The point of the deadline is not that you can't be off work, but that you stop getting paid for not working.
For example, the way it works in Australia is that after you have used up your sick days, you have to take any further absences from work out of your annual leave balance, and once that is exhausted, you switch to leave without pay.
I had a downline team member who once needed to extend their time away from work for over 5 months due to illness. They had been with the company for several years at that point, so they had a reasonable sick leave balance, probably 10 weeks. When it became clear that they needed longer, they used their remaining 4 weeks of annual leave, then took a month of leave without pay, then another. They were still employed, I approved their leave requests each time they needed to extend, and we just used the most appropriate tool that was available at the time.
The thing you're getting permission for is not to be sick, it is to be considered still employed while not doing work, rather than being fired/disciplined for being AWOL.
> ... the markets will eventually find out that it's useless, and everything will go back to normal, and the people you don't like will have lost money, so there's no point in being outraged...
Except that in the process of the markets finding out, things will not go back to normal if everyone's retirement is tied to the market. And in the process of finding out, things will not go back to normal if the hype cycle disrupts traditional hiring/firing decisions.
If it's as bad as some of us believe, then when it falls apart, a lot of people get hurt as collateral damage.
The market eventually found out about Bear Stearns, but a lot of innocent people lost their homes in the process.
Exactly. The question is not "are people using it to do stuff?" because we know right now they are. Given free or heavily-subsidised access to powerful tools, people will use them.
If I had someone giving me free access to cranes and excavators, I'd be raving about how easy it was to build houses now. But tomorrow when I have to pay full price for them, I'm going to be making very different calculations about return on investment.
The question we need to be asking is "what is the likely full-price cost we'll have to pay for these tools, and is that cost likely to be worth paying?"
What Ed's pointing to is that the full-price cost will have to cover the capital expenditures that have been invested, or the companies which risked that capital will go bust. That gives us a floor for what the full price cost will be, and that floor seems higher than the value being offered by the tools.
> ... Anthropic's revenue increased from $1 billion in Dec. 2024 to $47 billion May of 2026. Which of course doesn't guarantee that it will continue to grow at that scale...
My 2 year old is 80cm tall now, and was just 50cm tall 18 months ago! So it's not wrong for me to expect him to be over 2 metres tall when he's 8...
I just woke up and THIS! ... you almost owe me a new keyboard! I love it!
This statement cleanly encapsulates the entire problem with all of the frontier models' companies' pre-IPO numbers.
They have something-something "new technology" and we don't know anything about how the market is going to settle on the ethics, the utility, the human capacity opportunity cost impacts of not training and/or mis-educating an entire cohort of intern-engineers for a few seasons to a generation, the full environmental costs of hardware and operations necessary for the training each new larger model, ... and we cant even quantify the unknown-unknowns - the risks we cannot forsee.
To predict market revenues for the next few years based on the curves, that they self report without external disclosure of the underlying numbers, is just like expecting your 2 yr old to continue growing at the same pace in the future and in the past - laughable. Good thing it was just water not coffee and it didnt quite come "out my nose" :- ) Thank you kind stranger!
The trick is in the wording - they probably aren't getting that many subs. They're saying they "expect" to get that many, at some point in the mythical future.
mlmonkey did not say that this new observation was the same phenomenon as golf ball dimples, just golf ball dimples already disproved the "long accepted" belief that "smoother the surface, the lower the aerodynamic drag".
The point is that if there are only one or two red flags, you can risk assess them and continue as is if the risk is low. But if there are a large number of red flags, then you need to consider your exit strategy as well.
For example, the way it works in Australia is that after you have used up your sick days, you have to take any further absences from work out of your annual leave balance, and once that is exhausted, you switch to leave without pay.
I had a downline team member who once needed to extend their time away from work for over 5 months due to illness. They had been with the company for several years at that point, so they had a reasonable sick leave balance, probably 10 weeks. When it became clear that they needed longer, they used their remaining 4 weeks of annual leave, then took a month of leave without pay, then another. They were still employed, I approved their leave requests each time they needed to extend, and we just used the most appropriate tool that was available at the time.
The thing you're getting permission for is not to be sick, it is to be considered still employed while not doing work, rather than being fired/disciplined for being AWOL.
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