Speaker 1: Media. Hello on, Welcome to this week's Better Offline. I'm
Speaker 1: your host ed ze Tron. So yes, you're getting two
Speaker 1: monologues this week because we had a guest pull out
Speaker 1: last minute, leaving me with just my keyboard, my microphone,
Speaker 1: and a diet coke in one of those weird vacuum
Speaker 1: sealed tubes that really only real diet coke freaks on.
Speaker 1: And today I'm going to start with a few questions.
Speaker 1: What's going on in Ananthropic What is Dario Amide up to?
Speaker 1: Why do things keep breaking? Used to be the coders
Speaker 1: could just launch claud and run a bunch of subagents
Speaker 1: to look productive. Think you can rely on claud code.
Speaker 1: Guess again, Dario Amede doesn't care about you, and he
Speaker 1: certainly doesn't care about your family. Anyway, to set the scene,
Speaker 1: I need to give you a few details about claud
Speaker 1: Code in general, which you don't pay for clawed code itself.
Speaker 1: There's not like a CLAWD code subscription. When you subscribe
Speaker 1: to Anthropic service, you pay for a CLAWD subscription and
Speaker 1: you either pay twenty bucks, one hundred bucks, or two
Speaker 1: hundred bucks a month, with each tier having more access
Speaker 1: than the last, and access meaning right limits so you
Speaker 1: can use it more. Though if you're wondering what that
Speaker 1: actually means, that's really by design, as all Anthropic tells
Speaker 1: you is that you've got a five hour limit and
Speaker 1: a weekly limit on them models, with a separate one
Speaker 1: for clawed Opus, which is their more expensive, more complex one.
Speaker 1: An important detail is that these subscriptions are also heavily subsidized.
Speaker 1: When you pay Anthropic two hundred dollars a month, you're
Speaker 1: not paying on a per token rate, which is what
Speaker 1: AI starts have to do. They pay per million input
Speaker 1: and output tokens. No no, no, you just do stuff
Speaker 1: and stuff comes out, and you're able to do the
Speaker 1: same things you would I have used in the API.
Speaker 1: But you're burning tokens, and you can burn over two
Speaker 1: and a half thousand dollars in model tokens on a
Speaker 1: two hundred buck a month subscription, or at least you could,
Speaker 1: and some users have been able to spend upwards of
Speaker 1: five thousand dollars on the same subscription rate. Limits are
Speaker 1: generally used to restrict people from burning as much, but
Speaker 1: the problem has become that for Anthropic to approach anything
Speaker 1: close to profitability would have to rate limit people into
Speaker 1: the well into the depths of Hell at this point.
Speaker 1: Moving on. In the middle of March, Anthropics started a
Speaker 1: two week long promotional campaign where they doubled rate limits
Speaker 1: for off peak hours of using Claude, set to end
Speaker 1: on March twenty seven to twenty twenty six, a day
Speaker 1: before it was said to end on March twenty six
Speaker 1: to twenty twenty six, and Tropic would announce it was
Speaker 1: starting peak hours with claud code users maxing out their
Speaker 1: sessions faster than between the hours of five am and
Speaker 1: eleven pm Pacific Manday to Friday, with a spokesperson limply
Speaker 1: adding that efficiency wins aren't named, of course, would offset
Speaker 1: this and only seven percent of users would hit the limits.
Speaker 1: All of this was sold as a result of managing
Speaker 1: the growing demand for Claude. Yes, spoiler alert, more than
Speaker 1: seven percent of users appear to have hit the limits
Speaker 1: and nobody seems to be feeling particularly efficient. Don't know
Speaker 1: where those gains are one use of one hundred dollars
Speaker 1: a month. Max Plan complained about hitting sixty one percent
Speaker 1: of his session limit the five hour one after four prompts,
Speaker 1: which he found out based using a tool called cc
Speaker 1: Usage cost ten dollars and twenty six cents in tokens,
Speaker 1: he still spent ten percent of his subscription and four prompts.
Speaker 1: Another said that they hit sixty three percent of the
Speaker 1: limit on their two hundred a month plan in the
Speaker 1: space of a day, and another hit ninety five percent
Speaker 1: off to twenty minutes of using their max plan, going
Speaker 1: to get one hundred dollars a month on that one.
Speaker 1: Another person hit their max limit off to two or
Speaker 1: three things, don't know what they were, and another vow
Speaker 1: to cancel they're two hundred dollar a month subscription after
Speaker 1: hitting their weekly limit in the space of a day,
Speaker 1: saying that they and I'm going off of a translation
Speaker 1: from fucking Grock, so forgive me expected the premium experience
Speaker 1: between hundred dollars and what they got was constant limit stress.
Speaker 1: I've linked a lot of these in yesterday's free newsletter.
Speaker 1: The SUBPRIMEI crisis is here. Really advise you read it,
Speaker 1: but also you can see how many people are mad,
Speaker 1: or just go on Twitter and search claud limits. It's
Speaker 1: it's not great now. While well, Anthropic technical staff member
Speaker 1: Lydia Halle posted that Anthropic was aware of people hitting
Speaker 1: usage limits in claud code way faster than expected, and
Speaker 1: that some investigation of some sort was taking place. It's
Speaker 1: hard to imagine that Anthropic had no idea that these
Speaker 1: limits were so severe, or that any of this was
Speaker 1: a surprise. Now as I wrote this sentence that I'm
Speaker 1: reading on Tuesday, March thirty first, it doesn't appear that
Speaker 1: any changes have been made. People are still complaining about
Speaker 1: hitting their limits in a few prompts, and Anthropic is
Speaker 1: yet to update anyone. In my opinion, because these are
Speaker 1: the rate limits they decided were necessary to keep the
Speaker 1: business going and roll their nasty ass into IPO. A
Speaker 1: few days previously, though, Anthropic could also accidentally, and I
Speaker 1: put that in quotation, Marks leaked the existence of their
Speaker 1: Cappy Boro and Mythos models to Fortune magazine, by which
Speaker 1: I mean they had a data cash to quote Fortune
Speaker 1: with over three thousand assets that was left open on
Speaker 1: the internet and Fortune somehow found it. You know, Kanna
Speaker 1: reminds me of like a skeezy bloke dropping a Magnum
Speaker 1: condom out of his wallet in front of a woman
Speaker 1: and being like, hey, yeah, you see that, or whoops, whoops.
Speaker 1: In any case, this massive leak also included absolutely fucking
Speaker 1: nothing about the models themselves, other than that they're a
Speaker 1: step change better and that their cybersecurity features were so
Speaker 1: very scary that they would have to roll them out slowly.
Speaker 1: I'm I don't know, man, I no insult to the
Speaker 1: people at Fortune. I just don't think they're on fucking
Speaker 1: Showdan looking up aws buckets. So wonder how this got there? Now?
Speaker 1: I will say, at first I was completely sure that
Speaker 1: this was a deliberate leak, because three thousand assets left
Speaker 1: open on the Internet and none of them have any
Speaker 1: info on the model, but just scary things like ooh
Speaker 1: with too much better. But now I'm not so sure,
Speaker 1: because yesterday Anthropic accidentally leaked the entire source code of
Speaker 1: its claud code coding interface. The leak was a result
Speaker 1: of a reference in claud Code's MPM package, the thing
Speaker 1: that you queried download clord code onto your computer via
Speaker 1: the terminal that led right back to a ZIP archive
Speaker 1: on Anthropic servers per the register that contained the source code.
Speaker 1: I will add that there's an ongoing discussion about what
Speaker 1: actually caused this problem with someone hacker news, hacker news,
Speaker 1: how can use I'm just going to keep it saying
Speaker 1: it might be a problem with bun, the packaging tool
Speaker 1: used to allow people to download clawed code that Anthropic
Speaker 1: acquired in December of last year. To be clear, this
Speaker 1: isn't a leak of Anthropics models, but it's still an
Speaker 1: unbelievably large leak, one that exposed claud code's innards to
Speaker 1: the entire Internet and all of their competitors. And while
Speaker 1: I imagine using the source code is illegal on some level,
Speaker 1: I can't imagine there's any reason their competitors can't take
Speaker 1: a look or that they're you think that they're all
Speaker 1: sitting around being like, oh, I absolutely can't, I mustn't.
Speaker 1: It's not okay, especially when this is a company that
Speaker 1: fucked over just about anyone building anything that you build
Speaker 1: on top of a claud code subscription, thinking about how
Speaker 1: they treated open code. By the way, anyway, now is
Speaker 1: a great time to remind you that claud code create
Speaker 1: a Boris Churney said at the end of December that
Speaker 1: one hundred percent of his contributions to clawd code were
Speaker 1: written in claud code, and told Lenny Richitski in February
Speaker 1: twenty twenty six the coding is now solved for most
Speaker 1: use cases. I assume that the use cases that haven't
Speaker 1: been solved include making sure that there isn't a direct
Speaker 1: link from the claud code installer to a cloud Flare
Speaker 1: storage bucket with its source code ready to download. That
Speaker 1: one just doesn't seem like they got that one pinned down.
Speaker 1: I've also had that. The same interview added that Cherney
Speaker 1: hadn't written a single line of code since November twenty
Speaker 1: twenty five, which is I mean, those of you playing
Speaker 1: at home, I know many of you really enjoy my
Speaker 1: game show is that good? And I just have to
Speaker 1: ask you is that good? Anyway? I feel like I
Speaker 1: very recently warned everybody about the very obvious dangers of
Speaker 1: allowing lms to write all of your code. These models
Speaker 1: do not have thoughts or knowledge, or really anything other
Speaker 1: than probabilistic generations of outputs based on training data and
Speaker 1: a lot of it, and they're quite complex. Nevertheless, this
Speaker 1: means that any time you choose to just accept the
Speaker 1: code they generate without reading it thoroughly, you're choosing to
Speaker 1: trust thing inherently untrusted, whether it doesn't think or have knowledge.
Speaker 1: This is just the beginning of us finding out the
Speaker 1: ugly cost of software engineers trusting large language models to
Speaker 1: write their code at scale. Llms are good at writing
Speaker 1: lots of code, which in turn means that the code
Speaker 1: requires far more time to review, which assumes you do
Speaker 1: review it, which becomes far more difficult when you're constantly
Speaker 1: pressured to ship more and more and more software every
Speaker 1: fucking week. Or if you're Boris Journey and you believe
Speaker 1: that shipping software fast is the same thing is shipping
Speaker 1: good software. I'm now thinking about the launch of anthropics
Speaker 1: claud cowork, a product that can allegedly manage files on
Speaker 1: your computer or draft documents or some such Billshere nobody
Speaker 1: seems to be able to explain it. At the time,
Speaker 1: Boris Journey proudly boasted that clawed cowork was built in
Speaker 1: around a week and a half, which makes perfect sense, says.
Speaker 1: Almost immediately, a story came out of a guy who
Speaker 1: tried to reorganize his wife's desktop files using cowork, which
Speaker 1: is one of the literal things on the cowork website.
Speaker 1: It tells you to do, only to watch it delete.
Speaker 1: Every single one of his folk goes permanently. He was
Speaker 1: only able to recover them thanks to a nicloud backup.
Speaker 1: This is the future that these so called large language
Speaker 1: model companies want for you. Bad software chipped quickly hyped
Speaker 1: by a captured media, doesn't give a damn about whether
Speaker 1: the services are the things you pay for or functional
Speaker 1: or useful, and doesn't even bother using the tools or
Speaker 1: understanding them. And nobody else appears to be discussing how
Speaker 1: inherently deceptive these companies have. Become a subscriber to Claude
Speaker 1: who paid for an annual subscription in December twenty twenty
Speaker 1: five now as a product that has significantly less value
Speaker 1: thanks to egregious rate limits. And that's also like if
Speaker 1: you can even do your job anymore, I imagine people
Speaker 1: in the twenty buck a month subscription are really fucking suffering.
Speaker 1: And in general, anthropics models seem to go and look
Speaker 1: at the Reddit if you want to understand more. They
Speaker 1: seem to oscillate in utility and effixi based on the
Speaker 1: time of day you use them and their proximity to
Speaker 1: a new model launch. This is a really weird story
Speaker 1: that I've never been able to get to the bottom of,
Speaker 1: but there have been reports for like over a year
Speaker 1: of different mode from Anthropic from OpenAI from whomever getting
Speaker 1: dumber at random times. No one's able to get to
Speaker 1: the bottom of it. I've heard people saying they quantize
Speaker 1: the models make them smaller during the day. I don't
Speaker 1: know if you have any information about this, shoot me
Speaker 1: at shoot me a piss on clerk, or email me
Speaker 1: a easy at better offline dot com. That's Echo Zeta
Speaker 1: at better offline dot com. What we do know is
Speaker 1: that claud Code, one of the few popular AI products,
Speaker 1: is built with the same disregard for safety and customer
Speaker 1: happiness as the rest of Anthropics, astonishingly shitty business that
Speaker 1: burns billions of dollars with no end in sight. Chief
Speaker 1: claud Code slopagandist Boris Cherney doesn't give enough of a
Speaker 1: fuck about his customers to actually read his code, and
Speaker 1: I imagine the same goes for a lot of other
Speaker 1: engineers within the company a big tech at large. The
Speaker 1: consequences are already obvious. In the last few months, A
Speaker 1: coding tools brought down Aws twice and lost Amazon hundreds
Speaker 1: of thousands of orders and led to a security breach
Speaker 1: inside Meta mere weeks ago. And now how these tools
Speaker 1: of leaked claud code source code. How much is enough
Speaker 1: to make people wake up to the inherent dangers of
Speaker 1: using these models the right software at scale. I guess
Speaker 1: we're gonna find out. I'll see you on Friday for
Speaker 1: another monologue.