dag100

And management asked nobody, and then did it anyway.

Your preferences are unusual. Most people either don't care or prefer flashiness over consistency.

It's something I've come to realise about the why the world is the way it is. Yes, to a certain extent it is because of locally maximal power structures and hierarchies propagating - but it is also because, taken as a whole, people are really just like that. A single politician may be corrupt, but that does not mean that most people, if taking their place, would not be as or more corrupt. Management sucks, yes - but that doesn't mean that most engineers who become managers wouldn't act the same way. You and I may prefer consistency over flashiness, but the majority of the world couldn't care less. So flashiness and "experiences" win.

> But if nobody has money to buy things then there is no point in producing anything.

The top 1% can still buy things. They can buy a lot of things, in fact. In 2024 in the US, the top 20% by income account consumed roughly the same amount as the bottom 60% (https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cesan.nr0.htm). This gap has widened over time (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1W5px) and will probably continue to widen even further.

Your argument is effectively saying "how can lowering the quality of my product affect customers when they freely use it?".

If you use Facebook regularly, you are locked into it because unless you manage to convince your entire friend network to move to some other social media with you, you will have to "leave them behind".

I think the more pressing issue is that there isn't really much space left for humans in the economy if thinking can also be automated.

Why stop there? Why not let AI take over all functions, Whispering Earring (https://gwern.net/doc/fiction/science-fiction/2012-10-03-yva... for anyone who hasn't read it) style?

I don't think the level of investment in an idea is equivalent to how impressive it may be. Most of the investment in AI is based on the idea that it will make professions and human labour obsolete, which means whoever has the reins at the moment it "solves" the "problem" of human labour will effectively reign over everyone else. The level of investment is then somewhat orthogonal to how technically impressive it is.

Not to mention that the less easily-explainable a technical achievement is, the less investment it will attract simply because fewer people will grasp the ramifications. You can describe AI in two words ("machine human") while it would take a few more to describe compilers in an instantly understandable way.

But operating systems are not distros.

Less laconically, distros generally refer to the userland parts of the operating systems rather than the actual kernel. FreeBSD does not use the Linux kernel so calling it a distro, which typically refer specifically to Linux distros, wouldn't be accurate.

Calling FreeBSD "just a distro" is verging on insulting. It's an operating system.

Chess exists solely for the sake of the humans playing it. Even if machines solved chess, people would rather play chess against a person than a machine because it is a social activity in a way. It's like playing tennis versus a person compared to tennis against a wall.

Photographs, videos, and digital media in general, in contrast, are used for much, much more than just socializing.

Seeing as how austerity governments campaigned on reducing social benefits and achieved considerable success over the past few decades, I don't see how your solution consisting of granting people even more social benefits will ever happen. Unless there law and order is about to break down, there is no reason for the rich to leave all of that money "on the table".

This is basically a violation of the robustness principle ("be liberal in what you accept, be conservative in what you produce"), but I doubt there will be much improvement on this front seeing as tokens are fed back into the model. A succinct phrase is a compressed form of a longer sentence that expresses the same idea, so from the perspective of having to feed the model's output back into it, more tokens presumably work better by providing a greater of surface area for processing, so to speak. This is just my intuition, however.

They probably don't care enough to notice the tells. I think that it's generally those ambivalent, skeptical or opposed to AI who notice, while those who wholeheartedly support AI see no reason to differentiate between it and humans and so do not even try to.

I think there was a major jump in AI capabilities from Anthropic and OpenAI between the end of 2025 and the start of 2026 that made them far more reliable at programming correctly. I wonder what changed in the secret sauce.

1. Whether it is debt or not makes no difference so long as someone else will take it. You imply that Apple having cash means customers owe Apple something. I say that Apple having cash just means Apple could have something else in the place of cash in the future if someone chooses to take Apple's cash for it.

2. I disagree. An autocratic government is fully capable of issuing fiat currency, and a the government being obliged to provide resources in return for its currency is a concept orthogonal to democracy. It doesn't matter whose "debt" cash stems from. All that matters is that it can be traded easily.

Also, I updated my comment to point out more clearly where I disagree with your conclusions. (Apologies for such a late response. I hit HN's rate limit.)

What I'm trying to say is that I don't see any benefit in describing cash as "debt" and instead find it misleading as it implies an obligation to be fulfilled that doesn't actually exist for anyone except the government, and certainly not its customers.

In fact, to address an earlier comment:

> Not because they think you, average Joe who cannot think of anything to offer the world beyond simple labor, will actually ever come up with some magical thing they want to buy. But because they know that the idea of holding debt gives them social standing; prestige. They aren't taking your promise expecting something real in return — hence why the debt simply accumulates — they are taking your promise because having that promise on paper offers them value.

> And in some robot/AI future where humans no longer can even offer labor as something of marginal value, holding debt will still offer social standing and prestige all the same. Therefore there is no reason why these companies wouldn't continue to sell products to humans for fictional future promises, just like they already are.

The cash Average Joe proffers for a product - what you describe as "debt" - wouldn't be in Joe's possession without first being exchanged for Average Joe's simple labour. Simply put - Average Joe cannot be indebted to Apple without first trading his labour for someone else's indebtedness, which he then gives to Apple in return for his iPhone. If his labour has no value, he has no unit by which to even denominate any potential indebtedness he may offer.

I would argue that most people already understand money in the way you describe it: as a medium of exchange. Your description of money just frames this function through the idea of an obligation of some sort which doesn't exist actually for anyone except the government.

You haven't responded to my second statement:

> And, as soon as they spend the cash, somehow their sales have retroactively gone from being donations to fair transactions. Allowing the future to affect the past is clearly absurd.

According to you, any transaction in which one party A proffers a non-currency resource, and the other, B, offers currency, is in fact the signing of a contract in which B promises to provide the other party something in the future. However, A could then turn around and promise party C for its resources using B's promise - and effectively transfer this promise to C, which then holds the right to demand resources from B.

You are effectively just describing the fiat system of currency where B is the government.

Calling cash, which is fungible and transferrable, "debt", which generally denotes an obligation of some sort, obfuscates what your logic.

Once you pay Apple - ergo, transfer it IOUs that represent your promise to provide resources in the future - it has no way of holding you to your promise other than by giving you back your IOU or giving it to someone else. This does not square with the definition of "debt".

Framing it in terms of debt simply confuses people. Of course a billionaire would not be able to "call all the debt [they have] accumulated". You're just saying that they maintain so much value that they can't ever trade it all for tangible goods and services. However, no-one except the government has to honour their request to trade their so-called "debt" that they have accumulated from others for actual resources.

I feel like this makes very little sense, because a purchase is a trade - one resource (currency) for another (the product/service). If the product has no value, there is no reason to engage in the trade. This can only exist for the purpose of wealth transfer from the operator of the shopping robot to the seller of the useless products, or as a facade of some sort.

By your measure, any company, in fact any entity, that isn't in the red is giving away something for "free". If Apple had made their products cheaper so that they just broke even, according to you, they would not have given away anything for free (as there would be no debt to receive or credit to provide).

And, as soon as they spend the cash, somehow their sales have retroactively gone from being donations to fair transactions. Allowing the future to affect the past is clearly absurd.

Apple is not giving away something for free; rather, they are losing possible future gains from immediately putting the cash to work.

"increased" implies that people bought brand-new Mac Minis to run ClawdBot on, got bored of it, and then sold them back to be refurbished and resold.