apps are about ~$20/month, but I get more than just chat + Claude code.

If all I was doing was pumping an employers codebase through a coding agent, Claude would be the answer.

Not everyone has the right hardware.

I guess I’m thinking of the $100/mo users, for whom it’s probably possible to get the right hardware.

The hardware to match Opus costs at least $200k, and you have to maintain it, and it's still not going to be as good.

Adopting k8s when you hire your _second_ engineer (first after the CTO)? That’s a red flag that the CTO’s priorities are wrong and he’s just enjoying tinkering with his infra instead of solving the users’ problems.

I thought that was the point of the article, right?

That the tech benefits may not be there, but they’re using it for the non-tech benefits

From the article:

> My personal threshold would be the moment the CTO isn't the only engineer anymore. As soon as a second person shows up, the problems K8s solves become real.

> Even with LLMs, they are going to rack up tech debt

And if they don’t?

Well, congrats then, I guess.

> That the tech benefits may not be there, but they’re using it for the non-tech benefits

My read of the article is that this is correct, but that the benefits they're using it for are the operational, and organisational.

I think the comment you're replying to is arguing that those benefits don't really matter or outweigh the additional complexity costs when N=2 (engineers). I think I'd probably agree.

I think I still disagree.

If K8s is new to you, sure. Definitely not the time to learn it.

But I can see a world where it’s fine to use early on.

Especially if your team is cloud native. K8s isn’t really a new controversial toy in my eyes, it’s pretty well supported and good enough for most things out of the box.

I just don’t think it’s as big a deal as the “CTO IS WASTING EVERYONES TIME” argument.

It’s free lines of code on the internet that you are going out of your way to run on your own machine.

It’s either that, or an extreme conservatism where nothing must deviate from how it used to be.

It’s easy to be a hero if you risk nothing. Fatty Bolger risked it all!

"In the morning Fatty was mildly unnerved to see the other hobbits painting a large sign outside the little house with 'Frodo lives here' and 'Sauron sucks!' on it."

Ya, their coding harness is way better than Claude code, but because it’s directly using the clause api it’s way more expensive. Rolling it into the family would make it product-class-defining.

Its not even just commonly used. I’d say if papers with code tried to refer to themselves as PwC they’d get a cease and desist.

Global government sounds terrible. Most people don’t live in western liberal democracies, so I assume a world government would be something other than that. I have no interest in living under a government that promises the average political, religious, personal and economic environment of the world.