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This is a situation in which a government would typically step in and force companies to stop ratfucking end users in favor of business partners, but the proble
by viccis 10mo ago
This is a situation in which a government would typically step in and force companies to stop ratfucking end users in favor of business partners, but the problem here is that (a) it's an international problem that would require cooperation with China and (b) the US has the most venal administration in history and has already taken bribes from AI and hardware companies.
These companies going all in on purely AI partnership sales are foolish because the aforementioned user ratfucking is step two of Doctorow's original description of enshittification:
1. Attract users and partners with market disrupting quality of service
2. Screw over users in favor of partners, knowing that users are less likely to be critical and more likely to be locked in
3. Screw over partners once you've achieved enough market dominance that they are also locked in
4. Use rent seeking behavior (government bribes, etc.) now that you've exhausted your users and partners for growth
- dmix 10mo agoThis is an announcement of increased competition in a market with acute supply shortages. That’s exactly what is supposed to happen. Jumping to regulating the global RAM market this early sounds like the worst of all solutions. You want people to get cross-government approval every time they want to buy or sell RAM? American companies will call up Korea to get their RAM rations.
- anonymous908213 10mo agoNote that the company in question is specifically sanctioned by the US, so this is not exactly a glowing example of the utopia of the free market you seem to be holding it up as. Rationing chips makes sense to me. You don't have to set the ration at a low enough level that it would ever impact legitimate businesses. You could just set a ration level that prevents a company that is losing hundreds of billions of dollars from spending imaginary money buying 40% of the annual raw material supply despite lacking the capability to refine the raw materials into a working product, for the sole purpose of denying it to their competition. You strawmanned the opposition as requiring cross-government approval "every time anyone wants to buy RAM", but maybe we could just start with requiring cross-government approval to buy 40% of the global supply.
- ZWoz 10mo agoSeems like supporting argument against governmental regulation. In this specific case, against sanctions.