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odd_primes


				

				

				
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joined 2025 June 19 02:29:15 UTC

				

User ID: 3777

odd_primes


				
				
				

				
0 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2025 June 19 02:29:15 UTC

					

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User ID: 3777

Anthropic's move here (combined with them handicapping Opus 4.6 a few weeks ago) seems to clearly be an attempt to achieve profitability. The free/subsidized rate train for end users has pulled into the station, and now you have to pay more for the same (or worse) capabilities you were enjoying before.

I guess it depends whether you think this is a forced move due to running out of money or if they have run their internal numbers and think people are willing to pay the increased prices. VC money is a runway, it's not intended to be a permanent subsidy. If they reduce the amount of money they are burning on subsidized inference, that's money they can put into R&D, more GPUs, etc.

It's hard to speculate without knowing more about their internal metrics, but based on the complaints I have heard about Claude being slow, laggy, etc, it sounds like they are quite oversubscribed. If the demand exceeds the supply, increasing prices is the logical move.

There are some Chinese contenders within striking distance as well. GLM-5.1 is open weight and seems to perform somewhere between Opus 4.5 and 4.6. It's pretty incredible that there is open weight competition that's less than six months behind frontier state of the art.

It's a big reason to maintain a two income household as well, even if childcare ends up costing most of the second paycheck. Marital assets are generally going to be 50/50, but it's a lot harder for a woman to argue for alimony if she has been working full-time for most of the marriage.

There are really two different types of paywalls. The lazy version just hides the content using JavaScript but the site still serves it, so it can be displayed with a browser extension. Or the site gives you "n free articles" so an extension can just reset the counter. This has become less common over time.

Services like Substack use a more advanced version, that only serve the paywalled content to authenticated users. To get around that, you generally need:

  1. Someone with a paid account willing to scrape the content (or allow their creds to be used to scrape it).

  2. A site willing to host the content that won't fold after the first DMCA request.

I'm not aware of a Substack service for this, but archive.today does it for major news publications that are paywalled, and there's a fairly well known one for Patreon called kemono dot cr where people can upload paywalled content, or provide their Patreon auth token to enable it to be scraped automatically.