I have been working for 35 years now (is that blast of cold air just the feeling of getting old?), and have been mostly remote since Covid. I did go back during the RTO wave, but only for about a year. Some family medical issues forced me to ask to work remotely, which the company somehow approved.
It has been a mixed bag. Some random thoughts.
On good days, I get an enormous amount done. Long stretches of uninterrupted, focused work. On other days, I drift aimlessly.
I have always been somewhat disorganized (ADHD or whatever), but the office provided some structure. You had to show up, sit at your desk, and at least make a reasonable attempt at working. Remote work removes the external discipline.
It is not that I don't get things done. When something needs to happen, I can still pull myself together. Just last week I worked until 2 AM to meet some deliverables. But the chaos between those bouts of productivity has grown.
I always had a habit of using a Tuesday evening to speed-run whatever I had been putting off and occasionally sacrificing a weekend to catch up. But with remote work, the boundaries between work and leisure have become very fuzzy.
Maybe it was just the last 2 months of election season that were bad. I tried to fix it before but could not, but the last week since the elections got over has been magical :)
I miss the casual interactions that come from being around other people. But I think at least half that nostalgia is for an office that doesn't really exist. My actual work is with teams scattered across the world. Most of the people I would meet in the office are colleagues who report to my manager, rather than the people I collaborate with every day. But the ability to go out for lunch or coffee together, or meet at least the local people I work with, did count for something.
I can not really go back at this point in time due to continued family needs, but I wish I could.
I know this is not ask/tell HN, but a story about an article, so apologies for the digression.
My career was a similar length, but I'm retired now. ~2/3 of my career was remote. My personality made remote (or a private office, which was rare) significantly more productive. When others can observe me at my desk, I'm highly self-conscious and that distracts me. Catching glimpses of others' faces while I'm looking around in thought also rips me out of the flow. But when I know I'm alone, focus is a lot easier for me. Home is even better than a private office because when I'm not feeling it, I can go start a load of laundry or take out the trash, then come back and see if I'm feeling it. When I am feeling it, I can go longer because some of the chores are now out of the way. That was all as an engineer.
For the last ~1/3 of my career I was a manager, and most of that time was in the office. Being remote as a manager was a lot harder for me. I found it so much easier to understand where someone's head was at when we could sit in a room or take a walk together. If I saw them fidgeting more than usual in a one-on-one, I could try to figure out if there was something they were having trouble bringing up, or if they just weren't feeling like spending time together that day. If I saw a different look on their face than usual when they were at their desks, I could use that as a trigger to check-in and see if there was anything I could help with. It was a lot harder when those little clues were missing, especially during a difficult time like the pandemic. I eventually learned to replace some of that with DMs ("Hi there, it's been a few days since we've chatted, so I wanted to check-in to see how you're doing. Anything I can do for you?"), but it was more like me polling than me getting notifications, so it felt more intrusive and less efficient.
That's all just me. I think the differences vary a lot by person, by role, and even by team/company. There were certainly periods where being able to grab lunch and/or a whiteboard was extremely valuable (and fun!).
Similarly my career started off 'full remote' as it was a small company that began in the late 90's almost by accident, picking up employees mostly from meeting them on industry-specific IRC channels. The initial 5 or 6 employees including myself never met each other until a number of years later when we could afford flights/hotels to have a company sponsored event.
After that team grew beyond a small handful of individuals who all knew each other and were used to working remotely (e.g. open source style of work) it got a lot harder.
The absolute best working situation for me was having an office everyone typically worked out of, but I was not required to work from. I found that I could balance my workload where I'd be in the office 2-3 days a week doing the "social" stuff like collaborating with my team on whiteboard level designs, meeting with other teams, catching up on e-mail, etc. Then I'd have 2-3 days of focus time at home to go head down and ignore the outside world to get more technical deep dive work done.
This only really worked for me though because everyone else worked from the office. I would wake up one morning, and simply decide to go in or not based on how I was feeling. If other folks were remote or hybrid it simply would have not been nearly as valuable.
I very much miss the office. I actually moved states and into the big city to be closer to it about 6 months before COVID hit. All the expense of bigy city living, none of the benefit! I am now fully remote like I was at the start of my career.
You might benefit from a timer for kids like the Time Timer. Or if there's a close coffee shop or something just meet someone there occasionally and work remote together
Oh I live a short distance from my office. Coffee shop will be as close to the office I just can't go. My son has intractable epilepsy and I don't want my wife to be home alone managing this. Getting someone to come sit with you at home (as my proxy) waiting for a situation to happen is lot more abnormal than me just staying home. My wife and I do step out for groceries and chores obviously so it is not 100% black and white and I used to go to office for lunch every week but the habit degrades over quarters. But I can try to reboot it.
lol I am not the richest man, not even close and nothing physical happened. But I once got into a parasocial relationship after decades of monogamy and no dalliances. Never planned for it, and in hindsight years later don't know what happened. And it was so cathartic.
No. Never spent money on these sites. Public website/app. You could read any comments publicly too. Never even DMed, until ... Some things just happen, quite randomly. No more details.
I wasn't judging, I wanted to understand how it happened, and the added context is appreciated.
I don't know of that was your case, but many times, its a series of small, seemingly justifiable yet ill-advised, boundary-pushing (yet thrilling!) decisions that lead to somewhere messy.
Sure. I understand. My comment was meant to indicate that I never thought I would get where I did. Clean until you are not. Yes. Small small things becoming an obsession.
But I wonder whether the cost shown to us is what the company actually pays? Pretty sure finance would have written a discount which is not shown to employees to keep us in check.
My hearts says that's what going on but ... does someone know?
I looked into this the other day - it's hard to get concrete numbers but rumors online lead me to believe that negotiated discounts tend to only be in the 10-15% range and you need to commit to six figure of spending to get them.
The actual cost your company pays is likely _higher_ than what Claude Code shows in /cost, not lower. Also, very few organizations are getting any discount on API rates. Maybe the US military.
That's totally on me. I should have asked you before shutting down the subagents. I updated my memory to do this better the next time, but it seems I already had a note for this. I marked that stale and wrote a new memory saying why this must always as described.
First 10 minutes: Making a team, 2 guys or gals living a life, talk about it
11-30 minutes: Demoing how bad our security systems are, we need to patch them, day and night, can't keep up
31-40: But we need money, no one is paying our bounties
41-50: How about? They do not tell what it is
51-60: We are going to hack StarLink (they never say that, it is just the logo in the background when they are talking how easy it is to get in and out)
61-70: Dry Run, text scrolling on the screens
71-85: The Hack, split screens, zoom in and outs
86-88: Oh it was Solozzo (Binance) all along, not Starlink.
89:90: Dude fills up his car with the stolen USDT and realizes that as he is sitting in the car
You need to make the caper a positive enterprise. Nobody cares about enterprise security hygiene; so you need the head of Binance to be an evil-moustache guy, or the proposed hack to be a positive affirmation of the protagonist's skills over a world that does not value them.
I like the final twist. It would be even better if it turns out the protagonist was manipulated by the real players and he ends up with little reward (because crime doesn't pay, kids!) but with renewed faith in his abilities.
I am technically not saying that. I am taking off from the parent comment and speculating.
Their data from September is leaked via IPO preview, and October is not yet complete, so how can someone even project that?
// I am a techie, not a finance guy, so apart from public chatter, no inside knowledge.
And I do feel their IPO is being rushed before anyone has enough information to make up their mind. The VCs or private equity have given them a lot of money and want to cash out. When the revenue does slow down, any investor should pause to take a look at whether they can right the ship, or has the landscape itself changed.
Their revenue taps, product releases and marketing campaigns were all strategic: to be able to show nice numbers in the financials.
Once they stop playing games with quality of output of these models and revenue's shrink - they will be in deep deep trouble. They are hoping they will conjure up a break through with the IPO proceeds.
The flattening part is not reported, but based on estimates from a company called TickerTrends. If they were correct it would imply a sudden and unusual departure from some incredibly impressive growth. Even more unusual given the release of their industry leading Opus/Sonnet/Haiku. Something to watch but I would not consider that authoritative, and would not invest based on that either.
Opem models catching up in capabilities to do more and more tasks would easily explain it, there is a reason OpenRouter got sold for 7.5 bil, the money is in selling shovels and price per token, not chasing the frontier
The impressive growth is plausible, but it also rhymes with "bubble". There is obviously a value proposition in there, but I'm skeptical it's a trillion-dollar one. It's a machine for turning electricity and silicon into powerpoint and spotify slop
I partly agree. In support of your scepticism, I also think the frontier labs are overvalued. The expensive part which is not currently priced into the subscriptions is the training. Inference is usually profitable now - at least from what we can tell from industry reports.
Where this bubble differs from the dot-com bubble is that valuations have very strong, organic user demand behind them. In 1999, prototype websites with few customers were getting IPOs worth hundreds of millions. This time, demand is insatiable. Frontier mdoels also has very low global penetration, relatively speaking, so the TAM permits exponentially more sales, in theory.
However the risks are numerous for these labs. Foremost is that Chinese labs are able to easily distill frontier models. A tiny fraction of the cost of training, and they have a close approximation. Second, models are getting much more efficient per task. Companies are already discovering what "good enough" looks like, and it often ends up being much cheaper than what Anthropic and OpenAI are selling. This will only accelerate.
My investment thesis is bullish on the entire AI stack except the frontier labs. I think power generation is going to see huge demand. Ditto for infrastructure and data centers. Ditto for the products and services created by these models.
I don't have the numbers in front of me but could have sworn I had seen quarterly revenue growth rates dropping drastically over the last year or so. Still a strong growth rate, but much lower than prior growth rates.
Edit: Data because silent down votes are useless, Anthropic Q2 2026 grew 147% while Q3 grew 45%
Yes but its growth rates with respect to expenditures, and in particular capital expenditures (R&D etc), which we have no idea about.
Gross margins here are irrelevant: if they can't charge a high enough price to cover all expenditures and rely on cash raised via fund-raises, they are not financially healthy.
I have some sorta skin condition that I can not stand either the heated seats and the heated steering wheel.
But my wife ... in winters, the first thing on entering the car is to activate the heatings seats. Some people like them. And yes I paid for the subscription (or a package that cost me a bunch but gave me everything all inclusive).
Someone's got to get the vulnerabilities patched before AI (sorry, SI) does a coordinated hit job. I like this one at a time thing than a complete dystopia. By next year, half of these will be patched, and people writing more secure software .... sorry one too many jokes :)
It has been a mixed bag. Some random thoughts.
On good days, I get an enormous amount done. Long stretches of uninterrupted, focused work. On other days, I drift aimlessly.
I have always been somewhat disorganized (ADHD or whatever), but the office provided some structure. You had to show up, sit at your desk, and at least make a reasonable attempt at working. Remote work removes the external discipline.
It is not that I don't get things done. When something needs to happen, I can still pull myself together. Just last week I worked until 2 AM to meet some deliverables. But the chaos between those bouts of productivity has grown.
I always had a habit of using a Tuesday evening to speed-run whatever I had been putting off and occasionally sacrificing a weekend to catch up. But with remote work, the boundaries between work and leisure have become very fuzzy.
Maybe it was just the last 2 months of election season that were bad. I tried to fix it before but could not, but the last week since the elections got over has been magical :)
I miss the casual interactions that come from being around other people. But I think at least half that nostalgia is for an office that doesn't really exist. My actual work is with teams scattered across the world. Most of the people I would meet in the office are colleagues who report to my manager, rather than the people I collaborate with every day. But the ability to go out for lunch or coffee together, or meet at least the local people I work with, did count for something.
I can not really go back at this point in time due to continued family needs, but I wish I could.
I know this is not ask/tell HN, but a story about an article, so apologies for the digression.
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