> Individual humans are so fucking expensive to train and upkeep

This statement is dangerous man!

The step from here to "we need just a couple of tens of millions of people around the world" is so narrow!

Eh. Not to me, rest assured. I find humans both comically tragic and incredibly precious.

On python coding is definitively better that everything else: clean and not overengineered code, understands very well the code base.

The only thing I'm wondering if they on purpose downgraded opus 4.8 performances in the last days before the release just to make the "step" look bigger. I'm pretty sure they did it also in the past with all other opus 4.x releases.

Nice, but I'm really curious about how many tokens have been used.

There is only one hint: 475k tokens in the screenshot when OP asked the model to fix some behaviour, but it would be fascinating to know the total tokens amount.

In a lot of places outside US we are already above the average cost of an average human.

Zitron is in the business of content creation and not successful predictions. It doesn't matter how many times he (and several others around) will say the end is here, they have to be right only once.

BTW, one thing for sure he is right about are the economics, as of today there is no way these massive investments are gone be paid.

For the purposes of content creation they don't even have to be right once

Now that you mention it, has Ed ever made a single testable prediction that came true?

That prices would increase for the frontier models, and that usage limits would go down.

They don't have to be right even once. Why do they?

In italian we say "l'operazione è riuscita perfettamente, ma il paziente è morto" -> "the surgery was a complete success, but the patient died"

Both this and what Meta said reminds me of "Clarke and Dawe - The Front Fell Off" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM)

I also can't believe the people who were involved with writing this response from Meta, didn't realize how obviously bad it sounds. It's like there is no humans working and writing there anymore.

> It's like there is no humans working and writing there anymore.

Don't know if AI is to blame, but I've used to see these kinds of nonsense post-mortems even in the pre-llm era, and it's always due to some internal fighting ongoing between various departments.

Where do you think the LLMs learned it from...

"Who taught you how to do this stuff?"

"You, alright! I learned it by watching you!"

Pretty much. The most depressing thing about the bland slop produced by LLMs is realizing that this is what they "think" of us.

I was reminded of the Murray Walker quote. “There's nothing wrong with the car except it's on fire”

My dad says, "But other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?"

(Usually said jocularly when everyone is at their most upset, e.g. a vacation ruined)

A friend said at one of those moments, "And other than that, how was the play Mrs Lincoln?" And the 3rd person replied, "I don't know, I've never seen the play 'Mrs Lincoln'"

“The strait of Hormuz is open so long as Iran does not fire missiles at ships.”

"The numbers will go down as soon as you quit testing"

The actual quote was "if you don't test, you won't have cases"

> like there is no humans working and writing there anymore

Meta has never been a place for people with empathy to thrive or succeed. They literally enabled a genocide. Despite being warned by internal employees, profits were more important.

Which one. They have several under their blood soaked belt now

Very rigorous software engineering standards.

Does it matter if the response is tone deaf or simply misguided? I am a bit nihilistic here, but in one week absolutely nobody will be talking about this. Are the affected individuals going to abandon instagram? Are people going to reduce their usage out of concern for the safety of their accounts? Nothing will happen, hence there is no need for actual humans writing a good, well intended response.

> in one week absolutely nobody will be talking about this.

In news media, sure. But in IT teams around the world people will be referring to this (the exploit opening stupidity) for years as how NOT to do things. :)

Everyone has a limit to how much bullshit they'll put up with. This could be the last straw for some people to finally quit Instagram. I quit Instagram, Facebook and all other Meta properties in 2025, after complaining about various problems for years. Other people may quit temporarily and then return, but any time they spend away from Instagram may give them experience that will help them quit permanently later.

> Does it matter if the response is tone deaf or simply misguided?

I agree with you that in a week nobody will be talking any more, but I'm pretty sure it's a GDPR data breach, and they can have some trouble within EU.

Yeah, they probably don't give a fu.. about EU, but if the response doesn't matter at all why did they spend time on it?

Haha.. This reminds me of a classic Windows MessageBox meme that goes: "Operation failed successfully!"

We have the same saying in German: Operation erfolgreich, Patient tot.

"Operation succesful, patient dead" is a common saying in India.

I found an English use from 1883 - https://archive.org/details/argonaut131883sanf/page/n391/mod... .

> The creosote in toothache drops administered to a New York boy cured the pain, but killed the boy. This recalls the entry in the register at Bellevue Hospital, which reads; "Operation successful. Patient died."

The Argonaut, San Francisco, December 22, 1883.

Maybe it was euthanasia?

Thanks man, I was looking for something like this for a while!

You’re welcome

You are supposed to run it on full codebase before any single PR gets merge.

There are a lot of places in Europe where 1.5k$ is more than 50% of the total cost of an employee.

And the obvious question: what it's the cost of that revenue? Because it looks huge but ...

Don't you forget about India and Latinamerica... No way I see companies paying that much for outsourced employees

One could hire a competent developer here in Brazil for that amount. I know because my workplace has hired competent developers for that amount. You can even call them senior developers, but you can't get "non-startup seniors" with actual experience, those expect a bit more.

I just wanted to take their number at face value. It's not like it needs more real information to make AI a bubble.

I used to work in datacenters, during spinning disk era we had technicians from vendors basically every couple of days to replace some broken part. When the massive switch to ssd happened instead of having them every couple of days it was 3 or 4 times per month.

Despite no moving parts things broke anyway and, even if it doesn't break, the vendor can make you change the technology just by playing with maintenance cost of the older one, limiting or removing spare parts from the market.

My understanding is that a lot of AI data centers are still heavily relying on spinning HDDs, which is why seagate, western digital are selling more HDDs than ever before.

Huh, TIL. Here's the Seagate financials for Q3FY26:

https://s24.q4cdn.com/101481333/files/doc_financials/2026/q3...

"Hard Drive exabyte shipments of 199EB, up 39% YoY, with ~90% shipped to data center customers"

"Data center revenue of $2.5B, up 55% YoY, driven by strengthening cloud and enterprise demand"

And an article: https://www.seagate.com/stories/articles/the-ai-era-doesnt-r...

Spinning drives are still the "best" for data density and if the IO is sequential (which wouldn't surprise me with AI training workloads), the performance delta may not be that bad vs SSDs. As always, it depends on use case.

I know that a lot of cloud storage has tiered models, where the "expensive, but faster" tiers are SSDs, but then the slower cheaper tiers are HDDs, and the "cold storage" can be HDDs that are turned off all the way to tiers like AWS's S3 "deep archive glacier" tier being tape drives.