spenczar5

This is still the case today, if you let it be. I am friends with many neighbors with differing views from my own and literally do have them over for dinner, invite them to my toddlers' birthday parties, etc.

I don't recognize the things the author describes here - awareness of hot takes, opinions about coffee shop owners... they strike me as features of the online world, but not the offline one I inhabit.

> This is still $150M of pure gravy every single year.

The issue is rate of return. They are evidently spending $4.85bn on Xbox per year. The US federal interest rate is 3.5% so if you just put that money in US bonds you would get about $175M per year of much purer simpler gravy.

Sometimes you get there by accident. You make a thing, it grows or is used in unexpected ways, now suddenly performance matters.

Sometimes Python is just the language used in the domain. Lots of sciences live on Python because it is easy to teach to grad students and the package ecosystem is strong.

It's in the first sentence of your quote:

"our continued collaboration with Anthropic"

Read this as: "we get discounts, rate limit increases, a direct line to responsible product managers; in exchange we participate in friendly marketing." It's extremely common in this line of business - typical of database vendors, software tool companies, etc.

Yep! The industry term is "co-marketing" and its hard to avoid seeing once you spot it.

No, but they go on strike when negotiating their collective contracts, and put terms in the contract that govern how failures like this are investigated and punished.

> A correction was made on May 6, 2026: An earlier version of this article misstated the country where Guy Goma grew up. He is from the Republic of Congo, not the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Right guy, wrong Congo! You can't even make this stuff up.

Does it matter that pen and paper dominate? How much of the business's expenses are overhead?

That's a pretty interesting idea! I guess 160+ is sort of doing some of that for us - it compiles to SQL WHERE clauses, right - but generally, we found good results giving it a SQL dialect directly.

I think some of the reason is that there's so much coverage of writing SQL in its training set.

Yes! This works really well from Sonnet 4.5 onwards, in our experience. Sonnet 4.0 was a little rocky - we had to give it tons of documentation - but by now it works without much effort.

One thing that works very well is just giving it one or two example valid programs/statements in the custom language. It usually picks up what you're getting at very quickly.

When it slips up, you get good signal you can capture for improving the language. If you're doing things in a standard agent-y loop, a good error message also helps it course-correct.