> In some ways software is really fundamentally different from things like baking or plumbing
You were onto something with this but then got sidetracked.
The fundamental difference is that software (digital product) is cannot be given away and cannot be consumed, it can only be copied. Any other non-digital product, a bread loaf, a pipe, for someone else to use it, you have to give it away. You must not own the bread anymore so that the other person owns and uses it. Not the same with software since you never give away software, you give a free copy that costs nothing. Both you, the creator and the user now have a copy of the same thing and can use it indefinitely (this is the second difference, it is not consumed)
This is the fundamental difference that "disrupts" the classic capitalist economic flow. The proof of this disruption can be found in the continously changing pricing strategy of digital products and software, since companies are trying to adjust a fundamentally different product onto classical economic transactions.
The solution is a communist economy, where money won't be a transaction wall for product exchange and one's well being (as opposed to having to make money to live by)
I don't think it is this novel anymore though. Which easier and cheaper distribution, the same thing is starting to apply to other creative endeveours like music, art, or writing, where the costs of publishing start to get negligible, while there is an ever growing base of creatives who want to ofer their work to an audience.
And maybe we should treat Open Source more like other art forms, where you get patronage, or get small payments per download like in the shareware model.
While I find speculating about different models besides capitalism a good exercise, I also don't think these things are wholy incompatible with our current societal structure.
I am not sure what you mean by "this novel". It is a fundamental difference between all digital products (software, music, etc) and all other physical (non-digital rather) products. It doesn't have to be a novel difference to be important. This distinction in itself is enough to produce the effects we see on the economy. I mentioned the ever changing pricing strategy of such products as an example.
> I also don't think these things are wholy incompatible with our current societal structure.
Wholy incompatible? By no means, this industry is making tons of money. Surely it is compatible.
I think of it more like a handbreak. Yhe current capitalist societal structure is putting a hard limit to our potential as a society to fully leverege these technologies to better our lives. Open source is just a glimpse of what can be accomplished when money doesn't get in the way of our work exchange. And imagine what our humanity could have achieved if 1000x people did open source without having money issues.
If we wanted to treat words literally, the true rogue nation is USA. The only nation on earth to have actually dropped nukes on people. Have been prooved to spy on the entire world population. Plants coups around the globe. Invades any country they fancy in the name of democratization.
You are almost right. As I say since the beginning of this ai circus, this is the equivalent of flipping mcdonalds burgers (no insult intended for those workers). It is a thing, and people buy and eat them. But high quality burgers made by talented chefs will always be out there. That's my analogy, and i dont intend to be on the side of flipping mcdonalds burgers
Where I live, gourmet high quality burger joints definitely, and massively overwhelm McDonalds in number (Geneva, Switzerland). Even if I count in burger king. Shows that sometimes people pay for the quality even if they don't desperately need it. And its trivial to make better burgers than mcd, heck I can surpass them trivially at home with every ingredient, they are really the lowest level of quality, taste, looks, or (lack of) healthy components. You don't need Michelin * for that, far from it. Plus food is often cold outside of peak hours, something that never happened to me in proper restaurant.
Also, mcd ain't at the end much cheaper, just marginally, the choice of drinks is pathetic, usually no beer. The main reason folks go there because its easier/faster than getting table in real restaurant. But also the environment in mcd is absolute soulless cheap fugly shit. (there are kids corners to be fair, but they are often disgustingly dirty).
Its a very good analogy at the end IMHO, maybe just not tilting the way you intended, at least not here.
Haha well not my analogy, analogy is not a good way to reason, but Geneva in this situation is exactly the exception that proves the rule. Thanks for emphasising my point.
> i dont intend to be on the side of flipping mcdonalds burgers
So say the kitchen staff at every Denny's too. And yet...
The analogy is apt, but your coping strategy falls down because of numbers. There aren't a lot of spots for those "chefs" to get paid like they expect.
Most HN commenters might have gotten by over the past decades thinking they were "talented chefs", but were really more like the "short order cooks" whose jobs got eaten by fast food.
> if there is a word for this phenomenon for how our system has gotten into such a rotten stat
There is, it's the system's name: Capitalism
Noone ever in the universe claimed that this system serves primarily the needs of humans. It serves profit. Now there is a ven diagram that has a union area between profits and needs, but the system does not care about making this union bigger, it cares about making the profits bigger. When that overlaps with needs... it is just a happy side effect.
and yet the largest group of professional utilitarians in the world (economists) largely do claim what you are saying ‘nobody even in the universe’ would.
transitive preference satisfaction is generally a pretty good framework. if you give more people what they want, you get more of what you want in turn.
I tend to agree with this sentiment, but my takeaway is slightly different.
People who would describe themselves as supporters of "capitalism", as well as supporters of "communism" or "socialism", are not able to admit that their belief systems are actually religious in structure. Not spiritual perhaps, but effectively "secular religions".
Both capitalism and its nemesis arose in the mid 1900s, when humanity was obsessed with modernist thinking about "solving problems once and for all". And in that context, the people fell in love with these two "clean systems". A more perfect set of rules.
Sure, capitalism doesn't claim to be the most powerful god. But in surrogacy, it claims to be "the least imperfect system". Which is structurally the same claim: declaring the scripture to be some apex that is not surpassable.
The main difference between communism and capitalism was how it was implemented. The USSR went full-tilt ideologically rigid, and collapsed very quickly. The US didn't go full-tilt capitalism. It implemented a hybrid system with a high marginal tax, welfare programs, subsidies, labour unions, public works projects, along with a market system, and that hybrid non-ideologically rigid model served it well.
Around the time it was clear the USSR was collapsing, the USA went hard tilt in favour of ideological purity in capitalism. Systematic series of clawbacks in the tax regime, privatization, elimination of labour unions.
As they leaned into the religion, it was used against them, much like the communist religion was used against the people of the USSR. And now they have been robbed of their prosperity, of the value of their efforts, much like the people in the USSR were robbed.
Nice read but we also have democracy to prevent things but it still feels effectively hi-jacked by such fictional constructs like capitalism and the lobbying power
Theoretically we should be able to think of the majorities or ourselves and we can have a good system
but we also feel like a lack of choice I suppose, the elections feel between just two parties with choosing the lesser evil (I think zohran is cool tho in the democratic party and maybe he could signify some good things I guess)
Personally I feel like we need to focus more on the incentives and competency of people more than anything and try to vote it on that and not what they speak I suppose.
We don't have democracy because the people with the most money can use a century of learning how to manipulate people through mass propaganda, advertising, pr, spin to get the results they want. People don't form political opinions in a vacuum, they are formed by the messages they receive.
'Both capitalism and its nemesis arose in the mid 1900s, when humanity was obsessed with modernist thinking about "solving problems once and for all". And in that context, the people fell in love with these two "clean systems". A more perfect set of rules.'
All of this is junk. Karl Polanyi famously puts the birth of capitalism very late compared to other important thinkers, in 1834, by defining it as characterised by markets of fictitious commodities, i.e. stuff like labour, land, money. More mainstream would be to point to the Renaissance or british 16th century.
The idea that capitalism and communism would be dependent on an art movement of the early 20th century is quite bizarre, the Communist Manifesto was published in 1848 and by the late 19th century when modernism started to form unions and communist parties were already common.
Actually, modernism is a reaction to the apparent stalling of 'progress', WWI and nostalgia for the optimism of the early modern period. I.e. from 1500 to late 1800s. In part it was also a reaction to what is usually called modern physics, i.e. things like newtonianism and ether hypotheses breaking down in due to Michelson-Morley and early study of quantum phenomena, relativity and so on.
> All of this is junk. Karl Polanyi famously puts the birth of capitalism very late compared to other important thinkers, in 1834, by defining it as characterised by markets of fictitious commodities, i.e. stuff like labour, land, money. More mainstream would be to point to the Renaissance or british 16th century.
Once again, I'm not referring to theorycraft here. I'm talking about the pragmatics of it.
"Capitalism" as an ideological polemic that stood opposed to "Communism" was a concept that society adopted in the mid 1900s.
What you're talking about is some labeling of some social and economic mechanisms.
Marx might have described communism. But when the USSR came to power, the specific brand of communist _ideology_ that was adopted by the government was its own thing, its own creature and entity.
Likewise, many theorists might have described a loose economic structure as "capitalism", but the "Capitalism, Freedom, and American Pie", as an ideological fixpoint that was sold to society as something to aspire to was something entirely different from the academic theorycraft you're referring to.
another absurd ahistorical comment on HN, where capitalism apparently arose in the mid 20th century despite the long-standing pre-existence of stock issuing multinationals, wage laborers, currency-mediated trade, reserve banking, etc.
The American ideological fixture of Capitalism certainly did arise then. I'm not talking about the general descriptive academic theory that labels certain loose economic and social models as capitalism. I'm talking about the capital C capitalism, standing opposite to capital C communism. The USA vs USSR, the grand battle of ideologies.
We remember that right?
The ideology was born in the mid 1900s, in the middle of modernist fervour where humanity believed itself to be on the cusp of some sort of transformation into a kind of godhood. We had invented flight, we had harness light itself, we had controlled temperature, we had learned how to build buildings of any shape and size. And likewise we turned our attention to a machine for people.
Set up the right rules, and everything else will follow, the ideologies posit.
No the OP is right, we had a whole department vanish: translators. Half laid off and half absorbed to other roles. I am waiting for this to backfire eventually, but even if it does, it will still be cheaper to handle the backfire than employing all those people.
> To some engineers this is a bitter lesson, they chose to be engineers precisely because they don’t want to manage. AI inside one IDE will only get you so far though, so you start a second IDE and a third.
No, we chose to be engineers because someone has to actually do work and deliver stuff while everyone plays with the new toy.
Here is the question that no hype-driving AI coding enthusiast has answered so far on HN, or anywhere: Show us what what did you build in 3 months that we would have built in 3 years?
I still haven't got anyone to answer this, maybe this will be a first.
So this would exclude anything besides human body?
What about animals?
To me best definition of intelligence is:
It's the ability to:
- Solve problems
- Develop novel insightful ideas, patterns and conclusions. Have to add that since they might not immediately solve a problem, although they might help solve a problem down the line. Example could be a comedian coming up with a clever original story. It doesn't really "solve a problem" directly, but it's intelligent.
The more you are capable of either of the two above, the more intelligent you are. Anything that is able to do the above, is intelligent at least to some extent, but how intelligent depends on how much it's able to do.
> As models increasingly shape how millions understand social and political issues, hidden biases could have a wider, undetected influence.
And where is the problem with that?
The problem is that the system wants to ensure the subordinates believe what they're told to believe. And this requires precise control. But there is a methodological problem when we move from one-way narrative control from TV and social media to a two-way interaction like an LLM chat.
When you ask an LLM a political question and it disagrees with you then you argue and at the end it tells you you're right. So it doesn't really matter what it's initial political output is.
So the actual "problem" is that LLMs fail to stay true to carefully crafted political propaganda like other media. Which I don't care at all.
A healthy thinking person should only use an LLM as a mapping tool, not a truth seeking machine. About every topic including politics.
You were onto something with this but then got sidetracked.
The fundamental difference is that software (digital product) is cannot be given away and cannot be consumed, it can only be copied. Any other non-digital product, a bread loaf, a pipe, for someone else to use it, you have to give it away. You must not own the bread anymore so that the other person owns and uses it. Not the same with software since you never give away software, you give a free copy that costs nothing. Both you, the creator and the user now have a copy of the same thing and can use it indefinitely (this is the second difference, it is not consumed)
This is the fundamental difference that "disrupts" the classic capitalist economic flow. The proof of this disruption can be found in the continously changing pricing strategy of digital products and software, since companies are trying to adjust a fundamentally different product onto classical economic transactions.
The solution is a communist economy, where money won't be a transaction wall for product exchange and one's well being (as opposed to having to make money to live by)
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