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by ericd 29 days ago
>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.

4 comments

Most people I know don't use chatbots and don't find them helpful.
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.
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.
For coding or talking to it? $20 is ok to chat I guess. $100 is minimum if you do this for a job.
If you’re writing software professionally, does the “can’t afford to pay for Claude code” they were talking about apply?
You are feeding customer/employer code into systems that the customer/employer has not provisioned for you?
I run my own business, I am the employer.
I own an apartment, my heating/electricity/water/internet/repairs costs ~400$/month.
My salary hasn't been increased to pay for this extra helpfullness.
Then use the cheap/free plans?
My time is too valuable to waste it trying to convince AI models to actually work.
>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.

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.

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