I agree. The reason Cursor’s “first mover” advantage doesn’t matter is because there’s fundamentally no business there. I’ve used 3 IDE or text editors my whole life, I’ve never paid for one. If I wanted, I could use AI to write myself a new text editor. Like you said, there’s no moat for any of this shit, and I’m guessing that by 2027 the music will stop.
Ironically, AI is really good at the adding tests later thing. It can really help round out test coverage for a piece of code and create some reusable stuff that can inspire you to test even more.
I’m not a super heavy AI user but I’ve vibe coded a few things for the frontend with it. It has helped me understand how you lay out react apps a little better and how the legos that React gives you work. Probably far less than if I had done it from scratch and read a book but sometimes a working prototype is so much more valuable to a product initiative than learning a programming language is that you would be absolutely burning time and value to not vibe code the prototype
Yes, game theory is not a predictive model but an explanatory/general one. Additionally not everything is a game, as in statistics, not everything has a probability curve. They can be applied speculatively to great effect, but they are ultimately abstract models.
On the contrary, new stuff is cheap and abundant, it’s just optimized for price and quality at the expense of UX. 20 years ago setting up a new TV required plugging in wires and shit. Now it just means installing the walled garden OS, logging in, and handing over your data for collection. Based on the number of people who are OK with this, it’s hard to imagine it changing without people choosing something else.
Oh I don’t necessarily mean that co-ops are competitive at all with traditional ownership structures at all. Part of that is likely due to taxes and general financial forces (co-ops tend to need to be low-debt, privately held, etc.) and part of that is related to them being rare and largely concentrated in hyper liberal cities like Portland or SF or Seattle.
I just mean that they technically operate in markets but are not synonymous with the traditional notions of Marxian capitalism.
I agree, and I agree with Deng’s hypothesis, at least insofar in that China’s maintenance of social benefits appears to be successful, and, importantly, it operates strictly without actual political freedom.
I think what they’re getting at with this is that markets can exist without some of nastier parts of capitalism (e.g. a co-op operates in a market economy) but so much of the prevailing wisdom (both positive and negative) about capitalism equates markets with capital’s power-distribution function.
Why do you need proof anyway? Do you need proof that sentences are poorly constructed, misleading, or bloated? Why not just say “make it sound less like GPT” and let them deal with it?
I think this is pretty in-the-weeds compared to the original thread:
> Economics is like a constrained optimization problem: how to allocate scarce resources given unlimited desires.
Understanding the general tendencies of economic systems over time (e.g. “the rate of profit tends to fall”) is much more abstract than attempting to win at economics using time-based analysis.
Depending on how you feel about various theories of development, an argument that all of these categories reduce to time. At the very least, the relationship between labor, capital, and time seems pretty fundamental: labor cannot be instantaneous, capital grows over time, etc.
I’m skeptical of any profit motive that would actually justify building self-mastery into AI, but then again, this is possibly just a reiteration of California ideology problems. As it turns out, technology can be massively transformative, connective, and truly enable creative expression and mind-expansion, but the amount of that going on versus the internet just being an insane global bazaar of greed and entertainment far outweighs this.
I agree, I think that AI is not some “new” thing - we’ve had machines for a long time, and we just so happened to invent really good ones. Similar to how the machine of the Industrial Revolution laid waste to the social order of the landed aristocracy and what you might call “late stage feudalism”, so too does AI destabilize and outmode the core mythos of our time. We’re rapidly shedding an illusion of a world of free and equal, yet fundamentally different men who must learn to work together by technocratically solving issues that Capital (the machine) fails to solve. As Capital approaches its logical zenith (becoming machine incarnate), it finds fewer and fewer uses for these Last Men in the making. AI is the final stage of enlightenment thought, enabling its promises: an abolishment of differénce, a homogeneous civilization, an order which maintains equality by stripping individual freedoms.
Obviously we’re not ever going to see “infinite value”. I think it’s instructive to think of this on the margin or in terms of limits: would a putative AGI have an inflection point at which more of it produces less value, and even if it’s productive capacity were high, it could not be “infinitely high” (which would make it an economic absurdity).
Additionally, for the AGI producer (or platform host), there would have to be some way of price function that would cover the costs of operating or providing the AGI service.
Thus, a more realistic look at this is “purchasers of AGI would have no reason to purchase “more” of it beyond a certain threshold, after which it is no longer useful to their ends, however purchasing shares of the AGI producer would expose them to value from new customers who could use it better”
He has. He’s notably been burned a few times, one of the worst of which was 2021
TSLA. Iirc he was early but not wrong, with the 2022 collapse of all things ARKK related crashing and burning.
It’s actually extremely motivating to consider what LLM or similar AI agent could do for us if we were to free our minds from 2 decades of SaaS brainrot.
What if we ran AI locally and used it to actually do labor-intensive things with computers that make money rather than assuming everything were web-connected, paywalled, rate-limited, authenticated, tracked, and resold?
I think it’s pretty obvious but most people would prefer a regular schedule not a random and potentially psychologically jarring transportation event to start the day.
I think you’re right - some people will gamble no matter what, but removing all barriers to entry and advertising it on ESPN will certainly grow that market much more than people actively seeking out betting in shady places online.
It’s similar to weed legalization 10 years ago. Yes, it’s now much less likely that your weed will be spiked with meth or you will be robbed by your dealer, but also like 1000% more of the population smokes weed now and it has some bad social side effects that people don’t like to think about.
I think in both cases, as with prohibition, making something commonplace illegal again tends to make people do crazy things if they’re addicted, and I’d bet gambling is no different
That’s assuming Altman is sincerely going to keep trying to develop “AGI” and not try to turn OpenAI into a profitable business. You don’t need AI researchers if you get good enough video generation and pornbots to become immortally wealthy and say fuck the rest. If this is the case, OpenAI could be a completely done product, all that’s left to do is stop spending so much money on SG&A and get those revenue streams cranking.
Was thinking about this today. I had to do a simple wedding planning task - setting up my wedding website with FAQ, cobbling the guest list (together from texts, photos of my father’s address book, and excel spreadsheets), directions and advice for lodging, conjuring up a scheme to get people to use the on-site cabins, and a few other mundane tasks. No phone calls, no “deep research” just wrote browser-jockeying. Not even any code, the off-the-rack system just makes that for you (however I know for a fact an LLM would love to try to code this for me).
I know without a single doubt that I could not simply as an “AI” “agent” to do this today and expect any sort of a functional result, especially when some of these were (very simple) judgement calls or workarounds for absolutely filthy data and a janky wedding planning website UI.
A lot of BESS enclosures (sub grid scale, and grid scale) are much more primitive than a warehouse. If you don’t need to pay for HVAC, it’s free money for the operator.