As is often the case, the title is a bit misleading and implies a universality that I don’t think the author intended.
He is specifically talking about AI, and saying (in my understanding) that you shouldn’t worry too much about whether your specific thing will be overwritten by AI, as long as you focus on actually creating true, real value with your work.
I agree with that completely and can see it happening in my own field (marketing/tech writing.)
Yes, theoretically AI can replace every writer and marketer. The functionality is there.
No, this isn’t actually happening, because what’s mattered all along isn’t a generic marketing skill set; but the mental effort to actually provide value. No one wants to read a blog post by an AI because it’s boring, and the writers that actually have something of value in their writing are doing just fine.
That still seems super naive, at least if its extended to software engineering. Companies already treat software engineers like disposable cogs to be burnt out and discarded. I don't see how AI will improve that.
The problem isn’t whether or not companies need us— it’s about how many of us they need (demand), and how many of us there are (supply), because that determines our value. Companies pay people what they’ll work for, not based on how much they contribute to the bottom line; in economics, paying more than you have to for anything, including labor, is the irrational path. A steady, high demand for software developers has kept salaries high because that’s the only way they could get capable people to work for them.
The higher-end of markets aren’t immune to this. As the demand for lower-level workers drops, people will upskill trying to move up rather than get lopped off. Since there are fewer positions the further up the hierarchy you get, you don’t need a huge increase in supply to affect demand. That’s when you start seeing the most experienced, highest-earning people getting shit-canned because someone is willing to do a good-enough version of their role for 2/3 their sizable salary.
This can all happen without a single entire role being completely automated out of existence.
Go for it. I got out of that ridiculous ouroboro of an industry years ago. That might be great for you, but surely you can’t imagine VC funding enough startups to save the software labor market? The tech workforce is giant. Do you think there are tens or hundreds of thousands of ways to make unique new software products where even a single digit percentage are commercially viable? Software isn’t fungible: it needs to solve specific problems that people have, and do it well enough to deal with the hassle of switching software.
This isn’t an individual problem— it’s an industry-wide problem.
(I pulled the 2/3 number out of a hat to illustrate the point. I put exactly zero analysis into that.)
> If what you describe happens (33% cut to salaries) then the bar for your own startup to be worth it is suddenly lower.
That sounds like a material reduction in quality of life. Running a startup seems like it would entail way more hours worked and way more pressure, even if you were making better money. IMHO, that's not a good trade off.
> Running a startup seems like it would entail way more hours worked and way more pressure, even if you were making better money.
It is also ignoring scalability issues in the sense that if a large number of people now working regular jobs in tech are forced down this path, the amount of competition among these startups would be astronomical which would result is downward pressure on both the ability to fundraise and the ability to generate revenue for your particular startup.
Impossible for me to believe each individual startup founder would find some profitable niche to fit into.
The value-cost ratio is all that matters to a company. Yes, that implies that they are assuming all variations of value are achievable by AI which isn’t true and probably won’t ever be.
But they do think that, nearly all of them. Because they don’t understand value. This has been true since the very first corporation.
And that’s the problem. They will see a totally cheesed and squeezed metric telling them AI can reach 40% of the value of a “ ___ engineer “ at 10% of the cost and lay off engineers until shit starts exploding.
And the stock market will strongly reward that decision.
> I think if you’re legitimately providing value to the company, you aren’t disposable.
Businesses want worker fungibility and to reduce bus favor from having single point of failures. That usually, but not always, flies in the face of irreplaceability.
I was and I did. Now there's nobody on the team who can fulfil something we promised to our biggest customer a few months ago. Shrug not my problem because I don't work there.
> I think if you’re legitimately providing value to the company, you aren’t disposable.
Employees in knowledge work don’t generate constant value at all times. And companies want value at all times (that needs to be ever increasing). You’re not disposable at all point in time if you’re providing value at that point in time.
Companies shutdown profitable divisions/products because they aren't profitable enough. 'Providing value' is determined at a whim and by metrics out of your control.
Only quibble that in some areas like the games industry, being disposable (qua susceptibility to layoffs) was closer to the status quo well before AI came around.
>Companies already treat software engineers like disposable cogs to be burnt out and discarded.
I'm sorry but this is simply false. Nothing has really changed on the ground for SWEs. Nothing at all. Compensation is still sky high. Interviews are still the same. Career progression is the same. Everything takes the same amount of time. It's all business as usual for software engineering as a profession. AI is just one more tool in the toolkit; some devs use it, some don't. No engineering org has fallen for any hype in a meaningful way. Ultimately SWE teams on the frontline are busy doing what they always do, mostly in the way that they've always been doing.
The only thing that's changed in a remarkable way is how disconnected the rhetoric on social media is from ground reality. Anyone telling you AI is even replacing 5% of SWEs in the industry is a jobless hack.
> I'm sorry but this is simply false. Nothing has really changed on the ground for SWEs. Nothing at all. Compensation is still sky high. Interviews are still the same. Career progression is the same. Everything takes the same amount of time.
That's not remotely what I'm hearing or seeing from those who are on the job market.
The tech job market hasn't been "easy" for many years (basically since 2015 except for a ~2 year boom from mid 2020 to mid 2022). People always find different things to attribute the difficulty to. I remember way back in the day when bootcamps were the boogeyman.
The demand for authorised translators (approved in country X to correctly translate into country X’s native language from a particular language) has been steadily growing with globalisation and international trade. Contracts, court documents, financial records, medical records, birth and death certificates, technical reports: all of these must be translated and stamped by someone with the authority to do so, someone the government has confirmed to be competent.
The professional guilds are sounding the alarms, because there aren’t enough translators qualifying.
That's just factually untrue though. And there are high profile examples I would expect any well read person to know.
And we're at the point where you have to essentially choose the factually wrong point of view so there's no worth in even listing the counter examples.
There used to be many site aggregators curated by people for different categories - kind of like sub-reddits. At the same time, there were purely algorithmic search engines (yahoo, google, etc.).
The algorithmic approach won, but aggregators still exist.
I think that the friction lies somewhere in between what you’re observing and what ~safety1st addresses below.
The author has a specific issue in mind. Today the author chooses joy and refuses to evoke the woe and worries of the audience thus omitting their concerns; the audience fails to inherit the author’s optimism, likely due to some kind of asymmetry in sociopolitical outlook and status between the two parties.
HN is succumbing to the discordant trends in common discourse found elsewhere online. Demographic changes may have something to do with this.
I don’t think it’s demographic changes as much as it is fear of displacement.
Until 2 years ago, software engineering appeared to be an ideal career: strong demand for talent combined with high salaries. But with the productivity gains promised (and often achieved) with coding agents, people are understandably afraid. And people who are afraid take defensive measures: denial, anger, excessive criticism, etc. AI becomes, in some sense, “the enemy.”
I think that better explains the shift in overall tone.
I mean it's a title. Titles are under no obligation to condense the entire content of the article into one sentence. People who want to comment on the article should read it first, and then write in good faith.
The problem lies in the HN comments which have taken that title and interpreted it through the lens of unrelated political arguments: class warfare, anti-offshoring, etc. etc. I don't think any title would be immune from these people. They're just angry because the Internet has its hooks in their brain, and they're going to post about it.
His points are good and people would be wise to read the article and take them to heart. His key points are:
1) If you're a rent seeker, current trends will probably see you lose out to a bigger and more powerful rent seeker. He's probably right about that.
2) Creating more value than you consume is a great form of self-preservation, when you do this no one wants to get rid of you.
None of it's political. It's just good advice for life. I hereby forbid the masses from responding to these points with political rage bait.
HN has better moderation than a lot of places but from my vantage point the entire Internet is sinking into this garbage - we're more aware of the problem these days, at least, but everything and everywhere is more consumed by political hot takes than ever before.
If there was tech that forced commenters to read the article before they could comment on it - now THAT would be a valuable innovation!
> 1) If you're a rent seeker, current trends will probably see you lose out to a bigger and more powerful rent seeker. He's probably right about that.
> 2) Creating more value than you consume is a great form of self-preservation, when you do this no one wants to get rid of you.
> None of it's political. It's just good advice for life. I hereby forbid the masses from responding to these points with political rage bait.
They’re both tautologies. No new or useful info to glean. I didn’t need some highly intelligent security researcher to explain these things that are explained by intuition by anyone with an above room temp IQ.
There must surely be more to this, and given how many of his other recent blogs are a mix of political rant and a screed against da haterz. I suspect it’s a lot more political on his side than you think.
> If there was tech that forced commenters to read the article before they could comment on it - now THAT would be a valuable innovation!
lol, gotta love people who whine about HN quality and then just write pointless crybaby paragraphs like this. If you can’t beat em, join em I guess.
> No one wants to read a blog post by an AI because it’s boring
Nah. Humans can be boring too. No one wants to consume AI art in any form because art isn't just about what it is, but also how it came to be. We care about art and history because those things involved humans. And we like understanding the takes of our fellow humans. We don't care about the take of a statistical model on the topics of art and creativity.
The problem is that with generative AI, I have no means of protecting my work from being stolen.
It does not matter what license I put up. It doesn't even matter if I make it publicly available or not. LLMs have been trained on pirated material, they don't even have the decency to buy a copy. Even if I show my project to no one and just have a private repo on Github the code might still be used to train LLMs.
Your GPL licensed library? Yeah, we used claude to rewrite it and released it under MIT.
Now that wouldn't be so bad. One could argue copyright has long held back progress in certain areas. The problem is, the rules only apply one way. The rent seeking oligarchs of the tech industry can steal everything but I can't.
They can just eat the cost of a lawsuit, I can't. They can just decide to make a special deal with Disney to use their copyrighted material, I can't.
Sure the days of free markets capitalism are long gone. A few monopolists controlling the market has long been the norm. But AI makes it even worse. So much worse.
AI will be the straw that breaks the camel's back on copyright Imo. We've known since 90s Napster music piracy that copyright is broken in the information age, and its just a flimsy set of unprincipled edicts meant to protect those with power and money.
Nowadays AI companies have more money and lawyers than most movie studios, so
I predict that there will be a billion dollar company/ies (probably exist even now in stealth mode), whose business model will be to slopfork existing software - after all AI has proven to be very capable at that.
With trillions of dollars both supporting and opposing this business model, something will probably change in some way wrt copyright, and hopefully in a way that's an improvement to the average person.
> hopefully in a way that's an improvement to the average person.
Given the current political and economic environment, I wish I had the sort of optimism to believe any changes in the law would benefit the average person.
> Your GPL licensed library? Yeah, we used claude to rewrite it and released it under MIT.
Good. "You" made the world a better place at the expense of "me", the rent-seeking GPL author. I can go suck it if nobody wants my equivalent product with a worse license anymore. How do people not get this? If AI enables somebody to reproduce somebody else's hard labor much more cheaply, then it should do so instead of holding everyone else to ransom just because some self-entitled programmer wants to prevent competition when he's falling behind the market.
If you're a programmer, you have no moral right to complain about that because it's also the whole point of computer software. To do things more cheaply - ie to make somebody else's work worthless.
That's only a half measure if AI companies ruthlessly consume anything they can get. Microsoft might ignore repo visibility, they can still consume it. OpenAI may have a backdoor by nature of its apps/harnesses running on dev machines that do have copies of your project.
I guess you're safe with a privately self hosted project that you only share with people who don't have any AI and won't reshare it.
Then again, if you even distribute only binaries then in theory the AI could copy those and reverse engineer them, or just mutate the binaries.
> Feed vibecode to GitHub so the LLMs coprophagically train on their own slop.
Someone needs to build an easy to run AI agent that does that automatically, maybe with strategically bad choices (like complex no-op tests, bad algorithms, introduction of security vulnerabilities described as fixing them). I'd run it. Maybe it could even star/interact with other slop repos, so low activity couldn't be used as a filter.
You will get laid off but you won't if you create value and you will create value if you don't care about money and it will go recursive but it won't go recursive because there are limits. It won't change anything but it will change everything.
No one knows what he is actually saying (see comments) but at least he managed to compress the entire discourse on AI impact into a blog post.
I liked how it read. Not as a perfectly thought out post but more an ongoing conversation.
These are confusing times for engineers as the automators can now automate themselves away at even greater speed. Reminding ourselves to play positive sum games seems relevant.
The cake is too small to divide with humans and AI. We all feel that. Time to make more cakes :)
>You will get laid off but you won't if you create value
From my experience this isnt in the slightest bit true.
The professional managerial class not only sucks at identifying who creates value, they often feel threatened by those who do and try to knock them down a peg, disenfranchise them or commoditize them somehow.
You might assume that that the profit incentive would override this tendency towards shredding economic value but it doesnt, because of the principal-agent problem. The PMC always prioritizes their power within the organization over the organization's maximization of profit.
At least half of the hype about AI is about trying to gaslight developers into believing that theyre now worthless so that they can be more easily exploited by the PMC.
It was the same thing back when outsourcing to Actual Indians was in fashion in the 2000s.
Most western jobs are higher up the value chain, although it might not feel like it a software engineer or finance bro generates more value than a manufacturer or farmer.
More specifically, they generate value for people who are already relatively rich (often vastly so), and a consequence of declining marginal utility—which applies to money the same as any good— is that the it takes less actual utility value when you do that to produce any given amount of monetary value.
He deletes posts after they are no longer relevant. Given how people dig dirt up on people and take them out of context long after that context is forgotten, more people should do that (or delete social media altogether).
Some bigco jobs have felt that way to me: I don't know if I'm actually creating anything valuable, but I'm getting paid. I think the people who are most anxious right now are the ones who suspect they're not really creating anything of real-world value, and they're terrified that they're about to stop getting paid as well.
It's often way easier to capture value than to get compensated for creating it.
It's definitely indicative of an unhealthy organization or society when this happens but generally I've still found this to be the norm.
Indeed, maybe one of the reasons why free market capitalism functions is because it has a built in check (bankruptcy) against this natural human organizational tendency.
I think a large part of why software devs were so well compensated in the last decade was because we were helping build the systems which made the capture of value more efficient (whether from taxi drivers, smbs, property rentals or whatever), not because we were facilitating its creation.
Maybe in the first 10 years of your career, after that you totally have the skills needed to create value from nothing - something no value extracting actor will ever be able to learn.
Might take a while but the milk surely becomes butter. His point is valid, maybe your pov is a bit clouded because his baseline is quite high (fame, money) but its not that different at a lower baseline. You bring 1.x to the world that fights over a deemed finite set with 0.x tools.
Who creates value in the art market? Is it the artist who creates the work? Or the dealer who persuades the buyers that the work has value? As a builder I’m attracted to the fantasy that I can create value with my bare hands just by writing code (or telling the AI to write the code), without needing any of those horrible slimy people in suits to build a business around it. Rock n roll man. If you build it, they will come. Is that the reality though? Or just survival bias based on the fact that a few geeks got lucky during the original dotcom boom when they had no competition from actual businessmen?
you can create value by preventing damage in the future, this will get rewarded by the ecosystem itself. That's really hard to describe, but you can try simply removing a danger or annoyance in an ecosystem like your hood or local park then be attentive about what will be better in your own life.
Art creates value with measurable 1.9x in my country, its studied and thus gets funding because they know every 100€ funded will create 190€ of economic value. This means if you give an artist 100€ doesn't matter how - the local economy will grow by 190€. Magic? Well it's just many soft factors - higher quality of life leads to more educated and productive people!
Understand these are all tools to make more of WHAT IS ALREADY THERE and has nothing to do with extracting resources and selling them or bartering. I think your dotcom bubble is an extreme with no value for general advice.
So you think that engineers that maintain and write the FOSS that runs most of the world IT infrastructure ( Linux, Curl, GIT etc. ) do it for the returns ?
They don't, and as a result most don't get much if any.
For them to survive, they have to have got returns from somewhere - maybe welfare, inheritance, a day job. Someone has to have worried about the returns so they can be free from thinking about it.
And if you don't worry about returns, you will let someone extract it ruthlessly from you, that you contribute millions of value to a company that gives you nothing back. This may be fine to you at some level, but many of the people who you allow to exploit you use the resources they gain as leverage to further their selfish ends, like a certain richest man in the world who helped a certain politician buy an election at the most powerful country in the world.
No, that's exactly parent's point. The premise of the title can be read as "just create value, don't worry about monetizing, things will work out (financially)". Which is invalidated by FOSS
It isn’t. FOSS doesn’t just create value it gives it away for free usually in a not so friendly way to the point entire companies exist to streamline and support projects (eg redhat)
I am pretty sure not most of them. In something like linux, that is the case, but I think there are so many other projects that barely receive financial or any other kind of support
> If you don't worry about the returns, you won't get any.
He was focusing on value, not returns.
That being said, his take is still a dumb take - if you focus on creating value you may not capture any of that value for yourself. If you don't capture that value, someone else certainly will.
The age of creating value for the public good is well and truly over - any value you create for the public good in the form of intellectual output is immediately captured by profit-maximising companies for training your replacement.
It's not just a case of having your value captured by someone else, the AI corps are actually taking your captured value and then using it against you.
Well yeah, business has literally always extracted value from open source software, that’s one of the main benefits of it… (although license violations have been unprecedented with AI)
“Creating value” in open source has never been about capturing value at all, it’s always been about volunteering and giving back, and recognising the unfathomable amount of open-source software that runs the modern world we live in
“Capturing value” is the opposite of this, wall-gardens, proprietary API’s, vendor lock-in, closed-source code… it’s almost antithetical to the idea of open source
> “Creating value” in open source has never been about capturing value at all, it’s always been about volunteering and giving back
I disagree; the GPL has always been transactional. You capture the value in your product by ensuring improvements come back to you. The user "pays" by not being able to close the product off.
> If clean-room re-engineering a MIT code base starting from a GPL one is legit, then AI has just made that the status quo for everything.
I agree; this is what I meant by "the value is being captured by someone else".
GPL provides the author with a specific value - you get back improvements. Using AI to launder that IP so that improvements don't have to be upstreamed is effectively capturing the value.
> The age of creating value for the public good is well and truly over
It's not a zero sum game. Someone putting my open-source contributions (for example) in their dataset isn't subtracting value from me, or the rest of society.
I just do my job to the best of my ability. If I can help a colleague I do. I don't expect to get explicitly credited for everything I do.
If my employer can't see or don't care about the value I bring, I simply go to one who values me higher. I refuse to participate in office politics and that kind of BS.
This. First, the employer has to worry about the returns from which they draw some money to pay you. And for you to even get paid for doing a job, the company has to fear that you won't do it if you don't get paid - in most cases, it's not from the good of heart, but an implicit or explicit threat made by you or on your behalf by other people.
The current problem is automating yourself out of the job. You creating value compounds but as soon as you’re no longer needed the fruit of that compounded value is cut off from you.
Well if you want to spend your days doing something trivial enough to be automated I guess that might be a concern.
I mean I'm not sitting around doing data entry. If I'm automating something it's not my job it's someone else's. Ad a lot of the time that someone else really has other stuff they'd rather do as well.
I work on a product, I see sales generated by my work. By me specializing in my role and sales specializing their role we both benefit. Is that outsourcing the the worries? I don’t know, but when we get a client email it’s both product and sales collaborating that resolves it.
There are also co-ops, worker owned companies, etc.
Not necessarily true. If you're employed by e.g. a contracting company or consulting firm, your value to your employer is in #hours_billable because you are their product.
Not really sure what your point is. The employer is worried about getting good return on their investment in me, I am worried about getting good return on the time I'm investing in the company.
So my interest is that they recognize that I provide value, and pay me accordingly. It's possible that they recognize my value but choose to underpay.
I want them to pay me as much as possible, they want to pay me as little as possible. We reach a compromise, and if a different company offers a better deal I take it. That's their incentive to pay me a competitive salary. Doesn't matter what I say or how well I play office politics, they are most likely going to try to get a bargain and I am most likely going to leave for a better deal because there's always someone willing to pay more.
Haha that's not what the post (or the post it links to) says. Every CS student should know there's no free lunch in search and optimization. There's tradeoffs between random search, evolutionary algorithms, and convex optimization. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_free_lunch_in_search_and_op...
There's an AI "smell" to things that are generated. Why is that? Mode collapse is impossible to see from a small number of samples. Are we mode collapsing society? How would we know if we were?
Also, will computers surpass humans has such an implicit bias in it. Have humans surpassed ants? Have ants surpassed rocks? Have jet planes surpassed teletubbies?
> Every CS student should know there's no free lunch in search and optimization
The no free lunch theorem is so absurdly limited because of the constraints that it's IMO a tautology and fundamentally irrelevant outside of exceptionally tiny areas. You can't have one search algorithm that's better than others on average when searching entirely random things with no structure? 1. Yes, obviously. Nice to have a formulation but it's not exactly a surprise and 2. That's not what we deal with in the real world.
It's easy to create value for others and not worry about returns when you have enough money to not worry.
Unfortunately for most people, there's plenty of companies willing to take the returns and leave you paycheck to paycheck. That's literally what they are optimized to do.
I don't even disagree with the ideal, but I think a prerequisite step to this philosophy is UBI.
Geohot is a smart dude. But here I think he misses the forest for the trees.
He has a point, certainly. But while he is harping about the U part of ubi, he's completely ignoring the B part. UBI is meant to provide some basic income so people don't starve. It's just an optimization of welfare programs where you have a ton of bureaucracy and make people jump through endless hoops and cause them endless amounts of stress (which is known to make people work less, not more). And replace it by just giving all citizens the same amount.
Yes, that's a bit stupid for the people first paying taxes and then getting them right back again minus overhead costs, but if you think about it: that's what happens now too, only less efficient (in the netherlands, that is) so you pay even more overhead.
On top of that comes the other realization: If the current trend of automating everything continues,we'll ultimately end up with (hyperbole) 1 person owning all the machines doing all the work. That 1 person earning all the money, and (in an ideal case) paying his taxes to give everybody else welfare. Which just is the same as UBI.
In a certain way this already happens now. Most not-too-smart people that used to be gainfully employed as laborer somewhere are now on welfare, and the threshold for not-too-smart could go up rather steeply with the current AI trends.
>Yes, that's a bit stupid for the people first paying taxes and then getting them right back again minus overhead costs, but if you think about it: that's what happens now too, only less efficient (in the netherlands, that is) so you pay even more overhead.
I'm not sure this is stupid. I think the people against the negative income tax system are kind of stupid. Like, the best place to apply the welfare rules is where all other complicated rules about income are made: the tax office (IRS). If you decide that for whatever reason you really really want people receiving welfare to be second class citizens, you'd go out of your way and build a separate welfare office, where all the work the tax office is doing gets to be duplicated for no reason other than so you as a working class citizen can pay even more money to be angry at the second class citizens.
Overall, it sounds kind of stupid. You build a bureaucracy that designates people as a special class, so that this special class is difficult to escape from, since if everyone was a continuous recipient of welfare, there would be no second class and "escape" would merely be progression through the simple passage of time.
The dumbest arguments I've seen are extremely cranky and boil down to rich people becoming net beneficiaries of CO2 dividends, because they spent tens of thousands of dollars on EVs, heat pumps, cycling, insulation, solar panels, etc so they can get 100% of an annual 100€ CO2 dividend. Like, giving 100€ to even a single rich person is such a horrific crime, that it's better if everyone else, who actually needs it, should get less than the 100€ even if that reduction will result in hundreds of millions of € being diverted away from people who actually need the money to compensate their CO2 taxes.
Someone needs to make a website explaining why UBI doesn't work conceptually because this comes up over and over again on HN.
You cannot make UBI work from money saved by removing means testing. Even UBI is a welfare scheme and would require significant bureaucratic hoop jumping to check that a person claiming it isn't:
• Dead
• Non-citizen
• Already claiming it under a different name/bank account/etc
• In prison
• Moved abroad
and so on. All that is expensive, and yet the overheads of even existing welfare systems just aren't high compared to the amounts they pay out. Getting rid of means testing doesn't magically make the numbers balance.
Geohot is correct. UBI seems to only appeal to people who don't understand how the economy works. You can't have an economy in which one person earns all the money by definition.
This is a complete non-issue in basically every wealthy country bar potentially the US, all five things you named are already known to the government at all times. They also apply the exact same way to any other scheme, there's nothing new about it.
Quite a few governments have trouble verifying identity reliably. But to the extent they can do it, it's because there are lots of people employed to do so. The UBI thesis outline above is that you can find the money to pay for it by eliminating all those job roles from the government, so you can't use their existence to justify UBI as affordable.
Even if governments were perfect at ID verification it wouldn't change the argument above, right? Being perfect at verifying UBI eligibility would require a large government infrastructure, just like today, so you can't claim that the U part makes it super cheap to administer.
But no government is close to perfect. Here are some examples for your edification.
The UK doesn't even know how many people are living there, and it's an island. There's no centralized identity scheme and during COVID more people came forward for vaccination in some age bands than theoretically existed at all.
All countries struggle with basics like "is the recipient of the welfare dead". Here's a specific case where Italy didn't notice it should stop paying out a state pension (a form of UBI) for years after death, with the fraudster only getting busted when he tried to dress up as his own mother: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/nov/25/italian-man-dr...
Paying out money to dead people is a very common problem. Here's an EU report on all the basic ways countries get defrauded by failing to track basic facts about identities:
"Common fraud and error cases include falsified documents (birth, marriage and death certificates), identity fraud and falsified non-payment certificates"
Even in UBI, there would be a strong expectation that each person only receives it once. But checking stuff like that requires a huge bureaucracy.
>Here's a specific case where Italy didn't notice it should stop paying out a state pension (a form of UBI) for years after death, with the fraudster only getting busted when he tried to dress up as his own mother
I assume you want to stop the state pension as well then?
None of these include a mention of meaningful economic impact.
> Being perfect at verifying UBI eligibility would require a large government infrastructure, just like today, so you can't claim that the U part makes it super cheap to administer.
It's already in place regardless of UBI, so it doesn't add meaningful costs.
Of course it's never going to be perfect, absolutely nothing is. Why even mention that? What matters is the impact of it being imperfect.
Compare it to the impacts of tax evasion, or wage theft, and they'll be completely negligible.
> Even in UBI, there would be a strong expectation that each person only receives it once. But checking stuff like that requires a huge bureaucracy.
Or you issue UBI all at once during the month, and you stamp everyone who receives it with an indelible ink mark that takes longer than a day to wear off; like they do in poor countries to prevent double voting.
It's a solvable problem. The problem is that the "cost of managing welfare" is a small percentage of the cost of welfare, you can't pay for doubling/tripling it by saving 5%.
Most EU countries have national IDs, so the "only receive it once" is a solved problem.
The "still paying dead people" problem exists in the current pension system, so we already have bureaucracy in place to solve that one (yes, it's not 100% accurate, but it works sufficiently well en masse) so no need for new bureaucracy there.
In the UK a lot of that is solved by using the NI number that everyone has to have to work, claim benefits, get a state pension, or pay tax.
For people who are employed it could be done by existing systems already used to calculate tax (which is deducted automatically by employers here so the systems to do calculations exist).
Self-employed people already have to register with HMRC.
For the rest it is a far, far simpler than the requirements of the benefits system and less prone to fraud.
> You cannot make UBI work from money saved by removing means testing.
No one claims it can be made to work using ONLY money saved from means testing. Something like removing means tested benefits together with lowering tax thresholds could work though.
Except a lot of actual, very smart, economists are for UBI or similar arrangements (it's not a settled matter). And geohot might be smart, but he's just a self described hacker.
I think the problem is that a lot of the proponents are arguing for a level of UBI that is pretty close to the median wage whereas what would be affordable is probably a quarter of that.
I'll come out and get kicked out of communism club to say that I don't support UBI on the basic fact that money is exchanged for goods and services is just so foundational that I can't support UBI. I think everybody should have a roof over their heads and 3 square meals a day, but UBI isn't the way to get there.
Welfare is a direct payment to the poor and SNAP is very close to that. Work requirements and other administrative hurdles are the primary thing that keeps these programs from truly ensuring that everybody has basic dignity.
> money is exchanged for goods and services is just so foundational
it is in all large societies. That's true. But it is not in most small primitive societies. SO it's not like a law of nature, but more that we haven't found a system that works as well for large groups.
The trouble is that capitalism also has it's problems, and they're getting exacerbated by technological advancements. If you automate everything at a certain point there's just nothing to do for a large part of the population. And at that point the system stops working.
In science fiction we would get the 'post scarcity society', but nobody knows how that should work.
The UBI systems I've seen proposed that just might work are a sort of golden middle between those two. Not that different from the current welfare system we have in NL, but taking out the stress factor and stigma of receiving welfare.
The exchange of money for goods and services is foundational to capitalism, and UBI seems like a divide by zero kind of trick that's isn't going to work out. Let's fire a bunch of people to make the government more efficient with this one neat trick is just the most Republican thing ever.
Astroturfing? If I don't have an alternative, I'm secretly being paid by "them" to tear down UBI? Who would "them" even be? How would that even work?
Anyway, subsidized jobs programs is my answer. Pay people to do jobs. Plant trees! There's so many places that could use some reforesting. There's no shortage of work to do.
The idea you're suggesting here is 19th century era Marxism, and isn't based on historical or economic realities. There has never been a famine caused by new technologies creating unemployment, and food security is much higher now than at any other time in the past.
> There has never been a famine caused by new technologies creating unemployment
That's a bold statement. And depending on how you define famine it might even be true-ish. But I'm quite certain most poor people in the 1920s would disagree with you.
Which is why we got the russian revolution and both world wards at that time. All 3 were partially caused by 19th century industralisation creating an poor, hungry underclass.
It's not particularly bold, it's just a fact. It only seems bold because our society is still flooded with Marx-era propaganda.
Poor people in 1920 would agree with me. We know this because in this era Marxist ideas were already quite old, well known and widespread. He argued for what was effectively a UBI or very generous welfare system under a different name. He predicted the poor would rise up as capitalism drove their wages to zero and "alienated" them, then they'd overthrow it. But Marx became bitterly disappointed in his lifetime when capitalism didn't fail, wages didn't fall to zero and the working classes rejected his call to revolution.
Technological progress hasn't caused famines, it's ended them. What has caused several famines, though, is left wing people reorganizing society via force to solve imagined problems. If you're worried about people not having enough to eat, you should be terrified of a UBI.
You're misinterpreting what I wrote. I didn't say all famines were caused by left wing policies. Obviously historically most were caused by natural disaster, like the Irish potato blight. But when famines have been caused by social change, it wasn't due to the march of technology.
The British never forced anyone in Ireland to export food "at gunpoint".
> What do you plan to buy with your free government dollars? Want to buy eggs? Sorry, the egg people stopped making eggs, they are living free on UBI. Want to buy a house? Who built it? Nobody, because they all were getting UBI and didn’t want to build houses anymore. They write poems now. There’s still old houses available, but the price for them has 20xed, well outside of what you can afford.
In my country the people that are producing and selling eggs do it almost for free, they could do something else and get much more money, but they choose to do eggs. My theory is that people choose to do stuff not just because of the money. Narrowing all the interests to just money doesn't capture the complex reality. When you cancel the money thing, you let people choose what to do based on their real ambitions and aspirations, removing the alien interest (money) that skews the world so much that even geohotz got confused.
But then you can end up with a lot of people making what's fun to produce but we have an excess of (waste) and few people filling in to make what's missing (scarcity). Markets aren't perfect but they do help us solve that particular problem.
The topical reply is that those positions aren't paying enough.
However, if we have to pay e.g. miners millions to compete with a high UBI, we trigger a massive wage-price spiral. Since extracted raw materials are the bedrock of the entire supply chain, those costs cascade and multiply, eventually making the finished goods unaffordable for the very people receiving the UBI.
In reality, markets don't solve the scarcity of un-fun labor through magic efficiency. They solve it by leveraging debt, poverty, and an exploitable lower class to keep the foundational costs of society artificially low.
Without this DesperationFloor™, the math of our current commodity-based economy falls apart.
> Since extracted raw materials are the bedrock of the entire supply chain
Extracted raw material is incredibly cheap. Human industry and ingenuity are the real scarce resource, and UBI leverages these to an unprecedented extent. Debt and exploitation are an anti-pattern, even for a capitalist economy; they're deeply antithetical to true industry and creativity.
Apparently if we, the poorer ones, win the war of attrition, the problematic ones that own everything will resign to golf. Or something. Getting financial planning from a lottery winner.
> I dream of a day when company valuations halve when I create a GitHub repo. Someday.
Isn't that exactly what Anthropic did to the SaaS sector? Taking the "I can replace you with a very small shell script" line from BOFH lore (except that it was a bunch of SKILLS.md files, not shell scripts) and making it real.
I think it’s a bad idea for about the same reasons, but that’s assuming we’re implementing it right now in the current economy. If automation means that in the future there’s not much for all these people to do that creates value then it makes sense.
Which of course ignores the obvious point that UBI is all about taking existing resource redistribution and making it less costly and more efficient. Practically all Western countries redistribute income on a massive scale (compared to the default outcomes of a completely free market capitalism) in order to ensure everyone can provide for their basic needs, and that could all be gradually replaced by UBI.
This is broadly in line with OP's suggested ethic "create value for others, don't play zero sum games" since capitalism is based on rewarding those who create the most value, whereas zero-sum games are largely political in nature.
The inefficiency of the bureaucracy of limiting welfare (or charity) to the poor and needy. I don't know, though, maybe giving everybody's money to everybody cancels itself out.
You're giving money to everybody but then anyone who isn't poor and needy has to pay taxes on their income that more than offset the money. It's taking "the bureaucracy of limiting welfare (or charity)" and folding it in with the IRS and the local Department of Revenue.
Capitalism rewards those who CAPTURE the most value, not those who create it. Capitalism at its core is a system of expropriating the value of labor by those with capital who themselves create absolutely nothing.
Capital allocation is a serious job with very real consequences. The decision of how many AI datacenters should be built, to take an an unusually topical example, is one of capital allocation. Central planning is not a viable solution, it has failed everywhere it's been tried.
> The real problem to UBI is governments creating income via debt, IMO.
The national debt is just a hidden tax on future generations. You're stealing resources from the future (by selling claims to them in advance, that's what national debt is) and spending them in the present. It's justifiable in extreme cases like a war (or perhaps for massive public investments that can't be funded within the existing budget - which is actually not that common), but really not otherwise.
That's not how that works, because for each unit of debt (loans or negative balances) there is a corresponding unit of credit (bonds or positive balances) in the economy. Hence, mathematically speaking, all debts could be paid off instantly at any point in time.
The reason why the debt keeps growing endlessly is that there is a 0% lower bound on the interest rate, which if you think logically about it, means that debt can only grow, mathematically speaking. This creates the impression that debt is always a future burden that is eternally carried forward as if it was nuclear waste.
If the market interest rate is below zero, either the government and the central bank must intervene to maintain the state of the money system above zero, because that is the only representable state. The government can subsidize the difference between the market interest rate and the money system interest rate clamp by taking on private debt and turning it private. This is particularly evident once private corporations refuse to take on further debt.
However, even if the government stopped the subsidization, you still don't get out of the conundrum. The government is patching the symptom with its cause, which stalls the problem into the future, which is "good" if the cause is considered good and only the symptom is considered bad.
The same way housing is needed for living, money is needed for trading. Similar to housing becoming an investment and therefore no longer being able to be used for its intended purpose, money can face the same fate. When people use money as an investment, it can't be used for trading. Houses sit empty and money sits idle.
It turns out that money is such an integral part of the economy that if there is no money, people can't acquire the goods they need to survive and since there is a monopoly on money systems, you can't just switch to a private provider to perform the trading you need in case the government one fails.
In other words, you either choose between a fully formalized money based economy or subsistence lifestyle with nothing in-between. The difference between the two is so stark, that a failure in the money system might as well be the collapse of all elements of society. From that perspective, it is quite smart to keep kicking the debt can down the road. Meanwhile the person who refuses to kick the can will doom society unless they implement the possibility of negative interest in their money system.
The zero bound on nominal interest rates is not relevant today. (It may be relevant in a deflationary environment where debt or 'safe assets' are essentially needed as a liquidity instrument akin to money, but that all gets hoovered up when interest rates rise.) The U.S. government is paying a whole lot of interest on its national debt bonds not because of a formal constraint, but rather because its bonds would go unsold otherwise, it would be unable to roll over the existing bonds as they expire, and the whole house of cards would collapse. IOW, it's the chickens coming home to roost, and the American taxpayer is paying for it. The alternative is to inflate the debt away by debasing the currency, which is even worse.
I've often thought of state debt as an accruing tax collection deficit. Selling bonds (creating more of this debt) is more politically convenient than raising taxes but it digs a deeper hole and obliges the state to pay interest largely to the same class of people they have failed to tax.
If your business can't self-fund the investment, borrowing is justified. But if you're earning revenue that allows you to self-fund, why borrow? You're just incurring extra costs.
I feel like government borrowing sometimes and government borrowing more and more every year and never paying it down until the end of time or more likely bankruptcy are two different things
As long as you keep new borrowing below growth then you can do that indefinitely. The problem is when the next pandemic (or war) comes along you don't have much room to deal with it.
You can do the same with printing money, as long as you do it below growth you can do it indefinitely.
The problem always is that you can't stop and get off the tiger. No country can withstand the shock of a major cut in spending, because the population can't absorb the hit.
Forget UBI and AI. They are distractions. Today it's very unclear that even just existing welfare schemes are sustainable. Political parties can buy votes with welfare and they do, so it's an unstable configuration. Europe is full of countries with this problem.
A good example of a country in a downward spiral towards UBI hell is the UK. Around 25% of the working-age population now claim to be disabled, and around 10% receive disability benefits. Labour have a genius idea for how to fix this: let disabled people try out employment for a bit to see if they like it, whilst keeping their welfare payments. So they're turning disability benefits into UBI by the back door.
The UK can't afford anything even close to this. It can't even afford the theoretically non-universal benefits schemes it has: it has massive government debt and deficits because its economy doesn't generate enough wealth, and its health welfare system (the NHS) experiences Soviet-style shortages all the time.
This has happened despite that we've been mass automating jobs with computers and robots for decades. Chips aren't magic wands that make communism suddenly work. The problems with wealth redistribution are fundamental and will never go away regardless of your level of technology.
If you disagree, fine, but please for the love of God focus on walking before you can run. Drive government deficits to zero whilst keeping growth at US levels, and then talk about more generous welfare schemes.
(you can't magic new money by eliminating means testing either, see my other comment on this thread).
> The UK can't afford anything even close to this. It can't even afford the theoretically non-universal benefits schemes it has: it has massive government debt and deficits because its economy doesn't generate enough wealth,
I'm fairly certain its economy generates more wealth per capita than at any point in the past, and this is the general consensus. If you believe it doesn't, please explain how, as it goes against the commonly held belief.
Much of that wealth is wasted by excess government spending. Same pattern as India, which actually used to be ruled by the UK as a colony - then they became independent but kept all the excess bureaucracy and red tape from their former oppressors.
I didn't say otherwise. It generates more wealth now than in the past and that is still far from sufficient for its government to afford its current levels of welfare spending.
You did imply it, that in the past the same welfare was affordable that now no longer is, because its economy apparently doesn't generate enough wealth.
The UK doesn't have the same welfare as in the past. It's gives out vastly more money for more reasons than it did when the system was new, and it has a far greater proportion of the population receiving it.
My family household generates more wealth per capita than any time in it's history, but yet net savings is down. Do you know why? We spend it all on junk that we thin we'll make us happy but actually we become dependent on it.
Money is a social construct, not some kind of physical quantity subject to conservation laws, and can be and is introduced into the economic system all the time. The real question is really would introducing more money or a UBI cause social disruption by e.g. disrupting price signalling by high inflation or changing incentives to work so less goods and services that people actually value are produced.
It is a social construct but if you just print money you get ... inflation. You can't just increase money supply to redistribute wealth without consequences.
For me its more his attitude that puts me off.
He might be intelligent, but his EQ doesnt seem that high.
The condescending way he references the "malcolm in the middle"-episode "hot dumb girl" couldve been just the explaination of the "1 dollar = 1 million dollar".
Not necessarily UBI; one just needs an adequate day job. Then the hobby could be creating value with no expectation of any direct return: writing a blog, writing and giving away music, writing open-source software, doing any volunteer work, etc.
There's something more than just an adequate day job (which is perhaps necessary in more ways than just "get the money get the cheddar") - because we can find pages and pages of examples of "well paid" (doctor, lawyer, tech) people who are drowning in debt, living paycheck to paycheck, and perpetually unhappy.
Paycheck to paycheck is sort of fine, if you can still dedicate the time to your WoW clan, or your music, or your writing, and be happy about that. Well, to your kids, not expecting anything tangible in return.
If the day job expends all motivation, all your energy, and it + the commute eats all your time, then again it's an inadequate job.
I think there’s a strong bias towards hacking and cool side projects from the hackernews crowd. But I’m not so sure much of the general population would use their free time afforded by UBI for productive and useful endeavors. At least from my observations there’s a significant portion of the population that uses their free time to be idle and veg in front of the TV and/or get wasted. My concern with UBI, even if it was financially tenable as it would underwrite a whole lot of that - including the more criminal, antisocial sub-population.
Wouldn't convincing the criminal part of the population to just stay home be a net win? Policing and prisons are both notably more expensive then welfare.
People would probably still steal but without real world data we can only speculate on whether crime would increase or decrease. My bet is still on decrease.
> when you have enough money to not worry. Unfortunately for most people ... paycheck to paycheck
This is some truth to this argument, but the frequency with which it's brought out as an excuse to just dismiss any argument one doesn't like is too high in North America.
Simply bashing every argument with, "but some people are in a bad situation" doesn't really further discussion all that much.
Did you RTA? The author is predicting that those employees (at least in software dev) will get laid off; so they should get out and find some way to create real value (or make some other change) for their own sake, because they’re about to lose even “paycheck to paycheck”. You should debate this instead, because if true, it makes your point irrelevant.
As long as the global population is still rising, they will be carnage between competitions. The author and many others might be foresee the (near) future where the global population start declining, maybe then, we can do things just because we can.
No matter how much resources a society has, natural selection pushes everyone to keep trying hard to get more, as those that don't end up without resources.
In a society, the fastest way to get resources is to provide something in exchange to other members of the society. The most common thing we have to exchange for resources is work.
From those two things we can see that no matter what society you have or how wealthy it is, people will work as much as they can, or else they get behind in the rat race.
Not just if you already have enough money, but it's easy to say if you're as smart as Geohot. For those who aren't, (I'm not), creating that kind of value isn't just hard, it's impossible!
Indeed, what is worse is expectation created by rich people that whatever little value you did create should be given away for free! I see it frequently on HN with product launches where people are demanding product to be opensource with liberal license which effectively means it should be free.
If you do not partake in a war when a war is waged against you, you lose, and you either get subdued, or perish altogether. This is why pacifism for some part of a society is only possible when another part of the society is willing and capable of using lethal force to defend the society as a whole.
Due to this, it's important to always have sufficient quantities of very efficient weapons, exactly so that you would never have to put them to use.
War has existed as long as humans have. If you have any ideas for how to remove fear, aggression and disagreement from humans you might just be a god or a saint.
money is a judgement of value to society and a motivator to only allocate work in a useful way.. wouldn't UBI, even if coupled to actually producing _something_ will lead to a lot of useless stuff being made?
> wouldn't UBI, even if coupled to actually producing _something_ will lead to a lot of useless stuff being made?
The general premise of a UBI is that it's unconditional.
If you tried to say someone is required to produce something without specifying what it is, they'll produce whatever is the easiest thing to produce, which will naturally be useless if they otherwise wouldn't have produced anything because the only reason they're doing it is to satisfy the demand of someone not imposing any specific requirements on the output.
But if it's actually unconditional then the things produced would only be the things someone wants to produce, i.e. the things worth their time to produce when they're not actually required to spend their time producing it. Those things would tend to be useful because at least the author found them to be and there's a decent chance they're not unique in the world. If you e.g. make an app just because you want to use it yourself, maybe someone else wants to use it too.
>Those things would tend to be useful because at least the author found them to be and there's a decent chance they're not unique in the world. If you e.g. make an app just because you want to use it yourself, maybe someone else wants to use it too.
This seems reasonable on it's surface, however for anyone that is tried to start a business, or sell anything, there is a big gap here.
The gap between creating something useful (an app) and the ability to sell or market it is HUGE. That gap is the difference between useful or not.
So I agree, lots of "useless" stuff will be made because the drive to close that GAP (which looks small) won't be done because there is no need for it.
> The gap between creating something useful (an app) and the ability to sell or market it is HUGE. That gap is the difference between useful or not.
Most of that gap is the difference between making it and selling it. To sell it you need payment processing, customer service now that customers are paying and expect you to resolve their billing problems etc., marketing sufficient to get enough initial users to cover development costs now that you're trying to turn a profit, accounting and tax remittance now that you're taking money, etc.
That stuff isn't required if you make it for yourself and then post it on the internet for anyone else to use for free.
Curious, how would this affect the production of things that have long supply chains, or require lots of manual labor? There are many things that require labor, like plumbing, irrigation, farming, transportation, brick firing, steel production, etc. where the product is either an intermediary step, or otherwise contributes to something that the worker doesn't themself benefit from. Who would create my car, computer, desk, house, etc. if people are only working for themselves? Maybe I misunderstood your comment
The cost of these things would simply rise until people are willing to either produce them, or obviate the need for that production (such as by increasing automation in that particular sector).
I feel like a lot of people have the impression of a UBI that it would mean no one would have paid jobs anymore. It's primary advantage is that it removes the perverse incentive of the existing needs-based assistance system to not work (or not work more) because if you do you lose your benefits. Which doesn't exist if the payment is unconditional rather than conditional on not making [more] money.
But the amount would be something in the nature of $12,000/year. Is that actually a disincentive to work that would cause no one to take a paid job anymore? Only if no one wants a lifestyle that costs more than $12,000/year.
Would be great if true, but that doesn't really correspond in reality truly, especially in intellectual products. Compare even Linus Torvalds fortune with e.g. snapchat founder. Not even talking about thousands of 0 profit open source projects with millions of installations versus some saas hustler - usually the former provide much more value to society than some guy who is just good at selling stuff.
UBI might fuel some useless work, but it also might provide a way to people to be more into creative side of things rather than selling and marketing rat race.
Also in less developed countries money even less corresponds to value. It almost always has some kind of mafia and corruption that extracts huge portions of value from the economy and basically net negative, though profitable.
I'd like to live in the world where money are always allocated fairly, but we see that in IT, for example, predating, stealing data, spying on people bring more money than the honest work due to misaligned incentives, when bad actors pay more money than actual consumer.
We as a society would profit from not categorizing everything in terms of its usefulness. Things can and should be allowed to just be.
That being said, UBI would probably result in more useful things not less. There are so many cases of jobs and things that seem to just be busywork or outright scams. There are also a lot of things that only appear useful if you never take the time to think about them. A plastic straw that will pollute the environment for thousands of years just so i can have a drink for two minutes? That is useless.
Every street in every city being lined by cars that don't move for 95% of the time? That is useless and insane. Imagine what marvelous machines we could have built instead.
Also, I find the online discussion around UBI to be quite weird. I don't think anyone serious is advocating for it to be particularly high. In my opinion, UBI should cover your necessities plus some so you can participate in society.
This gives everyone the opportunity to take it slow or focus on personal projects without fear. Everything luxurious can not, and should not, be affordable with UBI. This will leave ample opportunity for people to still care about and want to work.
Humans will always do. It is in our nature. But not letting people get homeless or starve to death might enable those of us that don't want to do what our overlords deem useful to do the things our society so desperately needs.
I don't need some poor fool to cook my burger for me. I'd rather take turns with my friends that now have free time.
I hope you don't take this as a negative, but sometimes I wish I could think like people like you, very positive, but maybe I'm old/cynical?
There is a problem with "plus some so you can participate in society"
In a massive society this will never be agreed to. The 'some' here will never be enough. Too little and it's not UBI, too much and impossible to fund. Who is going to define what a luxury is? Is owning your own home a luxury, a car, washer and dryer?
"Don't worry about money" is something a lot of companies do. They can just try to create value first, then look for profits later (albeit often though "enshitification").
This bias towards creating value makes them more moral than mere mortals, creating huge amounts of innovation and surplus value.
> You have a right to perform your prescribed duty, but you are not entitled to the fruits of action. Never consider yourself the cause of the results of your activities, and never be attached to not doing your duty.
I have a hard time interpreting that as what geohotz is saying. If anything it seems to promote rent seekers by telling you - stick to your lane and don't complain. I.e. the caste system
> If anything it seems to promote rent seekers by telling you - stick to your lane and don't complain. I.e. the caste system
I was wondering if that would come up and HN delivers without fail. Anyway, you are free to interpret it as you see fit.
The guidance was for someone who was struggling with a moral dillema on facing relatives in war and undecided over action. It is not a diktat to work or provide unquestion labor.
For anyone who understood the whole story and backdrop of the situation, a reasonable interpretation is
- you are responsible for your actions but you cannot control the consequences of your actions due to many factors.
- When you detach yourselves from results, you can do your job without anxiety.
- do not let the fear over results be an excuse for inaction.
Give it a read and decide for yourselves if you are not convinced. Even without the teachings part, the whole story of Gita is actually an epic story/novel with some strong and conflicted characters with elaborate back stories.
The point is worrying about results creates anxiety that takes away your focus from doing the job which results is lower performance -> subpar results - it is a recursive spiral. Also results are not "wholly" under our control. Hence avoid worrying about the results "while" doing it.
The final result of any action depends on a lot of external factors for e.g. one might develop a product, but whether it succeeds or not depends on other players, economy, luck and host of other factors that one does not control or know. This feeds into the first point about not worrying about the results.
The idea is to not fret over results and give your best with dedication. E.g. An athlete shouldn't be worrying about their results while playing and should focus on the play.
> How can you be responsible for your actions but not the consequences of your actions
I only mentioned control of consequences not responsibility. It doesn't mean you are absolved of responsibility from consequences of your actions.
Take driving. You can only control your actions but you cannot control what happens on the road. You are still responsible for your actions.
Should the fear of the unknown on the road stop you from driving? Absolutely not.
Yeah, I think GP is right and this all feels like word play to me.
Let's say you're making your ideal wood chair for your living room. You're "fretting" over getting the arms, legs perfectly aligned, surfaces smooth, identical chamfers, etc. But fretting is bad and makes it hard to get anything done so you stop. Then you end up with a roughshod chair.
You shouldn't "fret" too much, but you also shouldn't "fret" too little. You should "fret" exactly the right amount which is... tautologically true, and not particularly insightful. Giving your best is committing yourself to fretting.
(I'm not sure if you understood the Gita reference, if you did you can ignore my comment.)
A better analogy isn't so much a chair made by yourself, but say you're making a chair for a competition. The only thing you can control is your actions. What's out of your control is whether or not some other guy who's an absolute veteran is also planning to compete (making you likely to lose), or if almost no one else joined the contest (much higher chance of winning.)
Another example is in the workplace.
You control what efforts you put in.
But your promotion (or even firing!) depends on a ton of other things. If the company's doing poorly, they may not promote you even if you did a great job. Conversely, if the company desperately needs a new senior person and you're the closest fit, even if you just did a mediocre job, you may get selected.
What's common in both cases is - doing a better job is more likely to be better for you. But there are no guarantees you'll win/get promoted, so don't be attached to that outcome, but only your efforts/labour.
> You have a right to perform your prescribed duty, but you are not entitled to the fruits of action.
> stick to your lane and don't complain. I.e. the caste system
That verse is quite famous and the general interpretation as I understand is this.
You have control on your actions but not on its results. The results depend not only on your actions but on many other factors outside of your control.
Now, one can interpret that it is instruction to "stay in your lane", but I have not seen that interpretation so far in my life in India.
you realize that the caste system that currently exists is completely different from what it was conceptualized as right? you most certainly want to read the conversation between yudhistra and nahusha that talks about caste https://vedabase.io/en/library/mbk/1/30/
I don't think we actually know who conceptualized the caste system. Even Manusmriti seems to be not as old as we thought before.
However, even in Mahabharatha there are examples of Karna and Ekalavya who despite having qualities (as Yudhishtira claims) of Kshathriya, they were rejected by the society as being lesser.
It is possible that caste system is an extension and crystallization of nepotism. Typically professions and trade secrets are handed down the families and it is conceivable this was codified at some point far in the past.
To claim that caste system has a more philosophical foundation would be a bit of a stretch in my point of view, especially when it has been throughout the history being used suppress.
You need to understand the context. The quote in Gita was to motivate the best warrior of the time at the battlefront facing opponents who were mainly his cousins and uncles.
In that context the quote is about performing the duties you were born to do without overthinking the consequences.
the context makes it even worse. its a strange kind of tribalism that is being promoted here. "do what you are asked to without understanding the real consequences". btw war is actual zero sum usually.
It’s a tricky philosophy to put into practice. I have oscillated between this approach (“owning” the effort) and “owning” the outcome. I have found that taking ownership of the outcome leads to better results because I have a personal stake in the outcome and I tend to think through the problem more deeply, but I am almost always left feeling more stressed and “empty” when the work is finished. When I focus on doing the best I can and let go of the outcome, the end result is almost always subpar which leaves me feeling frustrated, because I know it could have been better had I taken on more responsibility.
Even if your goal is to go out and create value for others, your contribution is proportional to what everyone else can offer. If others with AI will deliver that value cheaper, or if what I am good at can be easily automated, it's getting harder and harder to deliver more value than I consume.
Only if you're stuck in the comparison trap. The point isn't to compete about who can offer more value - the point is simply to offer more value (or create more value) than you consume. That's it.
What others do is actually irrelevant to the argument.
If what you are good at can be easily automated... be curious, grow, and get good at other things you can provide more value in. These are usually adjacent to what you're already good at.
Also, the timeline isn't 'the next few years' or 'the past', but 'your entire life.'
> What others do is actually irrelevant to the argument.
If I used to provide some value X in a day, and that was enough to cover my consumption for the day, but now others are providing the same value X in 5 minutes, it will not be enough to cover my consumption for the day anymore
Sure, but we are not talking about evaluating your contributions daily. Over a lifetime, people find new ways to provide more value. Life is long, and that is how adapting works.
We don't all sit at typewriters anymore either, but former typists found other ways to provide value, I'm certain, and didn't just disappear and become homeless (the vast majority of them, anyway).
Once upon a time, we had armies of secretaries that secretly (well, not so secretly) were the backbone of every institution. We don't have that anymore either, since computers replaced many of them.
Computers were originally people. They also got bested by new technology.
None of those people disappeared or became destitute; they adapted, and they found new ways to create more value. (Or, it's possible some ended up working for rent-seeking corporations, which is a different point)
>Sure, but we are not talking about evaluating your contributions daily. Over a lifetime, people find new ways to provide more value. Life is long, and that is how adapting works.
I can't really take that sentiment to my bank when I default on my mortgage while I retrain though. So although you're correct, across a lifetime, this isn't much of an issue, you're minimising people's very real near-term anxieties here.
I'm not being dismissive or trying to minimize anything, I promise. But most people aren't 'losing their jobs to AI' in the short-term as much as you might think. The layoffs have not been due to AI "taking jobs," but due to companies overhiring during the pandemic and finally having an excuse to lay people off, imho.
There is plenty of time to 'retrain.' You could even do it while you currently have a role. Some people won't be able to; I respect that, and those people will still find jobs.
This is certainly not the first 'period of layoffs' to ever occur, and I am not implying people won't face hard times. They may! But that also won't last forever, and when people get laid off they receive unemployment, which helps in the 'not defaulting on your mortgage' thing. Somehow, people (on average) seem to manage not losing their home every time they get laid off.
The idea that our unemployment rate is about to reach 25-50% in the next 3 years is absurd, imho. (I know you didn't say that, and I'm not trying to construct a strawman. I'm just applying numbers to it because 'very real near-term' is not the phrase I'd use for something that is, in my estimation, still half a decade or more away.)
Is it? If "others with AI" deliver what you consume, it should also make it easier to deliver more than you consume because what you consume becomes cheaper.
Maybe a part of the anxiety is the realization that much if what was delivered by well-paid people before AI is actually not something the very same people want to consume?
That’s fine. New opportunities to provide value will emerge. If software becomes oversupplied, fewer people will enter that field and move to other areas where value is needed. If you only want to add value in the software space, then yes, it may be a problem.
If now only everyone who is talented at crafting software (or any other job that might be replaced), but who is out of a job could magically be as talented at something else, and enjoy doing that other work, then we would have no problem. But one issue is, that often significant time goes into becoming good at what one does. Switching has a very high personal cost in terms of time and having no income for a prolonged time.
Even worse, people are not the same as when they were younger. They may have less ability to learn. Almost certainly they have lower internal motivation and enthusiasm, since their career of choice was just taken from them. Job retraining programs are probably a big hint here. They have a poor track record.
I produce software too but I starting producing food recently. I feel like it really takes edge off my AI-related anxiety. (I also realize I'm more rural than most of HN).
>> If others with AI will deliver that value cheaper...
That's the most interesting thing - in 99.9% they don't.
All their value is negated by lowering code base quality, pushing slop to prod ("but code reviews..." - don't help sorry, unless you spent a long time getting to understand a problem - simply reading a solution gives only false confidence that you understood it - you didn't, not fully). E.g. see all the outages at amazon, cloudflare, etc.
Quick short term wins lead to big longer term losses - and this is already happening.
The issue is - its basically impossible to make decision makers see this as this requires many years of expertise in tech, and it is very not obvious, and sounds like you just don't want to rely on AI to replace you etc etc.
While selling AI is easy - "look! it did this feature in 5 minutes! so much productivity".
The world very much is a Red Queen Race if your country has a program to import Indian tech workers. The only way to leave the Red Queen race in such countries is to abandon your career field and work in food service or retail instead.
Why not become a skilled craftsman and make a much better wage than in food service or retail? Every western country I've ever been in seems to have everlasting shortages of skilled plumbers, electricians and welders and prices have risen to match.
The skilled trades are better than unskilled work. Better than retail or food service, but they certainly aren’t a replacement for white collar jobs.
The median salaries for skilled trades aren’t great. You can make good money if you are willing to work a ton of overtime, or if you can manage to get one of the very limited union spots in the right city. Or if you become a business owner (and accept the corresponding risk) and mostly manage other skilled employees.
It’s also not a viable solution for more than a small percent of the population. Let’s say AI comes along and forces 25% of the white collar workers out of a job, there is only enough room in the skilled trades to handle a tiny fraction of those displaced workers.
That’s ignoring what massive unemployment does to salaries in the trades. And the fact that to make decent money in the trades you need years of working for peanuts first. And if you think age discrimination is a problem in tech, try breaking into the trades as a gray beard. The entry level jobs are built on the assumption that you are 20 years old and can do 12 hours of hard physical labor without needing a week off to recover.
Again it’s not impossible, it’s just not a solution at any kind of scale.
> Let’s say AI comes along and forces 25% of the white collar workers out of a job
Yeah, this is not going to happen. New job positions will open up instead, and white collar workers will be well placed to fill them since supervising an AI agent swarm is not that different from supervising the work of other humans - which is what white collar workers do as their job.
I disagree. Not all white collar workers are managers, and while I do think AI-supervision will be a growing field, it won't generate anywhere close to enough roles to replace how many ICs are going to be displaced. Companies are going to hit capital & scope resource limits (especially as model companies start extracting more value) way before they hire thousands of laid off white collar workers as additional AI supervisors.
I'm equally dubious about other white collar roles filling the gap, but I'm willing to hear out any arguments. To be honest I'm kind of desperate to hear one that would convince me otherwise..
Putting aside the obvious distinction of labor vs office work, are you sure about this? Like, sure as in you have tried to find a stable, well paying job in any of those trades?
The un-politically correct answer is that many college educated people perceive those working in the trades to be socially beneath them. And they often have different opinions on social issues than the typical tradesperson, which is apparently really important if you’re a plumber but not if you work at BigCo.
I think that’s more of an urban/rural divide than anything else. Most of tech workers living in the sticks have plumbers and electricians and contractors in our social circle because that’s who has money in the boonies.
But until you get to the very top of those professions, the work environment is worse in every way.
You’re working 2x as many hours for 1/4 the pay, you go back to work the day after your kid is born. Your knees are just absolutely fucked. It’s in no way an equivalent job. That’s the primary reason tech workers don’t want to do it.
The surest recipe to becoming a sucker and being left with nothing is leaving ownership and properly valuing your contributions to chance rather than respecting essential details. Anyone advising others they should just shrug and ignore it is either a moron or trying to play them.
Workers should generally aim to unionize and seek to capture more of their value through worker-owned co-ops.
Just join the right "communities" or else it might have very different results. A toxic community can exploit you (even if you make more value than you consume).
True, creating value isn't sufficient. But if you're creating value, you don't need that community; that community needs you. That doesn't mean it'll be easy to leave nor that you won't lose a lot by doing so, but it's better than being a leech. Leeches can only survive by finding another victim to suck blood from, and at some point that merry-go-round is going to run out of horsies. Pardon the mixed metaphors.
Philosophically, I agree, but in reality there are so many leeches, who take take take, their whole life, and in the end they are often better off, materialistically than the people, who provided the actual value.
Ah but of course leeches are better off materialistically than the people who provide value! It's almost a tautology. But do you think they're happier?
For example geohot could be vastly richer than he is if he wanted to. He wisely chooses not to, and advises others to do the same.
The problem is, it's not. Communities are messy and complicated, and if you take the slightest whiff of toxicity as a sign to leave a community, you're soon going to find yourself without one.
I know, the comment is meant to be ironic, actually. I was part of quite a few, and some rather large ones (~100 people). I don't leave communities easily, but if I decide to do it, I do it for good. However, I'd rather stay there and be myself.
What I found is, when you act yourself and if the community is not for you, the community silently ousts you. Then you can just collect your bag and leave. No drama, no fight.
However, most of the time, you can at least affect some of the people and motivate them to be better. Some bad people don't know that they are bad and have their hearts at the right place, so it's worth digging them up and let them improve by supporting them.
Different scale (I run 8, not 69) but the same fundamental challenge: what happens when one of those agents fails mid-task?
I hit this with my multi-agent system — 8 agents sharing a JSONL knowledge graph. Parallel writes caused a race condition: two agents read the same file state, both write back the full graph plus their additions, second write silently obliterates the first. Sometimes the file ends up with a half-written JSON line that breaks every subsequent read.
I patched it with an async mutex and atomic writes, but the real lesson was that I was fighting my runtime. On the BEAM, a GenServer processes messages from its mailbox sequentially — there's no concurrent access to serialize because the execution model is already sequential per-process. Supervision trees handle the crash case: child process dies, supervisor restarts it in microseconds, auto-repair runs on init, agents resume with clean state. Each process is ~2KB with its own heap, so you can run thousands with full isolation.
At 69 agents the coordination and fault tolerance problems get significantly harder. The BEAM was designed for exactly this — Ericsson ran millions of concurrent processes on telephone switches with nine nines of uptime using these patterns 40 years ago.
> The trick is not to play zero sum games. This is what I have been saying the whole time. Go create value for others and don’t worry about the returns.
This strategy is highly effective but it's also difficult to tolerate as an ordinary advanced ape. Watching others play less noble games and obtain easier wins can be discouraging over time.
I have found that the less you care about money the easier it is to acquire. Risk aversion, greed and interpersonal drama will kill a good idea way before anything else. I sometimes like to reframe this one as "100% of $0 is still $0".
I care less about receiving the money and more about the implications people have regarding money.
For example, when I'd joined a company I did not get any travel expenses. They expected me to pay the 200 euros a month myself. I'd suggested it and they shrugged it off. The company is now firing people and others are leaving.
The current company just has a default rate of money you get per km. They don't need to, but they know people want this and will ask about it.
Its a small example but it gives you a view of how a company operates
I call this an example of a company putting their money where their mouth is. You can pay lipservice all you want but where will you allocate your (scarce) resource(s)? Resource allocation is a pretty reliable communication channel to discern intent of a company, or a manager.
It’s the same with things like mental health and burnout prevention. You can either have a good work life balance through the year and good management and all that or you can have some consultant come throw a PowerPoint at your peons and a $5 voucher to some BS “health” app and call it a day. One is hard and effective and the other cheap and useless
They keep resources (money) at zero by spending them frequently unless they have something more expensive and more urgent to buy.
They are greedy because they want to pay the same amount (or less if possible) for better units (or upgrade them), which is why technology can be more urgent than creating more units.
They are very risk averse, but don't look like it. The more talented a player is, the more risky some of his decisions or actions may appear, but they're not riskier when you take talent into account. That being said, they do sometimes make very bold moves, even in tournaments, because they think the opponnent is not going to expect it.
> I have found that the less you care about money the easier it is to acquire.
That sounds cool but hasn't been my experience at all. I used to care about money, and used to earn well. These days I care less about money (which I can afford to, precisely because I used to care about money) and earn an order of magnitude less.
> This strategy is highly effective but it's also difficult to tolerate as an ordinary advanced ape. Watching others play less noble games and obtain easier wins can be discouraging over time.
A noble man that spends all his time jealous of the things the men without scruples have is not so much far from doing what they did. It's also what the men that did it before him told themselves "why play the right game if everyone else doesn't".
Disagree. You can still get fucking angry at how they’re capable of fooling others because of the skewed incentives we built in our capitalistic society
Of course you can, you're just way closer to being them. If you're in positions to take decisions that prevent others from doing it, do it without getting mad, actually improve things. If you're not, your getting mad will just make you more likely to join them later on. The cliche version is "hate consumes you".
"Every time a (whaling ship crew, police force, oil executive, etc) gets angry at protestors and sprays them with (water cannons, rubber bullets, lawsuits), they are more likely to join them!"
Unfortunately you're so far from the point that I don't think it's worth explaining. But the wisdom I shared is not mine, it exists for thousands of years. People have known for a long time it's useless to spend too long worrying about things you can't change, and that they should focus on those they can. And that bitterness is not going to help you. Those are the only assertions I'm making.
If you want to live bitter about how broken the world is instead of focusing on improving the things you actually can change that's up to you.
Stoicism must be the most misconstrued and misunderstood philosophical framework ever. It's just so good for the people in power, and Silicon Valley seems to have eaten it up perfectly and spit out a version of it that is quintessentially functional to convince people that questioning power is useless.
That is not what I said. You seem to assume people have no ability to change anything. I said people should focus on the things they can change.
> Disagree. You can still get fucking angry at how they’re capable of fooling others because of the skewed incentives we built in our capitalistic society
This is what I replied to. You cannot change that other people want to fool others. You can decide to fool others though. You can decide how you operate under a system you disagree with, and your contribution will help change it, to larger or smaller degrees. Being actually internally angry about "capitalism" day to day is completely useless though. Go be the economic agent you think more people should be. Work for someone with morals instead of maximize salary. Move to a country more similar to your values, so many things can be done than "be angry at capitalism".
I also don't see why being bitter and angry is a synonym to "questioning power" to you. You can think about things you disagree without getting angry presumably.
Funnily enough I totally agree with you in principle. Though I believe we are witnessing a constant erosion of these alternatives constantly and organically at the hand of the owner class. What you say assumes that the solutions you are mentioning are still viable.
Let’s say I agree and decide to join USaid to do good. Elon fucking Musk comes in, guts it, indirectly causes thousands to lose help and die.
My answer to this according to this frame should be “oh well, he would have done it anyway, can’t change that. Won’t help me being angry at the massive twat, so I’ll just jog on then”?
If you're a random worker of a huge organization and it gets bought or co-opted, yes you should jog on. Go help someone else that hasn't been co-opted.
This is why even though I'm generally a progressive I'm against unions. The solution to bad owners is everyone quitting their company. This was not feasible in a town with a single factory but is very feasible today. Quit working for bad people and bad people will change or become powerless. Prolong the ability for them to keep workers and they will keep being exactly as they are.
Different scale for me, but the same core problem: what happens when one agent fails mid-task?
I hit this with 8 agents sharing a JSONL knowledge graph. Parallel writes caused a race: two agents read the same state, both wrote back a full graph, and the second silently overwrote the first. I patched it with an async mutex and atomic writes, but the real lesson was that I was fighting my runtime.
On the BEAM, a GenServer processes its mailbox sequentially, so this class of shared-state bug largely disappears. Supervision trees also give you the part agent demos usually skip: when something crashes at 3am, it comes back clean instead of corrupting the rest of the system.
That ended up being the more important property than raw agent count.
> If you don’t use this new stupid AI thing you will fall behind. If you haven’t totally updated your workflow you are worth 0.
When I see this on any social platform, that is a sign that a VC / investor already invested or likely over-invested in said product and is manipulating emotions to shill their portfolio companies.
This is a tired tactic repeated and recycled tens of thousands of times over and over again and the first sense is to ignore them.
> That said, if you have a job where you create complexity for others, you will be found out. The days of rent seekers are coming to an end. But not because there will be no more rent seeking, it’s because rent seeking is a 0 sum game and you will lose at it to bigger players.
This is why many here are realizing the uncomfortable truth about why complexity over simplicity was celebrated. Of course job security.
But it turns out that the low hanging fruit at those companies that added close to no value LLMs were enough to achieve "AGI" internally; (meaning layoffs in this case).
The jobs of knowledge workers will still be there, but the big money just went into data centers (and not overpaying for more knowledge workers).
This post feels a bit ideological in nature. There are recurring processes at organizations to assess someone's fit in a given role. Generally when someone is no longer performing as expected, they're given time to correct their ways or retrain. If the organization has no system in place, then it really falls on the organization. I wonder if the author overestimates the amount of people who really want to be in a role they're not good at.
Most of what's getting "automated" was never really work, it was headcount that existed because nobody had a good reason to cut it yet. AI gave the reason..
To refer back to the trite business book section - making something new is a Blue Ocean Strategy approach. Fighting for existing market share is a bloodied Red Ocean approach that Thiel called “competition is for losers”. So both benevolent and be greedy approaches recommend the same. Make a new puddle for everyone to swim in and you can focus on empathy instead of defense.
> it will continue to improve, but it won’t “go recursive” or whatever the claim is. It’s always been recursive.
I suspect "going recursive" often colloquially means that AI systems achieve their exponential growth without human software engineers in the mix. This is a moment whose sudden apparent nearness does justify some of the ramping rhetoric, in my opinion.
I mean at this point, for that to happen it definitely isn't a matter of intelligence (it can fix errors later and learn from them), it's only a matter of memory and proper harness. Once memory it's solved for good, then recursive self-improvement is inevitable.
Once all the problems are solved we will be there. Sounds a lot like zeno's paradox. We might be closer than ever but still as far from the goal as ever.
I like reading optimistic posts and I hadn't hear the term Red Queens Race before. Now I understand it comes from Alice In Wonderland while she runs but never moves. The whole website has great little thought snippets. The author is upfront about repeating themselves. That's great, so do I.
I don’t quite get the amount of supposed subtext that others see in this piece, so the flippant attitudes here are off putting. Geohotz has already commented here that people are putting words into his mouth.
I agree with what is being said: AI will consolidate otherwise nonsensical jobs/roles/companies into fewer (probably more profitable?) ones, so if there’s a time to jump ship from one of these (assuming worst case scenarios), do it while you’re employed and you can land somewhere else that’s hopefully more stable.
This to me is a fairly no-nonsense piece over all. AI itself and tools like LLM are damn good though, limitations aside. We get to do a lot of things we haven’t had time to do before.
Literally everyone working for a wage is creating more value for others than they consume. The problem is the rent seekers are capturing that value. This is a crucial part geohot is missing. What people often don't think about and they should is that when you are employed for a wage by someone, you are the creditor and the employer is the debtor. Why? Because you work for say 2 weeks, and THEN they pay you. That whole time working you are crediting the employer and they are in debt to YOU. Think about how crazy this is. You the creditor must do what your debtor tells you. Maybe we don't think about it because it's too painful.
Under heaven all can see beauty as beauty only because there is ugliness.
All can know good as good only because there is evil.
Therefore having and not having arise together.
Difficult and easy complement each other.
Long and short contrast each other:
High and low rest upon each other;
Voice and sound harmonize each other;
Front and back follow one another.
Therefore the sage goes about doing nothing, teaching no-talking.
The ten thousand things rise and fall without cease,
Creating, yet not possessing.
Working, yet not taking credit.
Work is done, then forgotten.
Therefore it lasts forever.
There are zero-sum games you can't realistically escape. They're really common. Credentials is a zero-sum game. Political power, influence of all sorts, are zero sum games: if you have more of it, someone else has less. Land ownership is basically zero sum, too.
All of those are only zero-sum if you pick a conserved metric. Land ownership is zero-sum if measured in square meters. But say someone buys up land that is parched, dead, and empty. They use it by planting moisture-retaining crops and windbreaks and growing food, or running a business of benefit to the community. Now overall everyone is a little better off, despite 0 square meters being created.
Influence is even more so -- it's common to have situations where nobody is truly paying attention to anyone else. The people with good ideas can't get any traction, and the whole organization just spins in circles, lurching from one externally-imposed crisis to the next. If the people who gain influence use that influence to promote others who are worth paying attention to (and thus they gain influence), everyone benefits. But if you measure that in terms of how many minutes each person gets to speak at the All Hands, it's zero-sum.
Yes, although we do measure it in square meters (or acres, or tatami mats).
Is there such a thing as "partially zero-sum"? I mean, to express how, unless you get really creative in difficult ways, the supply of land is under pressure due to other people taking all the currently useful parts of it, such as the parts on your island and not underwater.
Yes, but in practice land-ownership is only zero sum in places like Europe where every square-kilometer has 300 years of documented ownership etc, or other high-density areas.
The Asia, Africa & the Americas have so much unused space that isn't as inhospitable as central Australia
Where in Asia do you have in mind? A few things I know off hand. Sri Lanka has a higher population density than Britain, Japan's is much higher than that, and Java has nearly the population of Russia in an area smaller than England (just England, not Britain or the UK). India and China are big, but have huge populations.
There is lots of "unused space" in places like Alaska or Siberia or deserts or mountains, but land is not a fungible commodity. Unused space is unused for a reason. In practice, almost all ownership of land is a zero sum game.
I'm saying they're not common. Those games you listed are either negative or positive sum. It's like if you draw a random number from a uniform distribution between [-1,1], you're almost certainly not going to get 0. When people say "zero-sum" they use it as a short-hand for "negative-sum", which is fine for casual speaking I guess, because the intended meaning does get across.
What about the important ones you're not escaping?
To be a bit specific: if you're currently in education, you almost certainly have to play many zero sum games. Yes, education can be a positive thing in itself, but only one of you is going to be best in class. Only a limited number of you will get your papers into that prestigious congress. And while the knowledge may hopefully be useful in itself, the credentials you got in getting it will be less valuable the more people have them.
Then you're off into the housing market. Can more houses be built? Sure. Can we build dikes to claim land from the oceans? Sure. All that is true, but it doesn't help you here and now when you need a place to live - then you're in a game with everyone else who needs a home right now, and if you get one, that's one someone else doesn't get.
Then you have your home, and someone is planning to expand the local almost-unused airport to suddenly take a lot of heavy transport air planes. The noise will impact you a lot. You'd like to influence politics, to call off these plans or at least demand some mitigation, but then you're in a game with others who want to influence politics. Sure, maybe there's a happy compromise to be found, but often there's not. If there isn't, then your ability to put pressure on the decision makers to defend your interests, is going to come at the direct expense of the people wanting an expansion of the airport. Or more likely the other way around.
My point is that yes, it sucks, but often we can't quit the rat race, and often there are conflicts of interest which can't be papered over. It comes off as too easy to, as this author does, say that we can just choose to play different games.
1. Build tools/libraries that empower superior execution performance. If you can execute faster than others you have more potential free time than them. This is a form of compound interest. I do this for myself but my output is not exclusive to myself.
2. Be operational. Create products that are always more durable than what is trendy, but when something does break return a resolution as rapidly as possible, provided excellent regression testing. Be constantly healthy, healing once injuries are found, and constantly aware of new injuries.
I find most people cannot do those two things. Most people cannot measure things and a great many people fear novelty.
This is exactly what manipulators/value extractors want you to think.
Case in point: how many here have heard of Mick Ronson?
Few perhaps. However most have heard of David Bowie.
See, Ronson was silently creating value for Bowie. Didn’t even get credited although songs like Life On Mars are what they are thanks to his contribution.
Mick was creating value while everyone one else was getting rich.
The whole world is obsessed with openclaw. Some companies are now even evaluating their employees' built agents, the tokens consumed, and the money spent on AI. It's really gotten out of hand.
I think the idea is that in the future, everyone will need a philosophy degree to go along with whatever business they will work in. It’s no longer going to be about “I know this skill, tell me what you want me to do,” but will be about “I know how we can solve these problems with this skill.”
If that stops being the limiting factor, then we’ll be in a post-scarcity world.
> The trick is not to play zero sum games. This is what I have been saying the whole time. Go create value for others and don’t worry about the returns. If you create more value than you consume, you are welcome in any well operating community.
Reminds me of Manfred Macx' attitude in the novel Accelerando by Charlie Stross
As others have said, it's a very optimistic view that can be infuriating to read when you are struggling to pay your bills.
I'd also argue it's not very effecicient : we are at our best when we have deadlines and clear targets to reach, and making money to pay the bills can be a very motivating one to stop procrastinating !
> we are at our best when we have deadlines and clear targets to reach
I'd argue we are at our best when those deadlines and clear targets are intrinsic rather than extrinsic, and that intrinsic motivation of that sort is actually more efficient than extrinsic, as it keeps you going much longer.
But yes, that's not always possible and depends greatly on your circumstances.
However, it is often much more possible than people allow themselves to think.
I think the author might argue, that simply becoming more efficient at creating a rent-seeking mechanism is not beneficial. No matter how well motivated you are to improve your zero-sum game skills, it's still zero-sum.
The rest of the comments here are really not passing the vibe check, but I’m glad to see a post like this. The message is true not just in AI or software dev but across all aspects of life. Give more than you take. Provide value.
Well, it must all start with a precise definition of "value" first, and then proceed to propose a method of lossless conversion of different kinds of values. Is a bottle of water less valueable in a desert than a luxury sedan?
Why does HN take this guy seriously? OK, he got pacman running on a PS3. Great. Remember the time he stood up on a stage discussing the path to Level 5 autonomous driving? Comma.ai actually produces a barely-adequate lane keeping system for obsolete cars. Remember fixing Twitter search in 12 weeks? This guy is a total charlatan.
On the question of whether Hotz knows what AI can or cannot do, the answer is demonstrably "no".
At the cost of being negative and miserable the whole time? If you integrate over time, being proven right or pleasantly surprised at the end doesn't make up for having been in the red for the duration.
Building tools and services to reduce hassle and friction for others is great. However, what often happens is that you end up creating and building a moat around that hassle. Think about how companies like TurboTax lobby the government to not build electronic tax filing stuff.
Cory Doctorow explains the dynamics well in Enshittification. First they turn against their users, then their business partners, then their employees. The layoffs you are seeing are just stage 3 enshittification. If you work at a company like this, my advice is to quit ASAP. At least then you leave on your own terms.
Indeed! He specifically cites Yanis Varoufakiss, dubbing this technofeudalism. If I may quote Doctorow a bit:
>Varoufakis defines capitalism as a system designed to preference profit over rent.
[snip]
>The feudal era wasn't defined by the absence of profits--rather, what made feudalism "feudal" was the triumph of rent over profits. When the interest of rentiers conflicted with the aspirations of capitalists, the rentiers won. Likewise, the defining characteristic of the capitalist era was not the abolition of rents, but rather the triumph of profits. When capitalism's philosopher-theorists lionized "free markets," they didn't mean "markets that were free from regulation," they meant "markets that were free from rents."
[snip]
>This is Varoufakiss technofeudalism exemplified. It's an economic system in which the majority of value is being captured by people who own stuff, at the expense of people who do stuff.... The fight between technofeudalism and technocapitalism is a fight over whether the landlord or the café owner takes the value that's created by the barista.
i'm fairly certain Cory Doctorow does not understand the economics of Enshittification.
companies subsidise their products so that exploration of these products is more feasible due to lower initial costs for the end consumers. the initial consumers don't pay the full price but they are borne by the later consumers once the exploration is done and they have knowledge about that market and business.
Cory Doctorow also probably confuses democratisation and enshittifaction - its usually the case that products get cheaper by also marginally reducing the quality. we get cheap goods from China but that's not enshittification - that's just efficiency. as a consumer I'm happy I have the option of paying low prices for products.
i wouldn't take this person too seriously because it looks like they don't understand the larger picture
What are you talking about. Cory literally coined the term to describe this phenomena. He is not confused by the idea of cheaper products with wider appeal. He takes issue with vendor lock-in that is weaponized first against the end-user, then against paying customers, and finally against investors themselves. This is first and foremost a criticism of online products and platforms, not mass-produced gadgets from China.
Do you think e.g. the AI/LLM boom is all rent seeking? Do you think there's no positive value for the world on the recently announced e.g. MacBook Neo and that it's purely a monopolistic activity? Those are 2 clear recent examples of big players making massive benefits for the world, and I'm okay if they get X% of that value as company valuation.
Not at all. OpenAI / Anthropic are producing tons of surplus value right now! Not to mention how great the Chinese open source LLMs are. And Apple's hardware division has always been fine.
Apple's 30% tax for payments in apps is the ultimate rent seeking example though. Want to install your own apps, lol you can't. And if big AI companies follow in the steps of Google/Facebook it's bad for everyone. Let's recognize it and prevent it from happening this time.
It's an 8GB RAM 256GB SSD laptop with a lower spec'd 6-core chip for $599 USD. Seems overhyped to me, PCs have done that for a while, just not as elegantly. Admittedly it probably has far better battery life than a PC, so that's a genuine advantage.
In general, it's kind of the difference between having a sharp axe vs a dull axe.
Though in the particular case of the MacBook Neo, I'm not sure whether we're talking about sharper or duller. Depends on the metric you're using, I guess.
The Neo is supposed to be the budget version. I think MacOS is a decent computing platform for some engineering and creative endeavors -- if one more college kid gets access to it for cheaper I say it's a positive
Macbook Neo is just another laptop. There is nothing "massive benefits for the world" in the context you are trying to put it. And doesn't Apple take close to a third in 'rent' for anything on their platform?
The bar isn't massive benefits for the world, the MacBook Neo is great! If there was a new company that builds MacBook Neos, that's a great company. They build something real and sell it for more than it costs to make, no strings attached.
The problem with Apple comes down to the App Store, the forced 30%, and all the apps that just don't get built cause of Apple. This is rent seeking, and this is evil.
If you don't want a MacBook Neo, don't buy one and it doesn't affect your life. But the App Store affects your life whether you own an iPhone or not. It affects the direction of the world. And that's where the rent seeking problem is.
Unlike profit-seeking, which creates value, rent-seeking redistributes existing resources, often through lobbying for subsidies, tariffs, or favorable regulations, causing economic inefficiency and higher prices.
So geohot's argument is that Anthropic, for example, who want to regulate AI (presumably favorably for themselves) are such an example. I don't actually think I agree, but I agree that the behavior looks similar on the surface.
You misunderstood. All geohot is saying is the same thing Scott Galloway constantly says - your job is to create surplus value. Provide more value than you take, over your lifetime, not over any specific one period, either.
The argument is that if you do that, returns will naturally come your way.
The issue is that many people never provide surplus value at all; some can't, and that is obviously completely acceptable (people who are disabled, have medical conditions, or who for some other reason cannot). But those who are able and choose not to provide surplus value are who he's talking about.
You may not agree, and that's okay, but that's the argument.
I wish that argument was trivially true. Yet we see tons of disadvantaged people working the real tough jobs helping the elderly or sick and they are getting precious little in return.
And to a lesser degree, I have been doing nothing but providing value. All my projects are free/libre, yet returns have not come my way at all. In fact people who could make returns come my way, for example by offering me a job that I am clearly well suited for, refuse to take a look at these projects.
Perhaps the argument is also about non-financial returns, and things like friendships, but I don't feel especially well connected either, even though I try to help anyone I can help in the areas I am active in.
I don't think the argument matches reality, unfortunately.
The "real tough jobs" pay little because the marginal job of that kind does not really create that much value. That in turn happens because the most disadvantaged tend to crowd into these jobs, to the neglect of other, more value-creating activities - yet another issue that might be handily addressed by UBI.
Yet these were the "essential workers" during the pandemic. Not the VCs, not the hedge fund managers, not the industrialists or bankers or rich housewives.
And all they got for their efforts were applauds.
Reality is that without their work all our societies would have failed and fallen.
Almost any common folks agrees that for example nurses aren't paid enough.
The real issue is that our "valuation" scheme is controlled by the wealthy not by the people and the only metric is what makes the rich richer.
Phew, I am having a real hard time agreeing with you there. I mean, just imagine what would happen, if those social and tough jobs were not performed by people dedicated specifically to doing those jobs. Then we would all have to take care of our family's elderly and that can easily turn into a full time job itself. Let just one relative have Alzheimers or they for some reason cannot move any longer, or even less drastic conditions, that still require you to watch over them, and you will have all hands full taking care of them. This is the reason, why in many societies we decided to outsource this to people whose sole job it is to take care of other people.
Or take nurses for example. You really think they provide low value? Tell me more, when you are seeing a hospital from the inside at some point. Yet they are not paid much.
That's why I stated that the marginal job is what sets the reward. We actually have a lot more people wanting to do these jobs than we reasonably have a use for. Your mention of hospital nursing is actually a case in point: actual Registered Nurses are quite scarce, often do highly valuable, specialized work, and get paid a lot.
What on earth are you talking about? In the US (which seems to be the context in question), Actual Registered Nurses™ are not by any means "scarce" and in fact make up the clear majority of all nurses. Nor do they get "paid a lot" compared to the demands of their jobs, especially considering this is a country that throws the same salaries at people for the mighty skill of writing JavaScript for a SaaS.
That's not what he's saying. At a company level he's saying that if they make more profit than they add value they have an indefensible business model and will eventually lose to bigger players.
At a personal level you can live your life similarly, add value where you can. You can do that by joining an organization that adds value as well.
All these feel good articles are very ideal in nature, I feel. Not to be the doomsayer, but without a solid backup of resources (be it money, power or some such thing), I find it hard to imagine to be this 'careless' towards returns. World indeed feels like a Red Queen race.
A couple of other people have expressed similar sentiments here, and I think it's the truth. You have to be in a position to give before you can sustain it reliably and/or reap the benefits from it.
Often though, this position is highly subjective and mental in nature. A homeless man could willingly give his food away, and still somehow be fine with that, if he believes that things will be fine regardless somehow (perhaps he has an alternative source of food, or sincerely doesn't think that skipping food once will set him back forever). At the other hand, someone with a difficult and tedious job that pays well may not feel like they have the time or energy to give without necessarily receiving anything in return, even though they may objectively be in a much better overall position for it.
I guess altruism necessarily requires some other essential basic needs to be in abundance first before it can overflow.
couldnt agree more with the author!
just will try "If you create more value than you consume, you are welcome in any well operating community." to be "equal value"
"There’s people who built billion dollars companies by orchestrating 37 agents this morning AND YOU JUST SAT THERE AND ATE BREAKFAST LIKE A PLEB!"
In Europe we like to sit there and eat breakfast like a pleb. After enjoying that, we build a million Euros company. Maybe or maybe not. Who cares if the breakfast is good.
I've always found something profoundly deceiving about all these "just create value posts", as if absolutely everyone could simply by some hard work actually create significant value for others.
The barrier to being able to add any value along the supply chain is shriking daily, meaning that very few people can actually add value.
The people that have managed to get on top of the system by these mean rarely aknowledge that their methods don't scale, which is a terribly irresponsible and ultimately narcissistic way to use their ideological influence.
If you give advice to a group, it should either scale to most of the group or aknowledge up front it's exceptionalistic.
Great advice if you want to be old and poor. Yes, there's a chance it works out because you're that good, but there's a chance it doesn't. This doesn't mean do the opposite and only worry about your returns, but strike a balance. The world we live in is not in general a bunch of isolated people in a meritocracy, connections and relationships within your workplace play a huge role. Politics exist. I know a lot of asshats that are highly successful even though pretty useless. Don't be that person, but don't be there for everyone and empty handed in the end.
Better advice would be stay hungry, stay curious, keep learning.
A more conspiracy minded version of myself might suggest there’s an active attempt to break the politically active middle class. Subtle changes in messaging that have been happening over the past few years from business owners and politicians seem to suggest that the future will involve masses of poverty. Gone are the days of “hard work” and “meritocracy” and they have been replaced by beef liver and romanticization of peasantry
> If you have a job like that, or work at a company like that, the sooner you quit the better your outcome will be.
AI will render your job to be rent seeking. Like self driving cars will automate away truck drivers - do you not think they need to be laid off because of AI?
> Like self driving cars will automate away truck drivers - do you not think they need to be laid off because of AI?
geohot is talking about AI has its limitation and that it won't truly replace the human yet. Truck drivers and some people who contribute net positive value are not rent seekers at the moment.
AI could render our jobs to be rent seeking, we don't know when.
We have unions actively opposing self driving cars mainly to protect their own jobs.
In fact I think it’s much more common for a company to lay off because of real ai impact than anything else
To be mean, I’d say no—those zero-sum games are always 'positive' for the players, because the people actually foot pay the bill aren't even at the table.
Come on, we live in a globalized reality. Those insulated by the 'Dollar Illusion' don’t even realize that the true costs are being extracted from the rest of the world. These so-called zero-sum games are nothing but a sophisticated machinery of power, meticulously designed to obfuscate the truth.
But those words are just too cynical; it doesn't really make any sense.
Of course, "exposure" and "influence" are mostly zero-sum games of their own. These folks aren't really creating any more value than others, so it makes sense that they aren't 'paid' all that much.
Not everyone knows who geohot is and even if they do they may not see the url handle. They may (like me) think why is a glorified shower thought tweet on top of HN.
They may not know that this dude was an anti-masker (with nuance) for example. This could really make them decide not to even spend too much time thinking about the passage which in theory is profound for 10 seconds but no further.
As much as ad hominem attacks are not great approaches, the one scenario I feel it's justified is in cases like this.
Masks didn't work for people needing an immediate cure, but it was never that, it always was a multiplier, and even an multiplier with only 30% efficiency would translate to 4x reduction in spread through 4 levels.
And that reduction was there to give healthcare workers a chance to not be overwhelmed as they were for a large part of the initial pandemic.
Public health recommendations aren’t medical advice though. The advice agencies give is given to everyone and so has to take things like supply chains and the economy into consideration before making recommendations.
I might be misremembering, but I think the WHO claimed this at some point?
It was obvious nonsense, and did not comfort me as I watched an avoidable catastrophe become, day by day, an unavoidable one; politicians caring more about pacifying the populace with platitudes than about taking measures to render SARS-CoV-2 extinct in the wild – measures which would have been several orders of magnitude cheaper than the extended pandemic lockdowns, disabilities and trauma, loss of life, and now a new disabling endemic disease we're going to have to fight the hard way, for centuries, until it can finally go the way of smallpox.
There was an extremely brief period where public health advice discouraged the general population from masking. This was because there was a huge undersupply for medical workers and because we hadn't fully figured out whether covid aerosolized mere weeks into the pandemic.
Once we had a bit more information in a rapidly evolving situation public health advice switched to recommending masks and stayed that way for years.
We cannot possibly expect public health advice to get everything right immediately during a once-in-a-century pandemic and this error should definitely not be used as a general "wow public health officials are dumb idiots or engaged in a malicious conspiracy", as this error is often used.
There was indeed a huge undersupply for medical workers. The appropriate response from public health officials should've been something like "surgical masks help protect others, and right now, we need to protect hospital patients", not "we want to keep masks available in hospitals where they're needed, because they're important, so let's tell people they're not important to make sure they're available". This is the kind of plan that would be used as an example of Adults Are Useless in a children's novel (ref: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AdultsAreUseless): it was never going to not backfire. (Does it even count as backfiring if you point the gun at your foot, and lean down to watch it go bang?) Institutional dysfunction can produce decisions that no individual would ever author, but there's a reason the Evil Overlord List has #12:
> One of my advisors will be an average five-year-old child. Any flaws in my plan that he is able to spot will be corrected before implementation.
And… it's SARS-CoV-2. Of course it aerosolises. The "we hadn't fully figured out" was sheer incompetence (see doi:10.1080/02786826.2024.2387985); just like the "we aren't sure whether it's reached our jurisdiction yet, so be vigilant", "oh lots people are showing symptoms", "actually turns out it reached us 3 weeks ago and is now endemic, haha oops" pattern we saw playing out in country after country, region after region, while open source intelligence collated on LessWrong obviously showed what the governments apparently could not see until tens of days too late. "Paranoid" early lockdowns could've lasted two weeks, allowed us to identify who was affected, and then allowed us to give them top-of-the-line isolated care while they recovered, and while the rest of the region got back to doing an economy. Instead, COVID-19 is still claiming new victims today.
Australia managed it, and everyone could've copied that, but they didn't. China could have managed it right at the start, and saved the world, if their accountability culture hadn't favoured a cover-up. (Their belated attempts to pursue a zero-COVID strategy were not particularly effective once it was a global pandemic and multiple strains were circulating, because it turns out you can't persuade people into not being ill; and sealing residential buildings is neither necessary nor sufficient contact tracing / isolation.) Zero-COVID would've been feasible as a global strategy, even starting as late as February 2020, if not for all the politicised bullshit. (No, "don't kill your neighbours by giving them a novel respiratory virus while all the hospitals are full" isn't authoritarianism. Sensible precautions are not setting a bad precedent, because it's a conditional precedent: if we were to wipe out the disease, there would no longer be a reason for those measures. In fact, the cryptographers figured out how to do privacy-preserving contact tracing, and shipped the protocol very quickly, so that the best available system was inherently anti-authoritarian.)
While I wouldn't use the phrase "dumb idiots", public health officials are, largely, responsible for long-term policy decisions, not rapid response. (If a response to a seasonal respiratory disease fails, you've usually got 8 months to put together a better one.) They had had little practice making the snap decisions, and they almost invariably made bad ones when it mattered. Replacing soap with diluted alcohol gel at handwashing stations, for example, is stupidity. Soapy water is one of the most effective anti-coronavirus measures disinfectants there is. A roughly 70% alcohol solution is a close second. (There are viruses that are not denatured by soap, for which alcohol is a much better disinfectant: I can only imagine that people got confused.) 30% alcohol solution is basically useless. Alcohol gel is useful because it's portable, but it's not as good for removing SARS-CoV-2 as washing your hands with soap and water.
So many resources were used (and entire supply chains were established!) ensuring that every surface is wiped, even though it's a respiratory disease and surfaces were not a major transmission vector; but very few resources were employed to ensure sufficient ventilation which, again, respiratory disease. It does not take a genius to make the link between "it infects your air holes" and "we should ventilate or filter the air". (Yes, I witnessed many people closing windows using the disinfectant cloth as a glove, to avoid touching the handle, right before filling the room with occupants.)
We were not prepared for the pandemic that happened, and I will condemn that, because are we going to do any better next time? Have we put measures in place to ensure that accurate information about the disease, including appropriate disease-specific hygiene measures, are rapidly disseminated? Have we ensured that international authorities and the populaces will calmly overreact, because overreaction is cheap and allows each patient to receive specialist treatment and maybe lets us wipe out the disease entirely? From where I'm standing, the WHO is weaker than ever, we've traumatised a generation to the point they'll resist any attempt to impose another lockdown (even though acting early means it might only last a few weeks, or even a few days!), and we've gained a political playbook for profiting from pandemic denialism.
A once-in-a-century pandemic should be expected to happen once in a century. Allocate a hundred people around the world whose jobs it is to know how to deal with that, and then listen to them if the rare event shows up. It's not conceptually difficult. That this is difficult for us in practice is damning.
The US is completely fucked if another pandemic hits within the next ~20 years. Or at least until a large percentage of the anti-vaxers created in the covid pandemic age out of the population. Having a decent response when half the country is going to be on team virus is not possible.
> Have we put measures in place to ensure that accurate information about the disease, including appropriate disease-specific hygiene measures, are rapidly disseminated.
This is irrelevant if half the country has the through process of "goverment says it therefore it is fake news bill gates microchip conspiracy".
The title is >Create value for others and don’t worry about the returns.
Isn't being an anti-masker the opposite of this viewpoint? Literally saying, I only care about the returns for myself, even if creates negative value for others.
It's so we can definitively identify this person as a Nazi, as persona non grata, so we can feel better about ourselves while we break quarantine and contravene public health orders to get clandestine haircuts and attend illegal cross-household parties.
So you must be careful to do everything they tell you.
But do not do what they do, for they do not practice
what they preach. They tie up heavy, cumbersome loads
and put them on other people’s shoulders, but they
themselves are not willing to lift a finger to move
them.
Everything they do is done for people to see: They make
their phylacteries wide and the tassels on their
garments long; [...]
Full stop disagree. This is not what HN is for, and should never be for. I have spent hours on IRC with geohot back in the late 2000s / early 2010s mind you, I never liked him, but this is not what HN is for, and not what it should ever become. You can do all of that on reddit, let's not ruin a good rare slice of the internet with meaningless bickering.
Ad hominem attacks are never good approaches. They're irrational in nature. Ad hominem is one of the first fallacies taught in a critical thinking class.
Ad hominems are formal fallacies. They are not valid deductive reasoning.
But people basically never use valid deductive reasoning for anything. Using available evidence to make predictions about things and act on those predictions is fine. If somebody has a history of poor thought or writing and then I encounter more of their thoughts or writing it is not unreasonable to say "this new material is likely to be poor and I don't need to spend time on it."
If somebody says "hey do you want to see Transformers 7", responding "I did not like Transformers 1-6 so I'll pass" is fine even if it is not deductive proof that you won't like Transformers 7.
if ad hominem attacks were of no value, humans wouldn't have evolved the strong tendency to engage in them.
they are not proofs in logic, hence the fallacy, but that does not mean they are irrational. it's irrational to think that human discourse can be capture by logic.
Surgical masks don't stop you from getting Covid. That was never what they were for: they were to reduce the viral load you exposed others to, between when you got infected and when you noticed that you were infected. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surgical_mask#Function.
Some cloth masks can (when dry) also trap small particulates through electrostatic interactions, although they are less effective as a mechanical filter than surgical masks; and many washing methods destroy this effect.
The distinction is important! The mechanism by which surgical masks prevent you from getting COVID-19 is peer pressure: it's important for people to know this, so they know how to protect themselves. (And there are fitted masks that protect the wearer: there was just a shortage of them, because despite all the warnings we were not prepared for a pandemic.)
The distinction does matter, because by not wearing a mask, instead of indicating that you don't care about your own safety, you're indicating that you don't care about anybody else's.
It was more nuanced than that and importantly, "Anti-masker" as a derogatory statement was about "This person is literally unwilling to do anything at all that doesn't pay off for them personally" because a goddamn mask is such a simple thing to do, and they just couldn't handle it, because it was someone else telling them to do something and some people just cannot function when that happens.
People lost their damn minds because "Hey could you maybe take a single small step to ensure you don't sneeze on produce" was protest worthy.
I do not believe someone saying "Masks made out of T-Shirts don't work well" or "Surgical masks aren't as effective as real N95 masks" are an "Anti-masker".
It was about vice-signalling. All the people who get pissy about masks do plenty of things for their "health" that have zero science behind them.
These people often did other things like hiding or downplaying any symptoms, and choosing to go to events while sick, and were often basically superspreaders.
This was all well understood like 25 years ago when WoW did that blood plague thing and people put effort into spreading it as much as possible. We've seen this with other diseases including ones that have no real controversy or political angle. Some people are just that insistent about doing everything they can to make the world a worse place.
But seriously, I think the level of discourse has gone down considerably on HN in the last few years. I know people always say this in their forum but I think it's true.
For instance, you'll see a post about GPT. Top comments are often "I use Claude", completely irrelevant. And then when [political thing happens] you get these passive-aggressive submissions with a lot of upvotes "how to switch to Claude". It's all just so exhausting. Constantly this moral grand-standing. Here is an example:
> I switched not because I thought Claude was better at doing the things I want. I switched because I have come to believe OpenAI are a bad actor and I do not want to support them in any way. I’m pretty sure they would allow AGI to be used for truly evil purposes, and the events of this week have only convinced me further.
I almost posted this exact comment. You're not alone in thinking HN has changed for the worse in recent years.
I get that it's just a reflection of cultural change and (over)reactions to anything adding friction. But for a forum dedicated to the "hacker" lifestyle, it's disappointing to see so much gatekeeping and FUD. I really wish this audience could start swinging back towards a response style that contains nuance and recognizes nuance.
I find myself opening this site less and less each week.
It feels like the quality of reddit collapsed over the last decade and a lot of the reddit style posting has come over here. Especially the examples above. To be fair both the good and the bad.
The upvoting for political tribalism (whole political spectrum) is so truly mind bogglingly unintelligent and unoriginal. Its just brings the bar down.
Did he struck a nerve? All I'm seeing here are attacks on his person rather than discussing his post, which is not even that controversial, just some common sense stuff.
I haven't yet read what the post submitted here is about, and personally I already have the same opinion as the comment you replied to. So I suspect they just wanted to comment about that rather than caring about this specific post, to remind people not to make the mistake of assuming that someone being well known doesn't automatically mean they always know what they're talking about.
In fairness to geohot, who exactly is an expert on what's going to happen to the labour markets as a result of AI? Whose take should I be weighing more heavily than this one?
Or should people just not bother sharing their opinions on this matter? Since it's impossible to predict the future.
Nobody can predict the future. But there are people whose job it is to deeply study the ways that various technologies have changed labor markets. Plenty of historians of science out there who can draw connections to and distinctions from the past.
As someone who actually used to IRC with him back in the day... (man... I'm starting to feel old lol) he's kind of arrogant in his demeanor. He embodies the true spirit of a hacker in the sense of "Hacker" as in Hacker News, but he gets under everyone's skin over the years. This eventually takes a toll on people, and it mounts up.
GeoHot could cure cancer, not put it in the blog post title, somewhere near the bottom, and all of HN would miss it and nobody would ever get the life saving treatment they could have gotten because of blind hatred.
As much as I disliked my interactions with him, I would rather always take someone on a per-event basis, I see his new blog post for what it is and go from there. If it's trash, its trash, otherwise, I'll acknowledge it.
I don't want HN to be another reddit where we blindly attack people.
This trope also contains a trap, however. There have been major insights from people stepping outside their lane. Physicists went into econ and built a whole subfield called econophysics, with Pareto and Mandelbrot among them. Mathematicians have transformed biology with population genetics, which led scientists to predict how genes spread through populations. Or the SIR model for how infections spread. Hidden Markov models lead to gene finding. Closer to home, we have exceptional programmers making giant piles of money in finance, with Simons and his Medallion Fund returning some 66% before fees. And then there's Bitcoin.
Many of the advances in biology in the middle of the 20th century were also helped along by physicists who switched to biology, often inspired by Schrodinger's What is Life? (1946). The list includes Francis Crick, Maurice Wilkins, and (coming from physical chemistry) Rosalind Franklin.
How is this "context"? There is no information here, just a snarky opinion about the person posting the blog, with zero relevance to the posted content.
From what I gather the maxxer/maxxing suffix is young Gen Z slang for hyper fixation. Looksmaxxing is being obsessed with your looks. Jestermaxxing would then be an outrageous jester or clown for the sake of it? Maybe it's a synonym for rage-baiting? I'll return to guarding my lawn.
1) You are not engaging with the content of the post at all. I would not mind if you actually articulated why you found this particular take so asinine/cringeworthy. But you don't.
2) You're unnecessarily uncharitable (the blog footer already reads "A home for poorly researched ideas that I find myself repeating a lot anyway"; there's no need to be so snarky).
Exactly the same on the other side though. If we believed that Dario Amodei or Sam Altman really knew how The Economy in its entirety worked, which is what they’re constantly pretending to do, then we should give them the central planning keys to the kingdom and declare communism tomorrow. I’m not being entirely facetious.
As a 2018 Tesla owner I strongly disagree with the idea that Elon's got a track record of success. The Model Y was their last successful product and it's just a stretched Model 3. FSD is not there. Robotaxi is an embarrassment. Cybertruck failed to deliver the gigacasted exoskeleton and shipped at double the original price point. Tesla has lost its way completely. (Also, Twitter has lost users and revenue ever since he got involved.)
I don't launch rockets into space, don't want a housekeeping robot, don't have a Twitter account, don't do ketamine, and have never been laid off from a government job, so I can't speak to any of those things which Elon has involved himself with more recently.
My personal experience with Elon's promises is through the Model 3 which I do own, and essentially none of his promises for it have materialized. It hasn't morphed into a revenue-generating taxi which drives around strangers at night; it can't be summoned from across town (or even across a parking lot); it can't even safely drive itself without oversight, which was a goal only "months away" in 2019.
You mean the tele-operated "autonomous Robots" ? Also, I'm waiting for >10 years now for his (really!) self-driving cars he promised would be just about 2 years away - every 2 years.
SpaceX is what gives him leverage but the success of the reusable rockets are the engineers behind it - he's just the ketamine-driven hype-man that drives the stock via publicity now.
What exactly would that be a winning track record in - as near as I can tell, his actual track record is in buying companies with an already-successful product team, and managing not to run them into the ground for a while?
You have got to be kidding me, you can dislike someone without being this wrong. Hes literally the richest man in the world, started the largest space delivery company in the planet and has brought extreme returns for his investors in every endeavor he’s undertook.
> literally the richest man in the world... extreme returns for his investors
This isn't really a benchmark for effectiveness at anything beyond making money.
I don't think anyone would dispute that he has an eye for investments (helped along by a healthy dose of the ol' silver spoon), not to mention a certain flair for convincing Uncle Sam to pick up the tab (i.e. a significant part of Tesla's growth relied on federal EV subsidies, and NASA heavily buying SpaceX launch capacity).
Effectively helping elect a dictator who is in love with fossil fuels undercuts at lot of his "wins". Never mind the Nazi saluting, fraudulent advertising, or bypassing safety regulations.
A foreign national buying one of the largest American media platforms and turning it into a right-wing propaganda machine should probably concern you at least somewhat.
This post absolutely reeks with the privilege of wealth. For the vast majority of people on this earth, the "Returns" from their labor matter a lot more to them than some vaunted, abstract ideals, as those ideals won't put food on the table or a roof over their children's heads.
The bottom line is that the majority of people alive today have to take whatever deal they are given in a sense, as they absolutely do not have the "Luxury" of not "Playing zero sum games."
Must be nice to be rich enough to get to spout philosophical BS and not worry how you're going to pay for groceries, but most people alive these days are a lot closer to being homeless than they are to being millionaires, and quitting a job that pays their bills so they can "Provide value to a community" and not worry about how they are going to get paid just isn't even a remotely viable option.
> This is what I have been saying the whole time. Go create value for others and don’t worry about the returns.
No. This is the time to abandon naive dogooderism.
The capitalists said that they don’t need labor any more. Fine. Prepare for that potentiality by not giving jack shit away for free. That includes permissively licensed open source software. But it goes way beyond that.
In the long term maybe we can get rid of the labor-employee relation so that people who do honest work don’t have to worry about their work becoming automated. Let the ones who engage in dishonest pseudo-work (capital accumulation) worry about their pseudo-productivity becoming null and void.
100% agree with geohot's point on creating value for others and playing the positive-sum game. It is the way. Just a small reminder that sometimes we could worry about the return a tiny bit, as we need returns to verify positive-sum value creation and to scale it.
You've constructed a strawman; geohot never argued you shouldn't ever receive returns. He argued you shouldn't worry about them, which is not the same thing. His argument hinges on the idea that creating surplus value will bring you returns, but worrying about what those returns are is pointless; those returns, as you say, could be monetary, happiness, fulfillment, power, etc.
And I would argue Elon (himself) stopped creating surplus value quite some time ago; some of his companies still do (Neuralink, SpaceX) but companies like Tesla and Boring are explicitly rent-seeking at this point. Tesla disrupts traditional, rent-seeking dealership models, but it simultaneously utilizes lobbying to secure favorable policies and economic advantages, with the goal being to block out other upstarts and competitors from competing.
And no, I do not count either the non-working Optimus or robotaxi as 'surplus value.'
>Take Elon Musk — tremendous positive-sum deals with people everywhere, and all together, that's what got him to the top.
Ah yes, "tremendous" positive-sum deals like:
>Musk admitted to his biographer Ashlee Vance that Hyperloop was all about trying to get legislators to cancel plans for high-speed rail in California—even though he had no plans to build it.
> Hyperloop was all about trying to get legislators to cancel plans
Sorry, I don't know the full story behind Hyperloop. But I really doubt he is trying to play a zero-sum or negative-sum game as the article hinted.
Setting aside all the disputes — the deals he made with people are positive-sum. Nobody is forced to buy a Tesla, or invest in, or work for SpaceX.
And in my personal view, all the article brings is deconstructive criticism — which does not fit my tastes. Maybe because I believe the world doesn't owe anyone anything. In fact, to make money, most of the time you have to play a positive-sum game and bring value to others. There is no shame in seeking profit — there is glory in it, if it comes through a positive-sum game.
Those who complain — they can always reject the deal and choose something else. And even better, go offer or support better products in the market and help the best one win.
> In fact, to make money, you have to play a positive-sum game and bring value to others.
That is simply untrue; the opposite is the literal definition of rent-seeking behavior, which produces gobs of money, but provides no (or very little, at best) new value to others.
> the opposite is the literal definition of rent-seeking behavior, which produces gobs of money, but provides no (or very little, at best) new value to others.
Rent-seeking is real, and you're right that it can be very profitable — while creating very little value for others. But even so, it remains the best available option when nobody else steps up to offer something better in free markets.
There are always two sides to any deal — the deal maker and the taker. The more competition on the maker side, the more value the taker can get. And the more takers demand real value, the less room rent-seeking behavior has to survive.
Agreed on all points; and I think that's precisely what this post argues people should do.
> The days of rent seekers are coming to an end. But not because there will be no more rent seeking, it’s because rent seeking is a 0 sum game and you will lose at it to bigger players. If you have a job like that, or work at a company like that, the sooner you quit the better your outcome will be. This is the real driver of the layoffs, the big players consolidating the rent seeking to them.
This reads as a typical anti hype article that attracts the people that are fed up with reality. But this framework never works because it's detached from current reality. AI is a big thing and it will eat most jobs weather you call it stupid or you like it.
As is often the case, the title is a bit misleading and implies a universality that I don’t think the author intended.
He is specifically talking about AI, and saying (in my understanding) that you shouldn’t worry too much about whether your specific thing will be overwritten by AI, as long as you focus on actually creating true, real value with your work.
I agree with that completely and can see it happening in my own field (marketing/tech writing.)
Yes, theoretically AI can replace every writer and marketer. The functionality is there.
No, this isn’t actually happening, because what’s mattered all along isn’t a generic marketing skill set; but the mental effort to actually provide value. No one wants to read a blog post by an AI because it’s boring, and the writers that actually have something of value in their writing are doing just fine.
That still seems super naive, at least if its extended to software engineering. Companies already treat software engineers like disposable cogs to be burnt out and discarded. I don't see how AI will improve that.
I think if you’re legitimately providing value to the company, you aren’t disposable.
If you are but still get canned, then you’re just dealing with irrational management, and that predates AI.
The problem isn’t whether or not companies need us— it’s about how many of us they need (demand), and how many of us there are (supply), because that determines our value. Companies pay people what they’ll work for, not based on how much they contribute to the bottom line; in economics, paying more than you have to for anything, including labor, is the irrational path. A steady, high demand for software developers has kept salaries high because that’s the only way they could get capable people to work for them.
The higher-end of markets aren’t immune to this. As the demand for lower-level workers drops, people will upskill trying to move up rather than get lopped off. Since there are fewer positions the further up the hierarchy you get, you don’t need a huge increase in supply to affect demand. That’s when you start seeing the most experienced, highest-earning people getting shit-canned because someone is willing to do a good-enough version of their role for 2/3 their sizable salary.
This can all happen without a single entire role being completely automated out of existence.
Software is already fantastically profitable. Productive SaaS companies right now collect ~500k in revenue per employee.
If what you describe happens (33% cut to salaries) then the bar for your own startup to be worth it is suddenly lower.
If large companies don’t pay us good salaries then why would we not go and build better competitors without the legacy and dead weight?
Go for it. I got out of that ridiculous ouroboro of an industry years ago. That might be great for you, but surely you can’t imagine VC funding enough startups to save the software labor market? The tech workforce is giant. Do you think there are tens or hundreds of thousands of ways to make unique new software products where even a single digit percentage are commercially viable? Software isn’t fungible: it needs to solve specific problems that people have, and do it well enough to deal with the hassle of switching software.
This isn’t an individual problem— it’s an industry-wide problem.
(I pulled the 2/3 number out of a hat to illustrate the point. I put exactly zero analysis into that.)
> If what you describe happens (33% cut to salaries) then the bar for your own startup to be worth it is suddenly lower.
That sounds like a material reduction in quality of life. Running a startup seems like it would entail way more hours worked and way more pressure, even if you were making better money. IMHO, that's not a good trade off.
> Running a startup seems like it would entail way more hours worked and way more pressure, even if you were making better money.
It is also ignoring scalability issues in the sense that if a large number of people now working regular jobs in tech are forced down this path, the amount of competition among these startups would be astronomical which would result is downward pressure on both the ability to fundraise and the ability to generate revenue for your particular startup.
Impossible for me to believe each individual startup founder would find some profitable niche to fit into.
Business can remain irrational longer than you can remain financially solvent.
The value-cost ratio is all that matters to a company. Yes, that implies that they are assuming all variations of value are achievable by AI which isn’t true and probably won’t ever be. But they do think that, nearly all of them. Because they don’t understand value. This has been true since the very first corporation. And that’s the problem. They will see a totally cheesed and squeezed metric telling them AI can reach 40% of the value of a “ ___ engineer “ at 10% of the cost and lay off engineers until shit starts exploding. And the stock market will strongly reward that decision.
>irrational management, and that predates AI
actually, it's AI that will be doing the predating
> I think if you’re legitimately providing value to the company, you aren’t disposable.
Businesses want worker fungibility and to reduce bus favor from having single point of failures. That usually, but not always, flies in the face of irreplaceability.
In a perfect world, yes. In most companies, finding good talent is a much harder problem than having too much of it.
I was and I did. Now there's nobody on the team who can fulfil something we promised to our biggest customer a few months ago. Shrug not my problem because I don't work there.
> I think if you’re legitimately providing value to the company, you aren’t disposable.
Employees in knowledge work don’t generate constant value at all times. And companies want value at all times (that needs to be ever increasing). You’re not disposable at all point in time if you’re providing value at that point in time.
Companies shutdown profitable divisions/products because they aren't profitable enough. 'Providing value' is determined at a whim and by metrics out of your control.
Only quibble that in some areas like the games industry, being disposable (qua susceptibility to layoffs) was closer to the status quo well before AI came around.
the goalposts for providing value are changing faster than ever
AI isn't an adequate replacement for experienced software engineers, that is true.
But employers think it is, and are falling for the hype and are affecting engineers left and right regardless.
Whether I'm wrong or they're wrong is immaterial.
They're still replacing SWEs with AI.
>Companies already treat software engineers like disposable cogs to be burnt out and discarded.
I'm sorry but this is simply false. Nothing has really changed on the ground for SWEs. Nothing at all. Compensation is still sky high. Interviews are still the same. Career progression is the same. Everything takes the same amount of time. It's all business as usual for software engineering as a profession. AI is just one more tool in the toolkit; some devs use it, some don't. No engineering org has fallen for any hype in a meaningful way. Ultimately SWE teams on the frontline are busy doing what they always do, mostly in the way that they've always been doing.
The only thing that's changed in a remarkable way is how disconnected the rhetoric on social media is from ground reality. Anyone telling you AI is even replacing 5% of SWEs in the industry is a jobless hack.
> I'm sorry but this is simply false. Nothing has really changed on the ground for SWEs. Nothing at all. Compensation is still sky high. Interviews are still the same. Career progression is the same. Everything takes the same amount of time.
That's not remotely what I'm hearing or seeing from those who are on the job market.
The tech job market hasn't been "easy" for many years (basically since 2015 except for a ~2 year boom from mid 2020 to mid 2022). People always find different things to attribute the difficulty to. I remember way back in the day when bootcamps were the boogeyman.
Try being a translator today. You can provide as much value as you want, you won't get a job anymore.
The demand for authorised translators (approved in country X to correctly translate into country X’s native language from a particular language) has been steadily growing with globalisation and international trade. Contracts, court documents, financial records, medical records, birth and death certificates, technical reports: all of these must be translated and stamped by someone with the authority to do so, someone the government has confirmed to be competent.
The professional guilds are sounding the alarms, because there aren’t enough translators qualifying.
That's just factually untrue though. And there are high profile examples I would expect any well read person to know.
And we're at the point where you have to essentially choose the factually wrong point of view so there's no worth in even listing the counter examples.
Something similar happened with web search.
There used to be many site aggregators curated by people for different categories - kind of like sub-reddits. At the same time, there were purely algorithmic search engines (yahoo, google, etc.).
The algorithmic approach won, but aggregators still exist.
I think that the friction lies somewhere in between what you’re observing and what ~safety1st addresses below.
The author has a specific issue in mind. Today the author chooses joy and refuses to evoke the woe and worries of the audience thus omitting their concerns; the audience fails to inherit the author’s optimism, likely due to some kind of asymmetry in sociopolitical outlook and status between the two parties.
HN is succumbing to the discordant trends in common discourse found elsewhere online. Demographic changes may have something to do with this.
I don’t think it’s demographic changes as much as it is fear of displacement.
Until 2 years ago, software engineering appeared to be an ideal career: strong demand for talent combined with high salaries. But with the productivity gains promised (and often achieved) with coding agents, people are understandably afraid. And people who are afraid take defensive measures: denial, anger, excessive criticism, etc. AI becomes, in some sense, “the enemy.”
I think that better explains the shift in overall tone.
I mean it's a title. Titles are under no obligation to condense the entire content of the article into one sentence. People who want to comment on the article should read it first, and then write in good faith.
The problem lies in the HN comments which have taken that title and interpreted it through the lens of unrelated political arguments: class warfare, anti-offshoring, etc. etc. I don't think any title would be immune from these people. They're just angry because the Internet has its hooks in their brain, and they're going to post about it.
His points are good and people would be wise to read the article and take them to heart. His key points are:
1) If you're a rent seeker, current trends will probably see you lose out to a bigger and more powerful rent seeker. He's probably right about that.
2) Creating more value than you consume is a great form of self-preservation, when you do this no one wants to get rid of you.
None of it's political. It's just good advice for life. I hereby forbid the masses from responding to these points with political rage bait.
HN has better moderation than a lot of places but from my vantage point the entire Internet is sinking into this garbage - we're more aware of the problem these days, at least, but everything and everywhere is more consumed by political hot takes than ever before.
If there was tech that forced commenters to read the article before they could comment on it - now THAT would be a valuable innovation!
> 1) If you're a rent seeker, current trends will probably see you lose out to a bigger and more powerful rent seeker. He's probably right about that.
> 2) Creating more value than you consume is a great form of self-preservation, when you do this no one wants to get rid of you.
> None of it's political. It's just good advice for life. I hereby forbid the masses from responding to these points with political rage bait.
They’re both tautologies. No new or useful info to glean. I didn’t need some highly intelligent security researcher to explain these things that are explained by intuition by anyone with an above room temp IQ.
There must surely be more to this, and given how many of his other recent blogs are a mix of political rant and a screed against da haterz. I suspect it’s a lot more political on his side than you think.
> If there was tech that forced commenters to read the article before they could comment on it - now THAT would be a valuable innovation!
lol, gotta love people who whine about HN quality and then just write pointless crybaby paragraphs like this. If you can’t beat em, join em I guess.
I _do_ believe the author implied universality on purpose.
That’s also close to the YC motto: “make something people want”.
Or as Paul Graham puts it: be good. https://paulgraham.com/good.html
> No one wants to read a blog post by an AI because it’s boring
Nah. Humans can be boring too. No one wants to consume AI art in any form because art isn't just about what it is, but also how it came to be. We care about art and history because those things involved humans. And we like understanding the takes of our fellow humans. We don't care about the take of a statistical model on the topics of art and creativity.
The problem is that with generative AI, I have no means of protecting my work from being stolen.
It does not matter what license I put up. It doesn't even matter if I make it publicly available or not. LLMs have been trained on pirated material, they don't even have the decency to buy a copy. Even if I show my project to no one and just have a private repo on Github the code might still be used to train LLMs.
Your GPL licensed library? Yeah, we used claude to rewrite it and released it under MIT.
Now that wouldn't be so bad. One could argue copyright has long held back progress in certain areas. The problem is, the rules only apply one way. The rent seeking oligarchs of the tech industry can steal everything but I can't.
They can just eat the cost of a lawsuit, I can't. They can just decide to make a special deal with Disney to use their copyrighted material, I can't.
Sure the days of free markets capitalism are long gone. A few monopolists controlling the market has long been the norm. But AI makes it even worse. So much worse.
AI will be the straw that breaks the camel's back on copyright Imo. We've known since 90s Napster music piracy that copyright is broken in the information age, and its just a flimsy set of unprincipled edicts meant to protect those with power and money.
Nowadays AI companies have more money and lawyers than most movie studios, so
I predict that there will be a billion dollar company/ies (probably exist even now in stealth mode), whose business model will be to slopfork existing software - after all AI has proven to be very capable at that.
With trillions of dollars both supporting and opposing this business model, something will probably change in some way wrt copyright, and hopefully in a way that's an improvement to the average person.
> hopefully in a way that's an improvement to the average person.
Given the current political and economic environment, I wish I had the sort of optimism to believe any changes in the law would benefit the average person.
> Your GPL licensed library? Yeah, we used claude to rewrite it and released it under MIT.
Good. "You" made the world a better place at the expense of "me", the rent-seeking GPL author. I can go suck it if nobody wants my equivalent product with a worse license anymore. How do people not get this? If AI enables somebody to reproduce somebody else's hard labor much more cheaply, then it should do so instead of holding everyone else to ransom just because some self-entitled programmer wants to prevent competition when he's falling behind the market.
If you're a programmer, you have no moral right to complain about that because it's also the whole point of computer software. To do things more cheaply - ie to make somebody else's work worthless.
> a private repo on Github
Delete your github repos and operate your own gitolite instance. Feed vibecode to GitHub so the LLMs coprophagically train on their own slop.
That's only a half measure if AI companies ruthlessly consume anything they can get. Microsoft might ignore repo visibility, they can still consume it. OpenAI may have a backdoor by nature of its apps/harnesses running on dev machines that do have copies of your project.
I guess you're safe with a privately self hosted project that you only share with people who don't have any AI and won't reshare it.
Then again, if you even distribute only binaries then in theory the AI could copy those and reverse engineer them, or just mutate the binaries.
> Feed vibecode to GitHub so the LLMs coprophagically train on their own slop.
Someone needs to build an easy to run AI agent that does that automatically, maybe with strategically bad choices (like complex no-op tests, bad algorithms, introduction of security vulnerabilities described as fixing them). I'd run it. Maybe it could even star/interact with other slop repos, so low activity couldn't be used as a filter.
You will get laid off but you won't if you create value and you will create value if you don't care about money and it will go recursive but it won't go recursive because there are limits. It won't change anything but it will change everything.
No one knows what he is actually saying (see comments) but at least he managed to compress the entire discourse on AI impact into a blog post.
I liked how it read. Not as a perfectly thought out post but more an ongoing conversation.
These are confusing times for engineers as the automators can now automate themselves away at even greater speed. Reminding ourselves to play positive sum games seems relevant.
The cake is too small to divide with humans and AI. We all feel that. Time to make more cakes :)
>You will get laid off but you won't if you create value
From my experience this isnt in the slightest bit true.
The professional managerial class not only sucks at identifying who creates value, they often feel threatened by those who do and try to knock them down a peg, disenfranchise them or commoditize them somehow.
You might assume that that the profit incentive would override this tendency towards shredding economic value but it doesnt, because of the principal-agent problem. The PMC always prioritizes their power within the organization over the organization's maximization of profit.
At least half of the hype about AI is about trying to gaslight developers into believing that theyre now worthless so that they can be more easily exploited by the PMC.
It was the same thing back when outsourcing to Actual Indians was in fashion in the 2000s.
…and a concise one at that. Which is more impressive given the (general) penchant to say less with more.
LSD is quite a thing.
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Most western jobs are higher up the value chain, although it might not feel like it a software engineer or finance bro generates more value than a manufacturer or farmer.
More specifically, they generate value for people who are already relatively rich (often vastly so), and a consequence of declining marginal utility—which applies to money the same as any good— is that the it takes less actual utility value when you do that to produce any given amount of monetary value.
AI is just another realm for corporate rentseeking.
Do we really think these billions of debt generatjon is anything else?
301.9K Followers
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Is this guy just paying bots to upvote and promote his stuff?
He's kinda famous, he cracked the iPhone and PS3 as a teenager.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Hotz
He deletes posts after they are no longer relevant. Given how people dig dirt up on people and take them out of context long after that context is forgotten, more people should do that (or delete social media altogether).
This is a trap for engineers.
If you don't worry about the returns, you won't get any.
There are circumstances where that is fine. Be sure you're in one of them first.
Yeah, but the order is still
1. create value, then
2. capture some of that created value.
Some people want to skip step 1.
Some bigco jobs have felt that way to me: I don't know if I'm actually creating anything valuable, but I'm getting paid. I think the people who are most anxious right now are the ones who suspect they're not really creating anything of real-world value, and they're terrified that they're about to stop getting paid as well.
It's often way easier to capture value than to get compensated for creating it.
It's definitely indicative of an unhealthy organization or society when this happens but generally I've still found this to be the norm.
Indeed, maybe one of the reasons why free market capitalism functions is because it has a built in check (bankruptcy) against this natural human organizational tendency.
I think a large part of why software devs were so well compensated in the last decade was because we were helping build the systems which made the capture of value more efficient (whether from taxi drivers, smbs, property rentals or whatever), not because we were facilitating its creation.
It's a glib framing but people often simplify rent-seeking to maximizing returns far beyond value.
Geohot seems to be telling people to do the opposite. Maximise value and don't consider returns.
Is it hyperbolic yes? Is it perfectly acceptable opinion to have and post on your own blog? Yes.
I think sometimes we all get caught in the I don't agree with them entirely. get him!! Online.
Maybe in the first 10 years of your career, after that you totally have the skills needed to create value from nothing - something no value extracting actor will ever be able to learn.
Might take a while but the milk surely becomes butter. His point is valid, maybe your pov is a bit clouded because his baseline is quite high (fame, money) but its not that different at a lower baseline. You bring 1.x to the world that fights over a deemed finite set with 0.x tools.
Who creates value in the art market? Is it the artist who creates the work? Or the dealer who persuades the buyers that the work has value? As a builder I’m attracted to the fantasy that I can create value with my bare hands just by writing code (or telling the AI to write the code), without needing any of those horrible slimy people in suits to build a business around it. Rock n roll man. If you build it, they will come. Is that the reality though? Or just survival bias based on the fact that a few geeks got lucky during the original dotcom boom when they had no competition from actual businessmen?
Fear not Daniel,
you can create value by preventing damage in the future, this will get rewarded by the ecosystem itself. That's really hard to describe, but you can try simply removing a danger or annoyance in an ecosystem like your hood or local park then be attentive about what will be better in your own life.
Art creates value with measurable 1.9x in my country, its studied and thus gets funding because they know every 100€ funded will create 190€ of economic value. This means if you give an artist 100€ doesn't matter how - the local economy will grow by 190€. Magic? Well it's just many soft factors - higher quality of life leads to more educated and productive people!
Understand these are all tools to make more of WHAT IS ALREADY THERE and has nothing to do with extracting resources and selling them or bartering. I think your dotcom bubble is an extreme with no value for general advice.
Hope this helps. Hang tight!
So you think that engineers that maintain and write the FOSS that runs most of the world IT infrastructure ( Linux, Curl, GIT etc. ) do it for the returns ?
They don't, and as a result most don't get much if any.
For them to survive, they have to have got returns from somewhere - maybe welfare, inheritance, a day job. Someone has to have worried about the returns so they can be free from thinking about it.
And if you don't worry about returns, you will let someone extract it ruthlessly from you, that you contribute millions of value to a company that gives you nothing back. This may be fine to you at some level, but many of the people who you allow to exploit you use the resources they gain as leverage to further their selfish ends, like a certain richest man in the world who helped a certain politician buy an election at the most powerful country in the world.
No, that's exactly parent's point. The premise of the title can be read as "just create value, don't worry about monetizing, things will work out (financially)". Which is invalidated by FOSS
It isn’t. FOSS doesn’t just create value it gives it away for free usually in a not so friendly way to the point entire companies exist to streamline and support projects (eg redhat)
aren't most of them being payed by big corps? Redhat, Google, Microsoft... you name it.
I am pretty sure not most of them. In something like linux, that is the case, but I think there are so many other projects that barely receive financial or any other kind of support
> If you don't worry about the returns, you won't get any.
He was focusing on value, not returns.
That being said, his take is still a dumb take - if you focus on creating value you may not capture any of that value for yourself. If you don't capture that value, someone else certainly will.
The age of creating value for the public good is well and truly over - any value you create for the public good in the form of intellectual output is immediately captured by profit-maximising companies for training your replacement.
It's not just a case of having your value captured by someone else, the AI corps are actually taking your captured value and then using it against you.
Well yeah, business has literally always extracted value from open source software, that’s one of the main benefits of it… (although license violations have been unprecedented with AI)
“Creating value” in open source has never been about capturing value at all, it’s always been about volunteering and giving back, and recognising the unfathomable amount of open-source software that runs the modern world we live in
“Capturing value” is the opposite of this, wall-gardens, proprietary API’s, vendor lock-in, closed-source code… it’s almost antithetical to the idea of open source
> “Creating value” in open source has never been about capturing value at all, it’s always been about volunteering and giving back
I disagree; the GPL has always been transactional. You capture the value in your product by ensuring improvements come back to you. The user "pays" by not being able to close the product off.
> You capture the value in your product by ensuring improvements come back to you. The user "pays" by not being able to close the product off.
If clean-room re-engineering a MIT code base starting from a GPL one is legit, then AI has just made that the status quo for everything.
> If clean-room re-engineering a MIT code base starting from a GPL one is legit, then AI has just made that the status quo for everything.
I agree; this is what I meant by "the value is being captured by someone else".
GPL provides the author with a specific value - you get back improvements. Using AI to launder that IP so that improvements don't have to be upstreamed is effectively capturing the value.
> The age of creating value for the public good is well and truly over
It's not a zero sum game. Someone putting my open-source contributions (for example) in their dataset isn't subtracting value from me, or the rest of society.
I just do my job to the best of my ability. If I can help a colleague I do. I don't expect to get explicitly credited for everything I do.
If my employer can't see or don't care about the value I bring, I simply go to one who values me higher. I refuse to participate in office politics and that kind of BS.
If you are employed, by definition you have outsourced the worries about the return on the value you create to your employer.
This. First, the employer has to worry about the returns from which they draw some money to pay you. And for you to even get paid for doing a job, the company has to fear that you won't do it if you don't get paid - in most cases, it's not from the good of heart, but an implicit or explicit threat made by you or on your behalf by other people.
The current problem is automating yourself out of the job. You creating value compounds but as soon as you’re no longer needed the fruit of that compounded value is cut off from you.
Well if you want to spend your days doing something trivial enough to be automated I guess that might be a concern.
I mean I'm not sitting around doing data entry. If I'm automating something it's not my job it's someone else's. Ad a lot of the time that someone else really has other stuff they'd rather do as well.
This is not necessarily true.
I work on a product, I see sales generated by my work. By me specializing in my role and sales specializing their role we both benefit. Is that outsourcing the the worries? I don’t know, but when we get a client email it’s both product and sales collaborating that resolves it.
There are also co-ops, worker owned companies, etc.
Not necessarily true. If you're employed by e.g. a contracting company or consulting firm, your value to your employer is in #hours_billable because you are their product.
And they, in turn, have outsourced the worries of the value they need you to create onto you!
Not really sure what your point is. The employer is worried about getting good return on their investment in me, I am worried about getting good return on the time I'm investing in the company.
So my interest is that they recognize that I provide value, and pay me accordingly. It's possible that they recognize my value but choose to underpay.
I want them to pay me as much as possible, they want to pay me as little as possible. We reach a compromise, and if a different company offers a better deal I take it. That's their incentive to pay me a competitive salary. Doesn't matter what I say or how well I play office politics, they are most likely going to try to get a bargain and I am most likely going to leave for a better deal because there's always someone willing to pay more.
> Always has been, and if you paid attention in CS class, you know the limits of those things.
I don't remember ever learning a theorem stating that computers cannot surpass humans.
Haha that's not what the post (or the post it links to) says. Every CS student should know there's no free lunch in search and optimization. There's tradeoffs between random search, evolutionary algorithms, and convex optimization. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_free_lunch_in_search_and_op...
There's an AI "smell" to things that are generated. Why is that? Mode collapse is impossible to see from a small number of samples. Are we mode collapsing society? How would we know if we were?
Also, will computers surpass humans has such an implicit bias in it. Have humans surpassed ants? Have ants surpassed rocks? Have jet planes surpassed teletubbies?
I know for a fact StanleyNickels™ have surpassed, nay, exceeded SchruteBucks™
> Every CS student should know there's no free lunch in search and optimization
The no free lunch theorem is so absurdly limited because of the constraints that it's IMO a tautology and fundamentally irrelevant outside of exceptionally tiny areas. You can't have one search algorithm that's better than others on average when searching entirely random things with no structure? 1. Yes, obviously. Nice to have a formulation but it's not exactly a surprise and 2. That's not what we deal with in the real world.
I get what you're saying, but I remember watching teletubbies back in the days with my nephew, and all questions of the form:
Have ____ surpassed teletubbies?
Can always be answered in the affirmative.
I remember P vs NP
It's easy to create value for others and not worry about returns when you have enough money to not worry.
Unfortunately for most people, there's plenty of companies willing to take the returns and leave you paycheck to paycheck. That's literally what they are optimized to do.
I don't even disagree with the ideal, but I think a prerequisite step to this philosophy is UBI.
https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2026/02/27/the-i...
from the same author
Geohot is a smart dude. But here I think he misses the forest for the trees.
He has a point, certainly. But while he is harping about the U part of ubi, he's completely ignoring the B part. UBI is meant to provide some basic income so people don't starve. It's just an optimization of welfare programs where you have a ton of bureaucracy and make people jump through endless hoops and cause them endless amounts of stress (which is known to make people work less, not more). And replace it by just giving all citizens the same amount.
Yes, that's a bit stupid for the people first paying taxes and then getting them right back again minus overhead costs, but if you think about it: that's what happens now too, only less efficient (in the netherlands, that is) so you pay even more overhead.
On top of that comes the other realization: If the current trend of automating everything continues,we'll ultimately end up with (hyperbole) 1 person owning all the machines doing all the work. That 1 person earning all the money, and (in an ideal case) paying his taxes to give everybody else welfare. Which just is the same as UBI.
In a certain way this already happens now. Most not-too-smart people that used to be gainfully employed as laborer somewhere are now on welfare, and the threshold for not-too-smart could go up rather steeply with the current AI trends.
>Yes, that's a bit stupid for the people first paying taxes and then getting them right back again minus overhead costs, but if you think about it: that's what happens now too, only less efficient (in the netherlands, that is) so you pay even more overhead.
I'm not sure this is stupid. I think the people against the negative income tax system are kind of stupid. Like, the best place to apply the welfare rules is where all other complicated rules about income are made: the tax office (IRS). If you decide that for whatever reason you really really want people receiving welfare to be second class citizens, you'd go out of your way and build a separate welfare office, where all the work the tax office is doing gets to be duplicated for no reason other than so you as a working class citizen can pay even more money to be angry at the second class citizens.
Overall, it sounds kind of stupid. You build a bureaucracy that designates people as a special class, so that this special class is difficult to escape from, since if everyone was a continuous recipient of welfare, there would be no second class and "escape" would merely be progression through the simple passage of time.
The dumbest arguments I've seen are extremely cranky and boil down to rich people becoming net beneficiaries of CO2 dividends, because they spent tens of thousands of dollars on EVs, heat pumps, cycling, insulation, solar panels, etc so they can get 100% of an annual 100€ CO2 dividend. Like, giving 100€ to even a single rich person is such a horrific crime, that it's better if everyone else, who actually needs it, should get less than the 100€ even if that reduction will result in hundreds of millions of € being diverted away from people who actually need the money to compensate their CO2 taxes.
>I'm not sure this is stupid
Ok, I meant to say: it feels a bit stupid. I hope the rest of my post show that I actually don't think it's stupid.
The owners of production paying taxes?! Seems unlikely.
Someone needs to make a website explaining why UBI doesn't work conceptually because this comes up over and over again on HN.
You cannot make UBI work from money saved by removing means testing. Even UBI is a welfare scheme and would require significant bureaucratic hoop jumping to check that a person claiming it isn't:
• Dead
• Non-citizen
• Already claiming it under a different name/bank account/etc
• In prison
• Moved abroad
and so on. All that is expensive, and yet the overheads of even existing welfare systems just aren't high compared to the amounts they pay out. Getting rid of means testing doesn't magically make the numbers balance.
Geohot is correct. UBI seems to only appeal to people who don't understand how the economy works. You can't have an economy in which one person earns all the money by definition.
This is a complete non-issue in basically every wealthy country bar potentially the US, all five things you named are already known to the government at all times. They also apply the exact same way to any other scheme, there's nothing new about it.
Quite a few governments have trouble verifying identity reliably. But to the extent they can do it, it's because there are lots of people employed to do so. The UBI thesis outline above is that you can find the money to pay for it by eliminating all those job roles from the government, so you can't use their existence to justify UBI as affordable.
Let's look at other wealthy countries with large economies.
Germany, Japan, UK, France, Italy, Canada, Spain, Australia, South Korea, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Taiwan..
Which of these have trouble verifying identity reliably, to the extent that it would be a meaningful obstacle to UBI?
Even if governments were perfect at ID verification it wouldn't change the argument above, right? Being perfect at verifying UBI eligibility would require a large government infrastructure, just like today, so you can't claim that the U part makes it super cheap to administer.
But no government is close to perfect. Here are some examples for your edification.
The UK doesn't even know how many people are living there, and it's an island. There's no centralized identity scheme and during COVID more people came forward for vaccination in some age bands than theoretically existed at all.
Germany fails at reliably verifying that people who turn up for a language test as part of naturalization are the same people being given citizenship: https://www.infomigrants.net/en/post/69787/germany-police-ar...
All countries struggle with basics like "is the recipient of the welfare dead". Here's a specific case where Italy didn't notice it should stop paying out a state pension (a form of UBI) for years after death, with the fraudster only getting busted when he tried to dress up as his own mother: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/nov/25/italian-man-dr...
Paying out money to dead people is a very common problem. Here's an EU report on all the basic ways countries get defrauded by failing to track basic facts about identities:
https://www.ela.europa.eu/sites/default/files/2025-03/SSC_fi...
"Common fraud and error cases include falsified documents (birth, marriage and death certificates), identity fraud and falsified non-payment certificates"
Even in UBI, there would be a strong expectation that each person only receives it once. But checking stuff like that requires a huge bureaucracy.
>Here's a specific case where Italy didn't notice it should stop paying out a state pension (a form of UBI) for years after death, with the fraudster only getting busted when he tried to dress up as his own mother
I assume you want to stop the state pension as well then?
None of these include a mention of meaningful economic impact.
> Being perfect at verifying UBI eligibility would require a large government infrastructure, just like today, so you can't claim that the U part makes it super cheap to administer.
It's already in place regardless of UBI, so it doesn't add meaningful costs.
Of course it's never going to be perfect, absolutely nothing is. Why even mention that? What matters is the impact of it being imperfect.
Compare it to the impacts of tax evasion, or wage theft, and they'll be completely negligible.
> Even in UBI, there would be a strong expectation that each person only receives it once. But checking stuff like that requires a huge bureaucracy.
Or you issue UBI all at once during the month, and you stamp everyone who receives it with an indelible ink mark that takes longer than a day to wear off; like they do in poor countries to prevent double voting.
It's a solvable problem. The problem is that the "cost of managing welfare" is a small percentage of the cost of welfare, you can't pay for doubling/tripling it by saving 5%.
Most EU countries have national IDs, so the "only receive it once" is a solved problem.
The "still paying dead people" problem exists in the current pension system, so we already have bureaucracy in place to solve that one (yes, it's not 100% accurate, but it works sufficiently well en masse) so no need for new bureaucracy there.
In the UK a lot of that is solved by using the NI number that everyone has to have to work, claim benefits, get a state pension, or pay tax.
For people who are employed it could be done by existing systems already used to calculate tax (which is deducted automatically by employers here so the systems to do calculations exist).
Self-employed people already have to register with HMRC.
For the rest it is a far, far simpler than the requirements of the benefits system and less prone to fraud.
> You cannot make UBI work from money saved by removing means testing.
No one claims it can be made to work using ONLY money saved from means testing. Something like removing means tested benefits together with lowering tax thresholds could work though.
UBI in the form of CO2 dividends works extremely well. Be more creative about the potential applications of the pay out mechanism.
Except a lot of actual, very smart, economists are for UBI or similar arrangements (it's not a settled matter). And geohot might be smart, but he's just a self described hacker.
If we're going to use authority arguments.
I think the problem is that a lot of the proponents are arguing for a level of UBI that is pretty close to the median wage whereas what would be affordable is probably a quarter of that.
I'll come out and get kicked out of communism club to say that I don't support UBI on the basic fact that money is exchanged for goods and services is just so foundational that I can't support UBI. I think everybody should have a roof over their heads and 3 square meals a day, but UBI isn't the way to get there.
I am not aware of any mechanism to ensure that everybody has a roof over their heads and 3 square meals a day besides direct payments to the poor.
Welfare and SNAP may be imperfect, but they seem to be working.
Welfare is a direct payment to the poor and SNAP is very close to that. Work requirements and other administrative hurdles are the primary thing that keeps these programs from truly ensuring that everybody has basic dignity.
> money is exchanged for goods and services is just so foundational
it is in all large societies. That's true. But it is not in most small primitive societies. SO it's not like a law of nature, but more that we haven't found a system that works as well for large groups.
The trouble is that capitalism also has it's problems, and they're getting exacerbated by technological advancements. If you automate everything at a certain point there's just nothing to do for a large part of the population. And at that point the system stops working.
In science fiction we would get the 'post scarcity society', but nobody knows how that should work.
The UBI systems I've seen proposed that just might work are a sort of golden middle between those two. Not that different from the current welfare system we have in NL, but taking out the stress factor and stigma of receiving welfare.
You don't support it on principle or because you don't think it works?
The exchange of money for goods and services is foundational to capitalism, and UBI seems like a divide by zero kind of trick that's isn't going to work out. Let's fire a bunch of people to make the government more efficient with this one neat trick is just the most Republican thing ever.
Well what is then? Respectfully, please have an alternative or otherwise how is this not astroturfing
Astroturfing? If I don't have an alternative, I'm secretly being paid by "them" to tear down UBI? Who would "them" even be? How would that even work?
Anyway, subsidized jobs programs is my answer. Pay people to do jobs. Plant trees! There's so many places that could use some reforesting. There's no shortage of work to do.
I think the whole premise for UBI is that there won’t be any jobs left, jobs to make a living at least.
Guess we'll starve then. Good luck dealing with hundreds of millions of hungry angry people.
The idea you're suggesting here is 19th century era Marxism, and isn't based on historical or economic realities. There has never been a famine caused by new technologies creating unemployment, and food security is much higher now than at any other time in the past.
> There has never been a famine caused by new technologies creating unemployment
That's a bold statement. And depending on how you define famine it might even be true-ish. But I'm quite certain most poor people in the 1920s would disagree with you.
Which is why we got the russian revolution and both world wards at that time. All 3 were partially caused by 19th century industralisation creating an poor, hungry underclass.
It's not particularly bold, it's just a fact. It only seems bold because our society is still flooded with Marx-era propaganda.
Poor people in 1920 would agree with me. We know this because in this era Marxist ideas were already quite old, well known and widespread. He argued for what was effectively a UBI or very generous welfare system under a different name. He predicted the poor would rise up as capitalism drove their wages to zero and "alienated" them, then they'd overthrow it. But Marx became bitterly disappointed in his lifetime when capitalism didn't fail, wages didn't fall to zero and the working classes rejected his call to revolution.
Technological progress hasn't caused famines, it's ended them. What has caused several famines, though, is left wing people reorganizing society via force to solve imagined problems. If you're worried about people not having enough to eat, you should be terrified of a UBI.
As an Irish person, I want you to explain to me how "left wing" the British were when they had us export our food at gunpoint.
You're misinterpreting what I wrote. I didn't say all famines were caused by left wing policies. Obviously historically most were caused by natural disaster, like the Irish potato blight. But when famines have been caused by social change, it wasn't due to the march of technology.
The British never forced anyone in Ireland to export food "at gunpoint".
https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/fo...
"Food security is much higher now than at any other time in the past", huh?
18 million households in the U.S. were food insecure in 2024.
And that's from 2024. How much was oil then?
Now with ICE and tarrifs things are going to hit really hard.
> What do you plan to buy with your free government dollars? Want to buy eggs? Sorry, the egg people stopped making eggs, they are living free on UBI. Want to buy a house? Who built it? Nobody, because they all were getting UBI and didn’t want to build houses anymore. They write poems now. There’s still old houses available, but the price for them has 20xed, well outside of what you can afford.
In my country the people that are producing and selling eggs do it almost for free, they could do something else and get much more money, but they choose to do eggs. My theory is that people choose to do stuff not just because of the money. Narrowing all the interests to just money doesn't capture the complex reality. When you cancel the money thing, you let people choose what to do based on their real ambitions and aspirations, removing the alien interest (money) that skews the world so much that even geohotz got confused.
But then you can end up with a lot of people making what's fun to produce but we have an excess of (waste) and few people filling in to make what's missing (scarcity). Markets aren't perfect but they do help us solve that particular problem.
The topical reply is that those positions aren't paying enough.
However, if we have to pay e.g. miners millions to compete with a high UBI, we trigger a massive wage-price spiral. Since extracted raw materials are the bedrock of the entire supply chain, those costs cascade and multiply, eventually making the finished goods unaffordable for the very people receiving the UBI.
In reality, markets don't solve the scarcity of un-fun labor through magic efficiency. They solve it by leveraging debt, poverty, and an exploitable lower class to keep the foundational costs of society artificially low.
Without this DesperationFloor™, the math of our current commodity-based economy falls apart.
> Since extracted raw materials are the bedrock of the entire supply chain
Extracted raw material is incredibly cheap. Human industry and ingenuity are the real scarce resource, and UBI leverages these to an unprecedented extent. Debt and exploitation are an anti-pattern, even for a capitalist economy; they're deeply antithetical to true industry and creativity.
Also: https://geohot.github.io//blog/jekyll/update/2025/02/19/nobo...
Apparently if we, the poorer ones, win the war of attrition, the problematic ones that own everything will resign to golf. Or something. Getting financial planning from a lottery winner.
> I dream of a day when company valuations halve when I create a GitHub repo. Someday.
Isn't that exactly what Anthropic did to the SaaS sector? Taking the "I can replace you with a very small shell script" line from BOFH lore (except that it was a bunch of SKILLS.md files, not shell scripts) and making it real.
Hard to say. SaaS is dead, long live SaaS.
I think it’s a bad idea for about the same reasons, but that’s assuming we’re implementing it right now in the current economy. If automation means that in the future there’s not much for all these people to do that creates value then it makes sense.
Which of course ignores the obvious point that UBI is all about taking existing resource redistribution and making it less costly and more efficient. Practically all Western countries redistribute income on a massive scale (compared to the default outcomes of a completely free market capitalism) in order to ensure everyone can provide for their basic needs, and that could all be gradually replaced by UBI.
This is broadly in line with OP's suggested ethic "create value for others, don't play zero sum games" since capitalism is based on rewarding those who create the most value, whereas zero-sum games are largely political in nature.
The inefficiency of the bureaucracy of limiting welfare (or charity) to the poor and needy. I don't know, though, maybe giving everybody's money to everybody cancels itself out.
You're giving money to everybody but then anyone who isn't poor and needy has to pay taxes on their income that more than offset the money. It's taking "the bureaucracy of limiting welfare (or charity)" and folding it in with the IRS and the local Department of Revenue.
Capitalism rewards those who CAPTURE the most value, not those who create it. Capitalism at its core is a system of expropriating the value of labor by those with capital who themselves create absolutely nothing.
Capital allocation is a serious job with very real consequences. The decision of how many AI datacenters should be built, to take an an unusually topical example, is one of capital allocation. Central planning is not a viable solution, it has failed everywhere it's been tried.
> Central planning is not a viable solution, it has failed everywhere it's been tried.
Laughs in chinese
(and yes I'm aware they use instances of capitalism. The difference is they have hard checks in place)
You can never just use existing resources as long as those end up in places they're no longer accessible to the market anymore.
Cash just about never sits just around as long as whoever holds onto it has no current need for extremely liquid assets. Like insurances.
I doubt that the ratio of cash that ends up bound up that way to the one that doesn't changes a lot overall.
The real problem to UBI is governments creating income via debt, IMO.
> The real problem to UBI is governments creating income via debt, IMO.
The national debt is just a hidden tax on future generations. You're stealing resources from the future (by selling claims to them in advance, that's what national debt is) and spending them in the present. It's justifiable in extreme cases like a war (or perhaps for massive public investments that can't be funded within the existing budget - which is actually not that common), but really not otherwise.
It's fine if you're leaving something to those future generations. Like a bridge or a dam built to last 100 years.
That's not how that works, because for each unit of debt (loans or negative balances) there is a corresponding unit of credit (bonds or positive balances) in the economy. Hence, mathematically speaking, all debts could be paid off instantly at any point in time.
The reason why the debt keeps growing endlessly is that there is a 0% lower bound on the interest rate, which if you think logically about it, means that debt can only grow, mathematically speaking. This creates the impression that debt is always a future burden that is eternally carried forward as if it was nuclear waste.
If the market interest rate is below zero, either the government and the central bank must intervene to maintain the state of the money system above zero, because that is the only representable state. The government can subsidize the difference between the market interest rate and the money system interest rate clamp by taking on private debt and turning it private. This is particularly evident once private corporations refuse to take on further debt.
However, even if the government stopped the subsidization, you still don't get out of the conundrum. The government is patching the symptom with its cause, which stalls the problem into the future, which is "good" if the cause is considered good and only the symptom is considered bad.
The same way housing is needed for living, money is needed for trading. Similar to housing becoming an investment and therefore no longer being able to be used for its intended purpose, money can face the same fate. When people use money as an investment, it can't be used for trading. Houses sit empty and money sits idle.
It turns out that money is such an integral part of the economy that if there is no money, people can't acquire the goods they need to survive and since there is a monopoly on money systems, you can't just switch to a private provider to perform the trading you need in case the government one fails.
In other words, you either choose between a fully formalized money based economy or subsistence lifestyle with nothing in-between. The difference between the two is so stark, that a failure in the money system might as well be the collapse of all elements of society. From that perspective, it is quite smart to keep kicking the debt can down the road. Meanwhile the person who refuses to kick the can will doom society unless they implement the possibility of negative interest in their money system.
The zero bound on nominal interest rates is not relevant today. (It may be relevant in a deflationary environment where debt or 'safe assets' are essentially needed as a liquidity instrument akin to money, but that all gets hoovered up when interest rates rise.) The U.S. government is paying a whole lot of interest on its national debt bonds not because of a formal constraint, but rather because its bonds would go unsold otherwise, it would be unable to roll over the existing bonds as they expire, and the whole house of cards would collapse. IOW, it's the chickens coming home to roost, and the American taxpayer is paying for it. The alternative is to inflate the debt away by debasing the currency, which is even worse.
I've often thought of state debt as an accruing tax collection deficit. Selling bonds (creating more of this debt) is more politically convenient than raising taxes but it digs a deeper hole and obliges the state to pay interest largely to the same class of people they have failed to tax.
Sounds like a win-win. Rich people win then they double dip and win again
This is like suggesting no business should ever borrow to invest.
If your business can't self-fund the investment, borrowing is justified. But if you're earning revenue that allows you to self-fund, why borrow? You're just incurring extra costs.
I feel like government borrowing sometimes and government borrowing more and more every year and never paying it down until the end of time or more likely bankruptcy are two different things
As long as you keep new borrowing below growth then you can do that indefinitely. The problem is when the next pandemic (or war) comes along you don't have much room to deal with it.
You can do the same with printing money, as long as you do it below growth you can do it indefinitely.
The problem always is that you can't stop and get off the tiger. No country can withstand the shock of a major cut in spending, because the population can't absorb the hit.
Forget UBI and AI. They are distractions. Today it's very unclear that even just existing welfare schemes are sustainable. Political parties can buy votes with welfare and they do, so it's an unstable configuration. Europe is full of countries with this problem.
A good example of a country in a downward spiral towards UBI hell is the UK. Around 25% of the working-age population now claim to be disabled, and around 10% receive disability benefits. Labour have a genius idea for how to fix this: let disabled people try out employment for a bit to see if they like it, whilst keeping their welfare payments. So they're turning disability benefits into UBI by the back door.
The UK can't afford anything even close to this. It can't even afford the theoretically non-universal benefits schemes it has: it has massive government debt and deficits because its economy doesn't generate enough wealth, and its health welfare system (the NHS) experiences Soviet-style shortages all the time.
This has happened despite that we've been mass automating jobs with computers and robots for decades. Chips aren't magic wands that make communism suddenly work. The problems with wealth redistribution are fundamental and will never go away regardless of your level of technology.
If you disagree, fine, but please for the love of God focus on walking before you can run. Drive government deficits to zero whilst keeping growth at US levels, and then talk about more generous welfare schemes.
(you can't magic new money by eliminating means testing either, see my other comment on this thread).
> The UK can't afford anything even close to this. It can't even afford the theoretically non-universal benefits schemes it has: it has massive government debt and deficits because its economy doesn't generate enough wealth,
I'm fairly certain its economy generates more wealth per capita than at any point in the past, and this is the general consensus. If you believe it doesn't, please explain how, as it goes against the commonly held belief.
Much of that wealth is wasted by excess government spending. Same pattern as India, which actually used to be ruled by the UK as a colony - then they became independent but kept all the excess bureaucracy and red tape from their former oppressors.
I didn't say otherwise. It generates more wealth now than in the past and that is still far from sufficient for its government to afford its current levels of welfare spending.
You did imply it, that in the past the same welfare was affordable that now no longer is, because its economy apparently doesn't generate enough wealth.
The UK doesn't have the same welfare as in the past. It's gives out vastly more money for more reasons than it did when the system was new, and it has a far greater proportion of the population receiving it.
Also, the UK's economy stopped growing in 2008.
My family household generates more wealth per capita than any time in it's history, but yet net savings is down. Do you know why? We spend it all on junk that we thin we'll make us happy but actually we become dependent on it.
This is the underlying malaise and no UBI or minimum wage or guaranteed employment will solve it.
The closest we could get would probably be to execute anyone involved in advertising, but that won't go over really well.
Money is a social construct, not some kind of physical quantity subject to conservation laws, and can be and is introduced into the economic system all the time. The real question is really would introducing more money or a UBI cause social disruption by e.g. disrupting price signalling by high inflation or changing incentives to work so less goods and services that people actually value are produced.
One important function of money is allocation of resources, and if a society is bad at allocating resources, it declines.
It is a social construct but if you just print money you get ... inflation. You can't just increase money supply to redistribute wealth without consequences.
Ah, well... TIL to not take anything geohot writes seriously in the future.
^Young readers: The mark of wisdom. Throw out all readings because you dislike one of them.
I may do it too, but I don't think I'd actually ever write it down.
For me its more his attitude that puts me off. He might be intelligent, but his EQ doesnt seem that high. The condescending way he references the "malcolm in the middle"-episode "hot dumb girl" couldve been just the explaination of the "1 dollar = 1 million dollar".
Well, reputation is made by many dimensions. Writing takes like the UBI one is definitely a signal to take into account.
Alternately, he's right and you're wrong.
xkcd://1053
That URN made me chuckle.
He's a privileged startup founder who has 301k followers on X. Who cares what he thinks about UBI, of all things? Also he looks like an ass.
Not necessarily UBI; one just needs an adequate day job. Then the hobby could be creating value with no expectation of any direct return: writing a blog, writing and giving away music, writing open-source software, doing any volunteer work, etc.
There's something more than just an adequate day job (which is perhaps necessary in more ways than just "get the money get the cheddar") - because we can find pages and pages of examples of "well paid" (doctor, lawyer, tech) people who are drowning in debt, living paycheck to paycheck, and perpetually unhappy.
Drowning in debt means the job is inadequate :-\
Paycheck to paycheck is sort of fine, if you can still dedicate the time to your WoW clan, or your music, or your writing, and be happy about that. Well, to your kids, not expecting anything tangible in return.
If the day job expends all motivation, all your energy, and it + the commute eats all your time, then again it's an inadequate job.
I guess then you disagree with the previous blog post, The Insane Stupidity of UBI, which says free money for all just makes prices go up.
Even if I accept that as true, which I do not, the value of money would have to go to zero for that to mean UBI doesn't work.
I think there’s a strong bias towards hacking and cool side projects from the hackernews crowd. But I’m not so sure much of the general population would use their free time afforded by UBI for productive and useful endeavors. At least from my observations there’s a significant portion of the population that uses their free time to be idle and veg in front of the TV and/or get wasted. My concern with UBI, even if it was financially tenable as it would underwrite a whole lot of that - including the more criminal, antisocial sub-population.
Wouldn't convincing the criminal part of the population to just stay home be a net win? Policing and prisons are both notably more expensive then welfare.
I wouldn't be satisfied with my share of UBI. I'd want yours, too.
People would probably still steal but without real world data we can only speculate on whether crime would increase or decrease. My bet is still on decrease.
> when you have enough money to not worry. Unfortunately for most people ... paycheck to paycheck
This is some truth to this argument, but the frequency with which it's brought out as an excuse to just dismiss any argument one doesn't like is too high in North America.
Simply bashing every argument with, "but some people are in a bad situation" doesn't really further discussion all that much.
Did you RTA? The author is predicting that those employees (at least in software dev) will get laid off; so they should get out and find some way to create real value (or make some other change) for their own sake, because they’re about to lose even “paycheck to paycheck”. You should debate this instead, because if true, it makes your point irrelevant.
As long as the global population is still rising, they will be carnage between competitions. The author and many others might be foresee the (near) future where the global population start declining, maybe then, we can do things just because we can.
Population growth or size has nothing to do.
No matter how much resources a society has, natural selection pushes everyone to keep trying hard to get more, as those that don't end up without resources.
In a society, the fastest way to get resources is to provide something in exchange to other members of the society. The most common thing we have to exchange for resources is work.
From those two things we can see that no matter what society you have or how wealthy it is, people will work as much as they can, or else they get behind in the rat race.
Not just if you already have enough money, but it's easy to say if you're as smart as Geohot. For those who aren't, (I'm not), creating that kind of value isn't just hard, it's impossible!
Hey, don't dismiss your intelligence like that!
Haha, thanks! I like to think I'm smart (sometimes), just not at Geohot's level.
I see your post as a pretty strong refutation of OP's premise.
Unless for those who can afford not worrying about money, of course.
Indeed, what is worse is expectation created by rich people that whatever little value you did create should be given away for free! I see it frequently on HN with product launches where people are demanding product to be opensource with liberal license which effectively means it should be free.
While I think you are not wrong, these are excuses to continue doing useless things
What useless things?
Partake in war
If you do not partake in a war when a war is waged against you, you lose, and you either get subdued, or perish altogether. This is why pacifism for some part of a society is only possible when another part of the society is willing and capable of using lethal force to defend the society as a whole.
Due to this, it's important to always have sufficient quantities of very efficient weapons, exactly so that you would never have to put them to use.
War has existed as long as humans have. If you have any ideas for how to remove fear, aggression and disagreement from humans you might just be a god or a saint.
War against someone who wants my society eradicated provides a lot of value to my people.
And much more pain, misery and suffering to people who never wished you anything bad but happen to live on the other side.
do you have the intelligence to verify that?
money is a judgement of value to society and a motivator to only allocate work in a useful way.. wouldn't UBI, even if coupled to actually producing _something_ will lead to a lot of useless stuff being made?
> wouldn't UBI, even if coupled to actually producing _something_ will lead to a lot of useless stuff being made?
The general premise of a UBI is that it's unconditional.
If you tried to say someone is required to produce something without specifying what it is, they'll produce whatever is the easiest thing to produce, which will naturally be useless if they otherwise wouldn't have produced anything because the only reason they're doing it is to satisfy the demand of someone not imposing any specific requirements on the output.
But if it's actually unconditional then the things produced would only be the things someone wants to produce, i.e. the things worth their time to produce when they're not actually required to spend their time producing it. Those things would tend to be useful because at least the author found them to be and there's a decent chance they're not unique in the world. If you e.g. make an app just because you want to use it yourself, maybe someone else wants to use it too.
>Those things would tend to be useful because at least the author found them to be and there's a decent chance they're not unique in the world. If you e.g. make an app just because you want to use it yourself, maybe someone else wants to use it too.
This seems reasonable on it's surface, however for anyone that is tried to start a business, or sell anything, there is a big gap here.
The gap between creating something useful (an app) and the ability to sell or market it is HUGE. That gap is the difference between useful or not.
So I agree, lots of "useless" stuff will be made because the drive to close that GAP (which looks small) won't be done because there is no need for it.
> The gap between creating something useful (an app) and the ability to sell or market it is HUGE. That gap is the difference between useful or not.
Most of that gap is the difference between making it and selling it. To sell it you need payment processing, customer service now that customers are paying and expect you to resolve their billing problems etc., marketing sufficient to get enough initial users to cover development costs now that you're trying to turn a profit, accounting and tax remittance now that you're taking money, etc.
That stuff isn't required if you make it for yourself and then post it on the internet for anyone else to use for free.
Curious, how would this affect the production of things that have long supply chains, or require lots of manual labor? There are many things that require labor, like plumbing, irrigation, farming, transportation, brick firing, steel production, etc. where the product is either an intermediary step, or otherwise contributes to something that the worker doesn't themself benefit from. Who would create my car, computer, desk, house, etc. if people are only working for themselves? Maybe I misunderstood your comment
The cost of these things would simply rise until people are willing to either produce them, or obviate the need for that production (such as by increasing automation in that particular sector).
I feel like a lot of people have the impression of a UBI that it would mean no one would have paid jobs anymore. It's primary advantage is that it removes the perverse incentive of the existing needs-based assistance system to not work (or not work more) because if you do you lose your benefits. Which doesn't exist if the payment is unconditional rather than conditional on not making [more] money.
But the amount would be something in the nature of $12,000/year. Is that actually a disincentive to work that would cause no one to take a paid job anymore? Only if no one wants a lifestyle that costs more than $12,000/year.
Would be great if true, but that doesn't really correspond in reality truly, especially in intellectual products. Compare even Linus Torvalds fortune with e.g. snapchat founder. Not even talking about thousands of 0 profit open source projects with millions of installations versus some saas hustler - usually the former provide much more value to society than some guy who is just good at selling stuff.
UBI might fuel some useless work, but it also might provide a way to people to be more into creative side of things rather than selling and marketing rat race.
Also in less developed countries money even less corresponds to value. It almost always has some kind of mafia and corruption that extracts huge portions of value from the economy and basically net negative, though profitable.
I'd like to live in the world where money are always allocated fairly, but we see that in IT, for example, predating, stealing data, spying on people bring more money than the honest work due to misaligned incentives, when bad actors pay more money than actual consumer.
Money is a function of demand, availability and leverage. Value is only an indirect part of it: a factor that drives demand.
It is easy to find examples of money not being a judgement of value in practice: think about thief or extortion for example, or pushing drugs.
We as a society would profit from not categorizing everything in terms of its usefulness. Things can and should be allowed to just be. That being said, UBI would probably result in more useful things not less. There are so many cases of jobs and things that seem to just be busywork or outright scams. There are also a lot of things that only appear useful if you never take the time to think about them. A plastic straw that will pollute the environment for thousands of years just so i can have a drink for two minutes? That is useless. Every street in every city being lined by cars that don't move for 95% of the time? That is useless and insane. Imagine what marvelous machines we could have built instead.
Also, I find the online discussion around UBI to be quite weird. I don't think anyone serious is advocating for it to be particularly high. In my opinion, UBI should cover your necessities plus some so you can participate in society. This gives everyone the opportunity to take it slow or focus on personal projects without fear. Everything luxurious can not, and should not, be affordable with UBI. This will leave ample opportunity for people to still care about and want to work.
Humans will always do. It is in our nature. But not letting people get homeless or starve to death might enable those of us that don't want to do what our overlords deem useful to do the things our society so desperately needs. I don't need some poor fool to cook my burger for me. I'd rather take turns with my friends that now have free time.
I hope you don't take this as a negative, but sometimes I wish I could think like people like you, very positive, but maybe I'm old/cynical?
There is a problem with "plus some so you can participate in society"
In a massive society this will never be agreed to. The 'some' here will never be enough. Too little and it's not UBI, too much and impossible to fund. Who is going to define what a luxury is? Is owning your own home a luxury, a car, washer and dryer?
"Don't worry about money" is something a lot of companies do. They can just try to create value first, then look for profits later (albeit often though "enshitification").
This bias towards creating value makes them more moral than mere mortals, creating huge amounts of innovation and surplus value.
People keep rediscovering the Bhagavad Gita in new ways
https://vedabase.io/en/library/bg/2/47/
> You have a right to perform your prescribed duty, but you are not entitled to the fruits of action. Never consider yourself the cause of the results of your activities, and never be attached to not doing your duty.
I have a hard time interpreting that as what geohotz is saying. If anything it seems to promote rent seekers by telling you - stick to your lane and don't complain. I.e. the caste system
> If anything it seems to promote rent seekers by telling you - stick to your lane and don't complain. I.e. the caste system
I was wondering if that would come up and HN delivers without fail. Anyway, you are free to interpret it as you see fit.
The guidance was for someone who was struggling with a moral dillema on facing relatives in war and undecided over action. It is not a diktat to work or provide unquestion labor.
For anyone who understood the whole story and backdrop of the situation, a reasonable interpretation is
- you are responsible for your actions but you cannot control the consequences of your actions due to many factors.
- When you detach yourselves from results, you can do your job without anxiety.
- do not let the fear over results be an excuse for inaction.
Give it a read and decide for yourselves if you are not convinced. Even without the teachings part, the whole story of Gita is actually an epic story/novel with some strong and conflicted characters with elaborate back stories.
What is the point of a job if not the results? How can you be responsible for your actions but not the consequences of your actions?
The point is worrying about results creates anxiety that takes away your focus from doing the job which results is lower performance -> subpar results - it is a recursive spiral. Also results are not "wholly" under our control. Hence avoid worrying about the results "while" doing it.
The final result of any action depends on a lot of external factors for e.g. one might develop a product, but whether it succeeds or not depends on other players, economy, luck and host of other factors that one does not control or know. This feeds into the first point about not worrying about the results.
> What is the point of a job if not the results?
The idea is to not fret over results and give your best with dedication. E.g. An athlete shouldn't be worrying about their results while playing and should focus on the play.
> How can you be responsible for your actions but not the consequences of your actions
I only mentioned control of consequences not responsibility. It doesn't mean you are absolved of responsibility from consequences of your actions.
Take driving. You can only control your actions but you cannot control what happens on the road. You are still responsible for your actions.
Should the fear of the unknown on the road stop you from driving? Absolutely not.
Yeah, I think GP is right and this all feels like word play to me.
Let's say you're making your ideal wood chair for your living room. You're "fretting" over getting the arms, legs perfectly aligned, surfaces smooth, identical chamfers, etc. But fretting is bad and makes it hard to get anything done so you stop. Then you end up with a roughshod chair.
You shouldn't "fret" too much, but you also shouldn't "fret" too little. You should "fret" exactly the right amount which is... tautologically true, and not particularly insightful. Giving your best is committing yourself to fretting.
(I'm not sure if you understood the Gita reference, if you did you can ignore my comment.)
A better analogy isn't so much a chair made by yourself, but say you're making a chair for a competition. The only thing you can control is your actions. What's out of your control is whether or not some other guy who's an absolute veteran is also planning to compete (making you likely to lose), or if almost no one else joined the contest (much higher chance of winning.)
Another example is in the workplace.
You control what efforts you put in.
But your promotion (or even firing!) depends on a ton of other things. If the company's doing poorly, they may not promote you even if you did a great job. Conversely, if the company desperately needs a new senior person and you're the closest fit, even if you just did a mediocre job, you may get selected.
What's common in both cases is - doing a better job is more likely to be better for you. But there are no guarantees you'll win/get promoted, so don't be attached to that outcome, but only your efforts/labour.
> You have a right to perform your prescribed duty, but you are not entitled to the fruits of action.
> stick to your lane and don't complain. I.e. the caste system
That verse is quite famous and the general interpretation as I understand is this.
You have control on your actions but not on its results. The results depend not only on your actions but on many other factors outside of your control.
Now, one can interpret that it is instruction to "stay in your lane", but I have not seen that interpretation so far in my life in India.
So, "have a go, do you best, shit happens, don't worry about it".
you realize that the caste system that currently exists is completely different from what it was conceptualized as right? you most certainly want to read the conversation between yudhistra and nahusha that talks about caste https://vedabase.io/en/library/mbk/1/30/
I don't think we actually know who conceptualized the caste system. Even Manusmriti seems to be not as old as we thought before.
However, even in Mahabharatha there are examples of Karna and Ekalavya who despite having qualities (as Yudhishtira claims) of Kshathriya, they were rejected by the society as being lesser.
It is possible that caste system is an extension and crystallization of nepotism. Typically professions and trade secrets are handed down the families and it is conceivable this was codified at some point far in the past.
To claim that caste system has a more philosophical foundation would be a bit of a stretch in my point of view, especially when it has been throughout the history being used suppress.
You need to understand the context. The quote in Gita was to motivate the best warrior of the time at the battlefront facing opponents who were mainly his cousins and uncles.
In that context the quote is about performing the duties you were born to do without overthinking the consequences.
the context makes it even worse. its a strange kind of tribalism that is being promoted here. "do what you are asked to without understanding the real consequences". btw war is actual zero sum usually.
War is often times even negative sum game.
Do what you are asked to ≠ Your duty.
Duty of a warrior is to fight for his country/tribe/side. Duty of a king might be to reduce suffering for his subjects.
Historically, no. It's like Tennyson: Theirs not to make reply, Theirs not to reason why, Theirs but to do and die.
the problem is that there's good stuff in here but expressed in such a compressed way that it can be misused and misread.
i completely agree with you and the post you are replying too. both are correct.
It’s a tricky philosophy to put into practice. I have oscillated between this approach (“owning” the effort) and “owning” the outcome. I have found that taking ownership of the outcome leads to better results because I have a personal stake in the outcome and I tend to think through the problem more deeply, but I am almost always left feeling more stressed and “empty” when the work is finished. When I focus on doing the best I can and let go of the outcome, the end result is almost always subpar which leaves me feeling frustrated, because I know it could have been better had I taken on more responsibility.
Even if your goal is to go out and create value for others, your contribution is proportional to what everyone else can offer. If others with AI will deliver that value cheaper, or if what I am good at can be easily automated, it's getting harder and harder to deliver more value than I consume.
Only if you're stuck in the comparison trap. The point isn't to compete about who can offer more value - the point is simply to offer more value (or create more value) than you consume. That's it.
What others do is actually irrelevant to the argument.
If what you are good at can be easily automated... be curious, grow, and get good at other things you can provide more value in. These are usually adjacent to what you're already good at.
Also, the timeline isn't 'the next few years' or 'the past', but 'your entire life.'
> What others do is actually irrelevant to the argument.
If I used to provide some value X in a day, and that was enough to cover my consumption for the day, but now others are providing the same value X in 5 minutes, it will not be enough to cover my consumption for the day anymore
Sure, but we are not talking about evaluating your contributions daily. Over a lifetime, people find new ways to provide more value. Life is long, and that is how adapting works.
We don't all sit at typewriters anymore either, but former typists found other ways to provide value, I'm certain, and didn't just disappear and become homeless (the vast majority of them, anyway).
Once upon a time, we had armies of secretaries that secretly (well, not so secretly) were the backbone of every institution. We don't have that anymore either, since computers replaced many of them.
Computers were originally people. They also got bested by new technology.
None of those people disappeared or became destitute; they adapted, and they found new ways to create more value. (Or, it's possible some ended up working for rent-seeking corporations, which is a different point)
>Sure, but we are not talking about evaluating your contributions daily. Over a lifetime, people find new ways to provide more value. Life is long, and that is how adapting works.
I can't really take that sentiment to my bank when I default on my mortgage while I retrain though. So although you're correct, across a lifetime, this isn't much of an issue, you're minimising people's very real near-term anxieties here.
I'm not being dismissive or trying to minimize anything, I promise. But most people aren't 'losing their jobs to AI' in the short-term as much as you might think. The layoffs have not been due to AI "taking jobs," but due to companies overhiring during the pandemic and finally having an excuse to lay people off, imho.
There is plenty of time to 'retrain.' You could even do it while you currently have a role. Some people won't be able to; I respect that, and those people will still find jobs.
This is certainly not the first 'period of layoffs' to ever occur, and I am not implying people won't face hard times. They may! But that also won't last forever, and when people get laid off they receive unemployment, which helps in the 'not defaulting on your mortgage' thing. Somehow, people (on average) seem to manage not losing their home every time they get laid off.
The idea that our unemployment rate is about to reach 25-50% in the next 3 years is absurd, imho. (I know you didn't say that, and I'm not trying to construct a strawman. I'm just applying numbers to it because 'very real near-term' is not the phrase I'd use for something that is, in my estimation, still half a decade or more away.)
Is it? If "others with AI" deliver what you consume, it should also make it easier to deliver more than you consume because what you consume becomes cheaper.
Maybe a part of the anxiety is the realization that much if what was delivered by well-paid people before AI is actually not something the very same people want to consume?
Problem is that "others with AI" aren't producing what I consume, i.e food, heat, clothing, housing and health care.
They're just producing what I produce, i.e software.
That’s fine. New opportunities to provide value will emerge. If software becomes oversupplied, fewer people will enter that field and move to other areas where value is needed. If you only want to add value in the software space, then yes, it may be a problem.
If now only everyone who is talented at crafting software (or any other job that might be replaced), but who is out of a job could magically be as talented at something else, and enjoy doing that other work, then we would have no problem. But one issue is, that often significant time goes into becoming good at what one does. Switching has a very high personal cost in terms of time and having no income for a prolonged time.
Even worse, people are not the same as when they were younger. They may have less ability to learn. Almost certainly they have lower internal motivation and enthusiasm, since their career of choice was just taken from them. Job retraining programs are probably a big hint here. They have a poor track record.
I produce software too but I starting producing food recently. I feel like it really takes edge off my AI-related anxiety. (I also realize I'm more rural than most of HN).
>> If others with AI will deliver that value cheaper...
That's the most interesting thing - in 99.9% they don't. All their value is negated by lowering code base quality, pushing slop to prod ("but code reviews..." - don't help sorry, unless you spent a long time getting to understand a problem - simply reading a solution gives only false confidence that you understood it - you didn't, not fully). E.g. see all the outages at amazon, cloudflare, etc.
Quick short term wins lead to big longer term losses - and this is already happening.
The issue is - its basically impossible to make decision makers see this as this requires many years of expertise in tech, and it is very not obvious, and sounds like you just don't want to rely on AI to replace you etc etc.
While selling AI is easy - "look! it did this feature in 5 minutes! so much productivity".
The world very much is a Red Queen Race if your country has a program to import Indian tech workers. The only way to leave the Red Queen race in such countries is to abandon your career field and work in food service or retail instead.
Why not become a skilled craftsman and make a much better wage than in food service or retail? Every western country I've ever been in seems to have everlasting shortages of skilled plumbers, electricians and welders and prices have risen to match.
The skilled trades are better than unskilled work. Better than retail or food service, but they certainly aren’t a replacement for white collar jobs.
The median salaries for skilled trades aren’t great. You can make good money if you are willing to work a ton of overtime, or if you can manage to get one of the very limited union spots in the right city. Or if you become a business owner (and accept the corresponding risk) and mostly manage other skilled employees.
It’s also not a viable solution for more than a small percent of the population. Let’s say AI comes along and forces 25% of the white collar workers out of a job, there is only enough room in the skilled trades to handle a tiny fraction of those displaced workers.
That’s ignoring what massive unemployment does to salaries in the trades. And the fact that to make decent money in the trades you need years of working for peanuts first. And if you think age discrimination is a problem in tech, try breaking into the trades as a gray beard. The entry level jobs are built on the assumption that you are 20 years old and can do 12 hours of hard physical labor without needing a week off to recover.
Again it’s not impossible, it’s just not a solution at any kind of scale.
> Let’s say AI comes along and forces 25% of the white collar workers out of a job
Yeah, this is not going to happen. New job positions will open up instead, and white collar workers will be well placed to fill them since supervising an AI agent swarm is not that different from supervising the work of other humans - which is what white collar workers do as their job.
I disagree. Not all white collar workers are managers, and while I do think AI-supervision will be a growing field, it won't generate anywhere close to enough roles to replace how many ICs are going to be displaced. Companies are going to hit capital & scope resource limits (especially as model companies start extracting more value) way before they hire thousands of laid off white collar workers as additional AI supervisors.
I'm equally dubious about other white collar roles filling the gap, but I'm willing to hear out any arguments. To be honest I'm kind of desperate to hear one that would convince me otherwise..
The wages for craftsman are actually not that great on average. Stories of them making 6 figures are not the norm.
Putting aside the obvious distinction of labor vs office work, are you sure about this? Like, sure as in you have tried to find a stable, well paying job in any of those trades?
The un-politically correct answer is that many college educated people perceive those working in the trades to be socially beneath them. And they often have different opinions on social issues than the typical tradesperson, which is apparently really important if you’re a plumber but not if you work at BigCo.
I think that’s more of an urban/rural divide than anything else. Most of tech workers living in the sticks have plumbers and electricians and contractors in our social circle because that’s who has money in the boonies.
But until you get to the very top of those professions, the work environment is worse in every way.
You’re working 2x as many hours for 1/4 the pay, you go back to work the day after your kid is born. Your knees are just absolutely fucked. It’s in no way an equivalent job. That’s the primary reason tech workers don’t want to do it.
How does that work when you're over 50?
The surest recipe to becoming a sucker and being left with nothing is leaving ownership and properly valuing your contributions to chance rather than respecting essential details. Anyone advising others they should just shrug and ignore it is either a moron or trying to play them.
Workers should generally aim to unionize and seek to capture more of their value through worker-owned co-ops.
Just join the right "communities" or else it might have very different results. A toxic community can exploit you (even if you make more value than you consume).
True, creating value isn't sufficient. But if you're creating value, you don't need that community; that community needs you. That doesn't mean it'll be easy to leave nor that you won't lose a lot by doing so, but it's better than being a leech. Leeches can only survive by finding another victim to suck blood from, and at some point that merry-go-round is going to run out of horsies. Pardon the mixed metaphors.
Philosophically, I agree, but in reality there are so many leeches, who take take take, their whole life, and in the end they are often better off, materialistically than the people, who provided the actual value.
Ah but of course leeches are better off materialistically than the people who provide value! It's almost a tautology. But do you think they're happier?
For example geohot could be vastly richer than he is if he wanted to. He wisely chooses not to, and advises others to do the same.
"just"
As you know, you can just just do it. It's just that simple.
Fix: Forgot to add /s switch.
This comment uses conventional commits.
The problem is, it's not. Communities are messy and complicated, and if you take the slightest whiff of toxicity as a sign to leave a community, you're soon going to find yourself without one.
I know, the comment is meant to be ironic, actually. I was part of quite a few, and some rather large ones (~100 people). I don't leave communities easily, but if I decide to do it, I do it for good. However, I'd rather stay there and be myself.
What I found is, when you act yourself and if the community is not for you, the community silently ousts you. Then you can just collect your bag and leave. No drama, no fight.
However, most of the time, you can at least affect some of the people and motivate them to be better. Some bad people don't know that they are bad and have their hearts at the right place, so it's worth digging them up and let them improve by supporting them.
Engineers are running 8 instances of Claude Code at once. That doesn't mean they are completing work 8x faster.
If you must hold the context for 8 agents in your head at once, your expertise as an engineer is wasted.
See https://emsh.cat/one-human-one-agent-one-browser/ - One man + one agent in 72 hours, did better than thousands of agents over weeks.
Staying focused on one or two important tasks still works. You won't fall behind.
Different scale (I run 8, not 69) but the same fundamental challenge: what happens when one of those agents fails mid-task?
I hit this with my multi-agent system — 8 agents sharing a JSONL knowledge graph. Parallel writes caused a race condition: two agents read the same file state, both write back the full graph plus their additions, second write silently obliterates the first. Sometimes the file ends up with a half-written JSON line that breaks every subsequent read.
I patched it with an async mutex and atomic writes, but the real lesson was that I was fighting my runtime. On the BEAM, a GenServer processes messages from its mailbox sequentially — there's no concurrent access to serialize because the execution model is already sequential per-process. Supervision trees handle the crash case: child process dies, supervisor restarts it in microseconds, auto-repair runs on init, agents resume with clean state. Each process is ~2KB with its own heap, so you can run thousands with full isolation.
At 69 agents the coordination and fault tolerance problems get significantly harder. The BEAM was designed for exactly this — Ericsson ran millions of concurrent processes on telephone switches with nine nines of uptime using these patterns 40 years ago.
Wrote up the full story (race condition mechanics, supervision strategies, real code): https://dev.to/setas/why-erlangs-supervision-trees-are-the-m...
> The trick is not to play zero sum games. This is what I have been saying the whole time. Go create value for others and don’t worry about the returns.
This strategy is highly effective but it's also difficult to tolerate as an ordinary advanced ape. Watching others play less noble games and obtain easier wins can be discouraging over time.
I have found that the less you care about money the easier it is to acquire. Risk aversion, greed and interpersonal drama will kill a good idea way before anything else. I sometimes like to reframe this one as "100% of $0 is still $0".
I care less about receiving the money and more about the implications people have regarding money.
For example, when I'd joined a company I did not get any travel expenses. They expected me to pay the 200 euros a month myself. I'd suggested it and they shrugged it off. The company is now firing people and others are leaving.
The current company just has a default rate of money you get per km. They don't need to, but they know people want this and will ask about it.
Its a small example but it gives you a view of how a company operates
I call this an example of a company putting their money where their mouth is. You can pay lipservice all you want but where will you allocate your (scarce) resource(s)? Resource allocation is a pretty reliable communication channel to discern intent of a company, or a manager.
It’s the same with things like mental health and burnout prevention. You can either have a good work life balance through the year and good management and all that or you can have some consultant come throw a PowerPoint at your peons and a $5 voucher to some BS “health” app and call it a day. One is hard and effective and the other cheap and useless
What top players do in Age of Empires II:
They keep resources (money) at zero by spending them frequently unless they have something more expensive and more urgent to buy.
They are greedy because they want to pay the same amount (or less if possible) for better units (or upgrade them), which is why technology can be more urgent than creating more units.
They are very risk averse, but don't look like it. The more talented a player is, the more risky some of his decisions or actions may appear, but they're not riskier when you take talent into account. That being said, they do sometimes make very bold moves, even in tournaments, because they think the opponnent is not going to expect it.
Alright time to go back to being a villager.
I do behave pretty differently in video games where failure doesn’t mean I lose my house or my child goes without medicine
> I have found that the less you care about money the easier it is to acquire.
That sounds cool but hasn't been my experience at all. I used to care about money, and used to earn well. These days I care less about money (which I can afford to, precisely because I used to care about money) and earn an order of magnitude less.
The problem is that you have to acquire money first to care less about it
> This strategy is highly effective but it's also difficult to tolerate as an ordinary advanced ape. Watching others play less noble games and obtain easier wins can be discouraging over time.
A noble man that spends all his time jealous of the things the men without scruples have is not so much far from doing what they did. It's also what the men that did it before him told themselves "why play the right game if everyone else doesn't".
Disagree. You can still get fucking angry at how they’re capable of fooling others because of the skewed incentives we built in our capitalistic society
Of course you can, you're just way closer to being them. If you're in positions to take decisions that prevent others from doing it, do it without getting mad, actually improve things. If you're not, your getting mad will just make you more likely to join them later on. The cliche version is "hate consumes you".
Oh nonsense.
Reverse the argument, does it make any sense?
"Every time a (whaling ship crew, police force, oil executive, etc) gets angry at protestors and sprays them with (water cannons, rubber bullets, lawsuits), they are more likely to join them!"
Unfortunately you're so far from the point that I don't think it's worth explaining. But the wisdom I shared is not mine, it exists for thousands of years. People have known for a long time it's useless to spend too long worrying about things you can't change, and that they should focus on those they can. And that bitterness is not going to help you. Those are the only assertions I'm making.
If you want to live bitter about how broken the world is instead of focusing on improving the things you actually can change that's up to you.
Stoicism must be the most misconstrued and misunderstood philosophical framework ever. It's just so good for the people in power, and Silicon Valley seems to have eaten it up perfectly and spit out a version of it that is quintessentially functional to convince people that questioning power is useless.
That is not what I said. You seem to assume people have no ability to change anything. I said people should focus on the things they can change.
> Disagree. You can still get fucking angry at how they’re capable of fooling others because of the skewed incentives we built in our capitalistic society
This is what I replied to. You cannot change that other people want to fool others. You can decide to fool others though. You can decide how you operate under a system you disagree with, and your contribution will help change it, to larger or smaller degrees. Being actually internally angry about "capitalism" day to day is completely useless though. Go be the economic agent you think more people should be. Work for someone with morals instead of maximize salary. Move to a country more similar to your values, so many things can be done than "be angry at capitalism".
I also don't see why being bitter and angry is a synonym to "questioning power" to you. You can think about things you disagree without getting angry presumably.
Funnily enough I totally agree with you in principle. Though I believe we are witnessing a constant erosion of these alternatives constantly and organically at the hand of the owner class. What you say assumes that the solutions you are mentioning are still viable. Let’s say I agree and decide to join USaid to do good. Elon fucking Musk comes in, guts it, indirectly causes thousands to lose help and die. My answer to this according to this frame should be “oh well, he would have done it anyway, can’t change that. Won’t help me being angry at the massive twat, so I’ll just jog on then”?
If you're a random worker of a huge organization and it gets bought or co-opted, yes you should jog on. Go help someone else that hasn't been co-opted.
This is why even though I'm generally a progressive I'm against unions. The solution to bad owners is everyone quitting their company. This was not feasible in a town with a single factory but is very feasible today. Quit working for bad people and bad people will change or become powerless. Prolong the ability for them to keep workers and they will keep being exactly as they are.
Have you ever had to pay rent or feed children?
Of course I'm not a rich Californian on a 300k salary
Different scale for me, but the same core problem: what happens when one agent fails mid-task?
I hit this with 8 agents sharing a JSONL knowledge graph. Parallel writes caused a race: two agents read the same state, both wrote back a full graph, and the second silently overwrote the first. I patched it with an async mutex and atomic writes, but the real lesson was that I was fighting my runtime.
On the BEAM, a GenServer processes its mailbox sequentially, so this class of shared-state bug largely disappears. Supervision trees also give you the part agent demos usually skip: when something crashes at 3am, it comes back clean instead of corrupting the rest of the system.
That ended up being the more important property than raw agent count.
Two things.
> If you don’t use this new stupid AI thing you will fall behind. If you haven’t totally updated your workflow you are worth 0.
When I see this on any social platform, that is a sign that a VC / investor already invested or likely over-invested in said product and is manipulating emotions to shill their portfolio companies.
This is a tired tactic repeated and recycled tens of thousands of times over and over again and the first sense is to ignore them.
> That said, if you have a job where you create complexity for others, you will be found out. The days of rent seekers are coming to an end. But not because there will be no more rent seeking, it’s because rent seeking is a 0 sum game and you will lose at it to bigger players.
This is why many here are realizing the uncomfortable truth about why complexity over simplicity was celebrated. Of course job security.
But it turns out that the low hanging fruit at those companies that added close to no value LLMs were enough to achieve "AGI" internally; (meaning layoffs in this case).
The jobs of knowledge workers will still be there, but the big money just went into data centers (and not overpaying for more knowledge workers).
The truth is in the middle.
This post feels a bit ideological in nature. There are recurring processes at organizations to assess someone's fit in a given role. Generally when someone is no longer performing as expected, they're given time to correct their ways or retrain. If the organization has no system in place, then it really falls on the organization. I wonder if the author overestimates the amount of people who really want to be in a role they're not good at.
Most of what's getting "automated" was never really work, it was headcount that existed because nobody had a good reason to cut it yet. AI gave the reason..
To refer back to the trite business book section - making something new is a Blue Ocean Strategy approach. Fighting for existing market share is a bloodied Red Ocean approach that Thiel called “competition is for losers”. So both benevolent and be greedy approaches recommend the same. Make a new puddle for everyone to swim in and you can focus on empathy instead of defense.
> it will continue to improve, but it won’t “go recursive” or whatever the claim is. It’s always been recursive.
I suspect "going recursive" often colloquially means that AI systems achieve their exponential growth without human software engineers in the mix. This is a moment whose sudden apparent nearness does justify some of the ramping rhetoric, in my opinion.
I mean at this point, for that to happen it definitely isn't a matter of intelligence (it can fix errors later and learn from them), it's only a matter of memory and proper harness. Once memory it's solved for good, then recursive self-improvement is inevitable.
Once all the problems are solved we will be there. Sounds a lot like zeno's paradox. We might be closer than ever but still as far from the goal as ever.
I like reading optimistic posts and I hadn't hear the term Red Queens Race before. Now I understand it comes from Alice In Wonderland while she runs but never moves. The whole website has great little thought snippets. The author is upfront about repeating themselves. That's great, so do I.
I don’t quite get the amount of supposed subtext that others see in this piece, so the flippant attitudes here are off putting. Geohotz has already commented here that people are putting words into his mouth.
I agree with what is being said: AI will consolidate otherwise nonsensical jobs/roles/companies into fewer (probably more profitable?) ones, so if there’s a time to jump ship from one of these (assuming worst case scenarios), do it while you’re employed and you can land somewhere else that’s hopefully more stable.
This to me is a fairly no-nonsense piece over all. AI itself and tools like LLM are damn good though, limitations aside. We get to do a lot of things we haven’t had time to do before.
Literally everyone working for a wage is creating more value for others than they consume. The problem is the rent seekers are capturing that value. This is a crucial part geohot is missing. What people often don't think about and they should is that when you are employed for a wage by someone, you are the creditor and the employer is the debtor. Why? Because you work for say 2 weeks, and THEN they pay you. That whole time working you are crediting the employer and they are in debt to YOU. Think about how crazy this is. You the creditor must do what your debtor tells you. Maybe we don't think about it because it's too painful.
ChatGPT could never
There are zero-sum games you can't realistically escape. They're really common. Credentials is a zero-sum game. Political power, influence of all sorts, are zero sum games: if you have more of it, someone else has less. Land ownership is basically zero sum, too.
All of those are only zero-sum if you pick a conserved metric. Land ownership is zero-sum if measured in square meters. But say someone buys up land that is parched, dead, and empty. They use it by planting moisture-retaining crops and windbreaks and growing food, or running a business of benefit to the community. Now overall everyone is a little better off, despite 0 square meters being created.
Influence is even more so -- it's common to have situations where nobody is truly paying attention to anyone else. The people with good ideas can't get any traction, and the whole organization just spins in circles, lurching from one externally-imposed crisis to the next. If the people who gain influence use that influence to promote others who are worth paying attention to (and thus they gain influence), everyone benefits. But if you measure that in terms of how many minutes each person gets to speak at the All Hands, it's zero-sum.
Yes, although we do measure it in square meters (or acres, or tatami mats).
Is there such a thing as "partially zero-sum"? I mean, to express how, unless you get really creative in difficult ways, the supply of land is under pressure due to other people taking all the currently useful parts of it, such as the parts on your island and not underwater.
Yes, but in practice land-ownership is only zero sum in places like Europe where every square-kilometer has 300 years of documented ownership etc, or other high-density areas.
The Asia, Africa & the Americas have so much unused space that isn't as inhospitable as central Australia
Where in Asia do you have in mind? A few things I know off hand. Sri Lanka has a higher population density than Britain, Japan's is much higher than that, and Java has nearly the population of Russia in an area smaller than England (just England, not Britain or the UK). India and China are big, but have huge populations.
There is lots of "unused space" in places like Alaska or Siberia or deserts or mountains, but land is not a fungible commodity. Unused space is unused for a reason. In practice, almost all ownership of land is a zero sum game.
Most games are either negative-sum or positive-sum. Very few are zero-sum.
Well, that's not what I said anyway. I just said that zero sum games are common and there are some important ones you're not escaping.
I'm saying they're not common. Those games you listed are either negative or positive sum. It's like if you draw a random number from a uniform distribution between [-1,1], you're almost certainly not going to get 0. When people say "zero-sum" they use it as a short-hand for "negative-sum", which is fine for casual speaking I guess, because the intended meaning does get across.
What about the important ones you're not escaping?
To be a bit specific: if you're currently in education, you almost certainly have to play many zero sum games. Yes, education can be a positive thing in itself, but only one of you is going to be best in class. Only a limited number of you will get your papers into that prestigious congress. And while the knowledge may hopefully be useful in itself, the credentials you got in getting it will be less valuable the more people have them.
Then you're off into the housing market. Can more houses be built? Sure. Can we build dikes to claim land from the oceans? Sure. All that is true, but it doesn't help you here and now when you need a place to live - then you're in a game with everyone else who needs a home right now, and if you get one, that's one someone else doesn't get.
Then you have your home, and someone is planning to expand the local almost-unused airport to suddenly take a lot of heavy transport air planes. The noise will impact you a lot. You'd like to influence politics, to call off these plans or at least demand some mitigation, but then you're in a game with others who want to influence politics. Sure, maybe there's a happy compromise to be found, but often there's not. If there isn't, then your ability to put pressure on the decision makers to defend your interests, is going to come at the direct expense of the people wanting an expansion of the airport. Or more likely the other way around.
My point is that yes, it sucks, but often we can't quit the rat race, and often there are conflicts of interest which can't be papered over. It comes off as too easy to, as this author does, say that we can just choose to play different games.
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Then there are situations where someone for inexplicable reasons make dickish comments.
That was my contracting philosophy for 15 years.
Create more value than what I cost, otherwise why are you paying me?
Yes, but I make it more precise into two points:
1. Build tools/libraries that empower superior execution performance. If you can execute faster than others you have more potential free time than them. This is a form of compound interest. I do this for myself but my output is not exclusive to myself.
2. Be operational. Create products that are always more durable than what is trendy, but when something does break return a resolution as rapidly as possible, provided excellent regression testing. Be constantly healthy, healing once injuries are found, and constantly aware of new injuries.
I find most people cannot do those two things. Most people cannot measure things and a great many people fear novelty.
This is exactly what manipulators/value extractors want you to think.
Case in point: how many here have heard of Mick Ronson?
Few perhaps. However most have heard of David Bowie.
See, Ronson was silently creating value for Bowie. Didn’t even get credited although songs like Life On Mars are what they are thanks to his contribution.
Mick was creating value while everyone one else was getting rich.
The whole world is obsessed with openclaw. Some companies are now even evaluating their employees' built agents, the tokens consumed, and the money spent on AI. It's really gotten out of hand.
The whole world ... Some companies ...
What is it, man?
I think the idea is that in the future, everyone will need a philosophy degree to go along with whatever business they will work in. It’s no longer going to be about “I know this skill, tell me what you want me to do,” but will be about “I know how we can solve these problems with this skill.”
If that stops being the limiting factor, then we’ll be in a post-scarcity world.
> if you have a job where you create complexity for others, you will be found out
This explains the panic. It describes most roles in big tech.
> The trick is not to play zero sum games. This is what I have been saying the whole time. Go create value for others and don’t worry about the returns. If you create more value than you consume, you are welcome in any well operating community.
Reminds me of Manfred Macx' attitude in the novel Accelerando by Charlie Stross
> That said, if you have a job where you create complexity for others, you will be found out.
Anybody have examples?
As others have said, it's a very optimistic view that can be infuriating to read when you are struggling to pay your bills.
I'd also argue it's not very effecicient : we are at our best when we have deadlines and clear targets to reach, and making money to pay the bills can be a very motivating one to stop procrastinating !
> we are at our best when we have deadlines and clear targets to reach
I'd argue we are at our best when those deadlines and clear targets are intrinsic rather than extrinsic, and that intrinsic motivation of that sort is actually more efficient than extrinsic, as it keeps you going much longer.
But yes, that's not always possible and depends greatly on your circumstances.
However, it is often much more possible than people allow themselves to think.
I think the author might argue, that simply becoming more efficient at creating a rent-seeking mechanism is not beneficial. No matter how well motivated you are to improve your zero-sum game skills, it's still zero-sum.
Or something like that.
The rest of the comments here are really not passing the vibe check, but I’m glad to see a post like this. The message is true not just in AI or software dev but across all aspects of life. Give more than you take. Provide value.
Well, it must all start with a precise definition of "value" first, and then proceed to propose a method of lossless conversion of different kinds of values. Is a bottle of water less valueable in a desert than a luxury sedan?
Why does HN take this guy seriously? OK, he got pacman running on a PS3. Great. Remember the time he stood up on a stage discussing the path to Level 5 autonomous driving? Comma.ai actually produces a barely-adequate lane keeping system for obsolete cars. Remember fixing Twitter search in 12 weeks? This guy is a total charlatan.
On the question of whether Hotz knows what AI can or cannot do, the answer is demonstrably "no".
Non-attachment to outcomes has always been one of the cornerstones of life.
It's better to be a happy optimist than a smart pessimist.
Pessimists are still happier in the long run: they are either proved right, or pleasantly surprised.
At the cost of being negative and miserable the whole time? If you integrate over time, being proven right or pleasantly surprised at the end doesn't make up for having been in the red for the duration.
That's assuming you get a choice in the matter.
Can anyone explain the rent seeker paragraph? Which companies are playing 0 sum game and which are not? Are all big players not rent seekers?
Building tools and services to reduce hassle and friction for others is great. However, what often happens is that you end up creating and building a moat around that hassle. Think about how companies like TurboTax lobby the government to not build electronic tax filing stuff.
Cory Doctorow explains the dynamics well in Enshittification. First they turn against their users, then their business partners, then their employees. The layoffs you are seeing are just stage 3 enshittification. If you work at a company like this, my advice is to quit ASAP. At least then you leave on your own terms.
Indeed! He specifically cites Yanis Varoufakiss, dubbing this technofeudalism. If I may quote Doctorow a bit:
>Varoufakis defines capitalism as a system designed to preference profit over rent.
[snip]
>The feudal era wasn't defined by the absence of profits--rather, what made feudalism "feudal" was the triumph of rent over profits. When the interest of rentiers conflicted with the aspirations of capitalists, the rentiers won. Likewise, the defining characteristic of the capitalist era was not the abolition of rents, but rather the triumph of profits. When capitalism's philosopher-theorists lionized "free markets," they didn't mean "markets that were free from regulation," they meant "markets that were free from rents."
[snip]
>This is Varoufakiss technofeudalism exemplified. It's an economic system in which the majority of value is being captured by people who own stuff, at the expense of people who do stuff.... The fight between technofeudalism and technocapitalism is a fight over whether the landlord or the café owner takes the value that's created by the barista.
i'm fairly certain Cory Doctorow does not understand the economics of Enshittification.
companies subsidise their products so that exploration of these products is more feasible due to lower initial costs for the end consumers. the initial consumers don't pay the full price but they are borne by the later consumers once the exploration is done and they have knowledge about that market and business.
Cory Doctorow also probably confuses democratisation and enshittifaction - its usually the case that products get cheaper by also marginally reducing the quality. we get cheap goods from China but that's not enshittification - that's just efficiency. as a consumer I'm happy I have the option of paying low prices for products.
i wouldn't take this person too seriously because it looks like they don't understand the larger picture
What are you talking about. Cory literally coined the term to describe this phenomena. He is not confused by the idea of cheaper products with wider appeal. He takes issue with vendor lock-in that is weaponized first against the end-user, then against paying customers, and finally against investors themselves. This is first and foremost a criticism of online products and platforms, not mass-produced gadgets from China.
TurboTax is a prototypical example of rent-seeking.
Do you think e.g. the AI/LLM boom is all rent seeking? Do you think there's no positive value for the world on the recently announced e.g. MacBook Neo and that it's purely a monopolistic activity? Those are 2 clear recent examples of big players making massive benefits for the world, and I'm okay if they get X% of that value as company valuation.
Not at all. OpenAI / Anthropic are producing tons of surplus value right now! Not to mention how great the Chinese open source LLMs are. And Apple's hardware division has always been fine.
Apple's 30% tax for payments in apps is the ultimate rent seeking example though. Want to install your own apps, lol you can't. And if big AI companies follow in the steps of Google/Facebook it's bad for everyone. Let's recognize it and prevent it from happening this time.
Strongly agree! I was answering my parent comment that had a very negative view, it is indeed an amazing situation where' in!
How should we prevent it, considering the huge financial incentives they have to go exactly that?
Wait what's a new laptop doing to push the needle exactly? Genuinely curious
It's an 8GB RAM 256GB SSD laptop with a lower spec'd 6-core chip for $599 USD. Seems overhyped to me, PCs have done that for a while, just not as elegantly. Admittedly it probably has far better battery life than a PC, so that's a genuine advantage.
In general, it's kind of the difference between having a sharp axe vs a dull axe.
Though in the particular case of the MacBook Neo, I'm not sure whether we're talking about sharper or duller. Depends on the metric you're using, I guess.
It doesn't cut a cake nearly as well as the old Macbook Air so obviously duller.
The Neo is supposed to be the budget version. I think MacOS is a decent computing platform for some engineering and creative endeavors -- if one more college kid gets access to it for cheaper I say it's a positive
Macbook Neo is just another laptop. There is nothing "massive benefits for the world" in the context you are trying to put it. And doesn't Apple take close to a third in 'rent' for anything on their platform?
The bar isn't massive benefits for the world, the MacBook Neo is great! If there was a new company that builds MacBook Neos, that's a great company. They build something real and sell it for more than it costs to make, no strings attached.
The problem with Apple comes down to the App Store, the forced 30%, and all the apps that just don't get built cause of Apple. This is rent seeking, and this is evil.
Here's a good system for evaluating technologies: https://www.ranprieur.com/tech.html
If you don't want a MacBook Neo, don't buy one and it doesn't affect your life. But the App Store affects your life whether you own an iPhone or not. It affects the direction of the world. And that's where the rent seeking problem is.
Unlike profit-seeking, which creates value, rent-seeking redistributes existing resources, often through lobbying for subsidies, tariffs, or favorable regulations, causing economic inefficiency and higher prices.
So geohot's argument is that Anthropic, for example, who want to regulate AI (presumably favorably for themselves) are such an example. I don't actually think I agree, but I agree that the behavior looks similar on the surface.
> Which companies are playing 0 sum game and which are not?
Most of the US ones are. Anthropic is the worst offender.
The Chinese AI model providers like DeepSeek are not.
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You misunderstood. All geohot is saying is the same thing Scott Galloway constantly says - your job is to create surplus value. Provide more value than you take, over your lifetime, not over any specific one period, either.
The argument is that if you do that, returns will naturally come your way.
The issue is that many people never provide surplus value at all; some can't, and that is obviously completely acceptable (people who are disabled, have medical conditions, or who for some other reason cannot). But those who are able and choose not to provide surplus value are who he's talking about.
You may not agree, and that's okay, but that's the argument.
I wish that argument was trivially true. Yet we see tons of disadvantaged people working the real tough jobs helping the elderly or sick and they are getting precious little in return.
And to a lesser degree, I have been doing nothing but providing value. All my projects are free/libre, yet returns have not come my way at all. In fact people who could make returns come my way, for example by offering me a job that I am clearly well suited for, refuse to take a look at these projects.
Perhaps the argument is also about non-financial returns, and things like friendships, but I don't feel especially well connected either, even though I try to help anyone I can help in the areas I am active in.
I don't think the argument matches reality, unfortunately.
The "real tough jobs" pay little because the marginal job of that kind does not really create that much value. That in turn happens because the most disadvantaged tend to crowd into these jobs, to the neglect of other, more value-creating activities - yet another issue that might be handily addressed by UBI.
Yet these were the "essential workers" during the pandemic. Not the VCs, not the hedge fund managers, not the industrialists or bankers or rich housewives.
And all they got for their efforts were applauds.
Reality is that without their work all our societies would have failed and fallen.
Almost any common folks agrees that for example nurses aren't paid enough.
The real issue is that our "valuation" scheme is controlled by the wealthy not by the people and the only metric is what makes the rich richer.
Phew, I am having a real hard time agreeing with you there. I mean, just imagine what would happen, if those social and tough jobs were not performed by people dedicated specifically to doing those jobs. Then we would all have to take care of our family's elderly and that can easily turn into a full time job itself. Let just one relative have Alzheimers or they for some reason cannot move any longer, or even less drastic conditions, that still require you to watch over them, and you will have all hands full taking care of them. This is the reason, why in many societies we decided to outsource this to people whose sole job it is to take care of other people.
Or take nurses for example. You really think they provide low value? Tell me more, when you are seeing a hospital from the inside at some point. Yet they are not paid much.
That's why I stated that the marginal job is what sets the reward. We actually have a lot more people wanting to do these jobs than we reasonably have a use for. Your mention of hospital nursing is actually a case in point: actual Registered Nurses are quite scarce, often do highly valuable, specialized work, and get paid a lot.
What on earth are you talking about? In the US (which seems to be the context in question), Actual Registered Nurses™ are not by any means "scarce" and in fact make up the clear majority of all nurses. Nor do they get "paid a lot" compared to the demands of their jobs, especially considering this is a country that throws the same salaries at people for the mighty skill of writing JavaScript for a SaaS.
That's not what he's saying. At a company level he's saying that if they make more profit than they add value they have an indefensible business model and will eventually lose to bigger players.
At a personal level you can live your life similarly, add value where you can. You can do that by joining an organization that adds value as well.
People volunteer e.g. playing games for free, spending considerable time and effort. The point is that the process is enjoyable by itself.
When it starts to feel like work, it starts to feel like needing wages for it.
All these feel good articles are very ideal in nature, I feel. Not to be the doomsayer, but without a solid backup of resources (be it money, power or some such thing), I find it hard to imagine to be this 'careless' towards returns. World indeed feels like a Red Queen race.
A couple of other people have expressed similar sentiments here, and I think it's the truth. You have to be in a position to give before you can sustain it reliably and/or reap the benefits from it.
Often though, this position is highly subjective and mental in nature. A homeless man could willingly give his food away, and still somehow be fine with that, if he believes that things will be fine regardless somehow (perhaps he has an alternative source of food, or sincerely doesn't think that skipping food once will set him back forever). At the other hand, someone with a difficult and tedious job that pays well may not feel like they have the time or energy to give without necessarily receiving anything in return, even though they may objectively be in a much better overall position for it.
I guess altruism necessarily requires some other essential basic needs to be in abundance first before it can overflow.
Lol AI is not search. I will never wrap my head around the pessimism of AI on HN
couldnt agree more with the author! just will try "If you create more value than you consume, you are welcome in any well operating community." to be "equal value"
I'd read several other posts and had a similar conclusion.
"There’s people who built billion dollars companies by orchestrating 37 agents this morning AND YOU JUST SAT THERE AND ATE BREAKFAST LIKE A PLEB!"
In Europe we like to sit there and eat breakfast like a pleb. After enjoying that, we build a million Euros company. Maybe or maybe not. Who cares if the breakfast is good.
I've always found something profoundly deceiving about all these "just create value posts", as if absolutely everyone could simply by some hard work actually create significant value for others.
The barrier to being able to add any value along the supply chain is shriking daily, meaning that very few people can actually add value.
The people that have managed to get on top of the system by these mean rarely aknowledge that their methods don't scale, which is a terribly irresponsible and ultimately narcissistic way to use their ideological influence.
If you give advice to a group, it should either scale to most of the group or aknowledge up front it's exceptionalistic.
Great advice if you want to be old and poor. Yes, there's a chance it works out because you're that good, but there's a chance it doesn't. This doesn't mean do the opposite and only worry about your returns, but strike a balance. The world we live in is not in general a bunch of isolated people in a meritocracy, connections and relationships within your workplace play a huge role. Politics exist. I know a lot of asshats that are highly successful even though pretty useless. Don't be that person, but don't be there for everyone and empty handed in the end.
Better advice would be stay hungry, stay curious, keep learning.
> Great advice if you want to be old and poor.
A more conspiracy minded version of myself might suggest there’s an active attempt to break the politically active middle class. Subtle changes in messaging that have been happening over the past few years from business owners and politicians seem to suggest that the future will involve masses of poverty. Gone are the days of “hard work” and “meritocracy” and they have been replaced by beef liver and romanticization of peasantry
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> They just say it’s AI cause that makes the stock price go up.
slightly naive take when the author recognises that AI will cause productivity increase.
You discarded the context within which he made that statement.
i read this
> If you have a job like that, or work at a company like that, the sooner you quit the better your outcome will be.
AI will render your job to be rent seeking. Like self driving cars will automate away truck drivers - do you not think they need to be laid off because of AI?
> Like self driving cars will automate away truck drivers - do you not think they need to be laid off because of AI?
geohot is talking about AI has its limitation and that it won't truly replace the human yet. Truck drivers and some people who contribute net positive value are not rent seekers at the moment.
AI could render our jobs to be rent seeking, we don't know when.
We have unions actively opposing self driving cars mainly to protect their own jobs. In fact I think it’s much more common for a company to lay off because of real ai impact than anything else
> "The trick is not to play zero sum games."
To be mean, I’d say no—those zero-sum games are always 'positive' for the players, because the people actually foot pay the bill aren't even at the table.
Come on, we live in a globalized reality. Those insulated by the 'Dollar Illusion' don’t even realize that the true costs are being extracted from the rest of the world. These so-called zero-sum games are nothing but a sophisticated machinery of power, meticulously designed to obfuscate the truth.
But those words are just too cynical; it doesn't really make any sense.
The obligatory reality check:
https://theoatmeal.com/comics/exposure
Of course, "exposure" and "influence" are mostly zero-sum games of their own. These folks aren't really creating any more value than others, so it makes sense that they aren't 'paid' all that much.
even thoses replies create common value.
Tomorow datasets.
Keep publishing !
You only have to look at ai slop taking over to see that what most people value is stupid.
A better mantra is to create value for yourself and then compound it by sharing it. Then you can't lose, yet can win even more.
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I don't think HN needs the top comment to be a vague attack on someone in response to a blog post that the comment doesn't even interact with.
Not everyone knows who geohot is and even if they do they may not see the url handle. They may (like me) think why is a glorified shower thought tweet on top of HN.
They may not know that this dude was an anti-masker (with nuance) for example. This could really make them decide not to even spend too much time thinking about the passage which in theory is profound for 10 seconds but no further.
As much as ad hominem attacks are not great approaches, the one scenario I feel it's justified is in cases like this.
> They may not know that this dude was an anti-masker (with nuance) for example.
Why are we supposed to care about that? There was a time when "masks do not work" was very much the conventional wisdom.
Masks didn't work for people needing an immediate cure, but it was never that, it always was a multiplier, and even an multiplier with only 30% efficiency would translate to 4x reduction in spread through 4 levels.
And that reduction was there to give healthcare workers a chance to not be overwhelmed as they were for a large part of the initial pandemic.
There was literally never a time where mainstream medical advice was "masks do nothing".
Public health recommendations aren’t medical advice though. The advice agencies give is given to everyone and so has to take things like supply chains and the economy into consideration before making recommendations.
Conventional for whom?
I might be misremembering, but I think the WHO claimed this at some point?
It was obvious nonsense, and did not comfort me as I watched an avoidable catastrophe become, day by day, an unavoidable one; politicians caring more about pacifying the populace with platitudes than about taking measures to render SARS-CoV-2 extinct in the wild – measures which would have been several orders of magnitude cheaper than the extended pandemic lockdowns, disabilities and trauma, loss of life, and now a new disabling endemic disease we're going to have to fight the hard way, for centuries, until it can finally go the way of smallpox.
There was an extremely brief period where public health advice discouraged the general population from masking. This was because there was a huge undersupply for medical workers and because we hadn't fully figured out whether covid aerosolized mere weeks into the pandemic.
Once we had a bit more information in a rapidly evolving situation public health advice switched to recommending masks and stayed that way for years.
We cannot possibly expect public health advice to get everything right immediately during a once-in-a-century pandemic and this error should definitely not be used as a general "wow public health officials are dumb idiots or engaged in a malicious conspiracy", as this error is often used.
There was indeed a huge undersupply for medical workers. The appropriate response from public health officials should've been something like "surgical masks help protect others, and right now, we need to protect hospital patients", not "we want to keep masks available in hospitals where they're needed, because they're important, so let's tell people they're not important to make sure they're available". This is the kind of plan that would be used as an example of Adults Are Useless in a children's novel (ref: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AdultsAreUseless): it was never going to not backfire. (Does it even count as backfiring if you point the gun at your foot, and lean down to watch it go bang?) Institutional dysfunction can produce decisions that no individual would ever author, but there's a reason the Evil Overlord List has #12:
> One of my advisors will be an average five-year-old child. Any flaws in my plan that he is able to spot will be corrected before implementation.
And… it's SARS-CoV-2. Of course it aerosolises. The "we hadn't fully figured out" was sheer incompetence (see doi:10.1080/02786826.2024.2387985); just like the "we aren't sure whether it's reached our jurisdiction yet, so be vigilant", "oh lots people are showing symptoms", "actually turns out it reached us 3 weeks ago and is now endemic, haha oops" pattern we saw playing out in country after country, region after region, while open source intelligence collated on LessWrong obviously showed what the governments apparently could not see until tens of days too late. "Paranoid" early lockdowns could've lasted two weeks, allowed us to identify who was affected, and then allowed us to give them top-of-the-line isolated care while they recovered, and while the rest of the region got back to doing an economy. Instead, COVID-19 is still claiming new victims today.
Australia managed it, and everyone could've copied that, but they didn't. China could have managed it right at the start, and saved the world, if their accountability culture hadn't favoured a cover-up. (Their belated attempts to pursue a zero-COVID strategy were not particularly effective once it was a global pandemic and multiple strains were circulating, because it turns out you can't persuade people into not being ill; and sealing residential buildings is neither necessary nor sufficient contact tracing / isolation.) Zero-COVID would've been feasible as a global strategy, even starting as late as February 2020, if not for all the politicised bullshit. (No, "don't kill your neighbours by giving them a novel respiratory virus while all the hospitals are full" isn't authoritarianism. Sensible precautions are not setting a bad precedent, because it's a conditional precedent: if we were to wipe out the disease, there would no longer be a reason for those measures. In fact, the cryptographers figured out how to do privacy-preserving contact tracing, and shipped the protocol very quickly, so that the best available system was inherently anti-authoritarian.)
While I wouldn't use the phrase "dumb idiots", public health officials are, largely, responsible for long-term policy decisions, not rapid response. (If a response to a seasonal respiratory disease fails, you've usually got 8 months to put together a better one.) They had had little practice making the snap decisions, and they almost invariably made bad ones when it mattered. Replacing soap with diluted alcohol gel at handwashing stations, for example, is stupidity. Soapy water is one of the most effective anti-coronavirus measures disinfectants there is. A roughly 70% alcohol solution is a close second. (There are viruses that are not denatured by soap, for which alcohol is a much better disinfectant: I can only imagine that people got confused.) 30% alcohol solution is basically useless. Alcohol gel is useful because it's portable, but it's not as good for removing SARS-CoV-2 as washing your hands with soap and water.
So many resources were used (and entire supply chains were established!) ensuring that every surface is wiped, even though it's a respiratory disease and surfaces were not a major transmission vector; but very few resources were employed to ensure sufficient ventilation which, again, respiratory disease. It does not take a genius to make the link between "it infects your air holes" and "we should ventilate or filter the air". (Yes, I witnessed many people closing windows using the disinfectant cloth as a glove, to avoid touching the handle, right before filling the room with occupants.)
We were not prepared for the pandemic that happened, and I will condemn that, because are we going to do any better next time? Have we put measures in place to ensure that accurate information about the disease, including appropriate disease-specific hygiene measures, are rapidly disseminated? Have we ensured that international authorities and the populaces will calmly overreact, because overreaction is cheap and allows each patient to receive specialist treatment and maybe lets us wipe out the disease entirely? From where I'm standing, the WHO is weaker than ever, we've traumatised a generation to the point they'll resist any attempt to impose another lockdown (even though acting early means it might only last a few weeks, or even a few days!), and we've gained a political playbook for profiting from pandemic denialism.
A once-in-a-century pandemic should be expected to happen once in a century. Allocate a hundred people around the world whose jobs it is to know how to deal with that, and then listen to them if the rare event shows up. It's not conceptually difficult. That this is difficult for us in practice is damning.
>are we going to do any better next time
The US is completely fucked if another pandemic hits within the next ~20 years. Or at least until a large percentage of the anti-vaxers created in the covid pandemic age out of the population. Having a decent response when half the country is going to be on team virus is not possible.
> Have we put measures in place to ensure that accurate information about the disease, including appropriate disease-specific hygiene measures, are rapidly disseminated.
This is irrelevant if half the country has the through process of "goverment says it therefore it is fake news bill gates microchip conspiracy".
The title is >Create value for others and don’t worry about the returns.
Isn't being an anti-masker the opposite of this viewpoint? Literally saying, I only care about the returns for myself, even if creates negative value for others.
It's so we can definitively identify this person as a Nazi, as persona non grata, so we can feel better about ourselves while we break quarantine and contravene public health orders to get clandestine haircuts and attend illegal cross-household parties.
Full stop disagree. This is not what HN is for, and should never be for. I have spent hours on IRC with geohot back in the late 2000s / early 2010s mind you, I never liked him, but this is not what HN is for, and not what it should ever become. You can do all of that on reddit, let's not ruin a good rare slice of the internet with meaningless bickering.
Ad hominem attacks are never good approaches. They're irrational in nature. Ad hominem is one of the first fallacies taught in a critical thinking class.
Ad hominems are formal fallacies. They are not valid deductive reasoning.
But people basically never use valid deductive reasoning for anything. Using available evidence to make predictions about things and act on those predictions is fine. If somebody has a history of poor thought or writing and then I encounter more of their thoughts or writing it is not unreasonable to say "this new material is likely to be poor and I don't need to spend time on it."
If somebody says "hey do you want to see Transformers 7", responding "I did not like Transformers 1-6 so I'll pass" is fine even if it is not deductive proof that you won't like Transformers 7.
if ad hominem attacks were of no value, humans wouldn't have evolved the strong tendency to engage in them.
they are not proofs in logic, hence the fallacy, but that does not mean they are irrational. it's irrational to think that human discourse can be capture by logic.
Isn’t rational a synonym for logical, though? People can subjectively rationalize their behavior, but that doesn’t make it objectively rational.
>They may not know that this dude was an anti-masker (with nuance) for example
If you're going to ad hominem, at least give a citation.
>As much as ad hominem attacks are not great approaches, the one scenario I feel it's justified
Because reasons?
> Not everyone knows who geohot is
But I guess people can get pretty much to the same conclusion by reading any of the blog post, I had the same idea just by reading the title here
what's anti-masker?
Some people thought that surgical masks wouldn’t stop you from getting Covid
Surgical masks don't stop you from getting Covid. That was never what they were for: they were to reduce the viral load you exposed others to, between when you got infected and when you noticed that you were infected. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surgical_mask#Function.
Some cloth masks can (when dry) also trap small particulates through electrostatic interactions, although they are less effective as a mechanical filter than surgical masks; and many washing methods destroy this effect.
Right, but that still makes the people who refused to wear one selfish assholes.
They didn't. The point is that they stop you from giving covid to other people.
It's a distinction without a difference. Masks served to reduce the herd from spreading covid. Including other people giving it to you.
The distinction is important! The mechanism by which surgical masks prevent you from getting COVID-19 is peer pressure: it's important for people to know this, so they know how to protect themselves. (And there are fitted masks that protect the wearer: there was just a shortage of them, because despite all the warnings we were not prepared for a pandemic.)
The distinction does matter, because by not wearing a mask, instead of indicating that you don't care about your own safety, you're indicating that you don't care about anybody else's.
You do realise that surgeons don't wear those masks to stop them from catching something right?
> Some people thought that surgical masks wouldn’t stop you from getting Covid
You do realize that masks would help prevent you from getting covid if other people are wearing the masks, right?
The comment just talked about masks, not whether you are the one wearing the mask.
It was more nuanced than that and importantly, "Anti-masker" as a derogatory statement was about "This person is literally unwilling to do anything at all that doesn't pay off for them personally" because a goddamn mask is such a simple thing to do, and they just couldn't handle it, because it was someone else telling them to do something and some people just cannot function when that happens.
People lost their damn minds because "Hey could you maybe take a single small step to ensure you don't sneeze on produce" was protest worthy.
I do not believe someone saying "Masks made out of T-Shirts don't work well" or "Surgical masks aren't as effective as real N95 masks" are an "Anti-masker".
It was about vice-signalling. All the people who get pissy about masks do plenty of things for their "health" that have zero science behind them.
These people often did other things like hiding or downplaying any symptoms, and choosing to go to events while sick, and were often basically superspreaders.
This was all well understood like 25 years ago when WoW did that blood plague thing and people put effort into spreading it as much as possible. We've seen this with other diseases including ones that have no real controversy or political angle. Some people are just that insistent about doing everything they can to make the world a worse place.
It just sucks so much.
Thank God I lived long enough to forget COVID-era terms.
I'm taking, Covid-era anti-masker (?)
I think it’s time to accept that Internet comments are the bloodsport of our day.
You must be new here.
But seriously, I think the level of discourse has gone down considerably on HN in the last few years. I know people always say this in their forum but I think it's true.
For instance, you'll see a post about GPT. Top comments are often "I use Claude", completely irrelevant. And then when [political thing happens] you get these passive-aggressive submissions with a lot of upvotes "how to switch to Claude". It's all just so exhausting. Constantly this moral grand-standing. Here is an example:
> I switched not because I thought Claude was better at doing the things I want. I switched because I have come to believe OpenAI are a bad actor and I do not want to support them in any way. I’m pretty sure they would allow AGI to be used for truly evil purposes, and the events of this week have only convinced me further.
Sir, this is a Wendy's
I almost posted this exact comment. You're not alone in thinking HN has changed for the worse in recent years.
I get that it's just a reflection of cultural change and (over)reactions to anything adding friction. But for a forum dedicated to the "hacker" lifestyle, it's disappointing to see so much gatekeeping and FUD. I really wish this audience could start swinging back towards a response style that contains nuance and recognizes nuance.
I find myself opening this site less and less each week.
It feels like the quality of reddit collapsed over the last decade and a lot of the reddit style posting has come over here. Especially the examples above. To be fair both the good and the bad.
The upvoting for political tribalism (whole political spectrum) is so truly mind bogglingly unintelligent and unoriginal. Its just brings the bar down.
This forum was never dedicated to the hacker lifestyle, it has always been run by profit seeking investor classes.
Did he struck a nerve? All I'm seeing here are attacks on his person rather than discussing his post, which is not even that controversial, just some common sense stuff.
I haven't yet read what the post submitted here is about, and personally I already have the same opinion as the comment you replied to. So I suspect they just wanted to comment about that rather than caring about this specific post, to remind people not to make the mistake of assuming that someone being well known doesn't automatically mean they always know what they're talking about.
In fairness to geohot, who exactly is an expert on what's going to happen to the labour markets as a result of AI? Whose take should I be weighing more heavily than this one?
Or should people just not bother sharing their opinions on this matter? Since it's impossible to predict the future.
Nobody can predict the future. But there are people whose job it is to deeply study the ways that various technologies have changed labor markets. Plenty of historians of science out there who can draw connections to and distinctions from the past.
As someone who actually used to IRC with him back in the day... (man... I'm starting to feel old lol) he's kind of arrogant in his demeanor. He embodies the true spirit of a hacker in the sense of "Hacker" as in Hacker News, but he gets under everyone's skin over the years. This eventually takes a toll on people, and it mounts up.
GeoHot could cure cancer, not put it in the blog post title, somewhere near the bottom, and all of HN would miss it and nobody would ever get the life saving treatment they could have gotten because of blind hatred.
As much as I disliked my interactions with him, I would rather always take someone on a per-event basis, I see his new blog post for what it is and go from there. If it's trash, its trash, otherwise, I'll acknowledge it.
I don't want HN to be another reddit where we blindly attack people.
This trope also contains a trap, however. There have been major insights from people stepping outside their lane. Physicists went into econ and built a whole subfield called econophysics, with Pareto and Mandelbrot among them. Mathematicians have transformed biology with population genetics, which led scientists to predict how genes spread through populations. Or the SIR model for how infections spread. Hidden Markov models lead to gene finding. Closer to home, we have exceptional programmers making giant piles of money in finance, with Simons and his Medallion Fund returning some 66% before fees. And then there's Bitcoin.
The common thread in all of your examples is people with mathematical training bringing mathematical formalisms to disciplines that lacked them.
If you're just offering the wisdom gleaned from your life experiences, they're unlikely to be more insightful that anyone else's.
I’m biased as generalist, but I believe there is science behind the emergent insights afforded to us.
Many of the advances in biology in the middle of the 20th century were also helped along by physicists who switched to biology, often inspired by Schrodinger's What is Life? (1946). The list includes Francis Crick, Maurice Wilkins, and (coming from physical chemistry) Rosalind Franklin.
He never shook the name "Egohot" from the Playstation days and it's just continually reinforced every time he comes back out of the woodwork.
cracking stuff is like 50% ego! that's the point
What's also kind of whatever is that he cracked the iPhone and the PS3 and then...
Most of the noise around him is who is hiring him and who is firing him. I can't think of anything that has been attributed to him in ages.
He’s written some posts I disagree with, but your comment here has no rebuttal, no counter arguments. I’m not sure you’ve even read the post.
It's context. So you know who the guy is if you're new to his writing.
How is this "context"? There is no information here, just a snarky opinion about the person posting the blog, with zero relevance to the posted content.
But how do I know stupid blogs are your niche, you don't even link to one in your profile!
Geohot is a bit of a jestermaxxer, but you really haven't presented much of an argument to support your conclusions.
A whatnow?
From what I gather the maxxer/maxxing suffix is young Gen Z slang for hyper fixation. Looksmaxxing is being obsessed with your looks. Jestermaxxing would then be an outrageous jester or clown for the sake of it? Maybe it's a synonym for rage-baiting? I'll return to guarding my lawn.
Downvoted you, because:
1) You are not engaging with the content of the post at all. I would not mind if you actually articulated why you found this particular take so asinine/cringeworthy. But you don't.
2) You're unnecessarily uncharitable (the blog footer already reads "A home for poorly researched ideas that I find myself repeating a lot anyway"; there's no need to be so snarky).
Exactly the same on the other side though. If we believed that Dario Amodei or Sam Altman really knew how The Economy in its entirety worked, which is what they’re constantly pretending to do, then we should give them the central planning keys to the kingdom and declare communism tomorrow. I’m not being entirely facetious.
Sound like a description of Elon and the X fanboys firehose.
You don't have to be a fanboy to respect outcomes.
He's got a winning track record. You may not agree with his politics or his morals but that's separate from his effectiveness.
Specifically he's effective at stepping outside the domain he currently operates into create inside another.
As a 2018 Tesla owner I strongly disagree with the idea that Elon's got a track record of success. The Model Y was their last successful product and it's just a stretched Model 3. FSD is not there. Robotaxi is an embarrassment. Cybertruck failed to deliver the gigacasted exoskeleton and shipped at double the original price point. Tesla has lost its way completely. (Also, Twitter has lost users and revenue ever since he got involved.)
Ok now say three things that Elon has accomplished successfully in the past few years.
If you can't then you're just speaking from emotion because they obviously exist.
I don't launch rockets into space, don't want a housekeeping robot, don't have a Twitter account, don't do ketamine, and have never been laid off from a government job, so I can't speak to any of those things which Elon has involved himself with more recently.
My personal experience with Elon's promises is through the Model 3 which I do own, and essentially none of his promises for it have materialized. It hasn't morphed into a revenue-generating taxi which drives around strangers at night; it can't be summoned from across town (or even across a parking lot); it can't even safely drive itself without oversight, which was a goal only "months away" in 2019.
You mean the tele-operated "autonomous Robots" ? Also, I'm waiting for >10 years now for his (really!) self-driving cars he promised would be just about 2 years away - every 2 years.
SpaceX is what gives him leverage but the success of the reusable rockets are the engineers behind it - he's just the ketamine-driven hype-man that drives the stock via publicity now.
> He's got a winning track record
What exactly would that be a winning track record in - as near as I can tell, his actual track record is in buying companies with an already-successful product team, and managing not to run them into the ground for a while?
You have got to be kidding me, you can dislike someone without being this wrong. Hes literally the richest man in the world, started the largest space delivery company in the planet and has brought extreme returns for his investors in every endeavor he’s undertook.
> literally the richest man in the world... extreme returns for his investors
This isn't really a benchmark for effectiveness at anything beyond making money.
I don't think anyone would dispute that he has an eye for investments (helped along by a healthy dose of the ol' silver spoon), not to mention a certain flair for convincing Uncle Sam to pick up the tab (i.e. a significant part of Tesla's growth relied on federal EV subsidies, and NASA heavily buying SpaceX launch capacity).
There are a ton of haters on HN that don't like Musk for no other reason than they were told not to like him.
Effectively helping elect a dictator who is in love with fossil fuels undercuts at lot of his "wins". Never mind the Nazi saluting, fraudulent advertising, or bypassing safety regulations.
Which dictator are you referring to?
Or begging Epstein for a chance to visit his island. Cringe.
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And which part of the things he said, would we find a counter argument to in the grass?
A foreign national buying one of the largest American media platforms and turning it into a right-wing propaganda machine should probably concern you at least somewhat.
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This post absolutely reeks with the privilege of wealth. For the vast majority of people on this earth, the "Returns" from their labor matter a lot more to them than some vaunted, abstract ideals, as those ideals won't put food on the table or a roof over their children's heads.
The bottom line is that the majority of people alive today have to take whatever deal they are given in a sense, as they absolutely do not have the "Luxury" of not "Playing zero sum games."
Must be nice to be rich enough to get to spout philosophical BS and not worry how you're going to pay for groceries, but most people alive these days are a lot closer to being homeless than they are to being millionaires, and quitting a job that pays their bills so they can "Provide value to a community" and not worry about how they are going to get paid just isn't even a remotely viable option.
> This is what I have been saying the whole time. Go create value for others and don’t worry about the returns.
No. This is the time to abandon naive dogooderism.
The capitalists said that they don’t need labor any more. Fine. Prepare for that potentiality by not giving jack shit away for free. That includes permissively licensed open source software. But it goes way beyond that.
In the long term maybe we can get rid of the labor-employee relation so that people who do honest work don’t have to worry about their work becoming automated. Let the ones who engage in dishonest pseudo-work (capital accumulation) worry about their pseudo-productivity becoming null and void.
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100% agree with geohot's point on creating value for others and playing the positive-sum game. It is the way. Just a small reminder that sometimes we could worry about the return a tiny bit, as we need returns to verify positive-sum value creation and to scale it.
You've constructed a strawman; geohot never argued you shouldn't ever receive returns. He argued you shouldn't worry about them, which is not the same thing. His argument hinges on the idea that creating surplus value will bring you returns, but worrying about what those returns are is pointless; those returns, as you say, could be monetary, happiness, fulfillment, power, etc.
And I would argue Elon (himself) stopped creating surplus value quite some time ago; some of his companies still do (Neuralink, SpaceX) but companies like Tesla and Boring are explicitly rent-seeking at this point. Tesla disrupts traditional, rent-seeking dealership models, but it simultaneously utilizes lobbying to secure favorable policies and economic advantages, with the goal being to block out other upstarts and competitors from competing.
And no, I do not count either the non-working Optimus or robotaxi as 'surplus value.'
>Take Elon Musk — tremendous positive-sum deals with people everywhere, and all together, that's what got him to the top.
Ah yes, "tremendous" positive-sum deals like:
>Musk admitted to his biographer Ashlee Vance that Hyperloop was all about trying to get legislators to cancel plans for high-speed rail in California—even though he had no plans to build it.
https://time.com/6203815/elon-musk-flaws-billionaire-visions...
> Hyperloop was all about trying to get legislators to cancel plans
Sorry, I don't know the full story behind Hyperloop. But I really doubt he is trying to play a zero-sum or negative-sum game as the article hinted.
Setting aside all the disputes — the deals he made with people are positive-sum. Nobody is forced to buy a Tesla, or invest in, or work for SpaceX.
And in my personal view, all the article brings is deconstructive criticism — which does not fit my tastes. Maybe because I believe the world doesn't owe anyone anything. In fact, to make money, most of the time you have to play a positive-sum game and bring value to others. There is no shame in seeking profit — there is glory in it, if it comes through a positive-sum game.
Those who complain — they can always reject the deal and choose something else. And even better, go offer or support better products in the market and help the best one win.
> In fact, to make money, you have to play a positive-sum game and bring value to others.
That is simply untrue; the opposite is the literal definition of rent-seeking behavior, which produces gobs of money, but provides no (or very little, at best) new value to others.
> That is simply untrue;
Fair point — updated to "most of the time."
> the opposite is the literal definition of rent-seeking behavior, which produces gobs of money, but provides no (or very little, at best) new value to others.
Rent-seeking is real, and you're right that it can be very profitable — while creating very little value for others. But even so, it remains the best available option when nobody else steps up to offer something better in free markets.
There are always two sides to any deal — the deal maker and the taker. The more competition on the maker side, the more value the taker can get. And the more takers demand real value, the less room rent-seeking behavior has to survive.
Agreed on all points; and I think that's precisely what this post argues people should do.
> The days of rent seekers are coming to an end. But not because there will be no more rent seeking, it’s because rent seeking is a 0 sum game and you will lose at it to bigger players. If you have a job like that, or work at a company like that, the sooner you quit the better your outcome will be. This is the real driver of the layoffs, the big players consolidating the rent seeking to them.
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When will they learn it’s not about value, but about power and perception of value is just means to that?
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This reads as a typical anti hype article that attracts the people that are fed up with reality. But this framework never works because it's detached from current reality. AI is a big thing and it will eat most jobs weather you call it stupid or you like it.
OK, and that reads like hype, and so we have hype and anti-hype. I suppose when they collide they combine in a energy-sucking implosion.
The hype Is backed by hard data in ai capabilities. The antihype is backed by human emotional fear.