I liked this analysis quite a bit. A few reactions:
(1) I don't think a tech company having a monopoly is necessary for a tech company to stop caring about their customers and focus on hype instead. Plenty of public tech companies do this, just to chase stock price and investors.
(2) It's weirdly the opposite mindset that Bezos talked about in that famous old video where he talks about "creating the best experience for the customer" is his business strategy. Interesting. I think ultimately companies may be misguided -- because, in fact, ChatGPT is succeeding because they created a better search experience. And hype bandwagoners may fail because, long-term, customers don't like their products. In other words, this is a bad strategy.
(3) what's weird about AI -- and I guess all hype trains -- is how part of me feels like it's hype, but part of me also sees the value in investing in it and its potential. The hype train itself and the crazy amount of money being spent on it almost defacto means it IS important and WILL be important. It's like a market and consumer interest has been created by the hype machine itself.
"what's weird about AI -- and I guess all hype trains -- is how part of me feels like it's hype, but part of me also sees the value in investing in it and its potential."
The DotCom bubble is an instructive historical example. Pretty much every wild promise made during the bubble has manifested, right down to delivering pet food. It's just that for the bubble to have been worthwhile, we would essentially have had the internet of 2015 or 2020 delivered in 2001.
(And because people forget, it is not too far off to say that would be like trying to deliver the internet of 2020 on machines with specs comparable to a Nintendo Wii. I'm trying to pick a game console as a sort of touchpoint, and there probably isn't a perfect comparison, but based on the machines I had in 2000 the specs are roughly inline with a Wii, at least by the numbers. Though the Wii would have murdered my 2000-era laptop on graphics.)
I don't know that the AI bubble will have a similar 20-year lag, but I also think it's out over its skis. What we have now is both extremely impressive, but also not justifying the valuations being poured into it in the here & now. There's no contradiction there. In fact if you look at history there's been all sorts of similar cases of promising technologies being grotesquely over-invested in, even though they were transformative and amazing. If you want to go back further in history, the railroad bubble also has some similarities to the Dot Com bubble. It's not that railroad wasn't in fact a completely transformative technology, it's just that the random hodgepodge of a hundred companies slapping random sizes and shapes of track in half-random places wasn't worth the valuations they were given. The promise took decades longer to manifest.
> (And because people forget, it is not too far off to say that would be like trying to deliver the internet of 2020 on machines with specs comparable to a Nintendo Wii. I'm trying to pick a game console as a sort of touchpoint, and there probably isn't a perfect comparison, but based on the machines I had in 2000 the specs are roughly inline with a Wii, at least by the numbers. Though the Wii would have murdered my 2000-era laptop on graphics.)
It depresses me to think how much of the 2020 Internet (or 2025 Internet) that is actually of value really ought to be able to run on hardware that old.
Or so I imagine, anyway. I wonder if anyone's tried to benchmark simple CSS transitions and SVG rendering on ancient CPUs.
Ever remember waiting something like hour to watch a 60-second movie preview over dialup?
I get a reminder every time I load a modern website in an area with very poor reception. Appears to not load at all —- not due to lack of connectivity but rather due the speeds and latencies being too slow for the amount of crap being fetched.
GPRS and EDGE were many times faster than dialup — must have been a dream — but now utterly unusable.
The sad part of it is, pretty much everything on that modern website that makes it too fat to load is completely unnecessary. You can create a beautiful, full featured page that's only a few kbytes.
It is a valuable and relevant lesson - when something wide and structural manifests (personal computing, the internet, smartphones, AI), lots of people will be able to see the coming future with high fidelity, but will tend to underestimate the speed of change. Because we gloss over all the many, many small challenges to get from point A to B.
Yes, now it feels like something like smartphones came of age overnight and was always inevitable. But it really took more than a decade to reach the level of integration and polish that we now take for granted. UI on phone apps was terrible, speeds were terrible, screens resolutions were terrible, processing was minimal, battery didn't last, roaming charges/3g coverage, etc. For years, you couldn't pinch to zoom on an iPhone, stuff like that.
All these structural problems were rubbed away over time and eventually forgotten. But so many of these small tweaks needed to take place before we could "fill in the blanks" and reach the level of ubiquity for something like an Uber driver using their phone for directions.
UI on phone apps still is terrible. Have you ever used a desktop with high-end gaming peripherals (fast monitor/keyboard/mouse), running a light desktop environment such as LXQt on Xorg, with animations disabled? The feeling of responsiveness leaves all mobile devices in the dust. Any modern CPU+SSD is fast enough, but good peripherals are still rare and make a huge difference. Most phones are still running 60Hz displays. A touchscreen is inherently clumsy compared to mouse+keyboard. Mobile UI feel is worse than desktop computers from the 90s.
"have you ever done this indescribably niche thing, which I believe renders your argument null and void, but is in fact not relatable in the slightest?"
The fact that it requires niche hardware and software (not "indescribably" niche) to achieve in modern times is a failure of the computer industry, not a problem with my argument. Low standards do not make mobile devices good.
And touch screen are impossible to fix even with niche configurations. I have no way to shrink my fingers to pixel size, and no way to make them transparent.
> And because people forget, it is not too far off to say that would be like trying to deliver the internet of 2020 on machines with specs comparable to a Nintendo Wii.
I mean, we could totally have done that. There's nothing stopping you from delivering an experience like modern Amazon or Facebook or whatever in server-rendered HTML4. CSS3 and React get you fancy graphics and animations, and fast, no-repaint page transitions, but that's pretty much all they get you; we had everything else 25 years ago in MSIE6.
You could have built a dynamically-computed product listing grid + shopping cart, or a dynamically-computed network-propagated news feed with multimedia post types + attached comment threads (save for video, which would have been impractical back then), on top of Perl CGI-bin scripts — or if you liked, a custom Apache module in C.
And, in fact, some people did! There existed web services even in 1998 that did [various fragments of] these things! Most of them built in ASP or ColdFusion, mind you, and so limited to a very specific stack; but still, it was happening!
It was just that the results were all incredibly jank, with no UX polish... but not because UX polish would have been impossible with the tools available at the time. (As I said, HTML4 was quite capable!)
Rather, it was because all the professional HCI people were still mostly focused on native apps (with the few rare corporate UX vanguards "doing web stuff", working on siloed enterprise products like the MSDN docs); while the new and growing body of art-school "web design" types were all instead being trained mainly on the application of vertically-integrated design tools (ActiveX, Flash, maybe web layout via Photoshop 9-way slice export).
I agree with most of this post, except the part where you could actually do it. I’ll be the first to admit that I was not in server rooms back then but I’ve heard from those who were. The biggest advantage Amazon had, for many years, over their competitors, is that they would take your order and tell you it was completed and wait to charge your card until it shipped because it was cheaper to write your order down than to spend expensive session compute waiting for the payment to go through. That kind of optimization was necessary because all the networks were slower or flaky then, including payment processing, and often relied on batch processing overnight that has become less visible today.
Meanwhile on the client side, web technologies had a lot of implicit defaults assuming pages on sites rather than apps and experiences. For example, we didn’t originally have a way for JS to preserve back/forward buttons functionality when navigating in a SPA without using hash tags in the URL. Without CSS features for it, support for RTL and LTR on the same website was basically nonexistent. I won’t even get started on charset, poorer support for dates that persists to this day, limited offline modes in a time when being offline was more common, and how browsers varied tremendously across platforms and versions back then with their own unique set of JS APIs and unique ideas of how to render webpages.
It took the original acid test and a bunch more tests that followed before we had anything close to cross browser standards for newer web features. I still remember the snowman hack to get IE to submit forms with UTF-8 encoding, and that wasn’t as bad as quirks mode or IE 5.
Actually maybe I disagree with most of this post. Don’t get me wrong, I can see how it could have been done, but it’s reductive to the extreme to say the only reason web services were jank is because UX polish didn’t exist. If anything, the web is the reason UX is so good today - apps and desktop platforms continuously copied the web for the past 28 years, from Windows ME with single-click everywhere to Spotify and other electron apps invading the OS. I’m not going to devalue the HIG or equivalent, but desktop apps tended to evolve slowly, with each new OS release, while web apps evolved quickly, with each new website needing to write its own cross platform conventions and thus needing its own design language.
> ChatGPT is succeeding because they created a better search experience
Funny enough, no "AI" prophet is mentioning that, in spite of it being the most useful thing about LLMs.
What I wonder is how long it will last. LLMs are being fed their own content by now, and someone will surely want to "monetize" it after the VC money starts to dry up a bit. At least two paths to entshittification.
"A junior intern who has memorized the Internet" is how one member of our team described it and it's still one of the best descriptions of these things I've heard.
Sometimes I think these things are more like JPEGs for knowledge expressed as language. They're more AM (artificial memory) than AI (artificial intelligence). It's a blurry line though. They can clearly do things that involve reasoning, but it's arguably because that's latent in the training data. So a JPEG is an imperfect analogy since lossy image compressors can't do any reasoning about images.
A dismissive “no” is not a helpful addition to this discussion. The truth is much more interesting and subtle than “no”. Directed stochastic processes that reach a correct conclusion of novel logic problems more often than chance means that something interesting is happening, and it’s sensible to call that process “reasoning”. Does it mean that we’ve reached AGI? No. Does it mean the process reflects exactly what humans do? No. But dismissing “reasoning” out of hand also dismisses genuinely interesting phenomena.
Only if you redefine "reasoning". This is something that the generative AI industry has succeeded in convincing many people of, but that doesn't mean everyone has to accede to that change.
It's true that something interesting is happening. GP did not dispute that. That doesn't make it reasoning, and many people still believe that words should have meaning in order to discuss things intelligently. Language is ultimately a living thing and will inevitably change. This usually involves people fighting the change and no one know ahead of time which side will win.
I don't think we need to redefine reasoning. Here's the definition of "reason" (the verb): "think, understand, and form judgments by a process of logic"
If Claude 4 provides a detailed, logical breakdown in its "reasoning" (yeah, that usage is overloaded), then we could say that there was logical inference involved. "But wait!", I already hear someone saying, "That token output is just the result of yet another stochastic process, and isn't directing the AI in a deterministic, logical way, and thus it is not actually using logic; it's just making something that looks convincingly like logic, but is actually a hallucination of some stochastic process". And I think this is a good point, but I find it difficult to convince myself that what humans are doing is so different that we cannot use the word "reasoning".
As a sidenote, I am _very_ tired of the semantic quagmire that is the current AI industry, and I would really appreciate a rigorous guide to all these definitions.
> Only if you redefine "reasoning". This is something that the generative AI industry has succeeded in convincing many people of, but that doesn't mean everyone has to accede to that change.
I agree. However, they can clearly do a reasonable facsimile of many things that we previously believed required reasoning to do acceptably.
Right -- we know that LLMs cannot think, feel, or understand.
Therefore whenever they produce output that looks like the result of those things, we must either be deceived by a reasonable facsimile, or we simply misapprehended their necessity in the first place.
But, do we understand the human brain as well as we understand LLMs?
Obviously there's something different, but is it just a matter of degrees? LLMs have greater memory than humans, and lesser ability to correlate it. Correlation is powerful magic. That's pattern matching though, and I don't see a fundamental reason why LLMs won't get better at it. Maybe never as good as (smart) humans are, but with their superior memory, maybe that will often be adequate.
(Memory Access + Correlation Skills) is a decent proxy for several of the many kinds of human intelligence.
HDDs don't have correlation skills, but LLMs do. They're just not smart-human-level "good", yet.
I am not sure whether I believe AGI will happen. To be meaningful, it would have to be above the level of a smart human.
Building an army of disincorporated average-human-intelligence actors would be economically "productive" though. This is the future I see us trending toward today.
Most humans are not special. This is dystopian, of course. Not in the "machines raise humans for energy" sort of way, but probably no less socially destructive.
It would be useful to supply a definition if your point is that others' definition is wrong. Are you saying they don't deduct inferences from premises? Is it "deduct" that you take issue with?
They do not perform voluntary exploration of the consequences of applying logical rules for deduction; at best they pattern-match. Their model of conceptual meaning (which last I checked still struggles with negation, meta-reference and even simply identifying irrelevant noise) is not grounded in actual observational experience, but only in correlations between text tokens.
I think it should be abundantly clear that what ChatGPT does when you ask it to play chess is fundamentally different from what Stockfish does. It isn't just weak and doesn't just make embarrassing errors in generating legal moves (like a blindfolded human might); it doesn't actually "read" and it generates post-hoc rationalization for its moves (which may not be at all logically sound) rather than choosing them with purpose.
Okay, sure. My intuition is that LLMs reason at about a three-year-old level which appears more impressive because of their massive memories. By your definition and criticism, I take it that you wouldn't describe a three-year-old as capable of reasoning, so we're probably on the same page.
> A dismissive “no” is not a helpful addition to this discussion.
Yes, your "no" must be more upbeat! Even if it's correct. You must be willing to temper the truth of it with something that doesn't hurt the feelings of the massive.
> Does it mean that we’ve reached AGI? No. Does it mean the process reflects exactly what humans do? No.
But here it's fine to use a "No." because these are your straw men, right?
Is it just wrong to use a "No." when it's not in safety padding for the overinvested?
I have a hunch it can reflect what humans do "A junior intern who has memorized the Internet and talks without thinking on permanent autopilot". We're just surprised how much humans can do without thinking.
You are missing the forest for the trees by dismissing this so readily.
LLMs can solve IMO-level math problems, debug quite difficult bugs in moderately sized codebases, and write prototypes for very unique and weird coding projects. They solve difficult reasoning problems, and so I find it mystifying that people still work so hard to justify their belief that they're "not actually reasoning". They are flawed reasoners in some sense, but it seems ludicrous to me to suggest that they are not reasoning at all when they generalise to new logical problems so well.
Do you think humans are logical machines? No, we are not. Therefore, do we not reason?
>Do you think humans are logical machines? No, we are not. Therefore, do we not reason?
No, but we are conscious, and we know we are conscious, which doesn't require being a logical being too. LLMs on the other hand aren't conscious and there's zero evidence that they are. Thus, they don't reason, since this, unlike logic, does require consciousness.
Why not avoid re-definining things into a salad mix of poor logic until you can pretend that something with no evidence in its favor is real.
The only thing I find bad about Google search now is their "AI" summary, which is often just wrong. I can deal with ads in the search results, I expect them, and I have no doubt ads will be shown in ChatGPT search results too, because they are bleeding money. And ChatGPT is under no obligation to show you anything with any accuracy, which is what the underlying tech is based on - guessing. Thanks, I'll take my chances with actual search results.
I think AI evangelists avoid talking about search because AI is why every internet search engine sucks. I use DuckDuckGo and Startpage, and when trying to find answers to nontrivial questions I get ONLY AI spam sites as results. (Come up with 1500 semi-specific SEO-friendly articles vaguely relating to subject the theme of website N. Then repeat until N=100
And shortly enough, AI is not even going to help with searching – it will eat its own s*t and offer that as answers. Unless the AI giants find some >99.99% way to filter out their own toxic waste from the training data.
There was a period I remember fondly when the SEO slop was still mostly human generated because AI couldn't quite do it yet, and I was getting much better results from DDG than from Google. Now it's all despair-inducing.
What you're saying is totally correct about AI slop polluting the web, but the reason they don't want to talk about it is because the second they frame "AI" as slightly better search, it invites all sorts of unfavorable financial comparisons. It also deflates the hype because now you're talking about a better version of a thing everyone is familiar with instead of some magical new buzzword like "agent" or "RAG" or whatever we're going to be talking about next year when agents don't work.
> It's weirdly the opposite mindset that Bezos talked about in that famous old video where he talks about "creating the best experience for the customer" is his business strategy.
A big part of hype as a business strategy is to convince potential customers that you intend to create the best experience for them. And the simplest approach to that task is to say it outright.
> in fact, ChatGPT is succeeding because they created a better search experience.
Sure. But they don't market it like that, and a large fraction of people reporting success with ChatGPT don't seem to be characterizing their experiences that way. Even if you discount the people explicitly attempting to, well, chat with it.
And there's a part of me that kinda think "lots of money will mean some large scale investments in labs that might result in some rare findings". Even though the hype + investor chase feels very shallow to me too.
"Created a better search experience" sure, just like eating human meat would create a better dinning experience because there is a lot of humans near you, at the end of the day what "AI" is doing is butchering a bunch of websites and giving you a blend, in the progress making you no longer required to enter those websites that needed you to do so to survive, because they are monetized by third party ads or some paid offering.
> There is more and more proof these tools are not as useful as they are hyped out to be. LLM-based coding tools seem to actually hurt programmers’ productivity. “Hallucinations” are not going away because the only thing these LLMs can do is “hallucinate”; they just sometimes (about 30% of the time, in fact) happen to generate some text that has some connection to reality.
This hurts the article, I think. I don't disagree with his point about companies caring too much about stockholders. But this anti-LLM envangelism just comes across as ludditism.
> This hurts the article, I think. I don't disagree with his point about companies caring too much about stockholders. But this anti-LLM envangelism just comes across as ludditism.
Is there any research out there suggesting LLMs help programmers get stuff done?
I can't say I follow the research closely but I have not seen any.
Googling for [ai llm productivity research] and looking at the first page of results I can't find much interesting evidence. One report says users asked to create a basic web server in JS complete the task 55% faster using an LLM. One report measures "perceived productivity". Students given text writing tasks are faster. One report measures productivity as lines of code written. The rest seem to just be projecting theoretical productivity gains.
> Core Result
>
> When developers are allowed to use AI tools, they take 19% longer to complete issues—a significant slowdown that goes against developer beliefs and expert forecasts. This gap between perception and reality is striking: developers expected AI to speed them up by 24%, and even after experiencing the slowdown, they still believed AI had sped them up by 20%.
But surely someone must have also found results showing productivity gains. I assume I was just not looking hard enough.
The report is definitely worth reading although I don't think the data is strong enough to draw significant conclusions from. I personally think that this should be studied more in depth over a longer time period since the current study had a 50 hour threshold (not exactly but close enough). One thing which is mentioned in the research paper[1] is:
> However, we see positive speedup for the one developer who has more
than 50 hours of Cursor experience, so it’s plausible that there is a high skill ceiling for using Cursor, such that developers with significant experience see positive speedup.
> Is there any research out there suggesting LLMs help programmers get stuff done?
Any research will be limited by what the researchers control for?
In my personal experience, when I get a well written bug report or hands on detailed logs, my instinct that I feed it to an Agent and let it figure it all out has never disappointed me. It runs in the background while I work on things I instinctively know the Agent wouldn't do a good job of. How did I develop those instincts? By using Agents for like 3 days. These things (especially, for code completion) are ridiculously effective for the programming languages & code bases I work in, if nowhere else.
> Has anyone measured any improved productivity? ... I am a happy Copilot Pro user since 2021, still.
Whether productivity is tanking or not, I will find it incredibly hard to stop using LLMs/Agents just because a metric or three indicates I'd be better off without them. I must note though, it might be too soon to put a mark on productivity as it is a function of how well new technologies are integrated into processes and workflows, which typically happens over decades and not months/years.
Yeah, author is definitely false here. I have 10+ years of professional experience backend programming and I've found VS Code copilot to be pretty helpful overall. It saves me a lot of time digging through documentation and writing out tedious little functions (e.g. converting dates from one format to another). I wouldn't use it to write anything lengthy but overall it has improved my productivity, though I could see how it might hurt junior engineers.
1/ They tested on 16 experienced developers.
2/ They only used cursor. No mention of other tools at the time. Cursor is notoriously bad on bigger codebases, while even Windsurf (competition at the time) would have shown different results.
3/ They only allowed training for 30 mins on cursor.
4/ As simonw mentions, the ones who improved had some previous experience with cursor.
5/ Yet, the study is definitively mentioned as AI actively ruining productivity and none of the other factors.
We do need to start talking about the failure of capitalism. I'm not naive enough to think that we should turn to communism, but it's clear how we're taught capitalism is suppose to work and how it plays out in reality are two different things.
Ideally capitalism would yield better product or services, for a lower price. That's no longer happening. We're getting shittier products and we're paying more. But somehow we convince ourselves that it's still good, because the stock market is going up, corporate profits are going up.
If there was ever any doubt that the hype is the product, then please explain the Tesla stock, 100% hype driven, there is zero correlation between the stock price and how the company is actually doing.
the theory assumes that in a free market, everyone is a rational actor, and that everyone is truthful
we live in the age of lies. you can either keep debunking them to deaf ears, or join the bandwagon and maybe make some money by fooling someone else. the whole stock market feels like a ponzi scheme now.
>We do need to start talking about the failure of capitalism.
People have been talking about the failures of capitalism long before the word was coined, going back to at least Abraham buying land with silver coins in 1675 BC and Jesus throwing out the money changers.
Although it's a mess, people are generally better off than a while ago or under non capitalist systems.
It’s because capitalism assumes a free market with competition. If you allow monopolies to thrive, you will not get those benefits. It’s just that some of these types of markets have different dynamics due to their structure. E.g. natural monopolies where the barrier to entry is huge up front costs. Interestingly the AI startup ecosystem is raising enough money to surpass the barrier of needing a ton of data to train AI.
That's true but it's not just monopolies per se. Another big part of it is information flow. The kind of idealized free markets that "work" involve relatively transparent interactions between buyers and sellers. Sort of like, well, a market --- an old-fashioned bazaar-type market with sellers offering their wares. You can walk down the line and see 10 people are selling apples or saddles or whatever and you can compare the prices and the products and make your decision.
Even in that setup, people can try to game the market. They can make something that looks like a good saddle and sell it to you and then it falls apart not too long afterward. They can get you to agree to a price but then tell you the stirrups aren't included even though they're attached to the demo model. They can ask for half payment up front while they custom make your item, then skip town.
And mechanisms sprung up to prevent this: regulation. Some are market-internal (reputation) and some are enforced (people can report you to the authorities for selling fraudulent goods, and you can be jailed or whatever).
The problem is mainly that nowadays companies have turned the majority of their innovation energy towards this kind of market-gaming meta-activity. It's no longer about goods, services, buyers, sellers, or any of those things. It's just about finding new ways to manipulate the market itself.
This is what the article seems to be saying, and I agree. I'm not sure I'd call it "hype", though. It's not that "the hype is the product", it's that the market activity is not oriented towards products at all. Products have become like abstract proxy tokens that are moved around to simulate what we think of as market activity, but all the real activity is happening in the meta-market.
> It’s because capitalism assumes a free market with competition
But even in the cases where we do have a free market, we're often seeing one company fiddle with quality, maybe drop the price a little, then the rest quickly follow and price goes right back up across the board.
not attacking your thinking, but the terms "capitalism" and "free market" aren't consistently well enough defined to capture the nuances of what this type discussion requires. At a minimum, capitalism is the right/ability to own something without others taking it from you, and free markets are markets you can participate in if you would like without asking permission from the govt or belonging to a guild.
capitalism works best for everybody on average when free markets are competitive, but when they are not, markets still work, they just work better for some, worse for others but better than nothing, and also overall worse for everybody because markets are not zero sum. The problem with a lot of what-turns-out-to-be left-wing and or populist thinking on markets is the assumption that markets are zero sum, "if there is a winner, there must be a loser", which while an attractive idea turns out to be false.
same is true of the completely overblown idea that people are not rational. people are not perfectly rational, but when it comes to parting with their money they are much more rational than they are not. If it were not true, people wouldn't be living rationally measurably better lives today than 100, 200, etc. years ago. there are many other sources of noise in measuring that swallow irrationality up with the noise. (yes, selling gambling to gambling addicts is an irrational money printing machine, but civilization has not collapsed)
For centuries as capitalism developed from more primitive systems (like feudalism and mercantilism), goods and services that gain value from social network effects were well beyond anyone's imagination. The printing press survived the church's attempts at suppression, but nobody back then could have conceived of a service that automatically distributed copies of your books to your friends — much less one that could profit from knowing who your friends are, rather than from explicitly charging you for the service.
Capitalism isn't a single thing with an approved international standard of implementation. It can be implemented in a million different ways and its possible we just need some big redesign of it.
> please explain the Tesla stock, 100% hype driven, there is zero correlation between the stock price and how the company is actually doing.
They do still have the best electric cars on the market.
Capitalism has always exhibited these problems, which is why it’s supposed to be counterbalanced by regulation. The problem is that our politicians have become utterly corrupt, with Trump himself being the epitome of blatant corruption. He understands that exhibiting corruption from the highest levels will cause it to propagate everywhere, bringing the system crashing down. This and the destruction of the Federal Reserve are his primary goals.
I don't know if anyone's done research on this extensively, but we seem to be very much living in a "vibe" society all around? the market is more irrational than ever, outright lies can be enough to hype up millions in value, and conversely the specter of bad vibes can tank anything.
Has it always been this way? or am I just slow on the uptake
I have noticed this as well, and yes it hasn't always been this way.
My theory is that we are simply too wealthy. For the average rich person (the top 20-30%), the first $70,000 goes to real companies who sell real things for money. Past that and it all is just kinda funny money. In our society there are actually a ton of people making this kind of money, so there's just this huge chunk of money that isn't really tied to anything real. If you lose $100k on cryptocurrency, or you spend $800 on some metaverse thing, it's fine, you can still buy food.
Of course this is also why people who don't make this kind of money are so baffled (and angry). Hearing that some no product company [1] was sold for billions of dollars feels insane when you're seriously considering the difference between a $5000 and a $6000 car.
> If you lose $100k on cryptocurrency, or you spend $800 on some metaverse thing, it's fine, you can still buy food.
20 - 30% cannot spend $100k per year as funny money, that is more like the top 5% but probably more like the top 2%.
High earners in the 20 - 30% often also live in expensive areas, so their dollar doesn't go as far as some of the more affordable places to live (housing, food, etc).
The parent comment just shows how most people do not understand how inequal the US actually is. I'd recommend to try this: https://wid.world/income-comparator/US/
If you make a yearly gross salary of 100K you're already in the top 11%. With 200K you're in the top 3%. Inequality also leads to social segregation, which means that we live in bubbles where most people are "like us" and it's very difficult to see how privileged we actually are.
Read Piketty's "Capital in the XXI century" to learn more about how crazy inequal the world, but specially the US, is becoming. Phenomena like Trump are easier to understand when taking this into account.
Nah. The top 10 percent of US households make $190,000 per year. That is simply a lot more money than a household strictly needs. At that point, your Roth IRA is maxed out, you own a home, and you still have thousands every single paycheck to play with.
Wealth inequality is intensely fractal, at every level it is enormous: someone at the 90th %ile household (there are 15 million of these), making 178k (1), can mostly imagine what someone at the 97th %ile, making 350k, would live like (there are 4.6 million of these), but someone at the 99th %, making 663k would be harder to imagine, and someone at the 99.9th %ile, making 3.2 million a year is basically impossible, and the 1500 taxpaying units at the 99.99th %ile, making 85 million a year is simply out of the frame of reality.
1: All stats are 2022 tax year, and are AGI per tax return, so excluding things like 401(k), based on https://www.irs.gov/statistics/soi-tax-stats-individual-stat... and defining household as "taxpaying unit"- e.g. married filing separately would count as two, at two separate levels of income
I think it's more insidious than the top 1%, what % of americans buy some frivolous overpriced coffee or cookie regularly? viral beverages like prime? the absurdity of ordering mcdonalds via uber eats?
income inequality is wild right now, but even lower classes are participating in some absurd sort of money grabs regularly...
the top of the market, these billion dollar companies that have perfected this sort of private equity capitalism have optimized every day luxury that can bleed anyone dry... not just the rich... wework or wish go down the tubes and it's on to the next one, founders rocket off and some unlucky investors are stuck holding the bag
every category of daily life now has some optimized extraction mechanism
Some of these investments come back around in terms of savings. Taxes and velocity of money (thus numbers of opportunities to be taxed) have been trending down.
Anyway, it's sorta always been this way. That AI is very much self-hyping might make this time worse, but otoh non-european economies have more ability now to make sure the fallout is mostly confined to the investors.
This is kind of obvious because the internal incentives for employees (who make lots of product decisions) are based on stock being more than half of staff compensation comes via RSUs.
Hype is the product, and what it's the product of is a wealth imbalance that forces capital into (and I apologize in advance for the ire this characterization is likely to cause) Stupid Boomer Things. That is, the way the oldest and wealthiest Americans want to live and/or what they think will make them the most money.
Poor old people don't like this kind of change because it has historically come at their expense. Young people don't like this new tech because they recognize it (to varying degrees of correctness) as pulling up the ladder on entry-level positions, decimating the social and knowledge landscape (particularly the treacherous, abyssal seas that used to be the World Wide Web), amd drawing capital away from green tech and social investment and into climate change-exacerbating energy usage and construction. But they don't have the capital to dictate investment decisions, so no one cares.
I don't think this changes without some sort of economic "catastrophe" that redistributes wealth fast enough that the current arbiters can't get their legs back under themselves in time to prevent it. That's why you keep seeing all of these weird and novel tactics to forestall even the hint of a recession, and why so many young people are practically begging for, say, a repeat of 2008.
Edit: Also, I really like this site's layout on my phone. It feels fresh and performant.
Doesn't matter. If a system's purpose is what it does, a people's priorities are what they invest in, in aggregate. Boomers hold outsize wealth and have steered America's economic and political ship for most of the lives of the younger generations. So the current crop of Stupid Things are mostly Stupid Boomer Things (or else they wouldn't exist, as there would be no money or political will to sustain them).
Refusing to take responsibility isn't a good look, either. So is derailing with respectability gripes. Let's solve the problem at hand.
That's nonsense. What age group are you in? Young people voted in record numbers for fascists last time around in the US. If you're young, are you going to take responsibility for them voting for fascists? What about people in the same age group in other countries? Do you take responsibility for how they vote too since they are in the same age range? Your ageism argument is ridiculous.
Your political and moral imagination in hampered by the uber-adversarial and totally transactional understanding of human nature that the liberal worldview presupposes (by "liberal", I mean the hyperindividualistic ethos in the tradition of Hobbes, Locke, and Mill). That's why you flirt with what sounds like socialist-style redistribution as the only option and view capital as an enemy of labor.
In the liberal worldview, private property has prior existence. The common good is understood as a concession, a derivative good composed of that which is ceded from private property. Human beings are viewed as atomized units, and society is consequently viewed as a fluctuating miasma of transactional relationships.
In the classical view, the common good has prior existence, and private property exists for the sake of the common good (we avoid a whole lot of grief and social strife by having private property; properly disposed, it is a successful means of distribution). Capital and labor are not construed as necessarily opposed. Rather, in a society in which cooperative relationships for mutual benefit are the rule (in place of a market driven by exploitation), capital and labor are friends. Both have skin in the game by assuming risk. In the classical view, workers are owed at least a family wage as a matter of justice. If we have a billionaire who fails to pay his employees adequately, then we have someone who quite literally has robbed his employees. Human relationships are not confined to merely the transactional, and we have duties toward society that precede our consent.
According to a liberal view, if a famine strikes ą region and some guy has a warehouse full of food, it would be theft for to take the food in that warehouse to survive, and theft, of course, is not morally permissible (it is absurd to claim otherwise; it's theft!). Meanwhile, according to a classical view, private property is not fixed absolutely. As you recall, it exists for the sake of the common good. So, in such a case, the food in that warehouse is not absolutely determined as private property. Private property is derived and ordered toward the common good. It would not be theft for the starving to take food from that warehouse, as the food quite literally belongs to them! (This is an extreme example, but I include it to demonstrate how the consequences of each stance play out.)
I think you misunderstand. My ideals (and what I suppose to be the closest model to reality) are closer to what you are calling the classical view. Your mistake here is in conflating capital with capitalists. Capital is a tool, capitalists are people who use (some would say abuse) that tool in line with what you are calling liberalism. Labor (the group, not the action; perhaps better termed laborers) can, should, and does use capital, but labor and capitalists in their most elemental forms will always be at odds, because the goal of labor is to do enough work to live a fulfilled and dignified life, and the goal of capitalists is to exploit capital and labor as efficiently as possible in order to acquire more capital.
Circling back, redistribution is necessary because, under Capitalism, capital accrues to itself at a higher rate of return than does labor (Piketty). Without the socioeconomic infrastructure to redistribute regularly in smaller and more palatable amounts, a major redistribution event is necessary to break the positive feedback loop of capital's higher rate of return. This is not pitting labor against capital, it is forcing capital back into the hands of labor so that it can be used towards their ends rather than that of capitalists. Note that collective use is valid in this hypothetical; the difference is whether capital is being deployed for monetary gain or social needs (the "common good").
> I think you misunderstand. My ideals [...] are closer to what you are calling the classical view.
I'm not so sure, because I reject the idea that capital and labor are always at odds. They are at odds if we take as normative and basic the "liberal" hyperindividualist pursuit of self-interest as the highest aim of a human being.
I also reject redistribution as the primary means of addressing what are first order problems. For example, if employers are paying less than a family wage while they themselves reap handsome profits, then the goal isn't to redistribute later somehow while propping up a culture of normalized greed, but to distribute justly in the first place. Redistribution, like you mention, is indeed an extreme event, but I contest the idea that it must come to such extremes, or that redistribution (even in "smaller and more palatable amounts") should be the norm for addressing bad distribution in the first place.
We needn't be pigeonholed into the false dichotomies that our modern paradigm, with some of its bogus categories and "necessities", imposes. Those clamoring for socialism are asking to jump out of the frying pan into the fire (I don't claim you are calling for this, but a naive segment is). Cultural norms, buttressed by the appropriate laws (the law is a teacher), are perhaps a better place to focus our efforts and our imagination. We should pay attention to the false categories and norms we have internalized that remove the stigma from predatory practices like underpaying or extracting compound interest. When you create a culture that is hostile to such practices, that goes a long way to shaping laws and behaviors.
I do not propose a political program here. I propose that we ought to examine the moral assumptions that box us into a drab range of possibilities. The hyperindividualist "liberalism" in question construes freedom apart from objective moral norms and enjoys privatizing moral questions. But even redistribution is a moral question! This is a larger topic than I have time to explore here, but if there is a take away, it is that we must stop skirting or privatizing discussion of basic moral questions (here of an economic nature and what they themselves presuppose), thinking that this somehow avoids conflict in a heterogeneous society. This only buys time as problems fester and persist.
> Also notable is Gregory Kavka, who argues, “Though it is rarely noticed, Hobbes is a bit of an economic liberal, that is, he believes in some form of the welfare state and in the redistributive taxation needed to support it.”7 .... But Kavka’s analysis has two significant flaws. First, ... Hobbes dedicates arguably greater attention to the problems associated with excessive wealth. ... The second problem with Kavka’s analysis is that it ignores Hobbes’s rich moral psychology that is integral to Hobbes’s understanding of the problems associated with wealth, poverty, and inequality.
> Hobbes’s political program prioritizes peace above all. Along these lines, it is essential when considering Hobbes on economics that one understands how poverty, concentrated wealth, and inequality can obstruct peace. This is one of the fundamental lessons Hobbes likely learned in the decades leading up to the English Civil War – a war at least partly facilitated by the economic upheaval, the impoverishment of many along with the enriching of others, the concentration of wealth, and the systemic inequality. Hobbes acknowledges some of this in his own history of the Civil War, Behemoth.
> While Hobbes is surely concerned about the problems poverty pose for his commonwealth, he expresses even greater concern about concentrated wealth. His earliest discussion of wealth can be found in his Briefe of the Art of Rhetoric, written in 1637, his summary of Aristotle’s Rhetoric.84
Classical liberals are not the same people as modern libertarians or minarchists.
> It took me hardly any effort to find an essay that appears to be arguing that Hobbes' thought is in many ways compatible with that sort of redistribution
Snark aside, my intent was to clarify what is loosely meant by "liberal" - the broad technical sense in the philosophical context and not the partisan/colloquial usage (which is something like "leftist", which is quite different; in the US, both dominant parties are liberal parties, and they disagree on questions like redistribution, with some tending more toward Mill on this issue, others Hayek, for example). It is not my intent to offer an exhaustive treatment of the variations of liberal positions (or an analysis of how they converge or diverge as they develop). Perhaps I should have avoided the term and simply stuck to "hyperindividualism" to avoid confusion.
However, I am opposed to redistribution as the basic mechanism of correcting what is a matter of basic justice. I am not arguing for equality or for redistribution as a normal corrective mechanism. I am arguing that if we bring back notions of economic justice, a correct understanding of what economies are for, of the relationship between the human person/society and the economy, and of our moral duties within the scope of economics, then we think less about how to slap a dirty bandage onto an open sore and think more about how not to wound in the first place. If workers made at least a family wage, you wouldn't need to worry so much about redistribution. If we didn't construe capital and labor as intrinsically in competition with one another, but rather as partners working toward a common good, we wouldn't obsess about class conflict and the socialistic impulse to eliminate class distinctions and flatten society.
I am suggesting we escape the false categories of our modern paradigm by reexamining our assumptions and looking at what an older and still very much alive vibrant intellectual tradition has to say.
Consider "Laborem Exercens" [0], which engages both capitalism and socialism without collapsing into either.
I blame the tech industry less than I blame the financial industry. Meme stocks, after all, don't have much to do with technology, aside from telecommunications enabling mass coordination among retail actors. Bitcoin doesn't either, although it has the veneer of tech, given that when it was known only to a few engineers, its market cap was substantially zero.
Tech companies are just reacting to market forces. The author invokes FB/Meta, but Zuck was blazing his own shitty trail with the metaverse until the market punished him beyond all reason (relative to the cash flow the ads business was still generating). He only jumped on the AI hype train when he was forced to. It's been a long time since fundamental analysis a la Warren Buffet was the core of prudent investing. But I think this is a result of human nature --- a large percent of people just like gambling, even if the expected value of their wagers is negative.
I also get the anger that the author feels. As a tech worker, my professional life is dictated to me by the whims of the market. But the all the attention from financiers is also a result of the immense wealth the industry has attracted (or generated, based on your perspective), so it's hard to complain without self-consciousness. Like many here, I probably live online a bit too much, and I try to see the silver lining in enshitiffication as a force that encourages me to live more in the real world, with my family members, in the present.
"The spectacle is the inverted image of society in which relations between commodities have supplanted relations between people, in which 'passive identification with the spectacle supplants genuine activity'." [0]
I read The Society of the Spectacle too young and it broke me forever :(
No, you listen to me Jack. You promised me that you would never
compromise the product, so do you feel
like taking some action and backing me up on this because me and my product
feel pretty compromised right
now
Richard, I don't think you understand
what the product is. The product isn't
the platform, and the product isn't your
algorithm either, and it's not even the
software. Do you know what Pied Piper's
product is, Richard?
Is--is it me?
Oh God no no how could it
possibly be you? You got fired! Pied Piper's
product is its stock.
LinkedIn just replaced its Jobs page with AI Slop. You can't do regular searches anymore, they've filtered and normalized all results, and they stopped labeling promoted content. (All searches now return the same number of results, many of which have little to do with your query) So now I'm deleting my LinkedIn account. Much of the internet is already dead.
I liked this analysis quite a bit. A few reactions:
(1) I don't think a tech company having a monopoly is necessary for a tech company to stop caring about their customers and focus on hype instead. Plenty of public tech companies do this, just to chase stock price and investors.
(2) It's weirdly the opposite mindset that Bezos talked about in that famous old video where he talks about "creating the best experience for the customer" is his business strategy. Interesting. I think ultimately companies may be misguided -- because, in fact, ChatGPT is succeeding because they created a better search experience. And hype bandwagoners may fail because, long-term, customers don't like their products. In other words, this is a bad strategy.
(3) what's weird about AI -- and I guess all hype trains -- is how part of me feels like it's hype, but part of me also sees the value in investing in it and its potential. The hype train itself and the crazy amount of money being spent on it almost defacto means it IS important and WILL be important. It's like a market and consumer interest has been created by the hype machine itself.
"what's weird about AI -- and I guess all hype trains -- is how part of me feels like it's hype, but part of me also sees the value in investing in it and its potential."
The DotCom bubble is an instructive historical example. Pretty much every wild promise made during the bubble has manifested, right down to delivering pet food. It's just that for the bubble to have been worthwhile, we would essentially have had the internet of 2015 or 2020 delivered in 2001.
(And because people forget, it is not too far off to say that would be like trying to deliver the internet of 2020 on machines with specs comparable to a Nintendo Wii. I'm trying to pick a game console as a sort of touchpoint, and there probably isn't a perfect comparison, but based on the machines I had in 2000 the specs are roughly inline with a Wii, at least by the numbers. Though the Wii would have murdered my 2000-era laptop on graphics.)
I don't know that the AI bubble will have a similar 20-year lag, but I also think it's out over its skis. What we have now is both extremely impressive, but also not justifying the valuations being poured into it in the here & now. There's no contradiction there. In fact if you look at history there's been all sorts of similar cases of promising technologies being grotesquely over-invested in, even though they were transformative and amazing. If you want to go back further in history, the railroad bubble also has some similarities to the Dot Com bubble. It's not that railroad wasn't in fact a completely transformative technology, it's just that the random hodgepodge of a hundred companies slapping random sizes and shapes of track in half-random places wasn't worth the valuations they were given. The promise took decades longer to manifest.
> (And because people forget, it is not too far off to say that would be like trying to deliver the internet of 2020 on machines with specs comparable to a Nintendo Wii. I'm trying to pick a game console as a sort of touchpoint, and there probably isn't a perfect comparison, but based on the machines I had in 2000 the specs are roughly inline with a Wii, at least by the numbers. Though the Wii would have murdered my 2000-era laptop on graphics.)
It depresses me to think how much of the 2020 Internet (or 2025 Internet) that is actually of value really ought to be able to run on hardware that old.
Or so I imagine, anyway. I wonder if anyone's tried to benchmark simple CSS transitions and SVG rendering on ancient CPUs.
Also in the amount of data.
Ever remember waiting something like hour to watch a 60-second movie preview over dialup?
I get a reminder every time I load a modern website in an area with very poor reception. Appears to not load at all —- not due to lack of connectivity but rather due the speeds and latencies being too slow for the amount of crap being fetched.
GPRS and EDGE were many times faster than dialup — must have been a dream — but now utterly unusable.
The sad part of it is, pretty much everything on that modern website that makes it too fat to load is completely unnecessary. You can create a beautiful, full featured page that's only a few kbytes.
That is indeed one of the differences I had in mind.
It is a valuable and relevant lesson - when something wide and structural manifests (personal computing, the internet, smartphones, AI), lots of people will be able to see the coming future with high fidelity, but will tend to underestimate the speed of change. Because we gloss over all the many, many small challenges to get from point A to B.
Yes, now it feels like something like smartphones came of age overnight and was always inevitable. But it really took more than a decade to reach the level of integration and polish that we now take for granted. UI on phone apps was terrible, speeds were terrible, screens resolutions were terrible, processing was minimal, battery didn't last, roaming charges/3g coverage, etc. For years, you couldn't pinch to zoom on an iPhone, stuff like that.
All these structural problems were rubbed away over time and eventually forgotten. But so many of these small tweaks needed to take place before we could "fill in the blanks" and reach the level of ubiquity for something like an Uber driver using their phone for directions.
UI on phone apps still is terrible. Have you ever used a desktop with high-end gaming peripherals (fast monitor/keyboard/mouse), running a light desktop environment such as LXQt on Xorg, with animations disabled? The feeling of responsiveness leaves all mobile devices in the dust. Any modern CPU+SSD is fast enough, but good peripherals are still rare and make a huge difference. Most phones are still running 60Hz displays. A touchscreen is inherently clumsy compared to mouse+keyboard. Mobile UI feel is worse than desktop computers from the 90s.
"have you ever done this indescribably niche thing, which I believe renders your argument null and void, but is in fact not relatable in the slightest?"
Good UI latency used to be standard:
https://danluu.com/input-lag/
(most recent HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33683278 )
The fact that it requires niche hardware and software (not "indescribably" niche) to achieve in modern times is a failure of the computer industry, not a problem with my argument. Low standards do not make mobile devices good.
And touch screen are impossible to fix even with niche configurations. I have no way to shrink my fingers to pixel size, and no way to make them transparent.
> And because people forget, it is not too far off to say that would be like trying to deliver the internet of 2020 on machines with specs comparable to a Nintendo Wii.
I mean, we could totally have done that. There's nothing stopping you from delivering an experience like modern Amazon or Facebook or whatever in server-rendered HTML4. CSS3 and React get you fancy graphics and animations, and fast, no-repaint page transitions, but that's pretty much all they get you; we had everything else 25 years ago in MSIE6.
You could have built a dynamically-computed product listing grid + shopping cart, or a dynamically-computed network-propagated news feed with multimedia post types + attached comment threads (save for video, which would have been impractical back then), on top of Perl CGI-bin scripts — or if you liked, a custom Apache module in C.
And, in fact, some people did! There existed web services even in 1998 that did [various fragments of] these things! Most of them built in ASP or ColdFusion, mind you, and so limited to a very specific stack; but still, it was happening!
It was just that the results were all incredibly jank, with no UX polish... but not because UX polish would have been impossible with the tools available at the time. (As I said, HTML4 was quite capable!)
Rather, it was because all the professional HCI people were still mostly focused on native apps (with the few rare corporate UX vanguards "doing web stuff", working on siloed enterprise products like the MSDN docs); while the new and growing body of art-school "web design" types were all instead being trained mainly on the application of vertically-integrated design tools (ActiveX, Flash, maybe web layout via Photoshop 9-way slice export).
I agree with most of this post, except the part where you could actually do it. I’ll be the first to admit that I was not in server rooms back then but I’ve heard from those who were. The biggest advantage Amazon had, for many years, over their competitors, is that they would take your order and tell you it was completed and wait to charge your card until it shipped because it was cheaper to write your order down than to spend expensive session compute waiting for the payment to go through. That kind of optimization was necessary because all the networks were slower or flaky then, including payment processing, and often relied on batch processing overnight that has become less visible today.
Meanwhile on the client side, web technologies had a lot of implicit defaults assuming pages on sites rather than apps and experiences. For example, we didn’t originally have a way for JS to preserve back/forward buttons functionality when navigating in a SPA without using hash tags in the URL. Without CSS features for it, support for RTL and LTR on the same website was basically nonexistent. I won’t even get started on charset, poorer support for dates that persists to this day, limited offline modes in a time when being offline was more common, and how browsers varied tremendously across platforms and versions back then with their own unique set of JS APIs and unique ideas of how to render webpages.
It took the original acid test and a bunch more tests that followed before we had anything close to cross browser standards for newer web features. I still remember the snowman hack to get IE to submit forms with UTF-8 encoding, and that wasn’t as bad as quirks mode or IE 5.
Actually maybe I disagree with most of this post. Don’t get me wrong, I can see how it could have been done, but it’s reductive to the extreme to say the only reason web services were jank is because UX polish didn’t exist. If anything, the web is the reason UX is so good today - apps and desktop platforms continuously copied the web for the past 28 years, from Windows ME with single-click everywhere to Spotify and other electron apps invading the OS. I’m not going to devalue the HIG or equivalent, but desktop apps tended to evolve slowly, with each new OS release, while web apps evolved quickly, with each new website needing to write its own cross platform conventions and thus needing its own design language.
> ChatGPT is succeeding because they created a better search experience
Funny enough, no "AI" prophet is mentioning that, in spite of it being the most useful thing about LLMs.
What I wonder is how long it will last. LLMs are being fed their own content by now, and someone will surely want to "monetize" it after the VC money starts to dry up a bit. At least two paths to entshittification.
"A junior intern who has memorized the Internet" is how one member of our team described it and it's still one of the best descriptions of these things I've heard.
Sometimes I think these things are more like JPEGs for knowledge expressed as language. They're more AM (artificial memory) than AI (artificial intelligence). It's a blurry line though. They can clearly do things that involve reasoning, but it's arguably because that's latent in the training data. So a JPEG is an imperfect analogy since lossy image compressors can't do any reasoning about images.
> They can clearly do things that involve reasoning
No.
> but it's arguably because that's latent in the training data.
The internet is just bigger than what a single human can encounter.
Plus a single human isn't likely to be able to afford to pay for all that training data the "AI" peddlers have pirated :)
A dismissive “no” is not a helpful addition to this discussion. The truth is much more interesting and subtle than “no”. Directed stochastic processes that reach a correct conclusion of novel logic problems more often than chance means that something interesting is happening, and it’s sensible to call that process “reasoning”. Does it mean that we’ve reached AGI? No. Does it mean the process reflects exactly what humans do? No. But dismissing “reasoning” out of hand also dismisses genuinely interesting phenomena.
Only if you redefine "reasoning". This is something that the generative AI industry has succeeded in convincing many people of, but that doesn't mean everyone has to accede to that change.
It's true that something interesting is happening. GP did not dispute that. That doesn't make it reasoning, and many people still believe that words should have meaning in order to discuss things intelligently. Language is ultimately a living thing and will inevitably change. This usually involves people fighting the change and no one know ahead of time which side will win.
I don't think we need to redefine reasoning. Here's the definition of "reason" (the verb): "think, understand, and form judgments by a process of logic"
If Claude 4 provides a detailed, logical breakdown in its "reasoning" (yeah, that usage is overloaded), then we could say that there was logical inference involved. "But wait!", I already hear someone saying, "That token output is just the result of yet another stochastic process, and isn't directing the AI in a deterministic, logical way, and thus it is not actually using logic; it's just making something that looks convincingly like logic, but is actually a hallucination of some stochastic process". And I think this is a good point, but I find it difficult to convince myself that what humans are doing is so different that we cannot use the word "reasoning".
As a sidenote, I am _very_ tired of the semantic quagmire that is the current AI industry, and I would really appreciate a rigorous guide to all these definitions.
> Only if you redefine "reasoning". This is something that the generative AI industry has succeeded in convincing many people of, but that doesn't mean everyone has to accede to that change.
I agree. However, they can clearly do a reasonable facsimile of many things that we previously believed required reasoning to do acceptably.
Right -- we know that LLMs cannot think, feel, or understand.
Therefore whenever they produce output that looks like the result of those things, we must either be deceived by a reasonable facsimile, or we simply misapprehended their necessity in the first place.
But, do we understand the human brain as well as we understand LLMs?
Obviously there's something different, but is it just a matter of degrees? LLMs have greater memory than humans, and lesser ability to correlate it. Correlation is powerful magic. That's pattern matching though, and I don't see a fundamental reason why LLMs won't get better at it. Maybe never as good as (smart) humans are, but with their superior memory, maybe that will often be adequate.
> they produce output that looks like the result of those things
Is a cardboard cutout human to some degree? Is a recording a voice? What about a voice recording in a phone menu?
> LLMs have greater memory than humans,
So does a bank of hard drives by that metric.
(Memory Access + Correlation Skills) is a decent proxy for several of the many kinds of human intelligence.
HDDs don't have correlation skills, but LLMs do. They're just not smart-human-level "good", yet.
I am not sure whether I believe AGI will happen. To be meaningful, it would have to be above the level of a smart human.
Building an army of disincorporated average-human-intelligence actors would be economically "productive" though. This is the future I see us trending toward today.
Most humans are not special. This is dystopian, of course. Not in the "machines raise humans for energy" sort of way, but probably no less socially destructive.
It would be useful to supply a definition if your point is that others' definition is wrong. Are you saying they don't deduct inferences from premises? Is it "deduct" that you take issue with?
They do not perform voluntary exploration of the consequences of applying logical rules for deduction; at best they pattern-match. Their model of conceptual meaning (which last I checked still struggles with negation, meta-reference and even simply identifying irrelevant noise) is not grounded in actual observational experience, but only in correlations between text tokens.
I think it should be abundantly clear that what ChatGPT does when you ask it to play chess is fundamentally different from what Stockfish does. It isn't just weak and doesn't just make embarrassing errors in generating legal moves (like a blindfolded human might); it doesn't actually "read" and it generates post-hoc rationalization for its moves (which may not be at all logically sound) rather than choosing them with purpose.
There are "reasoning models" that improve on this somewhat, but cf. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44455124 from a few weeks ago, and my commentary there https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44473615 .
Okay, sure. My intuition is that LLMs reason at about a three-year-old level which appears more impressive because of their massive memories. By your definition and criticism, I take it that you wouldn't describe a three-year-old as capable of reasoning, so we're probably on the same page.
> A dismissive “no” is not a helpful addition to this discussion.
Yes, your "no" must be more upbeat! Even if it's correct. You must be willing to temper the truth of it with something that doesn't hurt the feelings of the massive.
> Does it mean that we’ve reached AGI? No. Does it mean the process reflects exactly what humans do? No.
But here it's fine to use a "No." because these are your straw men, right?
Is it just wrong to use a "No." when it's not in safety padding for the overinvested?
I have a hunch it can reflect what humans do "A junior intern who has memorized the Internet and talks without thinking on permanent autopilot". We're just surprised how much humans can do without thinking.
>A dismissive “no” is not a helpful addition to this discussion.
Neither are wide-eyed claims stemming from drinking too much LLM company koolaid. Blatantly mistaken claims don't need more than a curt answer.
Why don't I go ahead and claim chatGPT has a soul, so to then get angry if my claim is dismissed?
> No.
You are missing the forest for the trees by dismissing this so readily.
LLMs can solve IMO-level math problems, debug quite difficult bugs in moderately sized codebases, and write prototypes for very unique and weird coding projects. They solve difficult reasoning problems, and so I find it mystifying that people still work so hard to justify their belief that they're "not actually reasoning". They are flawed reasoners in some sense, but it seems ludicrous to me to suggest that they are not reasoning at all when they generalise to new logical problems so well.
Do you think humans are logical machines? No, we are not. Therefore, do we not reason?
>Do you think humans are logical machines? No, we are not. Therefore, do we not reason?
No, but we are conscious, and we know we are conscious, which doesn't require being a logical being too. LLMs on the other hand aren't conscious and there's zero evidence that they are. Thus, they don't reason, since this, unlike logic, does require consciousness.
Why not avoid re-definining things into a salad mix of poor logic until you can pretend that something with no evidence in its favor is real.
> "A junior intern who has memorized the Internet"
... who can also type at superhuman speeds, but has no self-awareness, creativity or initiative.
> ChatGPT is succeeding because they created a better search experience
Or perhaps because Google created a worse search experience.
The only thing I find bad about Google search now is their "AI" summary, which is often just wrong. I can deal with ads in the search results, I expect them, and I have no doubt ads will be shown in ChatGPT search results too, because they are bleeding money. And ChatGPT is under no obligation to show you anything with any accuracy, which is what the underlying tech is based on - guessing. Thanks, I'll take my chances with actual search results.
I think AI evangelists avoid talking about search because AI is why every internet search engine sucks. I use DuckDuckGo and Startpage, and when trying to find answers to nontrivial questions I get ONLY AI spam sites as results. (Come up with 1500 semi-specific SEO-friendly articles vaguely relating to subject the theme of website N. Then repeat until N=100
And shortly enough, AI is not even going to help with searching – it will eat its own s*t and offer that as answers. Unless the AI giants find some >99.99% way to filter out their own toxic waste from the training data.
There was a period I remember fondly when the SEO slop was still mostly human generated because AI couldn't quite do it yet, and I was getting much better results from DDG than from Google. Now it's all despair-inducing.
What you're saying is totally correct about AI slop polluting the web, but the reason they don't want to talk about it is because the second they frame "AI" as slightly better search, it invites all sorts of unfavorable financial comparisons. It also deflates the hype because now you're talking about a better version of a thing everyone is familiar with instead of some magical new buzzword like "agent" or "RAG" or whatever we're going to be talking about next year when agents don't work.
That reminds me of this post, here, from a couple of weeks ago[0].
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44615801
> It's weirdly the opposite mindset that Bezos talked about in that famous old video where he talks about "creating the best experience for the customer" is his business strategy.
A big part of hype as a business strategy is to convince potential customers that you intend to create the best experience for them. And the simplest approach to that task is to say it outright.
> in fact, ChatGPT is succeeding because they created a better search experience.
Sure. But they don't market it like that, and a large fraction of people reporting success with ChatGPT don't seem to be characterizing their experiences that way. Even if you discount the people explicitly attempting to, well, chat with it.
And there's a part of me that kinda think "lots of money will mean some large scale investments in labs that might result in some rare findings". Even though the hype + investor chase feels very shallow to me too.
"Created a better search experience" sure, just like eating human meat would create a better dinning experience because there is a lot of humans near you, at the end of the day what "AI" is doing is butchering a bunch of websites and giving you a blend, in the progress making you no longer required to enter those websites that needed you to do so to survive, because they are monetized by third party ads or some paid offering.
> There is more and more proof these tools are not as useful as they are hyped out to be. LLM-based coding tools seem to actually hurt programmers’ productivity. “Hallucinations” are not going away because the only thing these LLMs can do is “hallucinate”; they just sometimes (about 30% of the time, in fact) happen to generate some text that has some connection to reality.
This hurts the article, I think. I don't disagree with his point about companies caring too much about stockholders. But this anti-LLM envangelism just comes across as ludditism.
> This hurts the article, I think. I don't disagree with his point about companies caring too much about stockholders. But this anti-LLM envangelism just comes across as ludditism.
Is there any research out there suggesting LLMs help programmers get stuff done? I can't say I follow the research closely but I have not seen any.
Googling for [ai llm productivity research] and looking at the first page of results I can't find much interesting evidence. One report says users asked to create a basic web server in JS complete the task 55% faster using an LLM. One report measures "perceived productivity". Students given text writing tasks are faster. One report measures productivity as lines of code written. The rest seem to just be projecting theoretical productivity gains.
Has anyone measured any improved productivity?
I can see this report from METR that is actually measuring something: https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o...
> Core Result > > When developers are allowed to use AI tools, they take 19% longer to complete issues—a significant slowdown that goes against developer beliefs and expert forecasts. This gap between perception and reality is striking: developers expected AI to speed them up by 24%, and even after experiencing the slowdown, they still believed AI had sped them up by 20%.
But surely someone must have also found results showing productivity gains. I assume I was just not looking hard enough.
I am a happy Copilot Pro user since 2021, still.
The report is definitely worth reading although I don't think the data is strong enough to draw significant conclusions from. I personally think that this should be studied more in depth over a longer time period since the current study had a 50 hour threshold (not exactly but close enough). One thing which is mentioned in the research paper[1] is:
> However, we see positive speedup for the one developer who has more than 50 hours of Cursor experience, so it’s plausible that there is a high skill ceiling for using Cursor, such that developers with significant experience see positive speedup.
[1]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.09089
> Is there any research out there suggesting LLMs help programmers get stuff done?
Any research will be limited by what the researchers control for?
In my personal experience, when I get a well written bug report or hands on detailed logs, my instinct that I feed it to an Agent and let it figure it all out has never disappointed me. It runs in the background while I work on things I instinctively know the Agent wouldn't do a good job of. How did I develop those instincts? By using Agents for like 3 days. These things (especially, for code completion) are ridiculously effective for the programming languages & code bases I work in, if nowhere else.
> Has anyone measured any improved productivity? ... I am a happy Copilot Pro user since 2021, still.
Whether productivity is tanking or not, I will find it incredibly hard to stop using LLMs/Agents just because a metric or three indicates I'd be better off without them. I must note though, it might be too soon to put a mark on productivity as it is a function of how well new technologies are integrated into processes and workflows, which typically happens over decades and not months/years.
Yeah, author is definitely false here. I have 10+ years of professional experience backend programming and I've found VS Code copilot to be pretty helpful overall. It saves me a lot of time digging through documentation and writing out tedious little functions (e.g. converting dates from one format to another). I wouldn't use it to write anything lengthy but overall it has improved my productivity, though I could see how it might hurt junior engineers.
The study where developers lost productivity due to using AI tools should always be mentioned with caveats.
This comment by simonw for reference: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44522772
1/ They tested on 16 experienced developers. 2/ They only used cursor. No mention of other tools at the time. Cursor is notoriously bad on bigger codebases, while even Windsurf (competition at the time) would have shown different results. 3/ They only allowed training for 30 mins on cursor. 4/ As simonw mentions, the ones who improved had some previous experience with cursor. 5/ Yet, the study is definitively mentioned as AI actively ruining productivity and none of the other factors.
We do need to start talking about the failure of capitalism. I'm not naive enough to think that we should turn to communism, but it's clear how we're taught capitalism is suppose to work and how it plays out in reality are two different things.
Ideally capitalism would yield better product or services, for a lower price. That's no longer happening. We're getting shittier products and we're paying more. But somehow we convince ourselves that it's still good, because the stock market is going up, corporate profits are going up.
If there was ever any doubt that the hype is the product, then please explain the Tesla stock, 100% hype driven, there is zero correlation between the stock price and how the company is actually doing.
the theory assumes that in a free market, everyone is a rational actor, and that everyone is truthful
we live in the age of lies. you can either keep debunking them to deaf ears, or join the bandwagon and maybe make some money by fooling someone else. the whole stock market feels like a ponzi scheme now.
>We do need to start talking about the failure of capitalism.
People have been talking about the failures of capitalism long before the word was coined, going back to at least Abraham buying land with silver coins in 1675 BC and Jesus throwing out the money changers.
Although it's a mess, people are generally better off than a while ago or under non capitalist systems.
It’s because capitalism assumes a free market with competition. If you allow monopolies to thrive, you will not get those benefits. It’s just that some of these types of markets have different dynamics due to their structure. E.g. natural monopolies where the barrier to entry is huge up front costs. Interestingly the AI startup ecosystem is raising enough money to surpass the barrier of needing a ton of data to train AI.
That's true but it's not just monopolies per se. Another big part of it is information flow. The kind of idealized free markets that "work" involve relatively transparent interactions between buyers and sellers. Sort of like, well, a market --- an old-fashioned bazaar-type market with sellers offering their wares. You can walk down the line and see 10 people are selling apples or saddles or whatever and you can compare the prices and the products and make your decision.
Even in that setup, people can try to game the market. They can make something that looks like a good saddle and sell it to you and then it falls apart not too long afterward. They can get you to agree to a price but then tell you the stirrups aren't included even though they're attached to the demo model. They can ask for half payment up front while they custom make your item, then skip town.
And mechanisms sprung up to prevent this: regulation. Some are market-internal (reputation) and some are enforced (people can report you to the authorities for selling fraudulent goods, and you can be jailed or whatever).
The problem is mainly that nowadays companies have turned the majority of their innovation energy towards this kind of market-gaming meta-activity. It's no longer about goods, services, buyers, sellers, or any of those things. It's just about finding new ways to manipulate the market itself.
This is what the article seems to be saying, and I agree. I'm not sure I'd call it "hype", though. It's not that "the hype is the product", it's that the market activity is not oriented towards products at all. Products have become like abstract proxy tokens that are moved around to simulate what we think of as market activity, but all the real activity is happening in the meta-market.
> It’s because capitalism assumes a free market with competition
But even in the cases where we do have a free market, we're often seeing one company fiddle with quality, maybe drop the price a little, then the rest quickly follow and price goes right back up across the board.
not attacking your thinking, but the terms "capitalism" and "free market" aren't consistently well enough defined to capture the nuances of what this type discussion requires. At a minimum, capitalism is the right/ability to own something without others taking it from you, and free markets are markets you can participate in if you would like without asking permission from the govt or belonging to a guild.
capitalism works best for everybody on average when free markets are competitive, but when they are not, markets still work, they just work better for some, worse for others but better than nothing, and also overall worse for everybody because markets are not zero sum. The problem with a lot of what-turns-out-to-be left-wing and or populist thinking on markets is the assumption that markets are zero sum, "if there is a winner, there must be a loser", which while an attractive idea turns out to be false.
same is true of the completely overblown idea that people are not rational. people are not perfectly rational, but when it comes to parting with their money they are much more rational than they are not. If it were not true, people wouldn't be living rationally measurably better lives today than 100, 200, etc. years ago. there are many other sources of noise in measuring that swallow irrationality up with the noise. (yes, selling gambling to gambling addicts is an irrational money printing machine, but civilization has not collapsed)
For centuries as capitalism developed from more primitive systems (like feudalism and mercantilism), goods and services that gain value from social network effects were well beyond anyone's imagination. The printing press survived the church's attempts at suppression, but nobody back then could have conceived of a service that automatically distributed copies of your books to your friends — much less one that could profit from knowing who your friends are, rather than from explicitly charging you for the service.
Capitalism isn't a single thing with an approved international standard of implementation. It can be implemented in a million different ways and its possible we just need some big redesign of it.
> please explain the Tesla stock, 100% hype driven, there is zero correlation between the stock price and how the company is actually doing.
They do still have the best electric cars on the market.
The advantage to capitalism is the escape hatch not the cybernetics.
Capitalism has always exhibited these problems, which is why it’s supposed to be counterbalanced by regulation. The problem is that our politicians have become utterly corrupt, with Trump himself being the epitome of blatant corruption. He understands that exhibiting corruption from the highest levels will cause it to propagate everywhere, bringing the system crashing down. This and the destruction of the Federal Reserve are his primary goals.
I think this is just a symbol of the current hype cycle.
We are living in a strange time because there is a combination of fear and greed in the market.
Yesterday I learned that market leverage (credit) is trending towards levels of the dot-com bust and great recession (https://en.macromicro.me/collections/34/us-stock-relative/89...)
When the tide goes out, the real swimmers remain and the tourists leave.
I quite enjoy that time in tech specifically, though I'm sure other industries face similar in-and-out flows.
I don't know if anyone's done research on this extensively, but we seem to be very much living in a "vibe" society all around? the market is more irrational than ever, outright lies can be enough to hype up millions in value, and conversely the specter of bad vibes can tank anything.
Has it always been this way? or am I just slow on the uptake
I have noticed this as well, and yes it hasn't always been this way.
My theory is that we are simply too wealthy. For the average rich person (the top 20-30%), the first $70,000 goes to real companies who sell real things for money. Past that and it all is just kinda funny money. In our society there are actually a ton of people making this kind of money, so there's just this huge chunk of money that isn't really tied to anything real. If you lose $100k on cryptocurrency, or you spend $800 on some metaverse thing, it's fine, you can still buy food.
Of course this is also why people who don't make this kind of money are so baffled (and angry). Hearing that some no product company [1] was sold for billions of dollars feels insane when you're seriously considering the difference between a $5000 and a $6000 car.
[1] (https://openai.com/sam-and-jony/)
> If you lose $100k on cryptocurrency, or you spend $800 on some metaverse thing, it's fine, you can still buy food.
20 - 30% cannot spend $100k per year as funny money, that is more like the top 5% but probably more like the top 2%.
High earners in the 20 - 30% often also live in expensive areas, so their dollar doesn't go as far as some of the more affordable places to live (housing, food, etc).
The parent comment just shows how most people do not understand how inequal the US actually is. I'd recommend to try this: https://wid.world/income-comparator/US/
If you make a yearly gross salary of 100K you're already in the top 11%. With 200K you're in the top 3%. Inequality also leads to social segregation, which means that we live in bubbles where most people are "like us" and it's very difficult to see how privileged we actually are.
Read Piketty's "Capital in the XXI century" to learn more about how crazy inequal the world, but specially the US, is becoming. Phenomena like Trump are easier to understand when taking this into account.
There is some nuance to it though, the average monthly car payment is $700! Only 10% are under $400.
With the median income ~$50k and many households owning two cars... much of the country is actively living beyond their means just to get to work.
We have built some sort of pseudo-luxury economy that seemingly has to be upkept by mandatory good vibes.
> My theory is that we are simply too wealthy.
Maybe 0.1% to 1% of us are, but the rest of us aren't.
Nah. The top 10 percent of US households make $190,000 per year. That is simply a lot more money than a household strictly needs. At that point, your Roth IRA is maxed out, you own a home, and you still have thousands every single paycheck to play with.
Funny money.
Wealth inequality is intensely fractal, at every level it is enormous: someone at the 90th %ile household (there are 15 million of these), making 178k (1), can mostly imagine what someone at the 97th %ile, making 350k, would live like (there are 4.6 million of these), but someone at the 99th %, making 663k would be harder to imagine, and someone at the 99.9th %ile, making 3.2 million a year is basically impossible, and the 1500 taxpaying units at the 99.99th %ile, making 85 million a year is simply out of the frame of reality.
1: All stats are 2022 tax year, and are AGI per tax return, so excluding things like 401(k), based on https://www.irs.gov/statistics/soi-tax-stats-individual-stat... and defining household as "taxpaying unit"- e.g. married filing separately would count as two, at two separate levels of income
This tracks with a report[1] that nearly half of consumer spending now comes from the top 10%.
[1]: https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/stock-market-today-dow-sp50...
Wealth inequality; too much of the wealth that exists is concentrated where it is worth the least.
I think it's more insidious than the top 1%, what % of americans buy some frivolous overpriced coffee or cookie regularly? viral beverages like prime? the absurdity of ordering mcdonalds via uber eats?
income inequality is wild right now, but even lower classes are participating in some absurd sort of money grabs regularly...
the top of the market, these billion dollar companies that have perfected this sort of private equity capitalism have optimized every day luxury that can bleed anyone dry... not just the rich... wework or wish go down the tubes and it's on to the next one, founders rocket off and some unlucky investors are stuck holding the bag
every category of daily life now has some optimized extraction mechanism
Some of these investments come back around in terms of savings. Taxes and velocity of money (thus numbers of opportunities to be taxed) have been trending down.
Anyway, it's sorta always been this way. That AI is very much self-hyping might make this time worse, but otoh non-european economies have more ability now to make sure the fallout is mostly confined to the investors.
That is the coolest website design I've seen in a long time. Absolutely love it. The article was good too.
Yes, although the drop shadow on the entire text was a bit distracting.
This is kind of obvious because the internal incentives for employees (who make lots of product decisions) are based on stock being more than half of staff compensation comes via RSUs.
Hype is the product, and what it's the product of is a wealth imbalance that forces capital into (and I apologize in advance for the ire this characterization is likely to cause) Stupid Boomer Things. That is, the way the oldest and wealthiest Americans want to live and/or what they think will make them the most money.
Poor old people don't like this kind of change because it has historically come at their expense. Young people don't like this new tech because they recognize it (to varying degrees of correctness) as pulling up the ladder on entry-level positions, decimating the social and knowledge landscape (particularly the treacherous, abyssal seas that used to be the World Wide Web), amd drawing capital away from green tech and social investment and into climate change-exacerbating energy usage and construction. But they don't have the capital to dictate investment decisions, so no one cares.
I don't think this changes without some sort of economic "catastrophe" that redistributes wealth fast enough that the current arbiters can't get their legs back under themselves in time to prevent it. That's why you keep seeing all of these weird and novel tactics to forestall even the hint of a recession, and why so many young people are practically begging for, say, a repeat of 2008.
Edit: Also, I really like this site's layout on my phone. It feels fresh and performant.
Just build nuclear.
>Stupid Boomer Things
Ageism is never a good look. There are smart and stupid people in every age group.
Doesn't matter. If a system's purpose is what it does, a people's priorities are what they invest in, in aggregate. Boomers hold outsize wealth and have steered America's economic and political ship for most of the lives of the younger generations. So the current crop of Stupid Things are mostly Stupid Boomer Things (or else they wouldn't exist, as there would be no money or political will to sustain them).
Refusing to take responsibility isn't a good look, either. So is derailing with respectability gripes. Let's solve the problem at hand.
>Refusing to take responsibility isn't a good look, either
You want me to take responsibility for how other people in my age group vote (not that I am a boomer, I'm not)? That's your argument?
Thanks but no thanks for this ridiculous comment thread.
>You want me to take responsibility for how other people in my age group vote.
Yes. Or, rather, you already are responsible, commensurate with your level of wealth/social influence.
That's nonsense. What age group are you in? Young people voted in record numbers for fascists last time around in the US. If you're young, are you going to take responsibility for them voting for fascists? What about people in the same age group in other countries? Do you take responsibility for how they vote too since they are in the same age range? Your ageism argument is ridiculous.
Your political and moral imagination in hampered by the uber-adversarial and totally transactional understanding of human nature that the liberal worldview presupposes (by "liberal", I mean the hyperindividualistic ethos in the tradition of Hobbes, Locke, and Mill). That's why you flirt with what sounds like socialist-style redistribution as the only option and view capital as an enemy of labor.
In the liberal worldview, private property has prior existence. The common good is understood as a concession, a derivative good composed of that which is ceded from private property. Human beings are viewed as atomized units, and society is consequently viewed as a fluctuating miasma of transactional relationships.
In the classical view, the common good has prior existence, and private property exists for the sake of the common good (we avoid a whole lot of grief and social strife by having private property; properly disposed, it is a successful means of distribution). Capital and labor are not construed as necessarily opposed. Rather, in a society in which cooperative relationships for mutual benefit are the rule (in place of a market driven by exploitation), capital and labor are friends. Both have skin in the game by assuming risk. In the classical view, workers are owed at least a family wage as a matter of justice. If we have a billionaire who fails to pay his employees adequately, then we have someone who quite literally has robbed his employees. Human relationships are not confined to merely the transactional, and we have duties toward society that precede our consent.
According to a liberal view, if a famine strikes ą region and some guy has a warehouse full of food, it would be theft for to take the food in that warehouse to survive, and theft, of course, is not morally permissible (it is absurd to claim otherwise; it's theft!). Meanwhile, according to a classical view, private property is not fixed absolutely. As you recall, it exists for the sake of the common good. So, in such a case, the food in that warehouse is not absolutely determined as private property. Private property is derived and ordered toward the common good. It would not be theft for the starving to take food from that warehouse, as the food quite literally belongs to them! (This is an extreme example, but I include it to demonstrate how the consequences of each stance play out.)
I think you misunderstand. My ideals (and what I suppose to be the closest model to reality) are closer to what you are calling the classical view. Your mistake here is in conflating capital with capitalists. Capital is a tool, capitalists are people who use (some would say abuse) that tool in line with what you are calling liberalism. Labor (the group, not the action; perhaps better termed laborers) can, should, and does use capital, but labor and capitalists in their most elemental forms will always be at odds, because the goal of labor is to do enough work to live a fulfilled and dignified life, and the goal of capitalists is to exploit capital and labor as efficiently as possible in order to acquire more capital.
Circling back, redistribution is necessary because, under Capitalism, capital accrues to itself at a higher rate of return than does labor (Piketty). Without the socioeconomic infrastructure to redistribute regularly in smaller and more palatable amounts, a major redistribution event is necessary to break the positive feedback loop of capital's higher rate of return. This is not pitting labor against capital, it is forcing capital back into the hands of labor so that it can be used towards their ends rather than that of capitalists. Note that collective use is valid in this hypothetical; the difference is whether capital is being deployed for monetary gain or social needs (the "common good").
> I think you misunderstand. My ideals [...] are closer to what you are calling the classical view.
I'm not so sure, because I reject the idea that capital and labor are always at odds. They are at odds if we take as normative and basic the "liberal" hyperindividualist pursuit of self-interest as the highest aim of a human being.
I also reject redistribution as the primary means of addressing what are first order problems. For example, if employers are paying less than a family wage while they themselves reap handsome profits, then the goal isn't to redistribute later somehow while propping up a culture of normalized greed, but to distribute justly in the first place. Redistribution, like you mention, is indeed an extreme event, but I contest the idea that it must come to such extremes, or that redistribution (even in "smaller and more palatable amounts") should be the norm for addressing bad distribution in the first place.
We needn't be pigeonholed into the false dichotomies that our modern paradigm, with some of its bogus categories and "necessities", imposes. Those clamoring for socialism are asking to jump out of the frying pan into the fire (I don't claim you are calling for this, but a naive segment is). Cultural norms, buttressed by the appropriate laws (the law is a teacher), are perhaps a better place to focus our efforts and our imagination. We should pay attention to the false categories and norms we have internalized that remove the stigma from predatory practices like underpaying or extracting compound interest. When you create a culture that is hostile to such practices, that goes a long way to shaping laws and behaviors.
I do not propose a political program here. I propose that we ought to examine the moral assumptions that box us into a drab range of possibilities. The hyperindividualist "liberalism" in question construes freedom apart from objective moral norms and enjoys privatizing moral questions. But even redistribution is a moral question! This is a larger topic than I have time to explore here, but if there is a take away, it is that we must stop skirting or privatizing discussion of basic moral questions (here of an economic nature and what they themselves presuppose), thinking that this somehow avoids conflict in a heterogeneous society. This only buys time as problems fester and persist.
It took me hardly any effort to find an essay that appears to be arguing that Hobbes' thought is in many ways compatible with that sort of redistribution: https://brill.com/view/journals/hobs/34/1/article-p9_9.xml Some quotes:
> Also notable is Gregory Kavka, who argues, “Though it is rarely noticed, Hobbes is a bit of an economic liberal, that is, he believes in some form of the welfare state and in the redistributive taxation needed to support it.”7 .... But Kavka’s analysis has two significant flaws. First, ... Hobbes dedicates arguably greater attention to the problems associated with excessive wealth. ... The second problem with Kavka’s analysis is that it ignores Hobbes’s rich moral psychology that is integral to Hobbes’s understanding of the problems associated with wealth, poverty, and inequality.
> Hobbes’s political program prioritizes peace above all. Along these lines, it is essential when considering Hobbes on economics that one understands how poverty, concentrated wealth, and inequality can obstruct peace. This is one of the fundamental lessons Hobbes likely learned in the decades leading up to the English Civil War – a war at least partly facilitated by the economic upheaval, the impoverishment of many along with the enriching of others, the concentration of wealth, and the systemic inequality. Hobbes acknowledges some of this in his own history of the Civil War, Behemoth.
> While Hobbes is surely concerned about the problems poverty pose for his commonwealth, he expresses even greater concern about concentrated wealth. His earliest discussion of wealth can be found in his Briefe of the Art of Rhetoric, written in 1637, his summary of Aristotle’s Rhetoric.84
Classical liberals are not the same people as modern libertarians or minarchists.
> It took me hardly any effort to find an essay that appears to be arguing that Hobbes' thought is in many ways compatible with that sort of redistribution
Snark aside, my intent was to clarify what is loosely meant by "liberal" - the broad technical sense in the philosophical context and not the partisan/colloquial usage (which is something like "leftist", which is quite different; in the US, both dominant parties are liberal parties, and they disagree on questions like redistribution, with some tending more toward Mill on this issue, others Hayek, for example). It is not my intent to offer an exhaustive treatment of the variations of liberal positions (or an analysis of how they converge or diverge as they develop). Perhaps I should have avoided the term and simply stuck to "hyperindividualism" to avoid confusion.
However, I am opposed to redistribution as the basic mechanism of correcting what is a matter of basic justice. I am not arguing for equality or for redistribution as a normal corrective mechanism. I am arguing that if we bring back notions of economic justice, a correct understanding of what economies are for, of the relationship between the human person/society and the economy, and of our moral duties within the scope of economics, then we think less about how to slap a dirty bandage onto an open sore and think more about how not to wound in the first place. If workers made at least a family wage, you wouldn't need to worry so much about redistribution. If we didn't construe capital and labor as intrinsically in competition with one another, but rather as partners working toward a common good, we wouldn't obsess about class conflict and the socialistic impulse to eliminate class distinctions and flatten society.
I am suggesting we escape the false categories of our modern paradigm by reexamining our assumptions and looking at what an older and still very much alive vibrant intellectual tradition has to say.
Consider "Laborem Exercens" [0], which engages both capitalism and socialism without collapsing into either.
[0] https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/d...
I just came to mention that I really enjoy the UI of this website. That is all.
Me too. I miss a lot when the web used to look more like this.
I blame the tech industry less than I blame the financial industry. Meme stocks, after all, don't have much to do with technology, aside from telecommunications enabling mass coordination among retail actors. Bitcoin doesn't either, although it has the veneer of tech, given that when it was known only to a few engineers, its market cap was substantially zero.
Tech companies are just reacting to market forces. The author invokes FB/Meta, but Zuck was blazing his own shitty trail with the metaverse until the market punished him beyond all reason (relative to the cash flow the ads business was still generating). He only jumped on the AI hype train when he was forced to. It's been a long time since fundamental analysis a la Warren Buffet was the core of prudent investing. But I think this is a result of human nature --- a large percent of people just like gambling, even if the expected value of their wagers is negative.
I also get the anger that the author feels. As a tech worker, my professional life is dictated to me by the whims of the market. But the all the attention from financiers is also a result of the immense wealth the industry has attracted (or generated, based on your perspective), so it's hard to complain without self-consciousness. Like many here, I probably live online a bit too much, and I try to see the silver lining in enshitiffication as a force that encourages me to live more in the real world, with my family members, in the present.
"The spectacle is the inverted image of society in which relations between commodities have supplanted relations between people, in which 'passive identification with the spectacle supplants genuine activity'." [0]
I read The Society of the Spectacle too young and it broke me forever :(
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Society_of_the_Spectacle
Did the author never watch Silicon Valley?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZFTaEenaHM
Richard, listen--
No, you listen to me Jack. You promised me that you would never compromise the product, so do you feel like taking some action and backing me up on this because me and my product feel pretty compromised right now
Richard, I don't think you understand what the product is. The product isn't the platform, and the product isn't your algorithm either, and it's not even the software. Do you know what Pied Piper's product is, Richard?
Is--is it me?
Oh God no no how could it possibly be you? You got fired! Pied Piper's product is its stock.
LinkedIn just replaced its Jobs page with AI Slop. You can't do regular searches anymore, they've filtered and normalized all results, and they stopped labeling promoted content. (All searches now return the same number of results, many of which have little to do with your query) So now I'm deleting my LinkedIn account. Much of the internet is already dead.