Claude partial outage

"On the other hand, a missile with a man or two within, controlling flight by graphitics, would be lighter, more mobile, more intelligent. It would give us a lead that might well mean the margin of victory. Besides which, gentlemen, the exigencies of war compel us to remember one thing. A man is much more dispensable than a computer. Manned missiles could be launched in numbers and under circumstances that no good general would care to undertake as far as computer-directed missiles are concerned . . ."

Which doesn't seem like it. The ideal is to keep removing couplings. But in practice, I find that focusing on the statefulness, the distribution-specificness, these "accidentals", is how you actually get leverage.

The obvious social consequence is now the tendency towards centralization, tyranny, "you people can't think for yourselves, not because you have some kind of 'inherent intelligence defect', but because the world is so complicated and interconnected that only coherent systems thinking (conveniently administered from one central point) is what can save you". In the Enlightenment world, the ideal was that every man could in principle, think for themselves.

A good ending might be that everybody benefits each other by distributing intelligence, but in practice centralization always seems to win.

I dare companies to gamble on running their businesses on absolute skeleton crews long term

some weeks ago, we changed the billed credit card - something went wrong on their end we were unable to use it for ~8-9 days.

Some pepople during this period said to certain tasks: "I will care about that if Claude is available again"

So, we are already there

Now we know they won’t even be able to read and write. But maybe Claude sonnet 12817 can maintain the operating system. It’ll be 17,000 dependencies in and mostly written in JavaScript, but it’ll work.

If people are spending less time bent over monitors or at desks under the dictates of corporate imperative, they will probably be spending more time doing actually interesting things. Reasoning is innately human. What we call "knowledge work" is not and is often anything but. People who are naturally curious will still discover things, even if irrelevant (from a market perspective) when the AI is on, for their own satisfaction.

If such an event were to occur, they would be called upon. It's really little different from what would happen today if suddenly the power grid or supply lines were down for a sustained period of time.

Also I disagree with the permise. People learned how to make technology that never existed once already, they can learn to do it again if needed. It will take time, which we'll have plenty of because your phone won't be working.

Most humans aren't useless by any measure of most or usefulness. Our culture is our tools, dying due to a lack of antibiotics doesn't mean you didn't have anything to contribute, it means you didn't have access to the tool you needed. This is the problem we need to guard against.

No one is going to lose the ability to reason! This is accepting the most extreme version of the marketing presented by frontier labs, don't do it. People may lose fluency or familiarity or access to training on specific skills. We should put some care into making sure that can't be a catastrophe, for sure.

The titular Pump Six breaks down and basically there's nobody left in the world who knows how to even reason about the steps needed to fix it. There's just some log dump and nobody understands what it means. Humans are no longer capable of complex reasoning, they just live in the moment and hump.

If we practiced for these Armageddon scenarios what would a highly prepared group of 20 be able to accomplish in a year. How fast could they get humanity back to the bronze age?

8k diffs PR is incredible, is it even sane for a human to comprehend that much?

There has to be a name for such scenario were the handoff from Agent to Developer is so difficult, its not even worth pursuing but to instead wait until the Agent comes back online.

No matter how good of a developer you are, we are still constrained to our minds working memory. Lots of people I have spoken to are aware of this. Agents produce lots of diffs in a fast pace, our minds don't get the time to grasp the changed logic. And then, we an Agent is unavailable all of the sudden, say in the case of it being an outage or usage limit reached, the human now have to go through massive amounts of changes. They cannot continue as usual, there is a spike, they have to learn the new changes and grasp everything before they can continue towards the goal.

Other than trivial PRs; everything I do with Opus/Fable gets reviewed by Astra; and everything I do with Astra gets reviewed by Opus/Fable.

Using only models from a single vendor, is like testing your website/webapp only on Chrome.

PRs shouldn't really be reaching 8k diffs no matter who authors them.

(but yes if AI is going to propagate, they need to fix their uptimes)

Isn't the answer that you just wait a few hours?

If the AI is giving you huge productivity gains these should more than compensate for time lost here. And there's probably other useful things to be done in that time anyway.

I don't know, what is all that code that needs to be merged so quickly doing anyway, I guess is my point. We keep hearing about these sorts of scenarios in hypothetical terms but where is all the amazing new software out on the market? Where are the products being built in a week that are awesome and genuinely solve a new problem and work?

I don't mean to be dismissive but it doesn't seem like outages like this are really a huge deal in the sense that they stop anything really important happening in the world, if only because when the systems are up not that much new important stuff seems to be being done in the world.

If you listen closely, you may hear them squawking in annoyance after each announcement.

The Samsara of AI subscriptions.

Would be interesting to see how OpenAI and Anthropic would respond to being "accidentally" hacked by their respective Frankenstein monsters.