> When we do land on something, if it affects existing subscribers you'll get plenty of notice before anything changes. Will hear it from us, not a screenshot on X or Reddit.
If you don't want things like this spreading through screenshots of X and Reddit, don't run "tests" like this in the first place!
(Also "if it affects existing subscribers" is a cop-out, I need to know the pricing of Claude Code for NEW subscribers if I'm going to adopt it at a company with a growing team, or recommend it to other people, write tutorials etc.)
pretty much none of these big providers are offering the guarantees needed to be taken seriously in workplaces right now. the technology itself isn't offering the deterministic guarantees that should warrant it in the workplace right now. problem is everyone's foot is just on the gas. even if your workplace isnt paying for it, people are just straight up rolling their own personal claude accounts to do work at orgs.
ive been trying to make the case all year that if we're going to let employees do shit with ai, lets try claude. in the past like.. 2-3 weeks all that goodwill has basically evaporated.
local inference needs to take off asap because all of these entities actually suck and i wouldn't trust a single sla with anthropic. they are not acting like a serious company right now, this is a joke.
Copilot's per-prompt pricing model is overwhelmingly the best value for money right now, although they more than doubled the price of Opus 4.7 compared to 4.6 and completely removed 4.5 and 4.6, which erodes their lead somewhat. Copilot restricts context much more than CC, but I still find it to be plenty capable. I've occasionally managed to give Copilot/Opus 4.6 a prompt that kept it productive for a full work day for a cost of just ~$0.10.
My company has Github Business, which provides all major models.
Claude runs out of tokens usually in the middle of the month. I can use it with opencode.
Then one extra Claude Pro.
Then also:
Codex business for a test month. gpt-5.4 was excellent.
And since kimi-2.6 I bought their monthly for testing. Works fine. Not as excellent as opus, but usable. Fixes tricky problems by its own.
Not an OpenRouter subscription yet. Those models are either free on opencode anyway, or not good enough.
The free MinMax 2.5 on opencode is pretty usable also.
I know of a very serious business that deployed Max to all of their developers. API pricing, from what I see, can become more expensive than just hiring another dev.
We're also not seeing much difference in real throughput at an agency. Everyone is getting decent results, output wise but it just doesn't seem to change the outcomes that much. There is also a mixed incentive at an agency, because a reduction in hours spent is a reduction in revenue.
It will be interesting to see how it all plays out, but I suspect if cost continues to increase and output only improves incrementally from here, that the cost will be the final decider rather than the competence.
I could see it being a thing we use only sometimes, for some things, but ultimately remain reliant on developers to get the work through the pipeline.
Management seems disconnected from reality. Real employees accumulate tribal knowledge, have an almost infinite context, and don’t keep disabling unit tests because they don’t pass. They don’t really cost money if it’s information workers that build almost all of the modern service industry. It’s management that we should see as a cost center.
That's true but employees offer more than code output, and you still need people operating the "machine" at this stage.
I am interested in how corporate politics evolves in this new environment. Usually all the way up the chain, managers and directors use head count as a measure of power and influence (and compensation). Who's going to pay a director top level pay when all they're doing is funneling requirements to various agents? That seems like a technical role that isn't particularly aligned with the soft skills management excel with either.
Well yes it is expensive, but companies are paying for that. It is far more expensive than the Max and it does go up to or more in some cases compared to the employee salary.
Larger companies are using Claude through AWS Bedrock and are willing to easily pay $5k+ per engineer per month for it.
The thinking appears to be that a model that can do the work of a developer must be worth a significant share of a developer salary. I think this idea is flawed.
Developer salaries are driven up by scarcity - scarcity of developer skills overall and scarcity of developer skills in specific places like California. If AI models destroy the scarcity then the price worth paying for a coding agent will drop dramatically.
Maybe Anthropic can get away with it for a couple of months. But this will not last.
But if e.g. a developer can do 50% more, shouldn't it be worth it to pay up to 50% of developer salary for the product?
So the % is debatable of course. There's cases where an AI agent can save weeks worth of investigation, there's cases where you are mainly blocked due to processes, and many different circumstances. It's up to every company on their own to decide it. But if they decide it's 50%, why shouldn't they spend 50% of salary on it?
Like imagine a large company with thousands of microservices. You need to build a feature, before you had to setup cross timezone team meetings to figure out who owns what, what is happening in each microservice, how it all connects together. But now you can essentially send an AI Agent to scour and prepare all this material for you, which theoretically in this planning could save hours of back and forth meetings.
If 1 hour / 1 eng costs $200, then a 10 people 1h meeting avoided would save $200 x 10 = $2000 alone.
I don't see it as a replacement for dev, it's more of a multiplier.
I believe what GP is saying is that there is a price calculation today, but then if enough devs become unemployed, their salary will go down, making them more competitive by finops calculations, at which point the Ai prices will have to come down as well. Where equilibrium is, no one knows
I think it's an interest hypothesis but I don't think it works out like that. AI prices aren't priced in relation to the work they do, they're priced in relation to tokens (input/output). As long as it's cheaper to use those tokens than it is to pay a dev, then dev salaries will likely fall. Whenever it becomes cheaper to hire a dev than to use AI, a company will likely just hire a dev. But AI prices won't fall just because dev salaries have.
Yeah, I mean I think there's just too much work and I think devs who are effective with AI won't become unemployed, but their productivity will be multiplied. More will be expected of companies in terms of output, so it will be just more output.
>But if e.g. a developer can do 50% more, shouldn't it be worth it to pay up to 50% of developer salary for the product?
That's the upper bound but it's not the market price.
Accounting software (+ hardware) doesn't cost nearly as much as the accountant hours it saves. Accountant salaries are simply not a relevant yardstick for the price that software vendors can charge for accounting software.
Equally, the market price for code generators will not stay anywhere near the price of developer hours it saves. It will be determined by competition.
Because accounting software is cheaper due to competition. In software eng Claude is currently strongest and there's higher costs involved than normal SaaS. There are many fields in which the tools/machinery cost more than the salaries of people.
>Because accounting software is cheaper due to competition. In software eng Claude is currently strongest and there's higher costs involved than normal SaaS.
Yes, competition not salaries determines the margins that software vendors can charge. That's exactly what I'm saying.
My expectation is that competition between coding agents will stay strong and costs for the current level of software engineering performance will fall.
>There are many fields in which the tools/machinery cost more than the salaries of people.
Of course not, but they cost more than the person using them, it's multiplying the productivity of that person, so if AI multiplied enough as well it would make sense.
The question was whether the salaries that would have been paid for the working hours replaced by the machine are a realistic yardstick for the market price of the machine.
I am pretty sure that a hole in the pocket in the order of 50 000 000 USD/month (assuming around 20 000 people using AI in not the smartest or most optimized way possible, therefore burning A LOT of tokens) will be noticeable by even the largest companies.
It is noticeable and even promoted, large companies do pay such sums for the API, like $5k+ per person per month. Not every eng is using AI that much already, but companies are clearly willing to pay those sums.
I just cancelled before seeing this news. i was already pissed about constantly hitting limits on the 20 a month plan and looking for alternatives and this seals the deal. Bye bye!
Yea, I've been fine so far, but something happened with Opus 4.6 and especially 4.7. I was able to do some actual work with a Pro plan before. Now it's just pure anxiety of hitting the limits.
With Sonnet it's a bit better, but I can get the same performance with GPT-5.4.
Now I'm pretty much paying the 20€ for Claude Pro so it can plan/review stuff and then I use pi.dev + GPT-5.4 for the actual work.
I just paid for Pro for the first time 24 hours ago. Its been great, but the limits are crazy. It's nice not dealing with ChatGPTs sycophantic gaslighting, and not having random bugs.
That said, I seem to be caught in that 2% test if I open in a private tab. What nonsense. I wouldn't be paying for Claude if it wasn't for its quality abilities, which necessarily includes Claude Code.
I can easily hit the weekly limit on Claude even on the $200 plan. I have yet to ever hit a rate limit on Codex $100. And the results are almost as good. And don't get me started on Anthropic's extra usage scam.
Not the op, but it’s fairly easy to hit if you automate a kanban and have some stuff you want to get done. All those little “wouldn’t it be great if” tasks that show up after doing a big task become very doable, it just soaks your tokens.
To play devil's advocate, without A/B testing a lot of decisions would be made with insufficient relevant data, and lead to subpar results that affect the many negatively form the road.
counter-point : the companies that are most famous for A/B testing routinely are also the ones with the most notoriously non-existent customer service departments globally, facebook/google/amazon/ebay. Groups that harbor dissatisfied customers by essentially being 'the only show in town.'.
so, what i'm saying is : I think a lot of companies align themselves with the cash first and then measure whether or not the negative image/user impact is manageable .
A lot of decisions made with A/B testing are also made with insufficient relevant data, but it's less obvious since it's easy to think the A/B results cover everything.
> Depends entirely on the stakes and whether personal data is involved
Sure. Let me just A/B test whether or not you'll respond positively or negatively to having your news delivered via push notification or delayed by 10 minutes.
I'm sure you would appreciate being tested on without your consent, just so that I can make an extra quick buck at your expense. Nothing amoral or unethical about it.
What do you think about slow rollouts for new features? Like, we think this new push notification system will be loved but let’s ship to only 1% of users in case there’s a horrible unforeseen consequence like occasional 10min delays? Dashboard goes upside down -> revert then work through logs to figure out what the hell went wrong.
So you're perfectly okay with repeatedly paying for a shit product, getting shat on by the company in the form of being tested for feedback, and "maybe" getting a better product in the future. Mind you, that "better" isn't necessarily better for you but more explicitly better for the company you're paying.
Sounds like someone who doesn't care about being a sheep. Or maybe someone whose salary depends on having sheep.
I think you are making far too wide-sweeping statements. I think most people here probably agree that if Anthropic drops Claude Code from the Pro plan after people have paid with the understanding that it is part of the package, that would be wrong, and they deserve to lose business over it. However, there are plenty of situations where A/B testing is entirely benign, and I would not have any problem with a company doing that testing without getting consent first. Every form of A/B testing is not done just for the gain of the company doing the testing.
> I need to know the pricing of Claude Code for NEW subscribers if I'm going to adopt it at a company with a growing team.
I agree, but can you really use Claude Code on the Pro plan as a full time developer, or professional 'knowledge worker' without hitting the usage limits fairly early in the day anyway?
I'm in the academia, and Claude's performance in my field could be described as a very fast junior grad student. When I use Claude Code, I typically spend a few hours figuring out what needs to be done exactly, and describing it in sufficient detail. Then Claude does it in 30 minutes, while an actual student would need days. And then I spend anything from minutes to days evaluating the results, depending on if it needs to be tested with real data and how much weirdness those tests uncover.
But I also have other work to do beyond guiding the automated grad student. Which means my Claude Code usage rarely exceeds 1–2 hours/week.
I use Pro professionally and didn't hit limits most of the time. I believe I used up 5hr quota once or twice. We switched to Team sub and I'm on Standard(which is Pro x1.25 I believe). I don't vibecode entire applications, I ask it to make boilerplate, smaller, well scoped features or fix some errors. I don't let it go off with a prompt "make another netflix clone" cause I just don't see any real value in that
Just the Pro Plan Claude Code on its own? Maybe you could last a full day on just using Sonnet. Maybe one Opus dab in the morning to plan your Haiku/Sonnet day?
I have Pro Claude, Plus GPT and Pro Gemini. When one runs out I switch to another project on the next LLM. If I really need a task finished I'll restart it on another LLM, but I'm loathe to do that as it eats tokens just getting back up to speed.
It’s pretty reasonable to say “demand is way up, quality is up, supply is constrained, and so price needs to rise”.
It seems weird to segment this way though. Surely it’s better to just give Sonnet to your bottom tier, rather than cut out the entire Claide Code product entirely?
Give folks a taste rather than lock the whole product behind a $100/mo plan.
But if Sonnet is bad it would give bad impression of the product, no? And it also takes compute, so you give a bad hallucinating impression of your product while still losing compute.
It’s not bad though, it’s crazy good in comparison to any model older than 1y old. If you don’t have access to any vibe coding at all it’s gonna be life changing.
But I think you are right, as long as Codex and Gemini are cheap alternatives then vs. 1yo models isn’t the correct comp.
Then it’s probably better to just resegment the whole Claude Code product as an enterprise only tier. (That also has the advantage of kicking out all the Claw subscribers that screw over the token limit economics for normal $20/mo users.)
I mean, this is why they do A/B testing. This way of testing stuff is not new at all, people who act genuinely surprised need to do a reality check. Companies want to maximize profit. They do this by testing what creates the biggest profit. A/B Testing is one of the ways to do this, and it has been used for decades in precisely this way.
Maybe a silly bet where the head of sales had 1-2 glasses of wine too much... "I bet they will still pay us 20 bucks/mo without CC! Don't believe me? I'm going to prove it!"
>"his title should be changed to Head of Corporate Bullshitting"
They're hitting the physical limits of energy production and chip supply for inference capacity. There's literally nothing that can be done but reduce usage to spread it around for now.
Hopefully the negative responses in that thread + the conversation here on HN might help them realize that totally removing Code access for Pro users isn't a good look.
And with no free trial period on top of that, nobody is going to want to pay $100+ just to check it out. I can't imagine the conversion rate of that test being positive.
good reminder to me to stay in practice with manual coding for my side projects! claude is super convenient for them for now but if it goes it goes, I definitely don't want to get dependent on it. maybe the local models will improve in a year too.
CC has such egregious API subsidies that it’s hard to not to leverage it unless the license tells an enterprise otherwise. Love the subsidized pricing while it lasts.
> CC has such egregious API subsidies that it’s hard to not to leverage it unless the license tells an enterprise otherwise.
It's hard to tell, honestly - about half the HN population will tell you that all the token providers are running inference at a profit when using the API and only the subscriptions are subsidised, while the other half will tell you that everything, including both the API and the subscriptions, are subsidised (i.e. running at a loss).
My company currently uses the Anthropic Enterprise subscription plan, but we’ve been informed that’s going away in 2027 in favor of API billing. If businesses are using subscriptions, I don’t think they will for long.
If your definition of "real businesses" is "Fortune 500, US based tech company with more money than sense or just happy to bleed VC money", sure, 99.999% of businesses are not real businesses.
You may also have a very narrow view of how the world actually works, left as an exercise to the reader to figure out which one it is
I don’t get the surprise or discontent. People hooking themselves up to a paid SaaS that only two vendors can offer (Anthropic and OpenAI), no competition or regulation to speak of… of course they’ll do whatever they want with their plans.
Hope you can still resume working on your projects without AI.
> Hope you can still resume working on your projects without AI.
How often does technology really move backwards? I can already run a decent local model on a spec’d out MacBook and for better or worse electronics/computers moves one direction (with minor supply chain hiccups along the way notwithstanding)
If one doesn't want rug-pulls, one signals their policy makers to create regulation to prevent it. Otherwise it's just... uncapped capitalism or what's the name
Yeah I flat out don't believe the 2% thing. It's possible that I was the 1 out of 50 who checked the page and saw that Claude code was removed... but it really seems like everyone I shared it with saw the same thing which is incredibly unlikely. Also I am an existing subscriber and checked the price page while logged in, so I shouldn't be counted in "2% of new subscribers" at all...
Yep, and the price point theyre looking at is 95% of an engineer.
Once they get people hooked, deskilled, and paying, the money ratchet only tightens.
And the companies KNOW that theyre replacing engineers, or trying to. So each engineer replaced is X salary a year they now have available, so make it back in SaaS LLM tokens.
Is it? I’m curious because I thought they were raising prices to pay for exorbitant training costs, not because subscribers are expensive on a unit basis.
I thought inference was cheap so there was little marginal cost of a new subscriber.
It is honestly truly fucking incredible how corps still find new, innovative ways to enshittify. Regular enshittification won't cut it, they have to exercise their artistic creativity. Who the fuck comes up with the idea that what services you get with your subscription are random? It's mind-boggling that some percentage of people visiting the website will be presented with an inferior version of the same subscription for the same price. I'm not even mad (despite my colorful wording), I don't use Claude, just impressed with the bold new territory being explored here.
I think of enshittification as "we're making plenty of money but let's make more." In other words greed.
Based on how much money Zitron has reported that these companies are losing on every subscription, this feels more like they're just trying to survive. In other words "ohshittification."
My take: it is not enshittification to raise the price for a product whose demand outstrips its supply. That is basic economics. There are alternatives, it’s not a monopoly. If you think it’s the best product, then pay more for it.
Personally I would be perfectly content if the price of Max went up a bit and Pro no longer worked for CC if it meant that Max was faster and more stable.
> It is honestly truly fucking incredible how corps still find new, innovative ways to enshittify. Regular enshittification won't cut it, they have to exercise their artistic creativity.
I had a bit of an epiphany the other day thinking about these VC companies offering products to the public at unsustainable prices. It's classic anticompetitive behavior.
You imagine anticompetitive behavior to come from a monopoly because they can afford to burn money to drive competition out before they bring prices back to profitable but the whole VC burn is the same thing. People talk about it a lot without really saying it explicitly when they talk about moats. The only moat Anthropic and OpenAI have is money and they utilize it by offering products below cost.
The two companies are just trying to outlast the other one until they are the only one left.
So it's not really enshitification as much as you were previously getting the deal of a lifetime.
In physical markets we call this kinda thing dumping and it's often regulated. Maybe offering SaaS or compute at below profitable rates should be investigatable too, to avoid killing competitors too easily?
Dumping is typically used in the context of international trade.
There are some predatory pricing laws, but they're much more narrow than most people believe. There is no law requiring things to be sold for more than it costs to produce.
I think it's funny that these topics make people angry enough to demand that we make laws to force companies to raise prices. We'll stick it to these companies by forcing them to charge us more! That will show them!
Such laws would be very bad for startups and newcomers because they'd be forced to price their new product higher than established competitors who have economies of scale. It would be a nice handout to the big companies.
The whole Silicon Valley VC industry and the majority of the net worth of SWEs on HN is based on dumping. "Burning VC cash" is transparently dumping, and it's squarely what the US big tech dominance is founded on. Amazon, Uber, Youtube, now LLMs. The huge majority of "success stories" of the last 15 years are based on dumping their product far below cost price, running at a loss for years until they dominate the market, and then jacking up prices/enshittifying/selling user data.
This happens naturally because no company can run at a loss forever.
I think it's funny that we're getting subsidized and discounted services and this makes some people so angry that the comment section is demanding laws that would force companies to charge us more.
Of course but they can run at that rate long enough to make it impossible for another company to compete and go bankrupt. Which is the problem.
Like I said, this is the iconic strategy of monopolies. They take their pool of money, move into a new market, lower prices below cost until local competition withers away then buy their assets at bankruptcy prices and raise prices to whatever they want. Those temporary discounts are designed to kill competition, innovation and choice.
VC subsidized prices are exactly as bad for the market as that. It's unclear to me if the intent is the same but intent doesn't really matter.
I'd also like to state that I'm not angry about it.
It could be an A/B test to see whether people without an existing subscription care about Claude Code (CC) at all. If they sign up then CC is disabled (or not as it is not really an issue to offer more). Capturing that info would definitely be useful to a growth team.
They need to give the non-code service a different name.
And a slightly lower price.
If it succeeds they can adjust pricing later.
Otherwise they are messing with their new and old customers heads, regarding a service with a name that ought to be reliably interpretable. And seriously messing with their own credibility. Wrong kind of A/B test.
This is incompetence which i would normally discount. But Anthropic seems to be falling all over themselves to irritate customers.
No I think the test is that some new sign ups won't get Claude code in that tier if they pick it and they're seeing if users will still pay for it without it?
Although the ones that never touch claude code are a free $20 a month, the ones that do are potentially a seventy to eighty dollar twenty dollars a month . it’s not instantly obvious which customers you prefer (revenue vs cash negative growth- on second thought obviously they prefer the second)
They've preferred the second so far, but they might have a fair reason to see if they can keep growing with the first one instead or cut down on some loss leading, right?
That's how i read it too - they want to test if people will still pay for pro plan if it doesn't include Claude Code. At the same time they are also saying that if you subscribe having been told it does include Claude Code, they may still change their mind later and take it away!
Random data point: Guest passes apparently still include Claude Code in their Pro trial. If they are running a test this is a really sloppy way to do it.
Would it really be that hard for them to just make all of the changes and then do a redeploy rather than doing them incrementally? It's not like they're just editing the raw HTML sitting on the server manually, right? Actually, don't answer that, I'm not sure I even want to know the answer.
So long as they're humanely harvested? Some argue that cows are mistreated when kept producing milk as much as they are, but I haven't looked into it because I'm selfish too.
Cows are mammals. They produce milk for their young for a period after giving birth then stop, just like a human woman. Which means that for us to take their milk we have to keep them constantly pregnant.
Ask a woman (or think about it if you are one) how they would like being forcefully impregnated then having their tits constantly milked, year after year. As a bonus, the born kids are separated into girls to be milked in the same cycle and boys to be killed and eaten.
The ruling itself is much more nuanced and covers a lot of situations, including extremely rare disorders of sexual development (DSD) and their variations. The most recent controversies on this topic did not involve transgender athletes, but that's largely unknown or misunderstood by people who only know this topic by headlines and sound bites.
The headline writers are relating it back to the topic which brings the most clicks, which is transgender athletes.
The IOC didn't go on a crusade against transgender athletes specifically. They were refining the rules on sex-based divisions and included a lot of considerations and nuance.
If the person or politics / group,they don't support then they have no problem just straight up making stuff up.
Like the hit piece of Elons Grok where it was "doxing" pornstars names,but in reality all it did was just search web online and got the info from the first website it could find.
But they made it seem like it was some hidden info that only Grok and Elon would know...
Sounds like you don’t understand doxing and may be overly sympathetic to a reactionary billionaire’s propaganda machine.
Doxing for the most part is simply aggregating publicly available information on an individual and broadcasting it to a wider audience. Rarely does it require more serious sleuthing or even “hacking”, although those are the more notorious instances because it involves someone who may have been trying to hide their identity for various reasons.
No, it's that people keep misusing that word for a broader and broader class of things. Pushing back on dilution of meaning isn't a lack of understanding.
Journalists should work for free. Which means that they are going to be paid by governments and corporations to spout propaganda because everyone has a mortgage to pay off...
I guess we could all forgive trying to destroy western civilization under the guise of saving it, but drew the line at poor media literacy when it comes to One Piece and Watchmen.
It was always difficult to get normal people to understand why the tech billionaires are so bad until Thiel gave us that clip of him getting stumped by the "should humanity survive" question.
I'm forever grateful to Thiel for that clip, and to Musk for his crippling Twitter addiction. It was pretty impossible to get regular people to understand that folks like Bill Gates or Larry Ellison are skinwalkers when all they ever see about these people is professionally managed public relations content.
The list is getting longer and longer, but a good touchstone is simply net worth. You don't normally get to the top of a foodchain without being an apex predator.
I thought about the same recently, in the context of the Epstein files.
You don't become a billionaire by being moral. Each time you don't do something because it's wrong, you lost opportunity to make more money.
You start with smaller things, then your standards slide more and more, until you are a billionaire, and you're so corrupt there isn't anything for you to do except make more money.
Which makes me wonder, how many people went to Epstein's island not because they like diddling kids, but because they needed to network with Epstein to make more money. How many actively participated just to be in his in-group? Not because they enjoyed, they just were so corrupt that they would do anything for business.
Can't you also make money by making a good decision that benefits you and another party? I feel like I do this all the time, just on a relatively small scale.
"Good" is subjective. But yes, all wealth creation requires working with other people. No one is an island. And most people are increasingly disturbed by the types of decisions required to amass more wealth than sovereign nations.
Not at the scale of billions of dollars. Sure, some of their money comes from positive contributions to society. But you don't get to be a billionaire if you restrict yourself to that. Millionaire? Sure, possible.
Yes, and when you see people excusing those actions even here on HN, that's exactly the mindset they have. Who is to say otherwise? There isn't some objective scale, it's all utilitarian.
Someone further down[1] talked about how “normal people” don’t realize the problem with Bill Gates and Thiel. But I think it’s rather the tech people here that don’t fully realize it.
> I feel like I do this all the time, just on a relatively small scale.
Yeah, scale. Scale is obviously important.
The road to billions of dollars is built on exploitation.
You can be multimillionaire by doing that. But not a billionaire.
It's pretty much "get unbelievably lucky/inherit it" or "be a piece of shit consistently, else you will be out-competed by someone being bigger piece of shit than you.
Becoming a billionaire is never done through your hard work.
It is only by exploiting the surplus of large amounts of workers at scale that permits being a billionaire. It is their hard work, not the billionaires.
Now, how much surplus the workers get is primarily the discussion between capitalism, socialism, and communism.
Naturally, capitalists are disinclined in giving ANY of the surplus, and keeping it all for themselves. But when every capitalist does that, thats how we end up with 7 year depression/boom cycles, when the whole economy treats workers poorly.
>It is only by exploiting the surplus of large amounts of workers
Well, it's possible for a person to become a billonaire without directly doing this.
I think it was said somewhere that Lebron James was one of the first wage billionaires, due to his 20+ years on top of the NBA.
But loosening the statement a little, if the person themselves hasn't its almost certain that the people that have paid them have (in the case of sports athletes, the companies paying for the ads).
Be that as it may, being a wage-slave billionaire still leaves you less exposed to direct first-hand moral dillemas than the CEOs of companies.
I don't, for example, think Phil Knight is an immoral person who intentionally did wrong things, though his company certainly has. You don't just become a billionaire and become corrupt, you have a mindset that justifies what you're doing and you conveniently excuse yourself or are unaware because you're dealing with things outside of your scope because a single person can't handle that much authority without delegating to people who will inevitably do corrupt things. PK didn't start out wanting to be a billionaire, he just wanted to sell shoes and maybe become a millionaire.
I suspect the vast majority of people who interacted with Epstein did it just to make connections and they made excuses, eg, Gates. I'm more likely to call someone immoral who interacted with him post-conviction than a billionaire, but generally labeling people moral/immoral instead of their actions misses why people do what they do. Very few people want to be considered immoral, but many people don't have an issue excusing immoral actions. Does that make sense?
If you want to get people top stop doing things like this, you have to attack the actions, not the person, because when you say all billionaires are immoral, it gives them nowhere to retreat, it gives them more reason to dig in, because who are you but some seemingly envious person who's made just as many compromises, just at lower levels?
I think if you're saying: "These billionaires are bad because they do bad things, and being so rich makes their capacity for harm much worse."
That's not slave morality, at least not necessarily, because the "doing bad things" can probably be expressed using normal classic values. It becomes slave morality when you abbreviate the above to: "These billionaires are bad because it's bad for anybody to be so rich."
I'm responding to troosevelts question, not accusing anybody in particular of one or the other. I've seen plenty of both on the internet, but in general I don't think it's slave morality unless somebody is saying that having so much money is intrinsically evil, that to have gotten that much money is wrong in itself, regardless of what the individual actually did or is doing.
> I suspect the vast majority of people who interacted with Epstein did it just to make connections and they made excuses, eg, Gates.
I am not sure about that.
Sex may have played a factor in this. I use the word "may", as I don't know for certain, but I don't buy into the "just to make connections". The superrich don't really need to "make connections" on an island where underage girls party.
This the mindblowing thing about the whole Epstein saga: so many people knew about this. And yet, the mutually assured destruction of having been associated with Epstein was enough to effectively impose a code of silence on all of them.
They have such clubs in your part of the world no doubt? (Netherlands, IIRC?)
The fostering of circles of trust, backed up with Kompromat, to strengthen elite solidarity, ease insider trading, treat handshakes as binding, and cover up the odd "unfortunate incident" is seemingly as old as time.
I don't think Taylor is close to lead any villain-list of superrich. Teter Phiel using money to buy influence and influence legislation or Melon usk, the guy fidgeting about with his right arm constantly pointing skywards - these guys definitely would be way before Taylor. But the main issue is why a few hold so much money. There needs to be a mandate to re-invest and improve the conditions on the planet past a certain threshold. Using their money to undermine democracy - now that should be a perma-jail offence.
This can't be said in any kind of good faith. You'd put a lot of people in bigger cities out on the streets, including people who never worked above "bookeeper" or "factory worker" whose houses happen to be in a desirable location 40 years after they bought them.
So just because they were bookkeepers we should let them hoard wealth when most Americans could not afford an unexpected expense? To a person with $100 in their checking account both a millionaire and a billionaire are impossibly far away.
I think what’s happening here is that a bunch of millionaires are complaining that there are people richer than them so they want the limit higher than them. But they don’t realize they’re the problem. They’re the top 3% while people are suffering.
If you’re ESL, that statement actually doesn’t specifically reference Epstein et al. If you’re not ESL, I suggest a remedial course and then the statement doesn’t specifically reference Epstein et al.
Of course the grappling to find one good billionaire begins. While Taylor Swift is not nearly as obviously evil as the tech bros, she grifts the shit out of her fans.
I do think it's kinda evil to create a parasocial relationship situation with millions of young girls and then mine every last penny of disposable income out of them. She could have just as easily superstar multi-millionare with far less grifting.
Simply having a lot of money makes someone evil? Why? They are obviously all quite competitive in business but the philanthropy they've done is pretty crazy. Gates for example is giving away hundreds of billions of dollars. What does it even matter if he's compassionate or not if he's doing that?
Thinking, experiencing the world, knowing that throughout our entire history of a species that tales of "excess greed" were also cautionary tales on how greed ruins society throughout the entire world.
My working class family members always gave 10% to charity (kind of the standard social contract in the US for giving) when that 10% made up a huge percentage of the money it takes for them to live a very basic life. Compare that to billionaires who have more money than they could ever spend and the percentage they have given:
Zuckerberg 2.1%.
Ballmer 3.7%
Bezos 1.6%
Sergey Brin 2.5%
Michael Dell 2.6%
Ken Griffin 5%
If philanthropy and normal living expenses (even assuming billionaire living standards) were the only things super-rich people spent money on that's fine. Unfortunately they use it to directly influence politics and society.
Wealth, like celestial bodies, has a gravitational field.
In general (not always, but it is mostly true) philantropy from billionaires and very profitable companies tend to be overshadowed by how much they profit from a system biased toward enriching them (see: The divide by Jason Hickel). A small metaphor to illustrate: are you a philantropist if you film yourself giving away 100$ to homeless people but make tens of thousands from posting the video?
Because it's about power, control, and influence. The wealth is just the tool. Melinda French and MacKenzie Scott are true philanthropists, Gates and Bezos are just status chasers. "Look at me!" "Please clap." and so on. There are only ~3000 billionaires in the world, so I am not too concerned about broad support for them in a world with 8-10 billion people.
"Fuck you" money is fine, we all strive for freedom during our lifetime as humans. "Fuck everyone" money is not a welcome target, imho. That's unelected power. Its easy to not be a billionaire of course: philanthropy. But do most billionaires? They do not. They hold tightly to their power.
"Why does it even matter?" Because many of us do not want to be ruled or governed by these people, who by all indications, are not fond of other humans and see them as a resource to exploit and control. I assure you, I have no envy for these people and their wealth, I am allergic to what it would take to accumulate and maintain it (as a high empathy, high justice sensitivity human). I know what enough is. This is self preservation from a class of predator.
People aught to be questioning more the future vision of those in positions to shape it. Someone who struggles with such simple questions around humanity while simultaneously building the tools of a surveillance state probably should not be one of the individuals driving our future.
It's quite clear that my vision of the future is nothing like theirs.
It's a lot more comforting to believe that the people who have influence over us are there by some right of some kind.
Wether it be because they're "smarter than us and have completed capitalism" (that's how Gates, Ellison and ironically Trump/Musk are thought of)
or by "divine right" as it used to be with Kings.
It's horribly sobering to realise that, actually, they're just people. Like, pretty ordinary unremarkable people who have access to different information than we do and have been exposed to different things. Rarely are they more than a single standard deviation from the norm in intelligence.
They're people, flawed, egotistical, easily manipulated, easily dragged into thinking weird things, persuadable and unless they're really self-aware: will be surrounded by sycophants that just repeat what they want to hear (because, that feels pretty good) until they have a warped "echo of an echo" understanding of the world.
I wouldn't wish this on anyone, it's terrifying to believe that you would be insulated from all direct criticism while being told that everything you do is the right thing no matter what it is. You can't trust your own fucking reflection in that situation.
But we do that to people, people who have enormous influence over us, and they get confused when we don't like them, and we get confused about how they can be so out of touch and unlikable.
A frustrating aspect of the AI debates has been the number of people who believe people like Sam Altman who say that the immense wealth created by AGI would be distributed to the masses to improve their lives. The notion that the mega wealthy Elon/Sams/Bezos elites are going to willingly give up unprecedented wealth because millions of people have become unemployed and impoverished is so wildly out of step with how those people have behaved their entire lives. Someone who says they have enough billions and want to improve millions of lives don't make it to those positions.
The only way that wealth gets shared will be unprecedented government coercion or worse.
Yea, it's puzzling to me that this isn't asked of folks like Altman and Amodei in every interview. Maybe it's because Altman would just start shilling his eye scanning orb and start repeating "WORLD COIN" ad nauseum. Either way, they should be getting pressed on this by all media.
It's not puzzling. Journalism was murdered because it asked Nixon too many questions. So now unless you softball interviews, you just don't get to interview anyone, so the only news orgs with content to monetize are the ones just printing Press Releases and being a backboard for "interviews".
It sure is fun how the party who screams about "personal responsibility" seems to get very upset if you ask a responsible person to explain themselves and their actions.
This comment naively believes in zero sum creation of wealth.
Wealth is not taken from our consumers and given to Sam Altman. Sam and his company are creating wealth - increasing the pie.
Of course it benefits everyone while also benefiting them.
Wealth need not be redistributed to improve lives. Just the mere invention of ChatGPT and letting people purchase it and use it is enough to improve people’s lives. Redistribution does not solve any poverty problem other than transfer power.
Sam redistributing money will not sustainably change anything about prosperity or poverty.
You're talking about normal technological developments that yes generally follow Econ 101 patterns. But AGI isn't like that. If AGI or something like it comes about it won't be a normal technology. The upside case for investors is that frontier models eliminate millions of jobs and remain controlled by a small group of owners. That's why they are investing sums unprecedented in human history. If all white collar work and an increasing amount of blue collar work is supplanted by AI how do those masses of newly unemployed folks make a living without wealth redistribution?
If AI capability plateaus and ends up as a normal technological development then I agree with you that it will mostly work out for the best. But that's not the scenario I'm worried about and plenty of folks in the industry are warning that's not the most likely path at this point.
> This comment naively believes in zero sum creation of wealth.
As long as we're in a capitalist society, wealth is certainly zero-sum.
Every technological advancement that made jobs easier just allows corporations to increase their margins or increase the workload. If I automate some of my work and now only need to work 20 hours/week, I don't get 20 more hours/week of free time, I'm just given more work to do.
If someone gets completely automated out of their job, they don't get to relax and enjoy free time. They have to find a new job to pay the bills. With more and more people getting automated out of a job, UBI will become a necessity. We will need to increase taxes on corporations to fund it.
So far prices have generally gone up, which indicates the pie available is scarcer.
I am looking forward to the day where more electricity, electronics, food, and housing are produced thanks to AI; but in the mid-term it feels like an AI bubble pop would do more to bring the price back down.
Great, you have access to a hallucinating chat bot. The rest of us are losing access to basic computing and entertainment thanks to skyrocketing prices so that these companies can create more refined bots for you to chat with.
While ChatGPT is a partial substitution for a college education, it doesn't satisfy the other needs I listed. I do think in the long term we'll get there, but the current situation matters.
For sure, I've been rolling my eyes at the Mars colony stuff for probably a decade or more now. I get that it's a fun futuristic thought experiment for nerds but the idea that Elon's going to send up some modern day Mayflower in the near future that builds a thriving settlement is obvious nonsense.
Well, the average person is so utterly illiterate in physics, science, and math that no, it's not obvious nonsense to them.
They don't really think through anything at all, because the human brain is hyperoptimized to not think, as thinking is energetically expensive, and even with that optimization to drastically reduce energy usage by just not using it, the brain still consumes a significant fraction of a human's energy budget.
We all have this problem. Even if you train for years to think "like a scientist" and critically analyze your beliefs and poke holes in the things you take for granted, you will always be vulnerable to ignoring something you shouldn't and missing something important.
I do get upset that people are so adverse to just doing some rough calculations about things. However, I've recently come to the conclusion that I just enjoy recreational math more than the average person. But I'm frustrated about all the people who sat next to me in math class saying "When will I ever use this?" and now going through their lives with zero literacy in math.
You had a chance to learn! To improve yourself! How could you squander that?! What else were you doing with that time? You were required to go to school for about 16 years, why didn't you just suck it up and make the most of that time?!
> It was always difficult to get normal people to understand why the tech billionaires are so bad until Thiel gave us that clip of him getting stumped by the "should humanity survive" question.
One "good" thing that came out of that thing.
I think main problem is that many people just think of them as "just a normal person but richer". But no. You don't get to that level of power by staying normal.
Hell, I remember when people pointed at Bill Gates going "see, you can be billionaire that puts their money to good", and while even before PDFiles got posted he had long history of being a piece of shit, now at least that stopped
> It was always difficult to get normal people to understand why the tech billionaires are so bad
This is mostly because normal people are not THINKING usually. It requires some event or insight when they begin to question what they see.
There are many ways to go about it, but my own personal favourite one, even though cheesy, is to tell them to watch the old B movie "They Live". Now, the movie is not really grand, has many plot holes, but Roddy made it fun (the kick ass scene with regards to bubblegem); and using glasses to see the thruth is such a powerful meme. People can then begin to question who owns the mass media. Then perhaps they may watch other movies such as Manufacturing consent (is a bit old now and thus dated, and people may find it boring, but I loved Noam's analysis back when his health was in prime condition). It is mostly in the USA where people think the superrich are god-sent. In other parts of the world this worshipping is way less. Or often does not exist; you won't find much love for the average superrich in Denmark or Sweden for instance.
The only non-evil Billionaire I know are the South park creators although they aren't tech Billionaires. I consider everyone else for the most part to not-be-good people.
Because south park decided to personally say essentially bad words to paramount using their episodes, the company which gave them a billion dollars.
So they took a billion dollars and they were still consistent with how they've been for decades at this point. All of this is truly remarkable in the particular world we live in.
I'd think that original creators such as J.K. Rowling, Steven Spielberg, Bruce Springsteen & Taylor Swift (among others) would be other members of the !evil bucket.
Taylor swift does seem to be using AI or something. I mean she's nice but not as nice as South park creators imo.
I have heard so much about Steven Spielberg but I must admit that I don't know much about the man but to me it does feel like you must be correct that he's a good guy, though I do see some controversies of steven spielberg on internet but South park is infamous with controversies as well.
There are 3028 billionaries from Forbes list and many many more almost-billionaires yet we have at most so few good billionaires that you can count them on your fingers.
>It was always difficult to get normal people to understand why the tech billionaires are so bad
By the "greying out" of your comment, I would assume two things:
First, the difficulty you describe is not on the past.
Second, normies are here in much bigger proportion than a hacker would assume, and they are offended on the behalf of tech billionaires.
One outcome of the Epstein files release is getting direct evidence, very clearly, how goddamned stupid and crass and uninteresting these assholes are.
They talk like the dumbest 1850s british aristocrats. They talk as if they are discussing how lazy the Irish are and how that is definitely why they are starving. They have objectively stupid opinions. They believe themselves especially smart as they fire off one or two sentences about high school level philosophy topics, and they somehow find a way to generate wrong answers to questions that really shouldn't even have wrong answers. All the while, they misspell everything because apparently they are outright illiterate too.
Like, they say such utterly stupid things as "Women are too emotional to make good decisions". As if they don't do the things they do for extremely petty reasons.
And yet, still some morons all over the US think they must be geniuses because they fell ass backwards into a literal bubble and came out rich. You can publicly be an absolute moron and the Wealth propaganda in the US is so bad people will still insist you must be magically genius and only pretending to be stupid.
Did they even encrypt their "I'd like to purchase a rape of a little girl please" emails?
They're not so much offended by it as that they would like to join the billionaire class and believe that those in power may at some point come to review their voting behavior on HN. For instance, YC asked for your HN username on the application form.
Of course I don't think they'd stoop so low as to look at the votes on subjects like this but that's the chilling effect for you and technically they have that ability. And they definitely look at the comments.
I don't know. What percentage of HN commenters really have serious aspirations for being a YC founder? 0.01%? 0.001%? Im not sure "What will YC think of me" is really that much of a driver of commenting behavior here.
People simp for billionaires all over the web, not just on HN. I've never understood it, and I probably never will. But, there are enough of them and their billionaire-defense commentary pops up everywhere. Not to mention the obvious downvote rings that will hit you if you ever insult one of a few key billionaires with large followings. This is widespread behavior and not about wanting to be a startup founder.
For me it’s because Peter Thiel has been pretty anti-transhumanism etc and he wasn’t stumped by the question he’s repeatedly answered it. Anyone who’s worldview is shaped by clips from tik tok should be downvoted
Bro you pair that with his other behavior and you can clearly see this is not a good guy. It's likely he is at least an accelerationist (Of the bad kind) of not more.
A lot of the older folks are also not well versed in their language or whatever you want to call it, so they can’t even connect comprehend these guys are compulsive liars and paranoid man children with no scruples.
They just think they are eccentric and by the virtue of their wealth they must be smart upstanding humans with a strong character.
Yeah but I'd argue that the eccentric billionaire trope itself is the creation of the PR industry. "We've got this guy with rancid vibes, how do we make him palatable?"
> It was always difficult to get normal people to understand why the tech billionaires are so bad until Thiel gave us that clip of him getting stumped by the "should humanity survive" question.
He was thinking about convergence. You're probably smart enough to be aware of that, so you're deliberately twisting his words.
> folks like Bill Gates or Larry Ellison are skinwalkers
On HN a decade ago this would have been moderated into oblivion. The recent manual un-flagging of poolitical posts by the mods (dang has openly discussed this) has changed the site for the worse.
Actually It woke people up to the fact that there is clearly bad things going on. The people that take the politically correct standpoint have a lot to learn. Talking about things that are going wrong in society is important. If you don't like that, go live on an island somewhere where you can cut yourself off from humanity.
Discourse is good for society, unless you think that society shouldn't exist, or freedom shouldn't exist...
So someone is evil because they answer questions by thinking through them? There are no questions in the universe that can’t be stopped and pondered over. In fact, it’s dangerous to even suggest that, that’s the exact mechanism that propaganda runs on.
Actually evil, no. Forever changed by their enormous wealth which messes you up mentally in a lots of fun unique ways, changes the nature of every relationship you'll have post wealth, and feeds into your ego and all your latent neurosis further and further alienating you from and believing yourself above your fellow man, yes.
Ah yes, the real danger to the world isn’t a powerful man feeling ambivalent about our survival. The real danger is society using that moment as propaganda.
This regarding Thiel, a man who most recently tried to make a “Greta Thunberg is the Antichrist” meme stick.
Question 1: If a human modifies with themselves with enough sci-fi tier technology are they still "Human"? (And therefore if humans "ascend" past their biology, humanity technically wouldn't survive)
Question 2: If a person cannot conceive that the 1st question is an interesting question, with multiple nuances, are they basically an idiot?
The question wasn't "should all humans not modify themselves", but "should humanity survive".
We currently legally protect mostly pre-contact civilizations like Sentinelese, so it stands to reason that regardless of what some people choose, other people will forgo transhumanist modifications, and "humanity" will survive regardless of what technology occurs or where your definition ends.
Unless of course the end goal is only a few billionaires get to live with their AI ppowered city states at most using servitors and decraniated as robots.
Hesitating to answer a question that may have nuance is not being “ambivalent”. He literally says “there’s multiple questions implicit here” in response to the question asked of him. I genuinely think people like you making sweeping assumptions about others are way more dangerous. People who refuse to critically think or analyze a situation and jump to conclusions.
You pair that with his behavior and you can see pretty clearly the guy does wants to control the world. Stop trying to see this in isolation of that one event.
Not to mention that he and his cohorts had such close ties to Epstein that I find it impossible to imagine he didn't know exactly what was going on. This is someone who's known for building profiles of anyone who mentions him online, not some ambivalent rich guy.
I used to get the occasional recruiter cold-calling me and hyping up the chance to work for some Musk- or Bezos-associated entity, and for me it's not as appealing as they think it is. But I politely decline without pointing out their fallacy.
Thiel is one of the more public faces of what is now known as the "Epstein class" of societal predators. But one of many and certainly not the epicenter.
There is certainly a shadow cabal of these elite billionaire types that avoid all public exposure yet are working very hard to destroy society and profit
Yep Epstein class. It’s a great phrase for the billionaire elites who have corrupted our society through their wealth. We need heavy taxes on them now to preserve our democracy.
And also, Thiel is literally in the Epstein files. Meeting with Russian officials repeatedly on the island. One is said to be his handler so he may just be an asset tasked with destabilizing America.
What are you, Thiel’s alt? The guy backed Facebook, built a mass surveillance firm, and talks about democracy as an obstacle. How do you expect people to feel about him?
No system is flawless. Every democratic system has its own issues. What is increasingly clear is that the current crop of tech billionaires do not belong anywhere near a position of power. God help us. The quality of individual is disappointing.
That's fine, if not very good, but the central problem remains (ignoring the capitalist corrupted business culture and its merging with the state behind much of this). We can't centralize our communications without major concessions in significant ways that non-techies seem unaware of until a big news item like this comes out. "What, they're logging my chats, and IP, voice clips, and now they want my ID for 18+ discords?" Yes, absolutely you are being logged and those logs will go places you have no control over. Maybe even to oppress you or your loved ones.
Discord's entire value proposition was "Hey just click here, no need to pay for a teamspeak server or do peer-to-peer jank." Deeply personal stuff is said and posted in those spaces. Common communication should not be shared like this and we keep falling back to the "tapped my phone line" problem.
The difference between then and now is that for a long time there was no alternative to POTS. You just had to use the phone to call someone. The phone company and whatever government tapping was very hard to get around. But today there are other ways to do near everything if we give up on for-profit centralized services.
I think society keeps flirting with federation and other things similar to that but never quite makes the jump. The twitter exodus went back to a new centralized service like Bluesky that will one day be sold to another deep-pocketed buyer with its own agenda, thus creating this problem again. Sure, now with federation or personal servers, the privacy issue goes back to the server operator, but at least that could be someone you trust, or even you. When currently, neither of those options are possible with things like Discord or Bluesky.
I'm testing moving my friends and gaming group to self-hosted teamspeak or stout or mumble or something like that. I think we'll lose some convenience, but life isn't all about gains. Sometimes you have to sacrifice things for the greater good. I also really want to start moving away from things like reddit, bluesky, HN, etc to federated services and have dipped my toes there quite a bit, but the population isn't there (yet?).
I hope this is a wakeup call that people need, much like the wake-up call the fight against personal encryption was in the 90s. I think we're in a super bad place right now, and its worth discussing the elephant in the room, even to non-techies, and what alternatives there are to the current system. I think people need to get over the convivence of the current system and realize if they want privacy and safety, they may have to migrate to services built with that in mind.
Everyone needs to cut ties with those companies. Not just with Persona but any service linked to Peter Thiel, Joe Lonsdale, Palmer Luckey, Elon Musk, David Sacks, etc. The entire MAGA cultist ecosystem.
Unfortunately there will be companies that take their money and won’t care. It’ll be up to other companies and consumers to punish them for it. Maybe we need a website that lets you quickly check if you should or shouldn’t use some service based on the investors.
I'm getting there. Just a few more. I've found myself kicking my not so distant past self for not listening better to my even further distant past self...
I think it's a bad trend. It's kind of a meta version of an ad hominem attack. The headline contained no information about why Discord is making the decision, only that there's a bad name associated with the company. The name of the company isn't even mentioned in the headline. This is prioritizing hate over information.
Counterpoint: I thought it was a useful analysis — I was very disappointed when the local Joann's closed and this added a bunch of context I would not have had otherwise.
As was I, but I don't see how the comparison to Best Buy supposedly aping Amazon is useful when step 1 is "don't go billions of dollars into debt for no benefit."
The old economy is never sustainable because the people it props up die.
Growth is slow but collapse is fast because it takes decades for those people to build, earn their status.
With our eggs in one basket, a small group of elders, they all die off within just a decade or so of each other. A much faster process than the 30-40 years it took to for them to grow their worth to trickle down on us.
Entropy tears apart all structure. Its mechanism for tearing apart society is generational churn.
Time is non-linear. No thing has the same epoch and erodes at the same tick. Endless linear economic growth will never be because once dead belief the elders were rich has to be rethought.
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