u/aradil

Their operating cost was basically break even.

Their revenue is not coming from deals with providers, it’s coming from customers.

They 10x’d their revenue in 6 months.

I have a premium team seat, and to meet a deadline I exceeded my weekly budget 2 days before the deadline.

I've had no choice but to buy additional API credits to get more tokens, which are running me $300/day right now.

First time this has ever happened, but you can quickly see how days of emergency usage can pay for months of subsidized usage. Claude Code says my last 10 days of use ought to have costed ~$2000.

I used wget to scrape a static copy of my Wordpress site and then deleted PHP and hosted the raw html.

I don't think anyone noticed or cared.

It was like magic when I wrote my first desktop application that could do something in first year university computer science class too. I remember the magic.

And for those with a little imagination, once you see a little magic, you can suddenly see a massive potential for things you can create.

The distinction comes from smashing your head on a keyboard for a long time over something that feels like it should be trivial, although AI really is making it easy to crack through something like that.

The real breakthroughs folks are going to start to have is the realization that they're going to have to start paying more money to have stuff they thought they should just be able to build for free.

What do you mean I have to pay Apple every year to have an app on my phone that I made?

It costs how much to run a server in the cloud?

Maybe folks will start to realize how much shit they are getting for free that is costing someone else a lot of money.

Considering there was a 10x increase in revenue, I'm guessing whatever contracts they had in place last year just didn't change that much and they added a shitload of newer, smaller clients.

Ah, US government actually pays through Amazon I believe, so that could be bundled vendors including the USG.

If it's the government, that number seems small.

I'll have to find a completely new career path, and I'll have to go to Blockbuster to rent movies on physical media again.

But you know what, that sounds pretty nice.

Sure, folks are chatting all the time about business development in the province.

But that doesn’t mean that public consultation happens about anything in the private sector unless it ought to because of rules and regulations.

The irony of posting an anti-AI activism post like this with a bullet character that doesn’t appear on a keyboard that obviously was written by an AI lol

We’re the location of one of the main trans-Atlantic sub-Ocean Internet cable termination points, it actually makes a ton of sense to have data centers nearby.

Right now all of my Canadian infrastructure at work is based in Calgary and Montreal; and we have a distinct lack of modern AI tooling based in Canada at all. Anything I want to use (because believe it or not, it’s not just for generating shitty posters for your kids’ fundraiser) is extremely limited in Canada, and for anything good I have to use American servers.

Which is shitty.

I don’t think there is normally public consultation before private business ventures spin up in our province.

On servers in Canada, which is part of the point here.

This sound very similar to the workflow Anthropic is promoting here.

I mention in my comment elsewhere in this thread that there is a separate use case for resource management to live above subagent forks to supervise; kinda like a locking mechanism.

[edit] Copying and pasting from elsewhere: This rubber duck session about how I’ve been using agents made me realize that I’m wasting tokens on resource management that a supervisor agent doesn’t need to be doing. We have solutions in software design for managing mutex locks on resources, and humans have them too, they are called lock out/tag out (LOTO), and neither require a supervisor by design.

Off to reinvent my process.

I’ve been working with cross agent communication for longer than it was a feature that Anthropic was deploying to end consumers and they aren’t wrong about how their implementation of subagents work and recommendations on how to use them.

But if you have completely different subsets of concurrently running agents with shared physical dependencies, inter-agent communication is now a first class citizen at least in Claude code, and it turns out that multiple layers of supervision makes sense in that space.

Got one machine you can do testing in a browser on at a time, or some other limit? You need something to manage that outside of your subprocesses, ideally one who understands a bit about what is going on but not so much that it’s eating tokens.

Regardless I appreciate the advice and research… one thing these folks have is early access to all of their tooling before it gets to us plebs. I’ve been baking my own, and making my own all along the way, it’s nice to feel like I’m on the right track.

What’s not nice is how irrelevant it makes anything I’m thinking about.

On the other hand, I’m sure all of their devs at these companies rolling out these features feel the same way.

[edit] This rubber duck session about how I’ve been using agents made me realize that I’m wasting tokens on resource management that a supervisor agent doesn’t need to be doing. We have solutions in software design for managing mutex locks on resources, and humans have them too, they are called lock out/tag out (LOTO), and neither require a supervisor by design.

Off to reinvent my process.

When the high cost of fuel is going towards things that reduce reliance on oil and gas that’s a good thing.

When the high cost of fuel is going to oil and gas companies (at least the ones that aren’t being bombed) as profit, that’s slightly less good.

Know what I’m sayin’?

Turns out countries don’t just bomb themselves generally.

That mill was open until 6 years ago and not a peep was made about it on Reddit at all.

It was dumping toxic effluent directly into a river.

This is a building with computers with a closed loop water system. They are not even remotely the same, and the folks up in arms about it are being manipulated.

Don’t get me wrong, there are very real, very disruptive things these technologies are causing in real time as we speak; but also trust me, those bad things are gonna happen whether or not this data centre gets built, and probably before a shovel even hits the ground.

Energy is being spent on the wrong thing here for sure.

Reasonable enough, however I don’t see anything about data centers, AI or not, that requires any sort of environmental considerations that don’t apply to any industry or commercial installation in the province.

There weren’t 10,000 posts on Reddit every five minutes when the pulp mill on Pictou was fighting the government for the right to continue dumping millions of litres of toxic waste water directly into Boat Harbour every day, like it had been doing every day for a half a century.

Some folks were protesting to protect the roughly 300 jobs it cost to shut it down; roughly the amount of permanent jobs this data centre will create. (Unclear if there will be knock on semi-regular refrigeration tech jobs to keep the cooling system working or if they are the permanent jobs)

The paper mill next door to this proposed data center uses 25% of all of the power in the province.

Well we tried to piggy back on Newfoundland’s hydro projects but it seems like those haven’t worked out.

It’s okay though, because we have plenty of non-hydro renewable projects on the go. You should read about them.

Well, it’s going to be hard for them to upgrade non-existing hydro infrastructure here.

When you say hydro here, do you mean water, or electricity?

I know that hydro is synonymous with electricity in an Ontario and Quebec where most electricity is provided by hydroelectric power, but that’s not the case here.