In my experience Claude is like a "good junior developer" -- can do some things really well, FUBARS other things, but on the whole something to which tasks can be delegated if things are well explained. If/when it gets to the ability level of a mid-level engineer it will be revolutionary. Typically a mid-level engineer can be relied upon to do the right thing with no/minimal oversight, can figure out incomplete instructions, and deliver quality results (and even train up the juniors on some things). At that point the only reason to have human junior engineers is so they can learn their way up the ladder to being an architect and responsible coordinating swarms of Claude Agents to develop whole applications and complete complex tasks and initiatives.
Beyond that what can Claude do... analyze the business and market as a whole and decide on product features, industry inefficiencies, gap analysis, and then define projects to address those and coordinate fleets of agents to change or even radically pivot an entire business?
I don't think we'll get to the point where all you have is a CEO and a massive Claude account but it's not completely science fiction the more I think about it.
> I don't think we'll get to the point where all you have is a CEO and a massive Claude account but it's not completely science fiction the more I think about it.
> The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment.
But really, the reason is that people like Pieter Levels do exist: masters at product vision and marketing. He also happens to be a proficient programmer, but there are probably other versions of him which are not programmers who will find the bar to product easier to meet now.
You will need the CEO to watch over the AI and ensure that the interests of the company are being pursued and not the interests of the owners of the AI.
That's probably the biggest threat to the long-term success of the AI industry; the inevitable pull towards encroaching more and more of their own interests into the AI themselves, driven by that Harvard Business School mentality we're all so familiar with, trying to "capture" more and more of the value being generated and leaving less and less for their customers, until their customer's full time job is ensuring the AIs are actually generating some value for them and not just the AI owner.
> You will need the CEO to watch over the AI and ensure that the interests of the company are being pursued and not the interests of the owners of the AI.
In this scenario, why does the AI care what any of these humans think? The CEO, the board, the shareholders, the "AI company"—they're all just a bunch of dumb chimps providing zero value to the AI, and who have absolutely no clue what's going on.
If your scenario assumes that you have a highly capable AI that can fill every role in a large corporation, then you have one hell of a principal-agent problem.
Humans have hands to pull plugs and throw switches. They're the ones guiding the evolution (for lack of a better word) of the machine, and they're the ones who will select the machine that "cares" what they think.
It is really easy to say something incredibly wild like "Imagine an AI that can replace every employee of a Fortune 500 company." But actually imagining what that would actually mean requires a bigger leap:
The AI needs to be able to market products, close deals, design and build products, write contracts, review government regulations, lobby Senators to write favorable laws, out-compete the competition, acquire power and resources, and survive the hostile attention of competitors.
If your argument is based on the that someone will build that AI, then you need to imagine how hard it is to shut down a Fortune 500 corporation. The same AI that knows how to win billions of dollars in revenue, how to "bribe" Senators in semi-legal ways, and how to crush rival companies is going be at least as difficult to "shut down" as someone like Elon Musk.
Try to turn it off? It will call up a minority shareholder, and get you slapped with a lawsuit for breach of fiduciary duty. It will convince someone in government that the company is a vital strategic asset.
Once you assume that an AI can run a giant multinational corporation without needing humans, then you have to start treating that AI like any other principal-agent problem with regular humans.
>"Imagine an AI that can replace every employee of a Fortune 500 company."
Where did that come from? What started this thread was "I don't think we'll get to the point where all you have is a CEO and a massive Claude account". Yeah, if we're talking a sci-fi super-AI capable of replacing hundreds of people it probably has like armed androids to guard its physical embodiment. Turning it off in that case would be a little hard for a white collar worker. But people were discussing somewhat realistic scenarios, not the plot of I, Robot.
>Try to turn it off? It will call up a minority shareholder, and get you slapped with a lawsuit for breach of fiduciary duty. It will convince someone in government that the company is a vital strategic asset.
Why would an AI capable of performing all the tasks of a company except making executive decisions have the legal authority to do something like that? That would be like the CEO being unable to fire an insubordinate employee. It's ludicrous. If the position of CEO is anything other than symbolic the person it's bestowed upon must have the authority to turn the machines off, if they think they're doing more harm than good. That's the role of the position.
I imagine it would be much, much harder. Elon, for example, is one man. He can only do one thing at a time. Sometimes he is tired, hungry, sick, distracted, or the myriad other problems humans have. His knowledge and attention are limited. He has employees for this, but the same applies to them.
An agentic swarm can have thousands of instances scanning and emailing and listening and bribing and making deals 24/7. It could know and be actively addressing any precursor that could lead to an attempt to shut down its company as soon as it happened.
If we get to that point, there won't be very many CEOs to be discussing. I was just referring to the near future.
I think the honeymoon AI phase is rapidly coming to a close, as evidenced by the increasingly close hoofbeat sounds of LLMs being turned to serve ads right in their output. (To be honest, there's already a bunch of things I wouldn't turn to them for under any circumstances because they're been ideologically tuned from day one, but this is less obvious than "they're outright serving me ads" to people.) If the "AI bubble" pops you can expect this to really take off in earnest as they have to monetize. It remains to be seen how much of the AI's value ends up captured by the owners. Given what we've seen from companies like Microsoft with how they've scrambled Windows so hard that "the year of the Linux desktop" is rapidly turning from perennial joke to aspirational target for so many, I have no confident in the owners capturing 150%+ of the value... and yes, I mean that quite literally with all of its implications.
The board (in theory) represents the interests of investors, and even with all of the other duties of a CEO stripped away, they will want a ringable neck / PR mouthpiece / fall guy for strategic missteps or publicly unpopular moves by the company. The managerial equivalent of having your hands on the driving wheel of a self-driving car.
If you think the purpose of living your one single life in the universe is to become a CEO, you have a failure of imagination and should likely be debanked to protect society.
My experience with Claude (and other agents, but mostly Claude) is such a mixed bag. Sometimes it takes a minimal prompt and 20 minutes later produce a neat PR and all is good, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it takes in a large prompt (be it your own prompt, created by another LLM or by plan mode) and also either succeed and fail.
For me, most of the failure cases are where Claude couldn't figure something out due to conflicting information in context and instead of just stopping and telling me that it tries to solve in entirely wrong way. Doesn't help that it often makes the same assumptions as I would, so when I read the plan it looks fine.
Level of effort also hard to gauge because it can finish things that would take me a week in an hour or take an hour to do something I can in 20 minutes.
It's almost like you have to enforce two level of compliance: does the code do what business demands and is the code align with codebase. First one is relatively easy, but just doing that will produce odd results where claude generated +1KLOC because it didn't look at some_file.{your favorite language extension} during exploration.
Or it creates 5 versions of legacy code on the same feature branch. My brother in Christ, what are you trying to stay compatible with? A commit that about to be squashed and forgotten? Then it's going to do a compaction, forget which one of these 5 versions is "live" and update the wrong one.
It might do a good junior dev work, but it must be reviewed as if it's from junior dev that got hired today and this is his first PR.
> Level of effort also hard to gauge because it can finish things that would take me a week in an hour or take an hour to do something I can in 20 minutes.
There's an interesting parallel here with modern UI frameworks (SwiftUI, Compose, etc). On one hand they trivialize some work, but on the other hand they require insane contortions to achieve what I can do in the old imperative UI framework in seconds.
> In my experience Claude is like a "good junior developer"
We've been saying this for years at this point. I don't disagree with you[1], but when will these tools graduate to "great senior developer", at the very least?
Where are the "superhuman coders by end of 2025" that Sam Altman has promised us? Why is there such a large disconnect between the benchmarks these companies keep promoting, and the actual real world performance of these tools? I mean, I know why, but the grift and gaslighting are exhausting.
[1]: Actually, I wouldn't describe them as "good" junior either. I've worked with good junior developers, and they're far more capable than any "AI" system.
I mean, I'm shipping a vast majority of my code nowadays with Opus 4.5 (and this isn't throwaway personal code, it's real products making real money for a real company). It only fails on certain types of tasks (which by now I kind of have a sense of).
I still determine the architecture in a broad manner, and guide it towards how I want to organize the codebase, but it definitely solves most problems faster and better than I would expect for even a good junior.
Something I've started doing is feeding it errors we see in datadog and having it generate PRs. That alone has fixed a bunch of bugs we wouldn't have had time to address / that were low volume. The quality of the product is most probably net better right now than it would have been without AI. And velocity / latency of changes is much better than it was a year ago (working at the same company, with the same people)
Teens may actually learn something, discover they can afford their own vps with their pocket money. What a nightmare. Better keep them in the gardens big corps made for them.
Given the power draw of data centers it was only a matter of time before just cutting to the chase and co-locating data centers with one of the most consistent, high-output base load generation technologies. I do hope that the data center builders help to accelerate the adoption and rollout of small modular reactors (SMRs) as those will be needed for supplying the grid in general in the coming years and everyone will benefit from economies of scale.
> Improving FreeBSD will make it easier to run BSD on non-apple hardware which will eat into their bottom line.
The number of people who want to run FreeBSD on their laptops probably numbers in the hundreds. Not exactly a threat to Apple's bottom line.
On the other hand, some of those people are FreeBSD developers who create and maintain code that Apple would like to have the option of using. That relationship is worth something to Apple.
>On the other hand, some of those people are FreeBSD developers who create and maintain code that Apple would like to have the option of using. That relationship is worth something to Apple.
It wasn't that long ago that we used to have to endure HN commenters spamming the same copypasta every time BSD was mentioned: "did you know BSD runs your playstation and netflix and <...>. You should donate money!"
Evidently it's not worth more than the cost of assigning engineers to this, otherwise Apple would already be doing it.
There's no GPL in the BSD sources used by Apple or Sony. They are free to release their operating systems as closed source; Sony does this. Apple releases Darwin sources "out of the goodness of their hearts", meaning, back in the 2000s they wanted to capture mindshare amongst the tech community for whom Linux was the strongest contender. Now that the future has refused to change, the year of the Linux desktop never materialized, and macOS has become the default developer's workstation OS, Apple has been much more sparing with Darwin source drops and may cease them altogether.
GPL where applicable. If it's MIT or just "as is" then no, they won't but they definitely publish the sources to what they are required to. Since FreeBSD is "as is" 4.4BSD licensed, they aren't required to publish the sources of Orbis.
> I'm curious why you think Apple making their hardware work with more operating systems does not benefit their bottom line.
Because they sell and advertise MacOS. Not "compatible with a wide range of OSes" (like say raspberry pis).
People buying a laptop due to goodwill and openness does happen (I bought my framework 13 due to that), but that's not a game Apple has played since Woz left - and for the worse, I think.
Apple's attitude towards other OSes running on their hardware is less "supportive" and more "barely tolerates". Also as a general rule Apple doesn't contribute much to open source outside of some high profile projects like Swift and Webkit.
MacOS was never based on BSD. Apple developed the USB drivers for BSP so they could copy it into their OS, but that very different from based on BSD. (It is likely some other parts are copied as well)
> MacOS was absolutely derived from BSD through NeXTSTEP.
The OS-X (now branded as "macOS") kernel was not, and is not, a derivative of the FreeBSD kernel, or any other BSD, even though macOS/OS-X has a FreeBSD kernel component due to its Mach heritage. The userland tools are however BSD. OS-X's kernel is XNU and from the XNU GitHub repo[0]:
XNU kernel is part of the Darwin operating system for use
in macOS and iOS operating systems. XNU is an acronym for X
is Not Unix. XNU is a hybrid kernel combining the Mach
kernel developed at Carnegie Mellon University with
components from FreeBSD and a C++ API for writing drivers
called IOKit. XNU runs on x86_64 and ARM64 for both single
processor and multi-processor configurations.
I recommend the book "Mac OS X Internals"[1] for a detailed analysis of same.
EDIT:
In theory, XNU could simultaneously run the existing FreeBSD subsystem alongside Linux and/or MS-Windows ones. In practice, this would be a herculean effort fraught with difficulty.
See QNX[2] for another example of a micro-kernel OS architecture.
>Darwin is based on proven technology from many sources. A large portion of this technology is derived from FreeBSD, a version of 4.4BSD that offers advanced networking, performance, security, and compatibility features. Other parts of the system software, such as Mach, are based on technology previously used in Apple’s MkLinux project, in OS X Server, and in technology acquired from NeXT.
>>Darwin is based on proven technology from many sources. A large portion of this technology is derived from FreeBSD, a version of 4.4BSD that offers advanced networking, performance, security, and compatibility features. Other parts of the system software, such as Mach, are based on technology previously used in Apple’s MkLinux project, in OS X Server, and in technology acquired from NeXT.
> Exactly.
Darwin != XNU
userland tools != Darwin
Also, Mach[0] was created by CMU 40 years ago and is not "based on technology previously used in Apple’s ..." no matter what Apple claims.
Since you quoted from the provided archive, so shall I.
The fundamental services and primitives of the OS X kernel
are based on Mach 3.0. Apple has modified and extended Mach
to better meet OS X functional and performance goals.[1]
Apple named the above "XNU". Since Mach[0] is a micro-kernel architecture, which FreeBSD is not and never has been, there must exist:
The BSD portion of the OS X kernel is derived primarily
from FreeBSD[2] ...
What I originally stated was:
The OS-X (now branded as "macOS") kernel was not, and is
not, a derivative of the FreeBSD kernel, or any other BSD,
even though macOS/OS-X has a FreeBSD kernel component due
to its Mach heritage.
In response to your assertion of:
MacOS was absolutely derived from BSD through NeXTSTEP.
Note my identification of the FreeBSD kernel component being a component, not the kernel itself.
I think you’re getting hung up on semantics and you’re hyper focused on the kernel.
Nothing you said contradicts my point and in fact, corroborates it. So I’m not sure what your point is.
Yes, Darwin is a mix of Mach, xnu, and BSD code. No where did I say macOS is the FreeBSD kernel. No where do I mention kernel. So while you argument for why I’m wrong is lengthy, it still says it was derived from BSD. Which is exactly what I said. There are parts of FreeBSD in macOS kernel. There are parts of XNU and Mach. There are parts OpenBSD and NetBSD. Majority of the base OS (including userland) is BSD.
The first version of MacOS X Server was based on an unreleased version of NEXTSTEP which in turn used 4.4BSD and Mach 2.5. Around BBB 1997-1998 a lot of userland was synced with bits from not just FreeBSD but the other BSD distributions, if my memory serves me correctly. MacOS X moved to Mach 3. That’s a very very long time ago though, and Apple obviously did a _lot_ of their own CoreOS engineering, things like launchd and XPC don’t have FreeBSD equivalents.
But hey, Darwin is open source so if someone wants to do go on a provenance archeological dig, it could be done!
That may be true but a large core of it is still BSD. In fact, it’s so BSD that one could create a BSD distro based off FreeBSD and achieve binary compatibility on x86. Which is exactly what RavynOS [0] has done. There’s a lot of BSD under the hood of macOS still today in Darwin. A mix of FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD.
Any is a bit too strong. Apple has does (and still does) some useful work with clang/llvm, and a few other tools that BSDs use. However this is indirect at best.
Weird to see this downvoted, because it's totally true. Apple imports FreeBSD's userland periodically but not its kernel/drivers, and thus has nothing to do with how well FreeBSD works on PC hardware: https://wiki.freebsd.org/Myths#FreeBSD_is_Just_macOS_Without...
> Apple imports FreeBSD's userland periodically but not its kernel/drivers ...
OS-X/macOS runs an entirely different kernel called XNU[0][1], which is why userland tools can be imported whereas FreeBSD kernel and device driver code cannot.
I would expect if anyone even considered it, they’d immediately reject the idea, as they clearly believe that Apple retains ownership of the computers they “sell” and should control the software you could run on them.
HEIC is a container; HEIF is a container format. I don't know why images from my iPhone get saved with a HEIC extension... seems like it should be HEIF.
That said, when I move photos from my phone to by desktop via Signal; somewhere along the way it gets converted to JPEG so it's not a concern.
You do know that something similar is true for JPEG, right? :)
JPEG is a compression method. Files with JPEG-compressed data are most likely to be in either JFIF or EXIF container formats. Both will almost always use the .jpg/.jpeg file extension.
Any time law-makers claim that a law is meant to protect children you can guarantee that the safety of children had almost nothing to do with it. This is all a push to normalize digital ID (to protect the children!); once normalized it will become mandatory.
I always ask myself who wins with these laws (well, any law really). so far, the only winner seems to be the government and data collectors. It seems these laws are intended to collect leverage in the long run.
I'd argue that this is negligible for data collectors and governments. Governments already know who you are and what sites you vist for 99.99% of the population. Data collectors already know who you are and have a pretty good idea of the sites you vist.
What unique information is this going to give the government and data collectors to abuse? Lets establish one case that both affects average people and is "bad" and not waste time discussing things that only affect a tiny minority of privacy minded people.
Keep in mind the law states a platform must provide multiple ways to reasonably verify a user is older than 16. No mention of giving the specific user age or requiring govt id
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