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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?

#71

Post by paxys »

theturtletalks wrote: post #47

> 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…

"We are going to put online shopping on the blockchain and eliminate gatekeepers and fraud"

Re: Last gasps of the rent seeking class?

#72

Post by theturtletalks »

eloisant wrote: post #60
theturtletalks wrote: post #47

> 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…

How long until the AI provider takes a 15%-20% cut? "Affiliate fees"...

It's why I'm building an open-source agentic commerce chat

Re: Last gasps of the rent seeking class?

#73

Post by theturtletalks »

paxys wrote: post #71
theturtletalks wrote: post #47

> 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…

"We are going to put online shopping on the blockchain and eliminate gatekeepers and fraud"

Who mentioned blockchain? You just need to allow e-commerce website to expose their storefront as a MCP app or UI and then clients can interact with them directly.

Re: Last gasps of the rent seeking class?

#74

Post by paxys »

I wish I could be this optimistic. The reality is that as we speak the average consumer doesn't have access to cheap electricity or affordable inference hardware or powerful models that work out of the box on existing computers. The only realistic option for the 99% is to buy a $20-$200 monthly AI subscription, and I don't see that changing anytime soon.

A couple decades ago people used to think that since anyone can build a website internet businesses will never have a moat. In a hyper-capitalist system the top players will always find a way to dig a moat.

Re: Last gasps of the rent seeking class?

#75

Post by theturtletalks »

vineyardmike wrote: post #61
theturtletalks wrote: post #47

> 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…

I don’t buy it. First, I think there is value in the “rent seeking” Amazon marketplace because how else would the models “go straight to the seller”, another centralized search engine? Why not just use the Amazon one then? Second, one of LLMs big weaknesses is judgement on what to trust. I would not trust the judgment of an LLM to determine “the seller is legit”… unless we outsource trust verification to a third part…

[dead]

Re: Last gasps of the rent seeking class?

#76

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

efficax wrote: post #68
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #48

> 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. I just think this analysis is wrong from the start. The "proper" pricing structure, the one trackin…

you do pay for their time, when you (or someone else) buys the company's products. but customer support exists because it makes the company money , so really they should be paying you

Again, while this is a popular and widely desired price structure, it works only because the annoying customers who generate bad customer support tickets are constrained by human friction. If Bonzo who doesn't know what he's doing starts generating 10 pages a day of plausible LLM slop demanding a response, you can't tuck the cost of handling that behind a standard product price. Enterprise-facing businesses will have to be more aggressive about rejecting or overcharging customers who are insufficiently sophisticated; consumer-facing businesses will be pushed towards the Gmail route of just not offering meaningful customer support at all.

Re: Last gasps of the rent seeking class?

#77

Post by WJW »

reedf1 wrote: post #58
anonymousiam wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

funny. people are probably more likely to know him as geohot here. and afaik he is ex-comma. a more likely motivation (if you wanted to suppose one) is that he sells local compute. https://tinygrad.org/#tinybox

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.

Re: Last gasps of the rent seeking class?

#78

Post by _DeadFred_ »

ReptileMan wrote: post #36

To me it seems like the rent seeking is everywhere and getting strong in all facets of our lives. Tech companies, utilities, marketplaces, car companies, appliance companies - everyone is pushing subscriptions, gate keeping features and milking every possible dime.

Local veterinary, dentists, medical practices, funeral home, retirement homes, roofing, HVAC, etc are being bought by private equity and wealth extracted.

When every financial transaction I make in part goes to a layer at the top that exists solely because they leveraged some digit in a balance book it is techno feudalism with an owning class being paid because they are the owning class, only instead of the baron always getting his cut it's invisible someones with even less accountability than the local feudal baron had.

Re: Last gasps of the rent seeking class?

#79

Post by ks2048 »

theturtletalks wrote: post #47

> 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…

Amazon has giant warehouses all over the country to deliver things to people quickly, sometimes within a couple of hours. What is an LLM going to do about that?

Re: Last gasps of the rent seeking class?

#80

Post by _DeadFred_ »

matthest wrote: post #34

It's undeniable that technology over the past decades has increased democratization in something every step of the way. YouTube destroyed Hollywood's monopolization of entertainment. Anyone with a smartphone now has a shot at becoming a full-time creator. Prior to this, it was gate kept by Hollywood execs. Smartphones destroyed Microsoft's monopolization of apps. Not a leap to believe this will happen to some extent…

Not really. It's undeniable that technology reset power structures, but ultimately it just ended up with new power structures/new people made the gatekeepers.

Just look at the people whose success was broken by Youtube overnight. Youtube/BigTech won over Hollywood, not the people 100% beholden to Youtube. Under Hollywood people still got their residuals. Under Youtube, next day you can be cut off completely.

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