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AI is a business model stress test

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Re: AI is a business model stress test

#321

Post by Altern4tiveAcc »

drivebyhooting wrote: post #111
venndeezl wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my opinion information wants to be free. It's wild to me seeing the tech world veer into hyper-capitalism and IP protectionism. Complete 180 from the 00s. IMO copyright laws should be rewritten to bring copyright inline with the rest of the economy. Plumbers are not claiming use fees from the pipes they installed a decade ago. Doctor isn't getting paid by a 70 year old for saving the 70 year old when they were in…

Excuse me, but even if in principle of “information wants to be free”, the actual outcome of LLMs is the opposite of democratizing information and access. It completely centralizes accesses, censorship, and profits in the hands of a few mega corporations. It is completely against the spirit of information wants to be free. Using that catch phrase in protection of mega corps is a travesty.

> It completely centralizes accesses, censorship, and profits in the hands of a few mega corporations.

Have the biggest models be legally forced to be released in the open for end users, then. Best of both worlds.

Wait a few years, and you'll even be able to run those models in commodity hardware.

Enshittification in order to give returns to shareholders suck. The tech is great and empowering for the commons.

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#322

Post by Altern4tiveAcc »

mrtesthah wrote: post #72
wnjenrbr wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my opinion, IP is dead. Strong IP died in 2022, along with the Marxist labor theory of value; of which IP derives its (hypothetical) value. It no longer matters who did what when and how. The only thing that matters is that exists, and it can be consumed, for no cost, forever. IP is the final delusion of 19th century thinking. It was crushed when we could synthesize anything, at little cost, little effort. Turns o…

This is a tone deaf take that ignores the massive imbalance in how IP law is wielded by large corporations vs individuals or small firms.

IP being used by small firms instead of large corporations does not make it a good thing. It's the same disgusting concept to deny freedom for end users to give control to who "owns" the IP.

IP as a concept needs to die.

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#324

Post by jaynate »

ChicagoDave wrote: post #303
jaynate wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Our sales people can make feature requests I can tell you with near-100% certainty. This isn’t what you want to happen. Disaster in the making. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should. There is very little competitive advantage to be gained from this type of effort in most companies.

What we "want" and what businesses will demand are very different things. I can tell you from 40 years build software, all companies care about is functional software. They don't care about code quality, maintainability, or tech debt. Never seen a single CTO say, "Let's carve out 20% of our sprints for tech debt," even though as architects we recommend something like that all the time. The motto has always been, "Mak…

I think we are both saying similar things here (believe it or not). Sales leaders turnover with surprising frequency - 18-24 months. About the time the sales team tells you what they “want” and you fine tune it, they will be gone. The next person will come in and probably scrap 50-75% of what the prior leader did. New requirements.

Meanwhile, besides functionality, you’ll want/need to plug in the latest and greatest go to market tools for marketing -and demand gen. But… that’ll be a custom effort, too.

Along the way you’ll also realize that you’re missing out on the most common practices in the industry because you built some idiosyncratic tool that only is relevant to your company.

History may very well prove me wrong, but I think you’re underestimating the expertise that underlies these products and platforms. It’s not just code, and the costs of getting it wrong are more than just an engineer’s time. When you waste time in GTM the impacts on the business and valuation are not linear, they’re exponential.

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#325

Post by yencabulator »

hamandcheese wrote: post #170
benjiro wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ignoring that Tailwind requires that same discipline... Pay close attention how often you end up in a situation where a different color was used, or how dark theme tags have been missing, and so much more. What if you need to copy a element with tailwind, this later gets altered to include a slightly different style, but wait, now you have a original somewhere else in your code base, that is missing those updates. So…

> What if you need to copy a element with tailwind, this later gets altered to include a slightly different style, but wait, now you have a original somewhere else in your code base, that is missing those updates. So you require the discipline just like CSS to keep things up to date. You solve these problems by creating abstractions in JavaScript (most likely react components), exactly the same way you'd solve any ot…

If you're using JS for any kind of "components", you can use JS for scoped CSS too.

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#326

Post by yencabulator »

kaicianflone wrote: post #230
azangru wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If suddenly CSS became pleasant to use, Tailwind would be in a rough spot. CSS is pleasant to use. I know I find it pleasant to use; and I know there are quite a few frontend developers who do too. I didn't pay much attention to tailwind, until suddenly I realized that it has spread like wildfire and now is everywhere. What drove that growth? Which groups were the first adopters of tailwind; how did they grow; when…

I haven’t seen this mentioned much, but Tailwind’s rise closely followed a shift away from runtime CSS-in-JS toward build-time, deterministic styling. Many JSX-era libraries (MUI, styled-components, Emotion) generate styles at runtime, which works fine for SPAs but creates real friction for SSR, streaming, and time-to-first-paint (especially for content-heavy or SEO-sensitive domains). As frameworks like Next.js, Vue…

Your examples, Vue and Svelte, give you build-time predictable output with scoped CSS without Tailwind. All the benefits and none of the downsides!

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#327

Post by jefftk »

w10-1 wrote: post #241
theropost wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there is a real issue here, but I do not think it is as simple as calling it theft in the same way as copying books. The bigger problem is incentives. We built a system where writing docs, tutorials, and open technical content paid off indirectly through traffic, subscriptions, or services. LLMs get a lot of value from that work, but they also break the loop that used to send value back to the people and comp…

> I do not think it is as simple as calling it theft in the same way as copying books Aside from the incentive problem, there is a kind of theft, known as conversion: when you were granted a license under some conditions, and you went beyond them - you kept the car past your rental date, etc. In this case, the documentation is for people to read; AI using it to answer questions is a kind of conversion (no, not fair u…

Why do you think there's was an implicit agreement that documentation was only intended for humans? I've written a lot of documentation, much of it open source, and I'm generally very excited that it has proved additionally useful via LLMs. If you had asked me in 2010 whether that was something I intended in writing docs I'm pretty sure I would have said something like "that's science fiction, but sure".

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#328

Post by jefftk »

michaf wrote: post #319
drivebyhooting wrote: post #4

In my opinion LLMs are intellectual property theft. Just as if I started distributing copies of books. This substantially reduces the incentive for the creation of new IP. All written text, art work, etc needs to come imbued with a GPL style license: if you train your model on this, your weights and training code must be published.

Is there such a license? Or any license with special clauses for LLMs? Is it enforcable? Could someone 'poison' an LLM training run with injecting just one such licensed document? I am genuinely curious about what levers exist (or are conceivable) to protect your own IP from becoming LLM training data, if regular copyright does not qualify.

This isn't the kind of thing you can do with a license, as long as training a model doesn't require a license. Now, that's an open question legally in the US, and there are active lawsuits, but that does seem like the way it's most likely to play out.

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#329

Post by yencabulator »

renegade-otter wrote: post #260
heliumtera wrote: post #21

Tailwind Labs relied on a weird monetization scheme. Revenue was proportional to the pain of using the framework. The sudden improvement in getting desired UI without relying on pre-built templates killed Tailwind Labs. There are many initiatives in a similar spot, improving your experience at using Next.js would hurt Vercel. Making GitHub actions runners more reliable, stable and economical would hurt Microsoft. Imp…

CSS has come a long way. I used to include Bootstrap in all of my projects, effectively by default. Now it's obsolete. Especially with Grid and Flex. Do people even know what they can do with CSS these days? https://lyra.horse/blog/2025/08/you-dont-need-js/

FWIW the radio button vedi vidi vici example has the round radio buttons overlaid with the text on Firefox.

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#330

Post by b112 »

jefftk wrote: post #327
w10-1 wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I do not think it is as simple as calling it theft in the same way as copying books Aside from the incentive problem, there is a kind of theft, known as conversion: when you were granted a license under some conditions, and you went beyond them - you kept the car past your rental date, etc. In this case, the documentation is for people to read; AI using it to answer questions is a kind of conversion (no, not fair u…

Why do you think there's was an implicit agreement that documentation was only intended for humans? I've written a lot of documentation, much of it open source, and I'm generally very excited that it has proved additionally useful via LLMs. If you had asked me in 2010 whether that was something I intended in writing docs I'm pretty sure I would have said something like "that's science fiction, but sure".

You still intended it for humans. Intent is defined by what one is aiming for, and without knowledge of an alternative, that was your intent.

100% I get that you are OK with it being used by non-human ingestion. And I think many might be OK with that.

One thing, I'm not sure how helpful the documentation is. I think we're getting training out of example, not docs. This makes me think... we could test this by creating a new pseudo-language, and then provide no examples, only docs.

If the LLM can then code effectively after reading the docs, we'd have a successful test. Otherwise? It's all parroting.

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