I don’t understand why people believe brokers are supposed to pay above market rates to “do the right thing.”
That’s how you get put out of business. Paying above market rates would be incompetence.
If I were a broker, I would have found the cheapest carriers possible. I don’t owe anyone anything, especially not an above market rate.
It’s the same argument that shippers try to use now that carriers shouldn’t maximize prices and “exploiting the market” is unethical.
It’s a free market. It’s the way it works.
Don’t like the way it works, find a different industry.
Blame the regulators and government officials that enabled this to begin with.
@KJKeavo@maybedanielleee It’ll know which one historically has shown up… but the person who built the relationship with the carrier that makes them willing to show up for you on a Friday afternoon is the key imo
The rate displayed internally that the dispatchers read from often isn’t the same field that updates a posted rate. Or if a load is posted manually, you still have to update the internal rate to match as well - often people will update the posted rate and forget to update the other so there’s miscommunication when a carrier calls in and someone who doesn’t own the load answers and reads the outdated internal rate.
In light of the SCOTUS ruling yesterday, I had a crazy idea.
The federal government should stand up a new agency with the sole mission of setting safety standards for motor carriers, vetting them to ensure they're in compliance, and enforcing the safety regs on America's highways.
This agency would need to be staffed with thousands of professionals versed in policy, actuarial studies of things like crash rates and causality, and a strong arm of law enforcement.
Deep investment would be required into the technology necessary to provide carrier fitness data to shippers and brokers so that they can make appropriate decisions with hiring carriers.
I'm not great at naming, but I think we could probably call this thing the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration.
Just an idea.
I don’t know how good this new 12 million context system is, or if it’s hype or whatever, but I think it definitely shows a point I’ve been making since 2023.
We really suck at everything.
- The chips are primitive
- The research and training and inference systems are primitive
- Our RL approaches are primitive
- We’ve barely started building harnesses
Everything we’re doing is massively inefficient right now.
And there are thousands of vectors for improvement.
And many of them are multiplicative.
Most people think we’re at like 88% of AI’s capabilities, and we’re pushing to hit 92% or eventually 97% or something.
Nah. This is us at .0003%
Everything we have is Punch Card AI.
And as the AI gets better it will reveal that it’s similar for our understanding of medicine, physics, chemistry, etc.
This barely even day 0. This is pre-history.
Speaking from personal experience, I didn’t understand the depth of the problem until @maybedanielleee started exposing it on here.
Brokers leverage market conditions. That’s literally our job. When trucks are tight, we push pricing up to customers so we can secure more money for our carriers. When trucks are plentiful, we push pricing down to carriers so we can win freight and keep those trucks moving.
Thats very different from knowingly loading carriers that should not be on the road.
Idk about anyone else, but I never got a call from Uncle Sam saying “Yo Sean, we’re gunna stop enforcing standards so you can screw the law abiding American truck drivers over.”
Of course you notice how many foreign drivers there came to be over the years, but the assumption has always been that the govt and the carrier companies were vetting at the driver level sufficiently. Until it wasn’t.
The real issue is that some companies, brokers and shippers included, will load anyone if the rate is cheap enough. Same goes for carriers regarding cheap labor. Until there are real consequences for knowingly using unsafe, noncompliant carriers/ drivers it will keep happening.
Brokers and carriers need each other. The hatred comes from both sides dealing with the worst actors on the other side. Work with people who do the job the right way, and you’ll probably hate them a lot less.
Under federal law, a freight broker's job is to arrange transportation. It is not to select, qualify, or supervise drivers. They hire motor carriers, not drivers.
When brokers step outside their defined role and begin screening drivers as if they were a hiring authority, they become something the law never intended them to be.
If brokers choose to exercise that level of control over driver selection, the law should treat them accordingly, as a hiring authority responsible for both the carrier and the driver they put on the highway.
@thekitze I think the use case is just narrower than people thought. If you can plug it into multiple systems you control, it’s insane. If you can’t, it’s just a wrapper on an LLM you already use. Still the best tech I’ve used by far.
@steipete@onlinedopamine can confirm it's noticeably better - not to where it was when on sonnet, but strict mode is definitely a step in the right direction.
Would say I needed to confirm tasks 70% less over the course of the day today.
Passed build/lint on at least one, but never actually promoted the dev build onto the live install - still on 2026.4.2 afterward. So the preflight/candidate selection seems to work, but the final apply/handoff step appears to fail. No production breakage, just couldn’t land the dev build for some reason.
The actual update dropping tonight? Don’t want to keep messing with dev build knowing my luck my clanker will catch fire.