[HN Gopher] Create value for others and don't worry about the re...
___________________________________________________________________
Create value for others and don't worry about the returns
Author : ppew
Score : 640 points
Date : 2026-03-11 05:45 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (geohot.github.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (geohot.github.io)
| sudo_cowsay wrote:
| 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).
| fragmede wrote:
| "just"
| bayindirh wrote:
| 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.
| fragmede wrote:
| 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.
| bayindirh wrote:
| 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.
| sfink wrote:
| 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.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| 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.
| tasuki wrote:
| 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.
| beanshadow wrote:
| > 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.
| ingatorp wrote:
| 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.
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| 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.
| FlyingSnake wrote:
| People keep rediscovering the Bhagavad Gita in new ways
|
| https://vedabase.io/en/library/bg/2/47/
| ramblerman wrote:
| > 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
| simianwords wrote:
| 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.
| chunkyguy wrote:
| 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.
| simianwords wrote:
| 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.
| sl-1 wrote:
| War is often times even negative sum game.
| rgun wrote:
| 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.
| card_zero wrote:
| Historically, no. It's like Tennyson: _Theirs not to make
| reply, Theirs not to reason why, Theirs but to do and
| die._
| ivell wrote:
| > 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.
| card_zero wrote:
| So, "have a go, do you best, shit happens, don't worry
| about it".
| vivzkestrel wrote:
| 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/
| ivell wrote:
| 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.
| devsda wrote:
| > 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.
| DangitBobby wrote:
| 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?
| devsda wrote:
| > 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.
| kody wrote:
| 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.
| kjgkjhfkjf wrote:
| > 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.
| bob1029 wrote:
| > 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".
| ramon156 wrote:
| 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
| mettamage wrote:
| 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.
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| 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
| vasco wrote:
| > 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".
| camillomiller wrote:
| 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
| vasco wrote:
| 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".
| throwaway346434 wrote:
| 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!"
| vasco wrote:
| 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.
| camillomiller wrote:
| 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.
| vasco wrote:
| 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.
| camillomiller wrote:
| 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"?
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| The problem is that you have to acquire money first to care
| less about it
| tasuki wrote:
| > 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.
| dominicrose wrote:
| 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.
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| I do behave pretty differently in video games where failure
| doesn't mean I lose my house or my child goes without
| medicine
| 7777777phil wrote:
| 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..
| keyle wrote:
| That was my contracting philosophy for 15 years.
|
| Create more value than what I cost, otherwise why are you paying
| me?
| austin-cheney wrote:
| 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.
| pu_pe wrote:
| 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.
| choeger wrote:
| 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?
| Finbel wrote:
| 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.
| root_user wrote:
| 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.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| 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.
| DangitBobby wrote:
| 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.
| trick-or-treat wrote:
| 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).
| risyachka wrote:
| >> 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".
| borski wrote:
| 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.'
| missingdays wrote:
| > 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
| borski wrote:
| 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)
| OtherShrezzing wrote:
| >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.
| borski wrote:
| 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.)
| minmax2020 wrote:
| 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?
| franciscop wrote:
| 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.
| customname wrote:
| Wait what's a new laptop doing to push the needle exactly?
| Genuinely curious
| sfink wrote:
| 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.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| It doesn't cut a cake nearly as well as the old Macbook
| Air so obviously duller.
| rvrs wrote:
| 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
| SyneRyder wrote:
| 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.
| georgehotz wrote:
| 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.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| How should we prevent it, considering the huge financial
| incentives they have to go exactly that?
| franciscop wrote:
| Strongly agree! I was answering my parent comment that had
| a very negative view, it is indeed an amazing situation
| where' in!
| chirau wrote:
| 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?
| georgehotz wrote:
| 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.
| georgehotz wrote:
| 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.
| simianwords wrote:
| 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
| pestaa wrote:
| 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.
| borski wrote:
| TurboTax is a prototypical example of rent-seeking.
| Amorymeltzer wrote:
| 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
| cafe owner takes the value that 's created by the barista.
| rvz wrote:
| > 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.
| borski wrote:
| 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.
| dzink wrote:
| 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.
| rvz wrote:
| 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.
| vintermann wrote:
| 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.
| energy123 wrote:
| Most games are either negative-sum or positive-sum. Very few
| are zero-sum.
| vintermann wrote:
| 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.
| energy123 wrote:
| 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.
| vintermann wrote:
| 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.
| sfink wrote:
| 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.
| card_zero wrote:
| 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.
| randomgermanguy wrote:
| 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
| graemep wrote:
| 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.
| simianwords wrote:
| > 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.
| ryanjshaw wrote:
| You discarded the context within which he made that statement.
| simianwords wrote:
| 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?
| cyh555 wrote:
| > 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.
| simianwords wrote:
| 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
| bravetraveler wrote:
| I didn't get a career/skillset for the aesthetics. Sounds like
| Communism, rabble rabble. Or a cult.
|
| Is this effective_altruism.jpg?
| avaer wrote:
| 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.
| simianwords wrote:
| While I think you are not wrong, these are excuses to continue
| doing useless things
| nine_k wrote:
| What useless things?
| simianwords wrote:
| Partake in war
| bratbag wrote:
| War against someone who wants my society eradicated
| provides a lot of value to my people.
| simianwords wrote:
| do you have the intelligence to verify that?
| wartywhoa23 wrote:
| And much more pain, misery and suffering to people who
| never wished you anything bad but happen to live on the
| other side.
| mlrtime wrote:
| 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.
| nine_k wrote:
| 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| 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_.
| nine_k wrote:
| 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.
| apples_oranges wrote:
| 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?
| dmantis wrote:
| 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.
| sdeframond wrote:
| 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.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > 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.
| mlrtime wrote:
| >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.
| TonyStr wrote:
| 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
| zozbot234 wrote:
| 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).
| raumgeist wrote:
| 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.
| mlrtime wrote:
| 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?
| card_zero wrote:
| 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.
| DangitBobby wrote:
| 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.
| muyuu wrote:
| 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.
| shaman1 wrote:
| https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2026/02/27/the-i...
|
| from the same author
| zozbot234 wrote:
| 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.
| card_zero wrote:
| 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.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| 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.
| DeepSeaTortoise wrote:
| 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.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > 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.
| notarobot123 wrote:
| 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.
| Obscurity4340 wrote:
| Sounds like a win-win. Rich people win then they double
| dip and win again
| ncruces wrote:
| It's fine if you're leaving something to those future
| generations. Like a bridge or a dam built to last 100
| years.
| crimsoneer wrote:
| This is like suggesting no business should ever borrow to
| invest.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| 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.
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| 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
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| 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.
| imtringued wrote:
| 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.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| 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.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| 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).
| deaux wrote:
| > 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.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| 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.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| 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.
| deaux wrote:
| 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.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| 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.
| mlrtime wrote:
| 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| 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.
| gottheUIblues wrote:
| 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.
| nc wrote:
| 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.
| rfwhyte wrote:
| 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.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| 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.
| castral wrote:
| Ah, well... TIL to not take anything geohot writes seriously
| in the future.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| xkcd://1053
| esafak wrote:
| That URN made me chuckle.
| fragmede wrote:
| Alternately, he's right and you're wrong.
| mlrtime wrote:
| ^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.
| vincston wrote:
| 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".
| darkwater wrote:
| Well, reputation is made by many dimensions. Writing
| takes like the UBI one is definitely a signal to take
| into account.
| bravetraveler wrote:
| 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.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > 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.
| bravetraveler wrote:
| Hard to say. SaaS is dead, long live SaaS.
| maybewhenthesun wrote:
| 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.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| 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.
| flammafex wrote:
| Guess we'll starve then. Good luck dealing with hundreds
| of millions of hungry angry people.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| 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.
| flammafex wrote:
| 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?
| tartoran wrote:
| Now with ICE and tarrifs things are going to hit really
| hard.
| maybewhenthesun wrote:
| > 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.
| deaux wrote:
| 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.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| 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.
| deaux wrote:
| 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?
| mike_hearn wrote:
| 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.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| >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?
| swiftcoder wrote:
| 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| > 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%.
| jrimbault wrote:
| 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.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| 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.
| fragmede wrote:
| 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.
| Obscurity4340 wrote:
| Well what is then? Respectfully, please have an
| alternative or otherwise how is this not astroturfing
| fragmede wrote:
| 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.
| tartoran wrote:
| I think the whole premise for UBI is that there won't be
| any jobs left, jobs to make a living at least.
| DangitBobby wrote:
| You don't support it on principle or because you don't
| think it works?
| UncleMeat wrote:
| 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.
| maybewhenthesun wrote:
| > 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.
| graemep wrote:
| 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.
| imtringued wrote:
| UBI in the form of CO2 dividends works extremely well. Be
| more creative about the potential applications of the pay
| out mechanism.
| echelon_musk wrote:
| The owners of production paying taxes?! Seems unlikely.
| imtringued wrote:
| >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 100EUR CO2 dividend.
| Like, giving 100EUR 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 100EUR even if
| that reduction will result in hundreds of millions of EUR
| being diverted away from people who actually need the money
| to compensate their CO2 taxes.
| maybewhenthesun wrote:
| >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.
| booleandilemma wrote:
| 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.
| joegibbs wrote:
| 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.
| yard2010 wrote:
| > 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.
| DangitBobby wrote:
| 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.
| acuozzo wrote:
| 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(tm), the math of our
| current commodity-based economy falls apart.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > 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.
| wisty wrote:
| "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.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| 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.
| tmvnty wrote:
| 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.
| PowerElectronix wrote:
| 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.
| fragmede wrote:
| 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!
| PowerElectronix wrote:
| Hey, don't dismiss your intelligence like that!
| fragmede wrote:
| Haha, thanks! I like to think I'm smart (sometimes), just
| not at Geohot's level.
| cpursley wrote:
| 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.
| XorNot wrote:
| 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.
| zetanor wrote:
| I wouldn't be satisfied with my share of UBI. I'd want
| yours, too.
| DangitBobby wrote:
| 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.
| pdyc wrote:
| 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.
| kudokatz wrote:
| > 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.
| kindkang2024 wrote:
| > Create value for others and don't worry about the returns
|
| What counts as a return is quite subjective -- it goes beyond
| money. Respect, happiness, meaning -- all of these count.
|
| Given that, if there are no returns at all, I bet that is not a
| positive-sum game that could last long. Like if you give and
| create value for others, but the recipient has no respect for you
| and you receive nothing -- it is not meaningful and will not last
| long. And you'd better walk away and start worrying about the
| returns.
|
| And to be frank, look at who creates the most value in the world
| -- they also could be the richest. That is no coincidence. Take
| Elon Musk -- tremendous positive-sum deals with people
| everywhere, and all together, that's what got him to the top.
|
| Kudos to all the entrepreneurs who work hard and create deal
| opportunities that could make everyone win.
| duskdozer wrote:
| >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...
| kubb wrote:
| When will they learn it's not about value, but about power
| and perception of value is just means to that?
| kindkang2024 wrote:
| > 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.
| borski wrote:
| > 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.
| kindkang2024 wrote:
| > 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.
| borski wrote:
| 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.
| taint6969 wrote:
| You clearly don't know the story behind Hyperloop. It was a
| scam to cancel High Speed Rail and set us back decades,
| that's it. It only worked because there are more selfish
| transplants here than locals, and amazingly every one of
| those idiots idolizes Elon Musk.
| taint6969 wrote:
| Yes, it's widely known among SF locals that Hyperloop was a
| huge scam from the beginning to cancel High Speed Rail. Why
| anyone of these Canadian/Euro retards are chiming in here is
| beyond me.
| borski wrote:
| 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.'
| kindkang2024 wrote:
| (Added Later :-) )
|
| 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.
| xodn348 wrote:
| It's better to be a happy optimist than a smart pessimist.
| wartywhoa23 wrote:
| Pessimists are still happier in the long run: they are either
| proved right, or pleasantly surprised.
| fragmede wrote:
| 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.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| That's assuming you get a choice in the matter.
| latenightcoding wrote:
| [deleted]
| nine_k wrote:
| 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.
| JSR_FDED wrote:
| 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.
| borski wrote:
| 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.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| 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.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| 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.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| 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.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| 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.
| filleduchaos wrote:
| What on earth are you talking about? In the US (which
| seems to be the context in question), Actual Registered
| Nurses(tm) 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.
| samiv wrote:
| 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.
| nathancroissant wrote:
| 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 !
| borski wrote:
| > 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.
| randomgermanguy wrote:
| 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.
| burnt-resistor wrote:
| 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.
| arisAlexis wrote:
| 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.
| card_zero wrote:
| 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.
| arisAlexis wrote:
| The hype Is backed by hard data in ai capabilities. The
| antihype is backed by human emotional fear.
| p697 wrote:
| 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.
| peepee1982 wrote:
| The whole world ... Some companies ...
|
| What is it, man?
| ray_ wrote:
| 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"
| CrzyLngPwd wrote:
| Non-attachment to outcomes has always been one of the
| cornerstones of life.
| Aldipower wrote:
| "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.
| MinimalAction wrote:
| 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.
| Archer6621 wrote:
| 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.
| solstice wrote:
| > 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
| nubg wrote:
| > That said, if you have a job where you create complexity for
| others, you will be found out.
|
| Anybody have examples?
| mihaic wrote:
| 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.
| wartywhoa23 wrote:
| The obligatory reality check:
|
| https://theoatmeal.com/comics/exposure
| zozbot234 wrote:
| 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.
| evolighting wrote:
| > "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.
| locallost wrote:
| 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.
| YCpedohaven wrote:
| > 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
| DickAndBalls wrote:
| it's not that subtle lmao It's pretty in our faces.
|
| Nice to see I'm not the only maniac here btw xD
| wartywhoa23 wrote:
| 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?
| strideashort wrote:
| 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.
| bananaflag wrote:
| > 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.
| georgehotz wrote:
| 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?
| Obscurity4340 wrote:
| I know for a fact StanleyNickels(tm) have surpassed, nay,
| exceeded SchruteBucks(tm)
| MadxX79 wrote:
| 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.
| IanCal wrote:
| > 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.
| Hadarai5 wrote:
| I remember P vs NP
| peepee1982 wrote:
| [flagged]
| kotaKat wrote:
| 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.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| cracking stuff is like 50% ego! that's the point
| aerhardt wrote:
| 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.
| mentalgear wrote:
| Sound like a description of Elon and the X fanboys firehose.
| ap99 wrote:
| 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.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| > 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?
| edgyquant wrote:
| 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.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| > 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).
| ap99 wrote:
| 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.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| 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.
| NickC25 wrote:
| Or begging Epstein for a chance to visit his island.
| Cringe.
| ap99 wrote:
| Which dictator are you referring to?
| StilesCrisis wrote:
| 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.)
| ap99 wrote:
| 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.
| StilesCrisis wrote:
| 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.
| fragmede wrote:
| 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.
| CrazyStat wrote:
| 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.
| cjs_ac wrote:
| 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.
| braebo wrote:
| I'm biased as generalist, but I believe there is science
| behind the emergent insights afforded to us.
| mns wrote:
| 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.
| swores wrote:
| 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.
| titanomachy wrote:
| 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.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| 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.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| 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.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| 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.
| bko wrote:
| 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
| kcoddington wrote:
| 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.
| Klonoar wrote:
| This forum was never dedicated to the hacker lifestyle,
| it has always been run by profit seeking investor
| classes.
| boringg wrote:
| 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.
| ramraj07 wrote:
| 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.
| jpadkins wrote:
| what's anti-masker?
| denverllc wrote:
| Some people thought that surgical masks wouldn't stop you
| from getting Covid
| ludston wrote:
| They didn't. The point is that they stop you from giving
| covid to other people.
| petcat wrote:
| It's a distinction without a difference. Masks served to
| reduce _the herd_ from spreading covid. Including other
| people giving it to you.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| 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.)
| drcongo wrote:
| You do realise that surgeons don't wear those masks to
| stop them from catching something right?
| petcat wrote:
| > 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.
| ludston wrote:
| 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.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| 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.
| stavros wrote:
| Right, but that still makes the people who refused to
| wear one selfish assholes.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| 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.
| mvcosta91 wrote:
| Thank God I lived long enough to forget COVID-era terms.
| pelagicAustral wrote:
| I'm taking, Covid-era anti-masker (?)
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > 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.
| giwook wrote:
| Conventional for whom?
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| 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.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| 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.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| 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.
| jatari wrote:
| There was literally never a time where mainstream medical
| advice was "masks do nothing".
| froglets wrote:
| 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.
| whizzter wrote:
| 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.
| rdevilla wrote:
| 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; [...]
| shpongled wrote:
| 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.
| pydry wrote:
| >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?
| lnxg33k1 wrote:
| > 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
| neuralkoi wrote:
| 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.
| fsckboy wrote:
| 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.
| otterley wrote:
| Isn't rational a synonym for logical, though? People can
| subjectively rationalize their behavior, but that doesn't
| make it objectively rational.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| 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.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| 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.
| GorbachevyChase wrote:
| I think it's time to accept that Internet comments are the
| bloodsport of our day.
| mpalmer wrote:
| But how do I know stupid blogs are _your_ niche, you don 't
| even link to one in your profile!
| lunias wrote:
| Geohot is a bit of a jestermaxxer, but you really haven't
| presented much of an argument to support your conclusions.
| otterley wrote:
| A whatnow?
| cpburns2009 wrote:
| 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.
| myrmidon wrote:
| 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).
| keiferski wrote:
| 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.
| Sammi wrote:
| It's context. So you know who the guy is if you're new to his
| writing.
| myrmidon wrote:
| 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.
| bena wrote:
| 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.
| 10xDev wrote:
| 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.
| Mtinie wrote:
| ...and a concise one at that. Which is more impressive given
| the (general) penchant to say less with more.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| AI is just another realm for corporate rentseeking.
|
| Do we really think these billions of debt generatjon is
| anything else?
| s_dev wrote:
| 301.9K Followers
|
| 0 posts
|
| Is this guy just paying bots to upvote and promote his stuff?
| titanomachy wrote:
| He's kinda famous, he cracked the iPhone and PS3 as a
| teenager.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Hotz
| samtheprogram wrote:
| 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).
| zurfer wrote:
| 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 :)
| pydry wrote:
| >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.
| JonChesterfield wrote:
| 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.
| sfn42 wrote:
| 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.
| auggierose wrote:
| If you are employed, by definition you have outsourced the
| worries about the return on the value you create to your
| employer.
| dchftcs wrote:
| 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.
| tartoran wrote:
| 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.
| sfn42 wrote:
| 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.
| sfn42 wrote:
| 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.
| data-ottawa wrote:
| 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.
| DangitBobby wrote:
| And they, in turn, have outsourced the worries of the value
| they need you to create onto you!
| acuozzo wrote:
| 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_.
| thendrill wrote:
| 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 ?
| dchftcs wrote:
| 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.
| jack_pp wrote:
| 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
| edgyquant wrote:
| 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)
| pezgrande wrote:
| aren't most of them being payed by big corps? Redhat, Google,
| Microsoft... you name it.
| nyantaro1 wrote:
| 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
| rustyhancock wrote:
| 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.
| Krei-se wrote:
| 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.
| titanomachy wrote:
| 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.
| pydry wrote:
| 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.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > 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.
| Retr0id wrote:
| > 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.
| gitgud wrote:
| 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
| globular-toast wrote:
| 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.
|
| -- _Tao Te Ching_ verse 2.
| civvv wrote:
| ChatGPT could never
| tim-projects wrote:
| 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.
| danilocesar wrote:
| I'd read several other posts and had a similar conclusion.
| humannutsack wrote:
| Hack, actor, liar, influencer. You might as well share that
| LeGate kid
| economistbob wrote:
| 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.
| WJW wrote:
| 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.
| varjag wrote:
| 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?
| keiferski wrote:
| 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.
| sarchertech wrote:
| 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.
| sarchertech wrote:
| 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.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > 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.
| blackmesaind wrote:
| 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..
| francisofascii wrote:
| The wages for craftsman are actually not that great on
| average. Stories of them making 6 figures are not the norm.
| joquarky wrote:
| How does that work when you're over 50?
| keiferski wrote:
| 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.
| safety1st wrote:
| 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!
| YCpedohaven wrote:
| > 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.
| harimau777 wrote:
| 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.
| keiferski wrote:
| 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.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Business can remain irrational longer than you can remain
| financially solvent.
| fsckboy wrote:
| > _irrational management, and that predates AI_
|
| actually, it's AI that will be doing the predating
| francisofascii wrote:
| the goalposts for providing value are changing faster than
| ever
| DrewADesign wrote:
| 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.
| jurgenburgen wrote:
| 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?
| DrewADesign wrote:
| 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.)_
| palmotea wrote:
| > 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.
| bayarearefugee wrote:
| > 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.
| echelon wrote:
| > 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.
| keiferski wrote:
| In a perfect world, yes. In most companies, finding good
| talent is a much harder problem than having too much of
| it.
| Lord-Jobo wrote:
| 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.
| direwolf20 wrote:
| 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.
| lanfeust6 wrote:
| 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.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| > 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.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| 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.
| onehair wrote:
| 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.
| ms8 wrote:
| 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.
| cardanome wrote:
| 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.
| rdevilla wrote:
| > 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.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| 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.
| palmotea wrote:
| > 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.
| torginus wrote:
| 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.
| bayarearefugee wrote:
| > 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.
| tolerance wrote:
| 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.
| otterley wrote:
| 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.
| SecretDreams wrote:
| > 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.
| grim_io wrote:
| Try being a translator today. You can provide as much value as
| you want, you won't get a job anymore.
| halJordan wrote:
| 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.
| djhn wrote:
| 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.
| Horos wrote:
| even thoses replies create common value.
|
| Tomorow datasets.
|
| Keep publishing !
| neuralkoi wrote:
| 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.
| skyberrys wrote:
| 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.
| whalesalad wrote:
| 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.
| pglikeskids wrote:
| karpathy, geohot, william legate, any other "developer
| influencers" i need to avoid?
| keybored wrote:
| > 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.
| capricio_one wrote:
| 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.
| jeffbee wrote:
| 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".
| jgbuddy wrote:
| Lol AI is not search. I will never wrap my head around the
| pessimism of AI on HN
| greenwallnorway wrote:
| 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.
| scoofy wrote:
| 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.
| rfwhyte wrote:
| 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.
| mempko wrote:
| 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.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2026-03-11 23:01 UTC)