The article <a href="https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/05/anthropic-calls-new-claude-4-worlds-best-ai-coding-model/" author="Benj Edwards" source="Ars Technica">New Claude 4 AI model refactored code for 7 hours straight</a> talks about how awesome Claude is but then when you look at all of the charts, you see that it's data published by Anthropic about its own software, publishing impressive percentages indicating some performance in benchmarks that they made up. So, they're telling you that their software is amazing according to measures that you only learned about from them. This is basically a press release. <img attachment="pyramid_scheme.jpg" align="right" caption="Pyramid Scheme">Anthropic wouldn't lie to get more investor money, would they? They wouldn't just make shit up in order to get more people to invest in their deeply struggling if not outright failing and functionally bankrupt company, would they? <img attachment="elizabeth_holmes_2014.jpg" align="left" caption="Elizabeth Holmes">Doesn't anyone else remember Elizabeth Holmes? Theranos? Black turtlenecks? Unsettling stare? Her company was worth $9B at one point. She had a plastic box. She said it did all the blood tests. It couldn't do anything. She got people to donate billions to her cause. No-one wanted to miss out on this amazing speculative venture. Did they believe her? Maybe some did. Maybe most did. But probably more than enough were just playing the "greater fool" gamble, speculating that they could buy in early and get out before the bubble collapsed. So don't tell me that there is no way that dozens of billions of dollars could be spilled on something that doesn't do anything close to what it says on the tin. These kinds of scams are the foundational girders of our modern economy. They are not there to do the thing that they say on the tin---the description is marketing to draw in suckers, while the real investors get in early and jump out before the soufflé pops, leaving a lot of naifs holding the bag. That doesn't mean that the purported product is 100% useless---as in Theranos's case---but that it's not nearly the thing you thought you'd bought. It's much less. You are being swindled out of your hard-earned value. Anthropic's boldness is impressive, though. They're even flat-out telling you that you have to pay a lot of money to buy a service that's shaky to use, at best. <bq>"I empathize with a lot of people out there trying to use our APIs and language models generally because they have to almost shift their perspective on what it means for reliability, what it means for powering a core of your application in a non-deterministic way," Albert added. "These are general oddities that have kind of just been flipped, and it definitely makes things more difficult, but I think it opens up a lot of possibilities as well."</bq> <img attachment="doc_ock_harnessing_the_power_of_the_atom.webp" align="right" caption="Doc Ock harnessing the power of the atom">They <iq>empathize</iq> with your inability to draw consistent value from their service. That's just the nature of it. It's absolutely gorgeous <i>Hochstaplerei</i><fn>. Go big or go home. The more you charge, the more people will want it. You can even admit instabilities because they make it sound like Anthropic engineers are like f&@king Doc Ock trying to harness the power of the atom with his robot arms. Who could blame Anthropic if the product is a bit rough around the edges when you're harnessing the <i>power of the stars</i> for your customers? They are on the <i>edge of greatness</i> here. Can you afford to miss out? <hr> <ft><i>Hochstapler</i> means "conman" or "fraud" in German. <i>Hochstaplerei</i> means "the acts of conmen"</ft>