Rolling the ladder up behind us

Wild overreactions is exactly what we need -- f.ex. the Linux kernel's gross negligence of security is no longer good enough is one thing that regularly comes to mind.

New geopolitics are in place, too. Our entire branch should do much, much better than they currently do.

One prediction: cybersecurity jobs might see some surge in the EU. Maybe.

In general though, I would work on transparently syncing world-wide database with partitions for personal data (photo galleries, contacts, calendars, media collections, game saves, anything at all) that is akin to, but much better than, torrents -- another very good example.

In general I am extremely mad at the privileged techies who just wrote philosophical essays about what "we" should be doing... while they themselves spent their riches on expensive (and likely sub-par quality) food in the restaurants of a certain coastal US city.

> pretty much every advancement in automation across history has sacrificed some fidelity and craftsmanship. That's the cost of automation

Can you help me think through how this looks when considering car manufacturing? Originally hand made cars were things of craftsmanship, but significantly lower quality and reliability than those produced with tiny tolerances on insane production lines. I'd take a modern car over a handmade one just about any day of the week.

History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme. Most of the discussion here seems to focus on the events of the past repeating themselves in almost the same manner, and ignoring the differences, which are substantial.

We're not talking about goods produced in bulk, but rather about a new intelligence that helps produce job shop type goods. That intelligence itself isn't a physical good though, and it can be copied freely and run elsewhere at almost no cost, and copyright won't save it. It's like toothpaste out of the tube once it's on the internet.

If we want to keep on track with the analogy to frame weaving machines, the difference is that capital and the availability of power were required to use those machines, which provided the moat required to protect profits.[Econ 101]

Models can be copied, and all of the investment in training used freely by anyone possessing a copy. This might have been how DeepSeek was trained, we'll never know. This is clearly different than in the case of weaving machines.

So instead of the cost of cloth, the cost of thought is going to drop considerably, and the quality of that artificial thought is (likely) at the lowest point it'll ever be. I can already run quantized versions of Deepseek on my CPU with 32 Gb of RAM. The future really doesn't seem to have an upper limit on what can be run locally.

With the ability to run models locally, the costs of running models will always have competition to lower prices. The other force is the capture of prompts and responses, whether covert or in the open, for other use, which must always be kept in mind.

The ability to build completely new things, will, I think, help to usher in a new era of innovation and allow anyone, anywhere, to start up companies to service the world.

[Econ 101] - In Economics 101, I learned that in a free and fair marketplace, it was impossible to maintain an outsized profit, because competition would always show up to take part of that profit.

> In Economics 101, I learned that in a free and fair marketplace, it was impossible to maintain an outsized profit, because competition would always show up to take part of that profit.

What you should have learned is that in an idealized, perfectly rational, perfectly competitive market this is true, and you should have also learned that such markets do not exist in reality, not least of all because rational choice theory does not accurately model human behavior, but also because perfect competition is not an attainable condition.

Well money is always the rub. And many people, once they become better off, become stingy and paranoid and don't want to reinvest -- which I completely understand, especially if they didn't have rich parents and trust fund(s) and had to grind their boots off to get where they are. If I ever make it I know I am absolutely joining that exact group. I owe the world nothing -- definitely not after decades of abuse and zero appreciation.

> it's pretty much impossible to start from scratch (without deep, patient pockets).

Well, I was not referring to myself here, FWIW. I ain't ever going below $10k a month (not to mention that for any meaningful life plans $18k - $25k a month is much more strategically desirable) but I was somewhat referring to many certain techies here on HN who (1) have the talents and tech skills and (2) are very well-off and could work for charity wages for 5+ years without a problem (think $3k - $5k a month).

I am just very sad that these people, who are in a 10x better position than I ever was for 23+ years of career, did not group up and did not create the next-gen lab experience, the likes of which we haven't seen since the days of UNIX. :/

As for the rest of the world, the owning class are quite fine with what they already have -- they know tech currently is not 100% reliable but they are never making 5x the investment for what they see as a 10% improvement (which is exactly the part where they are wrong -- but these people can't think beyond 2-3 quarters ahead anyway).