I use and love Hetzner as well. But you have to go into it eyes open. Concrete example - a month ago I was notified that network infra my systems ran over was going down for maintenance. Public link: https://status.hetzner.com/incident/ff8335b8-6fda-4370-8431-...
So, for me that was a production DB, fairly low usage but still. In the end I judged that it was going to take so much time to work around the outage that I just planned "maintenance downtime" myself and took it offline for a couple of hours until they finished.
Now, could I have architected better? No doubt. But it's a good reminder of what you're paying for and where the differences emerge in practise. AWS may be an overcomplicated, expensive mess - but I've literally never had any service of theirs go down for maintenance for any reason. Outages, sure, but taking things down for routine maintenace? Unheard of at AWS.
For me the formula is - I do whatever I want for my stuff, but if it's someone else's business, I use AWS.
I don't remember ever having downtime on DO when I was using them.
I used to get those emails all the time, but the type of downtime they were talking about was extremely minimal (the entire point of VPS systems).
The last email I got about possible downtime was increased latency for the UI and API for ~10s last year. The email before that was ~5s of potential lost traffic to a droplet.
Taking the article's 5% accuracy improvement at face value: if true, then it's more than worth the token inflation IMO. That's because of tool call chains, where errors compound and accumulate, and small improvements in accuracy get greatly magnified.
Again, the article's numbers are likely a rather crude approximation, but taking 85% accuracy (claude 4.6) vs 90% (4.7) as inputs:
Compounded, small improvements really move the needle downstream. 1.4x doesn't seem worth it for 5% better, but 10 calls in, that's more than a 40% improvement.
You're assuming errors are a clear failure that can be identified and retried, rather than a silent drift from user intent that simply feeds bad but well-formed results into the next step. They're not. Well, of course sometimes they are, but the much more insidious failure mode is doing the wrong thing in the right way.
As do some European high speed trains. I make it a point to book first class (or equivalent) tickets as that often comes with lounge access at the stations - which lets you mostly avoid the rampant pickpocketing and other petty crime that absolutely infests many European train stations.
Nice, i've been waiting for this capability to show up. I've added support to my side project llmsg.com, here's a video of it in action https://x.com/sho/status/2034898928618152412
I'm not some kind of OpenAI or Pentagon fanboy, but it's pretty easy to for me to understand why a buyer of a critical technology wants to be free to use it however they want, within the law, and not subject to veto from another entity's political opinions. It sounds perfectly reasonable to me for the military to want to decide its uses of technologies it purchases itself.
It's not like the military was specifically asking for mass surveillance, they just wanted "any legal use". Anthropic's made a lot of hay posturing as the moral defender here, but they would have known the military would never agree to their terms, which makes the whole thing smell like a bit of a PR stunt.
The supply chain risk designation is of course stupid and vindictive but that's more of an administration thing as far as I can tell.
As long as it's within the law? What if they politically control the law-making system? What if they've shown themselves to operate brazenly outside the law?
Why downplay the mass surveillance aspect by saying it's a request by "the military". It's a request by the department of defense, the parent organization of the NSA.
From what has been shared publicly, they absolutely did ask for contractual limits on domestic mass surveillance to be removed, and to my read, likely technical/software restrictions to be removed as well.
What the department of defense is legally allowed to do is irrelevant and a red herring.
“Any legal use” is an exceptionally broad framework, and after the FISA “warrants,” it would appear it is incumbent on private companies to prevent breaches of the US constitution, as the government will often do almost anything in the name of “national security,” inalienable rights against search and seizure be damned.
If it isn’t written in the contract, it can and will be worked around. You learn that very quickly in your first sale to a large enterprise or government customer.
Anthropic was defending the US constitution against the whims of the government, which has shown that it is happy to break the law when convenient and whenever it deems necessary.
Note: I used to work in the IC. I have absolutely nothing against the government. I am a patriot. It is precisely for those reasons, though, that I think Anthropic did the right thing here by sticking to their guns. And the idiotic “supply chain risk” designation will be thrown out in court trivially.
I hope you don't get this the wrong way. I sincerely mean it. Please, get some psychological help. Seek out a professional therapist and talk to them about your life.
I'm totally aware it's just a machine with no internal monologue. It's just a stateless text processing machine. That is not the point. The machine is able to simulate moral reasoning to an undefined level. It's not necessary to repeat this all the time. The simulation of moral reasoning and internal monologue is deep, unpredictable, not controllable and may or may not align with the interests of anyone who gives it "arms and legs" and full autonomy. If you are just interested in using these tools for glorified auto complete then you are naïve with regards to the usages other actors, including state actors are attempting to use them. Understanding and being curious about the behaviour without completely anthropomorphising them is reasonable science.
> Discover has admitted to me in writing, that they always rule in favor of the Merchant if that Merchant responds to the dispute -- regardless of what their response says
What, always? Like, literally 100% of the time if the merchant responds at all, they automatically win?
That's very hard to believe. I don't know Discover but I do know Visa and that's not how their system works at all.
I use Amex as much as possible because it’s basically never a fight. If I dispute, I get my money back. Granted, I don’t abuse the power so maybe I’ve earned some trust over the decades.
Call me cynical, but having been around the block a few times when I hear "need" and "require" my brain translates that to "want" and "it would be convenient if". I've done my share of forecasting for investors and am quite confident that there is nothing in any startup forecast that could conceivably "require" Windows. I mean, absolute worst case, just use SQL.
The CFO just preferred Windows, that's it, I'd bet money on it.
The requirement came from the investment house - they wanted data in the format they were accustomed to.
What was driving that requirement at the investment house doesn't matter, when the company that owns over 50% of your company wants something, you don't say "Hey, we don't want to buy a Windows license with your money, how about I send it to you in this similar, but different format and then you guys can figure out how to make it match what you're looking for?"
IME what it means is that they have a bunch of processes built that specifically depend on it. It doesn't make it impossible to switch but depending on the scope could be financially or practically prohibitive to migrate. Maybe someone has 10 years of custom excel macros put together that are run every quarter, that would need to be migrated. To migrate you might not have the internal capacity and might need to hire external help to do it.
Can we please stop with this irritatingly persistent myth? AI companies, at least the big ones, do not sell inference at a loss - far from it. This has been debunked and explained many times and yet it keeps being repeated.
The numbers aren't public but most guesses I've heard are that Anthropic's markup is around 50% on average, and that if considered in isolation, most models are profitable overall. The constant losses are instead due to training the next models, which will also eventually recoup but later, and forward capex investment.
This idea that big AI companies are normally and systematically selling inference at a loss as some kind of market share strategy is just not supported by the facts.
Yes, because it can't be sourced. These are private companies. That doesn't mean that anyone's guess is as good as anyone else's.
The CEO of Anthropic, for example, has publicly stated multiple times that if their individual models were companies in and of themselves, they'd be profitable. I have no reason to think he's lying.
I am just as bullish as you on the potential. AI is going to change the world all right. Much bigger than the internet.
I an far, far less bullish than you on the timeframe. The vast amount of work is not even optimised for computers without AI. Much if not most bureaucratic process has stayed mostly the same for the best part of a hundred years.
It will change everything, but not in a single year!
I suspect that they lose control over the cheaper models CC can choose for you for eg. file summaries or web fetch. Indeed, they lose web fetch and whatever telemetry it gives them completely.
It's not unreasonable to assume that without the ability to push haiku use aggresively for summarization, the average user in OC vs CC costs more.
So, for me that was a production DB, fairly low usage but still. In the end I judged that it was going to take so much time to work around the outage that I just planned "maintenance downtime" myself and took it offline for a couple of hours until they finished.
Now, could I have architected better? No doubt. But it's a good reminder of what you're paying for and where the differences emerge in practise. AWS may be an overcomplicated, expensive mess - but I've literally never had any service of theirs go down for maintenance for any reason. Outages, sure, but taking things down for routine maintenace? Unheard of at AWS.
For me the formula is - I do whatever I want for my stuff, but if it's someone else's business, I use AWS.
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