At my last job, I got a formal specification for one project. But the implementation happened in parallel for time reasons, so by the time the spec was frozen, 90% of the code was written.

What I think I hear you saying is, do formal verification as much as you can. But also remember that that's never 100%, and therefore you need to leave some kind of escape hatch or alternate process or something.

“financed through a one-time 50 percent tax on the stock of the largest AI companies”

Here's what bugs me: what guarantees that it stays a one-time tax? What guarantees that it is only on "the largest AI companies"? What keeps it from becoming "we'll take half of anything anybody has that we don't like"?

And what keeps me from becoming part of "anybody they don't like"?

And yet you said that. With no repercussions. Maybe you need to make up.

How many credits would it buy? How long would it take to use them up? What's the payback period?

From what I understand, for a developer, $5000/month is maybe the high end, but $5000/year is fairly standard. (Is that accurate?) So if it pays back in 15 months, that's pretty decent. If it pays back in two months, that's spectacular.

Using some rough napkin (well, spreadsheet) math, if you ran Qwen 27B for every minute every day at the current price of $0.195/$1.56 with a 2:1 input to output ratio (eg. agentic coding) at the advertised 22 tps it would take you just about 11 years to get to ~$5000 spent.

Disclaimer: There's a 35% sale from Alibaba right now. And I'm not accounting for input tokens going faster than output tokens.

Are you comparing the cost of hosted Opus to running Qwen 3.6 locally? That doesn't really seem fair.

If there's going to be a non-disparagement agreement as part of the severance, shouldn't it be a two-way street? "I get to ruin your reputation, but you can't say anything bad about me" seems manifestly unfair.

And, if there aren't enough lawyers to do all that work, you could use AI to file the suits.

I'll let you decide whether that's a dream or a nightmare...

I don't see why its a problem to use LLMs to assist with legal work if someone else uses it in a way that exposes them to lawsuits. That's like saying you shouldn't using a ledger to do accounting just because some people cook the books.

I have some faith in the lack of wisdom of (most) criminals. Most of them aren't geniuses, aren't super sophisticated, aren't good at following technical rules with 100% discipline.

So it's likely to work again - not as often as a law-abiding citizen would like, but not never.

The Union Pacific Railroad (the eastern half of the transcontinental railroad) also caused the financial crisis of 1873 (due to construction costs and various corruption and bribery around financing them). It then went bankrupt in 1893.

So, yes, it transformed the country. That didn't necessarily benefit the stockholders and bondholders.

1. It finished the railroad in 1869. 1873 was four years later. 1893 was 24 years later - a generation.

2. Check out "Nothing Like It in the World" by Ambrose.

Right, but four years later was definitely caused by the problem of (and shenanigans around) financing the original construction. Even if you want to say that 1893 was too late to be relevant, 1873 wasn't. It was the problem of financing the original construction that damaged the entire US economy.

To quit watching.