[pesus]

Exactly. Not only have the prices gone up, they've gone up for no real reason other than some CEOs are attempting to take over society. The average person isn't even seeing much of the upside of modern technology anymore, just the downsides. Gadgets no longer get cheaper over time, experiences no longer improve over time, and every new startup or innovation seems to be used to make their lives worse, whether directly or indirectly.

The average person does not really benefit from recent AI tech - and the minuscule benefits they may possibly sometimes get are easily outweighed by the negative effects. Say what you will about the morality of bread and circuses, but making them increasingly out of reach seems like a very bad idea to me.

[ericd]

>The average person does not really benefit from recent AI tech

Really? Most people I know seem to have found the chatbots tremendously helpful. It's much faster than researching via a bunch of google searches.

[mrhottakes]

Most people I know don't use chatbots and don't find them helpful.

[kotaKat]

And can 'most people' even afford most of these services? Having seen some people's spend, even a $200/month plan has me questioning why I'd spend $200/month on Anthropic products when $200/month would be a substantial chunk of my housing as a blue-collar class IT worker just to survive.

[ericd]

You don't need a $200/mo plan, that's for people chewing through Opus tokens with multiple instances of Claude Code going in parallel. My impression is that most people just use the free ChatGPT tier, or $20/mo at most.

[brianwawok]

For coding or talking to it? $20 is ok to chat I guess. $100 is minimum if you do this for a job.

[ericd]

If you’re writing software professionally, does the “can’t afford to pay for Claude code” they were talking about apply?

[eudamoniac]

You are feeding customer/employer code into systems that the customer/employer has not provisioned for you?

[LtWorf]

I own an apartment, my heating/electricity/water/internet/repairs costs ~400$/month.

[LtWorf]

My salary hasn't been increased to pay for this extra helpfullness.

[ericd]

Then use the cheap/free plans?

[LtWorf]

My time is too valuable to waste it trying to convince AI models to actually work.

[wao0uuno]

>It's much faster than researching via a bunch of google searches.

Ah yes that's certainly worth more than a steady job market, low inflation and affordable goods. Get real.

[ericd]

I think I'm already real? The main reasons for inflation, outside of computer components, are related to the fact that we're near the end of a long-term debt cycle. Look at demographics and monetary/fiscal policy. This is just the scapegoat du jour for long-term structural issues.

Stability in the job market seems to mean stagnation in the long term. That's fine in the short run, but eventually, you're Germany/France and major pillars of your economy are cornered and in trouble. Personally, I think the move is total at-will employment paired with UBI rather than the heavy-handed employer regs that those countries have for stability, and I think that's where we're going to have to go if job losses really start materializing.

[Corence]

Google search is worse because of recent AI tech flooding the internet with misinformation and low quality articles.

[ericd]

Low paid humans have been pumping out low quality SEO slop full of misinformation for at least the last 15-20 years, it’s not much different. If anything, the quality is probably somewhat higher.

[charcircuit]

>The average person does not really benefit from recent AI tech

ChatGPT and Gemini offer enormous consumer value for free.

[pesus]

What value do they get that both couldn't be done before and outweighs the costs?

[charcircuit]

Personalized learning. Some people on the US were paying over six figures to be educated and now they can do it at a much better quality for free.

[echoangle]

You don’t pay for the insight, you pay for the certificate. If the AI doesn’t give you a degree, it doesn’t really help you. Even before AI, you could have learned stuff from a degree for free.

[pesus]

I don't think the software that lies to you and makes things up on a regular basis is a very good teacher. Even if it was, that's not worth the cost to society vs just improving education.

[charcircuit]

Teachers make even more up than AI in my experience. I would always trust an AI over a human teacher.

[pesus]

That's an incredibly depressing and anti-intellectual way to go through life.

[brianwawok]

College was never about learning it was about signaling. I get two resumes on my desk, one went to Harvard, one learned about stuff on ChatGPT. Which has a higher likelihood of being a success?

[charcircuit]

It defends how you want to define success, but I would lean towards ChatGPT.

[Capricorn2481]

You would lean towards a resume that says "I learned from ChatGPT"? What does that even mean?

[wiseowise]

You probably meant for "free".

[charcircuit]

I meant $0.

[wiseowise]

You meant they use user data to train their models.

[charcircuit]

Which costs them money to do. Not the users.