51–60 of 170 posts
"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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
At some point you were part of that group that you are labeling a mistake. At another point, your children are or will be if you have any. Locking all of these productivity tools in one generation is a recipe for failure. You should think outside the box that you are currently trapped in.
nope, I learned how to compute on the DOS command line
This argument is a bit scattered. "Rent seeking" is being misused here. It's a relatively new term (~50 years old) but it has a lot of history behind it, specifically with enclosures . The Enclosure Acts [1] were a series of laws that took what was common property open to all and made them private property. This was embryonic capitalism [2]. Anyway, I remember that Google demo of making restaurant reservations. I bel…
It's being used in a more literal-meanings-of-the-words sense ("pursuing monopoly rents") rather than the narrow economic term-of-art sense of "pursuing monopoly rents through influence over public policy by means that do not create, or which inhibit the creation of, additional wealth" (the definition you seem to be complaining about it not adhering to without actually providing.)
But most of the usages would also be correct in the narrower sense, because virtually ever actor referred to as rent-seeking in the broader sense are also rent-seeking in the narrow sense as part of that. (E.g., actively lobbying for "safety" regulation which would disproportionately impair non-incumbent new competitors.)
> What the author is talking about isn't rent-seeking per se but a moat.
Pursuing a moat is just another term for seeking monopoly rents by any means, including rent-seeking in the narrow sense.
(There's also obviously an ideological angle in creating the term "rent seeking" as a term of criticism to those seeking monopoly rents through means that the creators of the term disapprove of, excluding seeking the same kind of rents by other means from "rent seeking".)
1. Demographics - Aging population needs transportation. God knows we certainly don't need really old people driving themselves. We got a taste of the future in West Portal in that regard not long ago.
2. Human Capital - The US has pretty much demonstrated that there is little desire to import low skilled labor. Where do these theoretical Taxi drivers come from? Or welders or plumbers. Labor is going to become increasing expensive no matter how you slice the pie.
3. Younger US citizens are going to gravitate to non-manual labor jobs. It is not just that every one is being steered toward college. Physical labor (trades) take a toll on the body. I know - I have work in them - and you quickly extrapolate what that will be like when you are 50.
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 would certainly not be the first person to suggest broadly applying private property rights to information makes questionable sense.
I'm not sure I buy the "everyone will be AI coding to replace things that cost money with their own apps" idea. I only have so much limited time in my day (and only so many tokens on my claude account per week). It's probably going to make more sense for me to buy a tool that's been given human attention over the span of weeks over something i prompt into existence in a few hours (especially if I need 10 such tools t…
Factor in how a lot of tools have weaponized their interfaces against their users - then the motivation isn't just cost, but usability.
Im starting to believe that the biggest moats will be in the application layer, and that people are starting to realize traditional saas moats apply to those companies too network effects, distribution, proprietary data, systems of record companies like opencode have none of the above cursor's distribution has been faltering and they're hard pivoting to training their own models with their proprietary data to try to…
Like self-driving taxis where the business model is to stop paying drivers so we can pay more to big tech companies. Viva la revolution!
I wonder how many people noticed that geohot is George Hotz, who authored the article on his GitHub page. George Hotz runs Comma AI, a self driving car company. https://comma.ai
This argument is a bit scattered. "Rent seeking" is being misused here. It's a relatively new term (~50 years old) but it has a lot of history behind it, specifically with enclosures . The Enclosure Acts [1] were a series of laws that took what was common property open to all and made them private property. This was embryonic capitalism [2]. Anyway, I remember that Google demo of making restaurant reservations. I bel…
> This argument is a bit scattered. "Rent seeking" is being misused here. It's being used in a more literal-meanings-of-the-words sense ("pursuing monopoly rents") rather than the narrow economic term-of-art sense of "pursuing monopoly rents through influence over public policy by means that do not create, or which inhibit the creation of, additional wealth" (the definition you seem to be complaining about it not adh…
Rent-seeking is fundamentally intermediation like a health insurer putting themselves between a patient and a healthcare provider or privatizing grazing lands or controlling water supplies from snowmelt (like the Resnicks) or privatizing trains in the UK.
Microsoft has a compeitive advantage with Windows, Google with its search engine and the ad business that funds it, Amazon with AWS or NVidia with GPUs. There are alternatives to all of these things but these companies maintain dominance with a combination of scale, cost, technology and network effects. That's not rent-seeking in a broad or narrow sense.
Rent-seeking would be Microsoft lobbying lawmakers to require schools and governments to purchase Windows, for example.
> Over the past fifty years, the U.S. economy built a giant rent-extraction layer on top of human limitations: things take time, patience runs out, brand familiarity substitutes for diligence, and most people are willing to accept a bad price to avoid more clicks. Trillions of dollars of enterprise value depended on those constraints persisting. – Citrini Research Agentic commerce will render Amazon and the rest of t…