> Deal can't lessen competition if AI minnow wasn't much of a competitor
Well sure, and if you allow acquisition they never will be.
970 karma · joined June 2, 2024
Well sure, and if you allow acquisition they never will be.
It seems like you're conflating sovereignty with economic dependence, which are two distinct concepts—being entirely economic independent seems highly geographically dependent. Few regions in the world are lucky enough to even have this option. For instance, you can be economically dependent on neighbors but still locally determine who runs the local courts. So it's not great evidence of how their society is run, particularly when other states—say, Afghanistan, where the current government has clearly exercised local sovereignty—have similarly been affected by the withdrawal of US troops and the seizing of assets.
Maybe I'm reading different critiques, but the angry people I've read have been upset with the labeling of condemnation of using AI to write as classest or ableist.
> They're just saying they aren't going to categorically condemn AI across the board. Seems like a perfectly reasonable position to me. Especially given that pretty much everything - human generated OR AI generated - builds on "that which came before".
Given how much AI-generation undercuts the core premise of the activity—writing out text—I don't really follow you. Besides if someone produces art of any merit the creator hardly needs the endorsement of NaNoWriMo to appear legitimate.
> To reproduce all widely-used OSS once (e.g., the idea of OSS still exists, but all current OSS is deleted and needs to be coded from scratch), using programmers at the average developer wage from India, it would require an investment of $1.22 billion. In contrast, if we use the average developer wage from the United States, then reproducing all widely-used OSS would require an investment of $6.22 billion. Using a pool of programmers from across the world, weighed based on the existing geographic contributions to OSS as discussed above, would lead to an investment somewhere in between the low and high-income country, $4.15 billion.
Note that they just assume that you can basically hire programmers to type that out and extrapolate from lines of code. So I'm guessing this is off by at least one order of magnitude.
Granted, I'm not sure if I have a better option, but I'd probably start with sampling OSS contributors to figure out how much time they actually devote to OSS.
Paper is here for the curious: https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication%20Files/24-038_51f8444f-...
Sure, but you're really straining the word "abstraction" here. By this definition all metaphysical concepts are just abstractions around material reality. Which is fine, albeit not that useful a definition of abstraction.
Not really—interaction with a lot of hardware is defined by software. Just looking at a cpu you have no clue how someone would use it or what they would use it for or even what kind of capabilities it has for human interaction.
Copilot is a deliberate circumvention of copyright. It might be legal but that doesn't change the clear intent here: charging people without having to do the work you're charging for.
This is literally a thing today. It may be illegal but the idea of prosecuting this is insane.
Someone should let our legislators know.
Ok, but this is basically impossible to litigate so what's the point of asserting it? Besides, copyright violation still requires distribution.
I very strongly disagree with this—the more wealth you have, the more you can afford to manipulate society (both public and private spheres) to create favorable conditions for retaining or increasing your wealth. This is just the concept of Buffet's "moat" broadened to apply to the rest of society rather than a market segment.
> Real-life rich people invest their capital in (hopefully) productive enterprises. If they do a bad job, their wealth gets reassigned to savvier investors.
"Productive" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. What actually might provide value to society and what might generate returns are wildly different things and are often diametrically opposed. Actual democratic control over the economy would yield a very different society than the one we live in, and it's very difficult to see how a capital-driven society doesn't create poverty and the long laundry list of associated evils (homelessness, illiteracy, substance abuse, widespread mental health issues, malnutrition, violence, etc etc).
Not to mention—more relevantly to our discussion here—technology's potential is woefully, woefully, woefully hamstrung by our insistence on using it to extract wealth from each other. Imagine what a smartphone could be capable of if it wasn't viewed as a profit center well outside the control of its users. Imagine what kind of internet we could have if people weren't obligated to sell ads to keep it running. Etc. This devotion to the "free market" (as if such a thing could actually exist outside of a textbook) has destroyed liberals' ability to imagine humanity's actual potential, and the demand for continual returns creeps into all our lives in the form of lower quality products, constant ads, drowning in plastic waste and roasting all summer. If the market is going to course-correct towards rational use of resources I have no clue what this would even look like.
> A common example of people trying to hoard wealth is homeowners who interfere with the free market by blocking new construction. This is going to work out great for them... until it doesn't.
The best way to make this argument will be to show when this fails (as it does, occasionally, do). Currently it's really only failing where global warming is literally washing real estate out to sea. Judging by who owns the real estate in this country—mostly, the richest generation to ever have existed and very possibly to ever exist—being a NIMBY is evidently a great way to grow your wealth. Crassus was known for making money by withholding his firemen from burning buildings until they handed the deed over. Joe Manchin's daughter makes money by exploiting an insulin monopoly at insane profit margins while people regularly have to choose between food, insulin, and rent. Etc. Markets are only able to correct these dynamics over the long term, much longer term than a human life. Hell, some of Europe's aristocracy are still clinging on to money and power that their family acquired a millennium ago for reasons completely lost to memory, and the "failures" famous in European history occur over centuries (e.g. see the Fugger family). The easiest way to make wealth is to already be wealthy.
> As another example of capital reallocation, if you're earning good money by working for an pre-revenue startup, you're enjoying the process of capital getting reassigned to you.
Of course! Trying to pass down what money I can is certainly why I took the job over, say, being a dishwasher. However, this is not an opportunity for most folks, and by any definition of making this an opportunity for everyone (not just a subset of society) is directly contradictory to the fundamentals of investment, which relies solely on using wealth inequality to drive productivity increases.
Look, all I'm saying is that investment is really useful for driving economic improvements... until it's not, at which point whatever service the invested-in thing provides should be nationalized and run at zero margin to avoid inevitable enshittification. I strongly, strongly recommend reading Schumpeter. For being the father of our industry I'm flabbergasted with how few people actually read him. It's easy to look at the 20th century and confuse the economic boom that came with industrialization and exploitation of virgin frontiers with the natural course of market forces, but the latter is coming to a close. Buckle up!
There's also a possibility the DOJ will fumble this and make them offer alternative engines in a more aggressive manner and fine them, which will change nothing. I think the judge indicated such, so hopefully they take this opportunity seriously.
Right, which is why you sell access to the chatbot with a knowing wink.
> You mistake what the purpose of copyright is.
At one point it was to ensure individual creators could eke out a living when threatened by capital. I frankly have no clue what the current legal theory surrounding it is.
Not if the benefits of this marginal productivity increase are hoarded by a small subset of society: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decoupling_of_wages_from_produ... You don't need to listen to communists to figure this out—you can just read Schumpeter.
Isn't that what got us into this mess in the first place? Seems to me that anti-competitive practices are the logical conclusion of privately-owned enterprise.
EDIT: to be clear, I'm very pro breaking up google. I'm just surprised that people are coming back around to the idea that government intervention is necessary to balance a stable economy with a private one.
The dish, obviously. A company (or a product) is an abstract concept that is largely meaningless without workers to actually provide value people want to pay for.
> Value is disconnected to the difficulty involved in producing it.
Human labor is the source of all value. If you're handing over money, it's because you're paying someone for the work they've done in some way.
> In fact, this is a key part of the free market. Precisely because it's easy for people who can do your job to produce a ton of value and hard for dishwashers to do the same, the market tries to push as many people as possible away from dishwashing and towards whatever it is that you do.
Yes, it's a lovely fantasy—but the real world doesn't work like that. The reason why I'm paid a lot isn't because I produce "value", it's because I'm really good at convincing rich people to pay me. The "free market" is just sucking off rich people with bad taste.
> Where do you get this idea?
Read Capital and get back to me. We need to open the schools!
It's much simpler than actually creating a game....