throwaway13337

4 ms·

1.
by throwaway13337 5d ago
I think I could have been clearer. The PE firm creates market demand for the goods/services that the purchased company used to provide at a better value to the customer. So yes, the 'creation' is a demand which is sort of a d
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by throwaway13337 5d ago
True. Though I don't like the term 'natural monopoly'. Most natural monopolies aren't - or don't have to be. Maybe a term like 'natural markets' captures it better? The property being that natural markets&
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by throwaway13337 5d ago
These PE-owned companies create market demand by being shitty. Somehow they are able to keep their margins and their market so that their business model makes sense. That's a puzzle, right? There is no shortage of investment looking fo
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by throwaway13337 5d ago
I think that's true to an extent. And, especially successful people, often would rather be their own boss for less money than to be a corporate cog. Having the freedom to make ethical judgements yourself and build local community is a
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by throwaway13337 5d ago
There's a pattern to the kinds of companies PE buys and I think it points to the real problem. They like companies with some kind of moat that makes it hard to unseat them. Basically, companies where there is no alternative for the con
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by throwaway13337 7d ago
I think we're in the 'early digital camera' phase of AI art gen. The real photographers knew they were shit photos. They were grainy, bad lenses, and ugly. A lot of people still liked them because they were much more convenie
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by throwaway13337 8d ago
Interesting that you bring this up. There's a real parallel between AI agents and corporations I've brought up in some other posts but with a very different tack. They don't need to be groups of agents to match the company an
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by throwaway13337 8d ago
That's true. But even saying I disagree with Yudkowsky and having an opinion about that /is/ a framing. My perspective has shifted because I read these things which makes me more homogeneous with the group even if I disagree.
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by throwaway13337 8d ago
The framing of how we think about AI has really been cultivated by a quite homogeneous group of people. These people, like all people that belong to a sub-culture, are almost certainly prone to groupthink. It's extremely important to s
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by throwaway13337 8d ago
This is cloud-era software philosophy. The device isn't yours. The software isn't yours. You are not a sovereign in your private space. It was a choice, made by product designers and government regulators. They came from an ethos
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by throwaway13337 9d ago
Nearly everyone in the US has a giant car that is basically a tank. They are dangerous. But it’s managed. Centralized power never works. We have the worst times in history to look at. Nationalization just centralizes to a different set of p
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by throwaway13337 12d ago
When you think about it, it is hard. Evolution was a billion year old game of who could kill who with biological weapons. Very rarely did a species totally succeed. We can’t even get wipe out mosquitoes. Apparently, though, AI research lead
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by throwaway13337 16d ago
A novel idea. Does it apply to human organizations, too? They seem have a habit of evolving self-preservation above their original goals. Once that happens, their benefit to society - the original reason for their creation - is outweighed.
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by throwaway13337 16d ago
Whether the company employs a human nurse or an AI, the company and not a human is indeed considered the responsible party. The LLC might be fucked but it is not a flesh-and-blood person. There is no person responsible. Just a legal entity.
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by throwaway13337 16d ago
Replace AI with 'company' and you realize that we're living in that world already. There's a reason it's called a Limited Liability Company. The whole point is to separate the company's liability from the indiv
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by throwaway13337 17d ago
It's so close to the "her" wallet thing that the main character pulls out to look at photos. It's just too big, and too metal. The form factor is good. I hope things move this direction. More broadly, it's interesti
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by throwaway13337 17d ago
Naming your agent is a big deal for personal ownership. I'm surprised it took this long for a company to do this. People hate some company's AI. They love their pets. AI needs to be your pet.
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by throwaway13337 21d ago
I appreciate the sorts of ways you're thinking about this. I don't think I see it much. It feels like you're looking at things similar to me but arriving at different conclusions. That's super interesting. So here's
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by throwaway13337 21d ago
I have no idea how artificial analysis got to be something anyone took seriously. This is their new benchmark set? A glance at their new index shows that whatever they're measuring, it isn't useful. Spend an hour with gemini 3.8 a
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by throwaway13337 23d ago
That hero video is interesting. A projector and speech. Maybe I'm in the minority here, but I find speech to text / text to speech (but not live audio mode) is quite comfortable and effective for coding now. The speech to text par
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by throwaway13337 23d ago
I agree with you. They are in violation of a reasonable interpretation of anti-trust laws already on the books. It's quite clear. And yet those laws are not enforced. You seem to be saying that there are a group of people who want it t
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by throwaway13337 23d ago
Open standards, protocols, and interoperability are definitely part of my values. But you're still relying on a law if I understand you correctly. If the society lacks them as deeply ingrained values as opposed to somehow to getting la
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by throwaway13337 23d ago
What you're saying is super reasonable and the ways I think about it too sometimes. I have two thoughts on this and I'm not sure how clear I can be. 1. I think sometimes the shape of a technology pushes a shape of society. But the
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by throwaway13337 23d ago
I can see why it can feel like that. It's still about framing, though. It's not a fight. The gatekeepers, like governments, laws, and money are social constructs - shared fictions. They are not physical things but made agreements
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by throwaway13337 23d ago
Centralization of power at all levels is bad. I therefore agree in spirit. But who is the 'we' in that 'we'? If you defer to a politician, you simply centralize more power into a body of government constrained by only cu
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by throwaway13337 23d ago
Maybe we should reframe how we see the big gate keepers like Google and Apple as they seem to be a new concept. They are not governments but have properties of them. Governments are defined as having a monopoly on violence. And we, through
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by throwaway13337 23d ago
Did the Collective find the resetNexus? I mean, yeah, it's probably a data center outage that cascaded to non-related providers due to people switching when their preferred provider was down. But that openai society definitely would ha
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by throwaway13337 1mo ago
Marketers have a term for this - "breaking through the noise". I call it pissing in the pool. I hope one day we see paid advertising as immoral. Immoral acts can be defined as negative sum on society but possibly positive to the i
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by throwaway13337 1mo ago
I guess my implied advice is to live the way you want even if it means making less money than you could? Yeah. I’ll own that. Believe it or not, you're on a website where a lot of the readers build stuff. And quite a few find success.
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by throwaway13337 1mo ago
I was just the sort you’re talking about. I did contract work so I could stay traveling and lived on money I made in previous full time jobs. It was a very nice way to live compared to the 9 to 5 even though I made less money. Having enough

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