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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?

#81

Post by theturtletalks »

ks2048 wrote: post #79
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?

Amazon has a monopoly in the US, but elsewhere in the world, 3rd party sellers have their own infra. Even in the US, sellers that sell outside Amazon have 3PLs they use that aren't as fast as Amazon, but also don't take a 20% cut on every sale.

Re: Last gasps of the rent seeking class?

#82

Post by umeshunni »

notfried wrote: post #12

This is a highly sensational take that is basically fan fiction. From "the era of purposefully frustrating humans is over", to "the added bonus of the collapse of the US economy. Frankly, it’s well deserved." and "everyone in the world is rooting for the Chinese models"; nothing of that is grounded in reality. The Chinese models are open source because they are not state of the art. Once they catch-up or lead, they w…

To be fair, the author does explicitly state that their blog is:

> A home for poorly researched ideas that I find myself repeating a lot anyway

Re: Last gasps of the rent seeking class?

#84

Post by FuckButtons »

conductr wrote: post #43
qoez wrote: post #5

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…

I can’t always see the personal appeal, however when I view through the lens of businesses that buy very expensive enterprise software and other SaaS products (maybe blending into consumer market), well I think they’re toast. I think the acceleration of AI tools recently isn’t going to be indicative of how long the full transformation will take, but a lot of companies will start preferring Build over Buy. I have no i…

I think a lot of people will do this, it remains to be seen how the actual economics of this shake out in the long run, especially considering, it’s not like the existing vendors are going to remain static.

Re: Last gasps of the rent seeking class?

#86

Post by solarkraft »

> 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 can hire people in India at scale to waste your time.

That is the market being free, George.

Re: Last gasps of the rent seeking class?

#87

Post by GMoromisato »

paxys wrote: post #74

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…

You should be more optimistic.

92% of the world has electricity. 74% of the world has internet access. 58% of the world has a personal mobile internet device.

That means the median consumer can access the free AI chatbots from OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.

Moreover, if you compare this to the world in 2000, you'll see that things have only gotten better. ~25 years ago, only 78% of the world had access to electricity, and only 6% had access to the internet. Effectively 0% had access to a personal mobile internet device.

I think, if you look at actual statistics, it is easy to be optimistic.

Re: Last gasps of the rent seeking class?

#88

Post by TZubiri »

I don't understand how you can look at LLMs and how you think they will result in less time wasting bureocracy? Sure the users can use LLMs to talk to call centers, but businesses will absolutely block the sun with the amount of LLMs they'll throw back at you, try to literally do anything on the phone, it's starting to be all LLMs.

In an LLM arms race, corporations will win bud, sorry.

Re: Last gasps of the rent seeking class?

#89

Post by yabutlivnWoods »

WJW wrote: post #77
reedf1 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 attenuation of the social significance.

Tech bros are little more than disciples of a dogma being missionaries for their dogma. There are other dogmas.

Re: Last gasps of the rent seeking class?

#90

Post by PaulHoule »

sublinear wrote: post #29
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…

Where does this hypothetical API live? Within a walled garden? We almost have that already with delivery apps and some credit cards. They're awful precisely because they are rent seeking in the form of convenience fees and artificial scarcity. What you call multimodal hell is what others call meaningful choice and market competition.

I get it. Usually when there is the possibility of using an API team A is still fighting to log in while as a 1 man team B I have something using the plain web already running.

Right now people are so angry about LLMs being a driver of enshittification that they aren’t realizing that LLMs are the first real threat to enshittification we’ve seen as they can wait for those stupid little anime girls and click on the street lights and the GDPR popups and ignore the ads and all of that.

I still imagine there’s another world where there was an open API for e-commerce that didn’t suck and the choice was adopt it or go out of business.

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