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Last gasps of the rent seeking class?

geohot.github.io

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Re: Last gasps of the rent seeking class?

#101

Post by stronglikedan »

PaulHoule wrote: post #16

"But like people who are good with computers, the models want a terminal, not some candy ass iPad UI." Back before the iPhone I used to get into arguments with HCI specialists that phones could be like butlers and should know with all the sensors that they have that you put it in your bag and behaved accordingly. I was told that was impossible then but it seems more possible now. Had the world gone at all that way we…

> phones could be like butlers and should know with all the sensors that they have that you put it in your bag and behaved accordingly

Do you mean like the pocket protection on my galaxy phone where it knows when it's in my pocket and blocks accidental touches?

Re: Last gasps of the rent seeking class?

#102

Post by dpark »

solarkraft wrote: post #86

> The best anyone can hope for is a free market, with everything properly priced. But for decades, the American market has not been free. It’s used purposefully added friction to exploit a time asymmetry between the business and you. And due to things like call centers, this has been very profitable for the businesses. Cable companies and insurance rely on the fact that your time is more valuable than theirs. They ca…

People often confuse “free” with “fair”.

Re: Last gasps of the rent seeking class?

#103

Post by mistrial9 »

lukev wrote: post #100
smeeth wrote: post #55

Methinks this post conflates “rent seeking” with “return on investment” just a tad. Economic rent is the extra money you can charge for owning a scarce resource. ML models are not waterfront real estate, they are IP. Other people can make more models if they can/want to. Now, whether IP should be legally protected is a totally separate question, and while we in the West tend to assume the answer is obvious geohot wou…

Also, the defining feature of capitalism is that it encloses what was previously common . Land used not to be owned (feudal lordship was functionally different than private ownership.) Then, society shifted, land became private, and that was the beginning of rent. This is enclosure. The whole concept of IP is to explicitly extend this process to ideas -- they are not free, they are owned, and I have to pay you to use…

almost.. you missed this part

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_slavery

Re: Last gasps of the rent seeking class?

#104

Post by doodlebugging »

someguydave wrote: post #85
doodlebugging wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here. It's been a while.

DOS still works

Yes it does. So does my old HP-11C calculator I used to write the first programs, in RPN for oil well log analysis, that I ever wrote outside of a class assignment.

All of those routines were reprogrammed originally in a flavor of BASIC and it soon became obvious that ASCII log displays from digitized published materials were marginally useful as interpretation tools. Tabular data was far too dense. We needed pictures. Therefore we chased graphical methods of displaying data leading us to C and then C++ for the graphical routines that made it easy to display all of the data from an oil well log and to scroll the logs while zooming in and out.

We started all that in some flavor of DOS and as time went by and everyone dumped their latest OS incarnation, we moved thru MS-DOS, PC-DOS, DR-DOS, etc until MS finally got with the GUI environment plan like Apple's Mac and produced a near worthless GUI called Win386 and later Win95. For a time it was fun.

Linux, the old new kid on the block, still works great from the command line too. The GUI exists to streamline some of the things that are more easily digested in graphical formats. It has nothing to do with anyone's intelligence or ability to pick up skills they don't have today.

Re: Last gasps of the rent seeking class?

#105

Post by bdangubic »

schubidubiduba wrote: post #94
solarkraft wrote: post #86

> The best anyone can hope for is a free market, with everything properly priced. But for decades, the American market has not been free. It’s used purposefully added friction to exploit a time asymmetry between the business and you. And due to things like call centers, this has been very profitable for the businesses. Cable companies and insurance rely on the fact that your time is more valuable than theirs. They ca…

No. The market being free would mean that a private person can also hire Indians to call companies.

what's stopping them from doing so?

Re: Last gasps of the rent seeking class?

#106

Post by lukev »

mistrial9 wrote: post #103
lukev wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, the defining feature of capitalism is that it encloses what was previously common . Land used not to be owned (feudal lordship was functionally different than private ownership.) Then, society shifted, land became private, and that was the beginning of rent. This is enclosure. The whole concept of IP is to explicitly extend this process to ideas -- they are not free, they are owned, and I have to pay you to use…

almost.. you missed this part https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_slavery

I could not possibly enumerate all the possible things that have been enclosed. Human beings obviously being the most morally egregious.

Re: Last gasps of the rent seeking class?

#107

Post by triceratops »

schubidubiduba wrote: post #94
solarkraft wrote: post #86

> The best anyone can hope for is a free market, with everything properly priced. But for decades, the American market has not been free. It’s used purposefully added friction to exploit a time asymmetry between the business and you. And due to things like call centers, this has been very profitable for the businesses. Cable companies and insurance rely on the fact that your time is more valuable than theirs. They ca…

No. The market being free would mean that a private person can also hire Indians to call companies.

No law against doing that. You could use Fiverr for it right now.

Re: Last gasps of the rent seeking class?

#108

Post by altairprime »

dpark wrote: post #102
solarkraft wrote: post #86

> The best anyone can hope for is a free market, with everything properly priced. But for decades, the American market has not been free. It’s used purposefully added friction to exploit a time asymmetry between the business and you. And due to things like call centers, this has been very profitable for the businesses. Cable companies and insurance rely on the fact that your time is more valuable than theirs. They ca…

People often confuse “free” with “fair”.

People often confuse “free” with “unregulated”, too.

Re: Last gasps of the rent seeking class?

#109

Post by janalsncm »

> Enter AI, the great equalizer of time.

Enter Terms of Service, monopolies and duopolies, and maybe even cybercrime statutes.

There’s no law that says AT&T can’t just ban your account if you hook up your “talk to customer service” bot to their AI/overseas customer service phone tree army.

Or, they can just lock your account for “safety” reasons.

Re: Last gasps of the rent seeking class?

#110

Post by ares623 »

yabutlivnWoods wrote: post #89
WJW wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People used to call him "egohot" back in the day when he was cracking playstation games, because he was already incredibly arrogant even at a young age.

Yeah. This has strong self-selection bias. Egohot thinks about this stuff a lot so obviously everyone does! Most people only care about money as they have no choice. Absent a cash-first system money has become a social construct. The valuation of a dollar is entirely ephemeral now. I see that social reality becoming more realized and the existing social system around money collapsing due to generational churns attenu…

Fuck Geohot for lending his hand to Musk during the Twitter takeover. He is obviously "sorted" and successful. But his recent blog posts suggests to me that he has started to realize, despite all his success, that if/when the system collapses, he'll be queuing up in the breadlines just like the rest of us.

The sooner the other techbros get the same realization the better.

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