21–30 of 69 posts
I guess im wondering where is the line that makes this evil but my made up frying pan ad just a harmless exageration.
> [...] serving me ads for Replit — one of the many vibe-coding startups that have emerged in the past couple of years, Replit (formerly repl.it) has been around for a decade as an online IDE / runtime, productized from work from 2009 for editing environments on udemy and co. But like many companies they pivoted their marketing schtick to AI because that's where the money is. Cursor and Zed are editors, but because t…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> everyone has the same (extremely low) odds In the author’s example, Replit has a very high chance of making a profit on those folks’ desperation. It’s not exactly an MLM. But the predatory mechanism is close. Loan sharking might be a more exact analog for the financial bit, but the social-media marketing strikes closer to MLMs.
I think the standard analogy would be selling shovels to the gold miners.
There was actually gold in the California hills. Nobody is starting a business the way the Replit ads seems to be pitching.
This one’s a simple pump and dump before the attorneys general get wiser.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The preceding clause is just as bad: >> the belief that AI can — and will — displace white-collar jobs is a lie that’s been accepted by the masses I see no argument whatsoever in the piece as to why this is the case, just an emphatic declaration. Anyway. The belief that the author isn’t talking out of their ass is an insidious lie spread by dark forces. QED.
> I see no argument whatsoever in the piece as to why this is the case, just an emphatic declaration. We’ve heard Claude is good enough now that you no longer need SE and founders will just do their coding for a year already. It hasn’t happened. And guess who develops CC and other Anthropic/OpenAI products?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the standard analogy would be selling shovels to the gold miners.
> standard analogy would be selling shovels to the gold miners There was actually gold in the California hills. Nobody is starting a business the way the Replit ads seems to be pitching. This one’s a simple pump and dump before the attorneys general get wiser.
Keep in mind the vast majority of gold miners found no gold.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We're what, 2 years in? Or 6 months since the coding models became reasonably proficient. No one knows what AI will look like 6 months from now let alone 5 years so the present jobs data can't tell you anything other than that nothing catastrophic has happened yet .
> No one knows what AI will look like 6 months No, but we know what it’s looked like over the past 6 months. We also have two years of Altman preening about imminent, massive job losses. Per his own timelines, those haven’t manifested. Predicting indeterminate catastrophe isn’t a prediction, it’s a scam.
The analogy to MLM doesn’t work. In a pyramid scheme, early investors are guaranteed money, whereas late investors are guaranteed losses. With a vibe-coding platform, everyone has the same (extremely low) odds of building a hit app, so is at least more equitable in that sense.
When my neighbour decided to pack it all in, he paid me 50 quid to pull his car into my workshop and take all the branding vinyl-cut off. Less than an hour for me, he'd been at it for days.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> standard analogy would be selling shovels to the gold miners There was actually gold in the California hills. Nobody is starting a business the way the Replit ads seems to be pitching. This one’s a simple pump and dump before the attorneys general get wiser.
I'm sure someone somewhere at some point has made some money on replit. There is always an outlier. Keep in mind the vast majority of gold miners found no gold.
Source? We would do panhandling trips as Boy Scouts in the California hills. On each outing at least someone found gold. Which means every one of us would have eventually found some given a few days.
Most panhandlers didn’t break even. But I’m challenging even that threshold for Replit. I’m guessing most of their vibe-coded businesses never make a penny of revenue.