Not at all. Saying something like that is the loudest signal for how out of touch you are with how audiences are made.
From the article:
> "...it’s like the first thing that they see or that first comment that they see is their opinion even when they haven’t heard the whole album.”
What is this trying to say? For every 1 person who thinks about truth in some independent way, I don't care if it's spiritual or because they do scientific tests for what the best music is or all of this other stuff; there are 19 people who are, "LIKES = TRUTH".
Are you getting it? That has nothing to do with payola or authenticity or scarcity or whatever. You have no idea anyway, you've never had to make a creative product. Likes = truth. Authenticity is the seeming unlikelihood that social media content authors are bought and sold. It's the OPPOSITE of what you think. It is the OPPOSITE of payola. And look, they're right. The vast majority of opinions on TikTok are not paid for. This is the OPPOSITE of radio.
I worked at a startup that was using Azure. The reason was simple enough - it had been founded by finance people who were used to Excel, so Windows+Office was the non-negotiable first bit of IT they purchased. That created a sales channel Microsoft used to offer generous startup credits. The free money created a structural lack of discipline around spending. Once the startup credits ran out, the company became faced with a huge bill and difficulty motivating people to conserve funds.
At the start I didn't have any strong opinion on what cloud provider to use. I did want to do IT the "old fashioned way" - rent a big ass bare metal or cloud VM, issue UNIX user accounts on it and let people do dev/test/ad hoc servers on that. Very easy to control spending that way, very easy to quickly see what's using the resources and impose limits, link programs to people, etc. I was overruled as obviously old fashioned and not getting with the cloud programme. They ended up bleeding a million dollars a month and the company wasn't even running a SaaS!
I ended up with a very low opinion of Azure. Basic things like TCP connections between VMs would mysteriously hang. We got MS to investigate, they made a token effort and basically just admitted defeat. I raged that this was absurd as working TCP is table stakes for literally any datacenter since the 1980s, but - sad to say - at this time Azure's bad behavior was enabled by a widespread culture of CV farming in which "enterprise" devs were all obsessed with getting cloud tech onto their LinkedIn. Any time we hit bugs or stupidities in the way Azure worked I was told the problem was clearly with the software I'd written, which couldn't be "cloud native", as if it was it'd obviously work fine in Azure!
With attitudes like that completely endemic outside of the tech sector, of course Microsoft learned not to prioritize quality.
We did eventually diversify a bit. We needed to benchmark our server software reliably and that was impossible in Azure because it was so overloaded and full of noisy neighbours, so we rented bare metal servers in OVH to do that. It worked OK.
I have had bad experiences across all major vendors.
The main reason I used to push for Azure instead during the last years was the friendliness of their Web UIs, and having the VS Code integration (it started as an Azure product after all).
VSCode integration out of the box, that I can understand. But I have a really hard time calling Azure UI "friendly". Everything is behind layers of nested pointy-clicky chains with opaque or flat out misleading names.
To make things worse, their APIs also follow the same design. Everything you actually would want to do is behind a long sequence of pointer-chasing across objects and service/resource managers. Almost as if their APIs were built to directly reflect their planned UI action sequences.
Corporate inertia. Sibling comment uses the term "hostage situation" which I admit is pretty apt.
Microsoft is an approved vendor in every large enterprise. That they have been approved for desktop productivity, Sharepoint, email and on-prem systems does not enter the picture. That would be too nuanced.
Dealing with a Large Enterprise[tm] is an exercise in frustration. A particular client had to be deployed to Azure because their estimate was that getting a new cloud vendor approved for production deployments would be a gargantuan 18-to-24 month org-wide and politically fraught process.
If you are a large corp and have to move workloads to the cloud (because let's be honest: maintaining your own data centres and hardware procurement pipelines is a serious drag) then you go with whatever vendor your organisation has approved. And if the only pre-approved vendor with a cloud offering is Microsoft, you use Azure.
Because Azure customers are companies that still, in 2026 only use Windows. Anyone else uses something else. Turns out, companies like that don't tend to have the best engineering teams. So moving an entire cloud infrastructure from Azure to say AWS, probably is either really expensive, really risky or too disruptive to do for the type of engineering team that Azure customers have. I would expect MS to bleed from this slowly for a long time until they actually fix it. I seriously doubt they ever will but stranger things have happened.
Turns out outside companies shipping software products aspiring to be the next Google or Apple, most companies that work outside software industry also need software to run their business and they couldn't care less about HN technology cool factor.
They use whatever they can to ship their products into trucks, outsourcing their IT and development costs , and that is about it.
Agreed, though only up to a point. Companies that need software to run their business, need that software to run.
When your operations are constantly hampered by Azure outages, and your competitors' are not, you're not going to last if your market is at all competitive. Thankfully for many companies, a lot of markets aren't, I suppose, at least for the actors who have established a successful rent and no longer need to care how their business operations are going.
I have worked at two retail companies where AWS was a no no. They didn't want to have anything depending on a competitor(Amazon). So they went the Azure route.
You’re assuming the alternatives don’t have just as many issues. There’s been exactly one “whistleblower” who is probably tiptoeing the line of a lawsuit. I wouldn’t assume just because there isn’t a similar disgruntled gcp or aws engineer doesn't mean they don't have similar ways.
this made me look into how cloud hypervisors actually work on HW level.. they all offload it to custom HW (smart nic, fpga, dpu, etc..). cpu does almost nothing except for tenant work. AWS -> Nitro, Azure -> FPGA, NVIDIA sells DPUs.
Depending on the space you work in, you have almost no choice at all. If you're building for government then you're going to use Microsoft, almost "end of story".
most the upper management of companies who use them have dont have the technical competence to see it. (eg: banks, supermarket chains, manufacturing companies)
once they are in, no one likes to admit they made a mistake.
Because the alternatives are also in similar state.
AWS or GCP are all pretty crap. You use any of them, any you'll hit just enough rough edges. The whole industry is just grinding out slop, quality is not important anywhere.
I work with AWS on a daily basis, and I'm not really impressed. (Also nor did GCP impress me on the short encounter I had with it)
I don't know about AWS or the rest of GCP, but in terms of engineering, my experience of GCE was at least an entire order of magnitude better than what the article alleges about Azure. Security and reliability were taken extremely seriously, and the quality of the engineering was world-class. I hope it has stayed like this since then. It was a worthwhile thing to experience.
in light of everything you've learned about the pharmaceutical industry and biotech venture, is there anything in particular about oncology that makes it well suited to venture?
like why is it people with cancer? why isn't it people with muscular diseases?
> Although an adaptive design guidance finalized in 2019 left the door open for bayesian trials, their use in drug development has to date been limited,4 such as in Ebola and SARS-CoV-2 epidemics and in pediatric and rare disease trials.
the reason it has been limited to those cases is
drug development, today, is constrained by commercialization.
all four categories listed - ebola, sars-cov-2, pediatric and rare disease drugs - each for their own reason, have low commercialization risk, so if they are scientifically robust solutions, there is ROI.
most drugs in development today are new indications for existing molecules, generally in oncology, also because these are the most favorable conditions for commercialization.
commercialization, commercialization, commercialization. people don't want innovations in drug approval, nobody is clamoring for that. they want innovations in commercialization.
i don't know if bayesian methods will make trials a lot cheaper. and that's their problem! there are already a lot of very smart people working on this issue, and they have litigated to death all the objective facts.
There's a weird thing that happens with cancer drugs that I just experienced.
When they are working with a pharmacy and your insurance, the price they'll charge you is $10,000 for enough pills to last a month. But when your insurance says "We won't cover that" all the sudden you find out the company has a backdoor subsidization program which will fully cover the cost of the drug for reasons I can't really fathom (good will?)
What's even more uncomfortable is my insurance (aetna) also mandates that I get my medicine from their subsidiary, CVS.
I really don't like this sort of thing. The price of everything in medicine feels distorted in unbelievable ways. Like famously a $0.25 acetaminophen pill that somehow magically costs $10 in the hospital. I guess there's some nice individual packaging.
I'm less and less convinced that it's even a cost sort of thing with these pharmaceutical companies. Like, sure they'll love to reduce that as much as possible. But the price itself seems entirely fictitious and based on what they can commonly get insurers to pay, and not anything related to the actual R&D of the drug.
The mutability of the price emphasis the cost/price disjoin.
Probably you are a soft recruit to "they got better' numbers for post trial marketing but even then, it's like a Ford is $30,000 or $3 depending how easily it can be sold.
Isn’t it just regular price discrimination? Profit maximizing firms with market power charge different prices based on willingness to pay in order to sell to people who won’t pay a higher single value monopolist price.
It's a bit like software pricing, the marginal cost of production is low. You often see massively different prices charged to different types of customer.
I used to support an application used by about half a dozen businesses. They all knew each other, that's how I got their business.
Two of them were paying significantly more for their support than the others. That's because those two had their phone numbers set to ring even when my phone is in quiet mode. Just for the privilege of being able to wake me whenever you want, and get my attention even when I'm in the middle of a hike, you're paying substantially more.
> I really don't like this sort of thing. The price of everything in medicine feels distorted in unbelievable ways. Like famously a $0.25 acetaminophen pill that somehow magically costs $10 in the hospital. I guess there's some nice individual packaging.
okay well, let's say you were to model "what explains the price of something" and you had two factors in your model, "markets" and "politics." most good models will have a residual which means "everything else."
when i say "low risk" to commercialization, i could mean a lot of things. it depends on what the drug category is.
if you develop the only cure for an otherwise fatal, pediatric, congenital disease, the parents will be willing to pay an unlimited amount of money for it. so there's no market price for it. so we know that, no matter what, a correct model for that is, 0% market. this is really, extremely difficult for most people who look at this issue, because it renders their opinions about what should you pay for this drug basically moot. they'll all have different answers. so the numbers of our independent variable, "price people are willing to pay" will be uncorrelated with the price people actually pay. and this is one of those instances where the absence of correlation means no causation. instead of looking cogently at this situation and saying, "well, okay, maybe i should temper my outrage about drug pricing in this actually very important scenario" they just get more outraged.
so what factors are left: political and everything else? well, the drug is effective, it's a cure, this describes a lot of drugs. that's what we are talking about, effective drugs. the FDA process has ALSO attacked the importance of market pricing from this angle too, the clinical trials process here and how it has been standardized around the world basically works. so the residual, if it's about the efficacy of the drug, actually does NOT explain the price very much at all. this is counterintuitive!
this is why a CURE for a disease is not 10x more expensive than something that already exists and manages a disease. so...
what's left? my guess would be, the price would be explained by, okay, a lot of it will be political. like 90% political. this is what i mean by "low risk of commercialization." nobody is going to win an election being like, your kid should die.
are you getting it now? you are getting hung up on prices. you don't know the first thing about prices. you think the journey to understanding prices has to do with "$0.25 acetaminophen pill that somehow magically costs $10 in the hospital" and hospital charge lists or whatever, which is 200% wrong, that's a huge red herring.
prices in categories that are low commercialization risk are almost always explained by a political process. which is to say, all the innovations today in commercialization are political. that's bad. but that should also illuminate why, if I were running the FDA, that's where my focus would be - besides, at the rest of the HHS, 10x the basic science R&D budget.
Long wall of text incoming, but please read if you want to know why drug pricing works like it does:
It’s because of the way insurance works in the US. Insurance companies have formularies, which are essentially menus of what products they cover. They also will label certain medications as “preferred” and actively steer consumers to them. Pharma companies fight to get preferred coverage from insurers.
Because of this, pharmaceutical companies go through complex negotiations with insurance companies. In theory, this is to get pharma companies to compete on price and offer discounts (called “rebates”). An industry of middlemen called pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) has arisen who negotiate with pharma companies on behalf of the insurers and create the formularies. The problem is, these guys take a percentage cut of the discount they secure for the insurers. This creates a perverse incentive to give preferred status to more expensive drugs. Take this hypothetical example of two competing drugs:
- Drug A costs $150, but gets negotiated down to $100
- Drug B costs $200, but gets negotiated down to $100
- The PBM gets a fee of 10% of the secured discount, meaning they make twice as much for creating a formulary with B rather than A
To no one’s surprise, drug B gets given preferred status over A.
Pharma companies figured this out a long time ago, and began to jack up their prices each year, only to immediately negotiate them back down to where they were previously, in the form of rebates, because this increased the likelihood of getting out ahead on the formulary by the PBM. The best example of this might be insulin, which has skyrocketed in list price, but profit for the insulin companies has actually remained much more stable. This is because each year the sticker price is raised, and then immediately slashed in the “negotiations” with the insurers.
After a while, the pure sticker shock began causing a lot of justified outrage among patients and the public. Pharma companies saw they were taking the blame for skyrocketing prices even though at the end of the day they were negotiating these prices down and weren’t actually making that money due to rebates. So they began to offer alternatives for customers not on insurance, in the form of “coupons”, “savings cards”, etc. These often get you prices close to what the actual cost of the medicine is before the “jack up the price then rebate it down” dog and pony show. But insurers/PBMs reacted poorly to these, and began punishing pharma companies through the formularies. This is why these have become shadowy “backdoor” programs.
It’s also important to note that the PBM’s aren’t even independent middlemen. 80% of the PBM industry is dominated by 3 companies, all of whom are owned by insurers: Express Scripts (Cigna), CVS Caremark (CVS/Aetna), and OptumRx (UnitedHealthcare)
So why even go through all this?
- Pharma companies don’t really have a choice, they have to to get on the formulary
- PBMs make their money entirely through this scheme
- Costs for insurers aren’t ultimately changing much from year to year. However, higher sticker prices means the public is ever more dependent on insurance for medical bills. It also provide justification for increasing premiums more than their costs might otherwise. And pharma ultimately takes the brunt of the blame.
Lastly, if you are wondering why this doesn’t exist in other countries, it’s an unsurprising reason: government subsidized health insurance. Unlike insurers and PBMs, there are no perverse incentives or profit motive, so cheaper prices are an actual benefit. Medicare/medicaid doesn’t have to go through these shenanigans, but they aren’t available widely in the US. You don’t even need healthcare for all. You just need a public healthcare option for everyone. That introduces an actor whose motives actually align with consumers, invalidates this entire charade, and forces insurers and PBMs to actually compete on merit and price.
TLDR: The lack of public healthcare options in the US has created an insurance cartel that has both consumers and pharmaceutical companies by the balls.
> the reason it has been limited to those cases is drug development, today, is constrained by commercialization.
That's a good observation, but I think it's an incomplete picture. Another important constraint is often regulatory inertia and historical baggage.
The UK pioneered small classical and adaptive trials using Bayesian methods, and there were some promising results. A lot of modern Bayesian methodology was, in fact, developed at the MRC BSU Cambridge with this goal in mind. For example, the probabilistic programming language BUGS (1989).
Given that most drugs fail, the industry is highly incentivized to use Bayesian methods to fail faster. These models allow for more rapid dose-finding and the ability to distinguish promising leads using interim data, which is vital given the massive cost of any trial, especially late-stage failures.
But for Bayesian methods to make a dent, they'd need to be applied to a large number of trials, and change doesn't happen overnight. Lots of big pharma players, e.g. GSK, are becoming interested in moving to Bayesian methods in order to leverage prior information and work better within small-data regimes.
you, today, can use Claude in Amazon Bedrock, and the way that works is, if you want it to be this way: the piece of code and model weights and whatever other artifacts are involved, they are run on Bedrock. Bedrock is not a facade against Claude's token-based-billing RESTful API, where Anthropic runs its own stuff. In the strictest sense, Bedrock can be used as a facade over lower level Amazon services that obey non-engineering, real world concerns like geographic boundaries / physical boundaries, like which physical data center hardware is connected by what where / jurisdictional boundaries, whatever. It's multi-tenancy in the sense that Amazon has multiple customers, but it's not multi-tenancy in the sense that, because you want to pay for these requirements, Amazon has sorted out how to run the Claude model weights, as though it were an open-weights model you downloaded off Hugging Face, without giving you the weights, but letting you satisfy all these other IP and jurisdictional and non-technical requirements that you are willing to pay for, in a way that Anthropic has also agreed.
This is what the dispute with the Pentagon is about, and what people mean when they say Claude is used in government (it is used in Elsa for the FDA for example too). Anthropic doesn't have telemetry, like the prompts, in this agreement, so they have the contract that says what you can and cannot use the model for, but they cannot prove how you use the model, which of course they can if you used their RESTful API service. They can't "just" paraphrase your user data and train on it, like they do on the RESTful API service. There are reasons people want this arrangement ($$$).
The vendor (Palantir) can use, whatever model it wants right? It chose Claude via "Bedrock." I don't know if they use Claude via Bedrock. Ask them. But that's what they are essentially saying, that's what this is about. Palantir could use Qwen3 and run it on datacenter hardware. Do you understand? It matters, but it also doesn't matter.
It's a bunch of red herrings in my opinion, and this sort of stuff being a red herring is what the article is mostly about.
As I understood it, Anthropic was prime on their own contract which the DoD infamously unsuccessfully tried to renegotiate mid-term. Are you saying that Palantir had some subcontracted use of Claude independent of Anthropic's existing contract?
Does it matter if the main difference is the OS? Chromebooks are way worse spec wise, and they’re still “phones with big screens” and a different OS. If someone made a windows laptop that was actually good without compromises in an ARM SoC, I’m sure it’d sell well too. The Qualcomm ones seem to have too many compromises today with the OS/driver layer unfortunately.
That last part is the stumbling block for sure - the Microsoft Surface Laptops are nice machines but damn if the driver thing doesn't continually piss me off.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/devices/surface-lapt... but at $900, and the Neo literally just being a Mac and doing everything any other Mac does (except some hardware related limitations like driving a 6k monitor, but doing 4k is "enough for most") means you save $300 and don't run into annoyances like "can't install my printer driver".
most issues at every scale of community and time are political, how do you imagine AI will make that better, not worse?
there's no math answer to whether a piece of land in your neighborhood should be apartments, a parking lot or a homeless shelter; whether home prices should go up or down; how much to pay for a new life saving treatment for a child; how much your country should compel fossil fuel emissions even when another country does not... okay, AI isn't going to change anything here, and i've just touched on a bunch of things that can and will affect you personally.
math isn't the right answer to everything, not even most questions. every time someone categorizes "problems" as "hard" and "easy" and talks about "problem solving," they are being co-opted into political apathy. it's cringe for a reason.
there are hardly any mathematicians who get elected, and it's not because voters are stupid! but math is a great way to make money in America, which is why we are talking about it and not because it solves problems.
if you are seeking a simple reason why so many of the "believers" seem to lack integrity, it is because the idea that math is the best solution to everything is an intellectually bankrupt, kind of stupid idea.
if you believe that math is the most dangerous thing because it is the best way to solve problems, you are liable to say something really stupid like this:
> Imagine, say, [a country of] 50 million people, all of whom are much more capable than any Nobel Prize winner, statesman, or technologist... this is a dangerous situation... Humanity needs to wake up
Dario Amodei has never won an election. What does he know about countries? (nothing). do you want him running anything? (no). or waking up humanity? In contrast, Barack Obama, who has won elections, thinks education is the best path to less violence and more prosperity.
What are you a believer in? ChatGPT has disrupted exactly ONE business: Chegg, because its main use case is cheating on homework. AI, today, only threatens one thing: education. Doesn't bode well for us.
I agree with what you're saying, and I certainly don't think the one problem facing my country or the world is just that we didn't solve the right math problem yet. I am saddened by the direction the world keeps moving.
When I wrote that I hope we use it for good things, I was just putting a hopeful thought out there, not necessarily trying to make realistic predictions. It's more than likely people will do bad things with AI. But it's actually not set in stone yet, it's not guaranteed that it has to go one way. I'm hopeful it works out.
Hacker News discusses "deadlines" as one of many management strategies. How much depth is there really? Other industries use bonuses as a simple management strategy. The kinds of people writing blog posts like this do terribly boring work, which is the real problem.
From the article:
> "...it’s like the first thing that they see or that first comment that they see is their opinion even when they haven’t heard the whole album.”
What is this trying to say? For every 1 person who thinks about truth in some independent way, I don't care if it's spiritual or because they do scientific tests for what the best music is or all of this other stuff; there are 19 people who are, "LIKES = TRUTH".
Are you getting it? That has nothing to do with payola or authenticity or scarcity or whatever. You have no idea anyway, you've never had to make a creative product. Likes = truth. Authenticity is the seeming unlikelihood that social media content authors are bought and sold. It's the OPPOSITE of what you think. It is the OPPOSITE of payola. And look, they're right. The vast majority of opinions on TikTok are not paid for. This is the OPPOSITE of radio.
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