Calling #2 more sustainable has no basis in reality, it's just a feeling. It's like saying that clothing before the loom or farming before the tractor were "more sustainable". No, it isn't, it just appeals to yeoman farmer instincts that somehow technology=bad when it's what powers (and sustains) our modern world of 8 billion people.

It's sustainable in the literal sense, I.E. a tailor can simply tailor forever without needing to constantly worry about keeping up with new tools or technologies, or needing to upgrade or change their methodology constantly.

The tech world is obsessed with moving fast and breaking things, and you can't just do the same thing forever and expect it to always work.

Think about how much food we throw away in the developed and developing worlds. How often we buy new clothing when we could mend old clothing. How often we ask for more when we could do with less. How often we want to eat at a restaurant when we could make leftovers. How often we want something sweet when we could just eat something bland. How often we heat and cool our homes when we could wear more or less clothing.

It turns out that while these are all truisms, nobody wants to fix them. Developed countries are okay passing pigovian taxes, to a limited extent, to help fix these problems. Developing countries are even less interested in fixing these problems. It turns out that austerity is incredibly unpopular. Everyone wants to tell other people not to do the things they don't like but nobody wants to listen to what other people tell them not to do.

Just a reminder that Europe colonized Asia, Africa, and the Americas in the search for spices. Later on the interest changed to tea. Literally the only thing that Europe wanted was better tasting food and drink (initially at least.) By the time the potato had become widespread, they could have had enough calories to feed the continent, and yet the desire for flavor is what lead to untold misery for hundreds of years for millions of people.

We need to be realistic about what works and what doesn't. Austerity never wins.

“More sustainable” than burning hydrocarbons to produce chatbot tokens. Humanity could sustain itself on those resources much longer if we were more careful with them. The very definition of sustainability.

It allows for our modern unsustainable world of 8 billion people you mean?

Given that #1 seems to be based almost entirely on stealing from #2, and never paying reparations, I’d say it’s pretty unsustainable.

It’s like saying robbing banks for a living isn’t sustainable and working at a bank is. That’s not exactly a stretch.

#1 may well put #2 out of a living but that isn't the same as stealing and doesn't (at least in and of itself) make it unsustainable. The fact that models were trained on scraped content isn't a matter of technical necessity but rather the path of least resistance (lowest cost in this case). Synthetic data is increasingly used for reasons of quantity, quality, and various technical considerations.

All of the major players in AI currently, literally stole to build their models. There isn’t one out there that hasn’t. So yes, it is the same as stealing because they were LITERALLY, in the literal sense, stealing.

Well, pirated. Piracy and stealing aren't the same thing.

Regardless, I acknowledged the general issue. However I pointed out that doing so was not a technical necessity. If you base your worldview or actions around X implying Y but then it turns out that actually Y was merely a matter of convenience you're probably going to arrive at a wrong conclusion.

There's also the issue where you're emphatically calling it stealing without providing a clear criteria. The legal system as a whole has yet to conclusively resolve the various piracy accusations. The legality of consuming publicly available content remains quite controversial.

It absolutely is a technical necessity. You could build a model from scratch today without doing the same thing. And every model attempting to train on AI generated output degrades into nonsense almost immediately.

There’s a reason Reddit is making millions of dollars letting these companies mine their human generated content. You think OpenAI or anyone else would pay for that if they could just cyclically train on AI generated content???

> attempting to train on AI generated output

I said nothing about that. Good synthetic data does not (typically) involve ML algorithms. Although that might be changing.

I'll politely suggest that you go read the literature before engaging further.

Reddit, Twitter, and similar are valuable because the data covers current events. Their content makes up a reasonably comprehensive timeline of the world at large. You don't need that to train a barebones functional model but it's certainly useful in order to train a knowledgeable one. Regardless, if they're charging for access it clearly isn't piracy so it doesn't seem like your original objection would hold any water in that case.

> I'll politely suggest that you go read the literature before engaging further.

Which commercial AI vendor has not stolen any content when creating their models? I’ll wait.

Which commercial AI vendor has created their models exclusively training on datasets created and created by other AI?

> Regardless, if they're charging for access it clearly isn't piracy so it doesn't seem like your original objection would hold any water in that case.

Given that they were previously violating the site’s terms of service when scraping the content: yes, they were absolutely stealing.

The bigger issue is that the AI we currently have available has been produced by setting a giant pile of money on fire with no real plan for ever earning it back. And that is not sustainable because at some point the checks dry up. We have zero idea what the economics of unsubsidized inference are because we still don't actually know how much money the frontier labs are currently losing.

I predict mixtapes, with the operative word being tapes, make a big comeback.

Everything analog/physical in every discipline will make a comeback.

SD cards have gone through the roof. I'm anxiously awaiting them to reach a point that it justifies me shooting film that costs $12 per role.

But big businesses suck at innovation so much that their primary form of innovation is through acquiring small businesses. But that is a big benefit for #2 as we need innovations to get to a sustainable system.

The problem is that it is increasingly difficult to survive as a small business (due to constantly increasing compliance/regulatory/legal burdens), so it makes sense to ‘sell out’ as soon as possible (or just give up early). The rate of small businesses growing into large ones has been decreasing for at least 20 years.

This is tech we are talking about. There are very little, if any, regulatory burdens in place here.

The only things that DO hurt SMBs across the board are things like paying for private health insurance and retirement plans. Two core things every worker needs but only massive corporations can truly provide.

It's why things like medicare for all and universal childcare are so popular among workers, also why things like corporate welfare are so disgusting.

>"There are very little, if any, regulatory burdens in place here."

Speaking as someone who works in a small company that designs and manufactures embedded devices, I can tell you that many of the 'minor' regulations which are not supposed to burden small businesses actually do. My (single) biggest annoyance is the conflict minerals reporting requirements which were supposed to apply to very large companies, but have been 'passed down' to smaller suppliers (as anyone with half a brain would have expected). There are many other KYC, CBP, and other regulations which have substantial impacts as well.

The only innovation needed to be sustainable is to recognize that capitalism is not sustainable, and never can be. But that's not a profitable innovation, so it never gets pursued.

That's not at all a benefit for #2—when small businesses that are thriving and making Society #2 better get bought up by big businesses, they cease to be part of Society #2. In many cases, the innovative things they were doing simply disappear, as the big business that bought them didn't want to use it, they just wanted to kill it.

"Big business," in the sense it exists today, is itself a detriment to our society as a whole, and can only exist because of the utter destruction of antitrust that happened under Reagan. Without that, much more of our current society would look like #2, with or without LLMs.

I am waiting for the online reification of this split with bated breath so that I can fuck off to society #2 and never have to interact with society #1 again.

Isn't society #1 going to outcompeted #2?

In the short term, probably.

In the long term, probably not.

They can do whatever they want. Their cultural output is completely and utterly uninteresting to me.

You are already part of society #2. You are just giving your life, energy and money every day to society #1.

yeah #1 leeches ideas from #2 and makes all the money, its like a vampire class

I don't see that at all. I see spammers and propagandists love LLMs because they can use it to accomplish their goals at the expense of the rest of us. I see AI companies marketing their products hard but in ways that seem self-defeating. Seems obvious but ads shouldn't make people hate the product and the AI folks don't seem to understand this. I see lots more effort to find artisanal things because people understand how much spammy stuff is being made. So I see basically an attack on the media ecosystem and people adapting with various levels of success to those attacks. I also see it costing the platforms as now they have extra effort and expense to keep their value for their users. Nobody wants to read a bunch of LLM generated slop on the social feed.

I'm not too worried about it because the first segment of society is doomed to be 'good but never great.'

AI lacks the ability to identify greatness because it's trained on the output of the average person who also lacks this ability.

It's going to create a new elite class of people who have good taste and the masses who have bad taste. Many current elites will end up with the masses. They may retain their wealth on paper, but it will be a cheap, low-quality existence but they will be convinced it's luxury.

I think eventually, everyone will get what they want, but not everyone will get what they need.

Taste is subjective, authenticity is not. People in #2 want human created content, even if it's not as "good".

My definition of bad taste is; will be derivative. These people will consume variants of the same thing over and over, not realizing it to be the case. They will be narrow minded and predictable. They will be afraid of any other ideas which doesn't fit the acceptable pattern of their tribe.

I replied above, but they're already like this.

True but I don't think we've reached the limit.

This is why I advocate for people to spend some time outside in nature and try to do something different once in a while because it's so easy to get stuck in a really small bubble. Especially when you exist in an entirely man-made, soon-to-be fully AI-controlled environment. You may lose your ability to have novel thoughts.

Some people are already there but the range of thoughts seems to be narrowing.

My biggest fear is being caught up in such group for financial reasons and trying to navigate some kind of linguistic and conceptual minefield everyday. I already encountered a situation like that twice in my career. Very tense environment. Feels like you're in a brainwashing cult and have to pretend to be one of them; it's really hard to pretend to be ignorant of certain kinds of information when you don't know what the full range of forbidden ideas is. Saying the wrong things got me fired both times; differences in our mental conditioning created very subtle tension/discomfort between me and management.

They will tolerate people who are 'running a simpler program' than themselves but they will absolutely not tolerate someone with a broader programming. Hence you have to pretend to be narrow-minded which is hard to maintain. This is why I like remote work.

The elites already have bad taste. They aren't going anywhere without tax and financial reform and the return of political donation regulation.

I make my own furniture. I am absolutely not a carpenter. But I hate Ikea furniture - it's made of shitty, flimsy, materials, and its design priorities are all based on cost and ease of transport, not on being great furniture that will last years and be an actual asset to the home.

This is an analogy, obviously. Ikea has been innovative, and it does provide a useful service for people; if you just moved into a new place and need to furnish it as quickly and cheaply as possible, then off to Ikea you go. But it's still shitty furniture.

My furniture doesn't look great, sometimes. My joinery is not perfect. I don't have all the tools I need to do this properly. But the design goals for each are what we need to live our lives. My wife has a stupidly high bed in her office, piled mattresses so she can spread them out if we have many visitors. I made her a bedside table that matches that height. It's a complete one-off; I won't make another that size, and we probably won't need it if we move house.

My point is that we already have this split in other areas of our lives; the Vimes Theory of boots (rich people buy boots that last generations, poor people buy boots every year). Ikea furniture. Buying a mass-produced crockery from a big store, or buying hand-made crockery from a local potter. We're just adding information and code to this split.

I’m not a furniture maker, but I have a rather close connection to the industry. I used to hate ikea furniture. In fact I hated almost all modern furniture that mass market, that wasn’t high end. I was a huge proponent of vintage furniture ( and still am), but I have really come around on ikea. They sure still make some crap, but they also make some genuinely innovative pieces that can last if you treat them with a basic level of care. I’d specifically call out / praise a few of their beds with built in drawer solutions. A few good desks too. They also have other mostly solid wood products too. It really depends. Just my $0.02.

Agreed. I was a carpenter for a long time and have built everything from completely disposable structures to things that ended up in Design Within Reach.

I think Ikea is great. Sure, the cheaper stuff consists of veneered particle board at best. But they (at least used to) use thicker veneers, often include relatively high quality hardware, and make some products that are just completely solid (stainless kitchen gear, simple but serviceable pine furniture, standing desks, some bedding).

What gets to me are places like West Elm and similar companies. Mid-Century design, but it's the same veneered particle board as the much cheaper Ikea stuff, and costs far more.

That's the thing. Ikea's alternatives are all worse in some dimension. The Amish do make good furniture though.

Many of Ikea's wood (wood-like?) products are pretty flimsy, designed to be built once and never moved or taken apart. (cough - all cupboards, most cabinets - cough)

But somewhat ironically their steel kitchenware is competitive with catering equipment. It may not be as well designed for maximum functionality and storage packing efficiency, but costs about the same or even less than comparable Vogue gear. Over the years I've spotted an increasing number of street food vendors using Ikea bowls and trays, so the price and availability advantage appears to be real.

Billy bookshelves seem pretty good even though they are veneered board of some kind. I have several and they have lasted many years (eve ones bought second hand) and moves. Not the best, but not terrible and great value for money.

The cubical storage units are pretty solid and practical.

On the other hand the IKEA wardrobe I have is falling to pieces.

> What gets to me are places like West Elm and similar companies. Mid-Century design, but it's the same veneered particle board as the much cheaper Ikea stuff, and costs far more.

Somewhat similar to what I was thinking. In the UK John Lewis sell (or used to) sell bookshelves very similar to a Billy (in construction and appearance depending on the veneer) at three times the price.

There's a tier of quality that's just fine... as long as you don't move it much, either from home to home or just rearranging too much.

If you do, then the unglued joints decay and it becomes wobblier and wobblier.

Agree completely. As I said, Ikea provide a valuable service. And I'm sure that for some pieces, quality is compatible with the core design values of cost and transportability.

And, to extend the analogy, I'm sure Google's AI results will be perfectly serviceable for some people in some situations.

But for my wife's odd, non-standard, situation I had to build it myself. And for some people's odd, non-standard, situation they'll need to construct (or find) a bespoke information service that matches their needs. That will probably cost them more and the joinery won't be as neat.

Ikea is an interesting place in that you can get something that will either last either 15 minutes or 75 years. There really isn’t much in between.

I want to buy you a CMOT Dibbler Sausage for the Vimes reference. Perfect metaphor for this situation. His point was that it was the cheap boots that keep people poor, so that makes me think artist and artisan patronage will be an even bigger thing in years to come.

I’ve become quite doubtful about the Vimes theory because getting boots resoled involves labour so has become relatively expensive.

Also my expensive boots didn’t last a lifetime, last time I went to get them resoled I was told they had deteriorated too far.

The metaphor may not hold up well in practice, but as counterexamples, I've had a pair of motorcycle boots since the late 80s that have never needed any maintenance beyond some saddle soap, and my grandfather's fountain pen from the 1920s just turned 100 and still writes fine. I put a new nib in it about 15 years ago or so.

My IKEA furniture has lasted 12 years so far, including 3 moves, with only minor cosmetic damage.

I have a 20 year old Malm dresser that made four moves and is doing just fine.

(I do have it screwed into the wall as it’s been recalled for tipovers.)

I think the Malm has the highest body count of any individual piece of furniture on the planet.

A lot of their furniture now has warnings that it must be secured to the wall - for that very reason. On their (Norwegian) website, this starts with furniture around 100cm tall, especially if it is talland thin or sits on legs.

I guess the change (and recalls) are a result of lawsuits from that same dresser.

Keep in mind that IKEA today is also not going to be the same quality as IKEA 20 years ago, even for products that still have the same name and look.

Do you think that AI could actually free up time in your life in other areas, so that you could spend more time doing the things you love like making furniture? Or maybe help you directly in your furniture-making, by perhaps helping you to research things?

Please don't misunderstand: my point is not "AI is good."

It is problematic in many ways. My point is that I think the "AI versus actually doing cool human-crafted stuff" split is... a misguided, maybe even harmful, mental model of a more complicated reality.

What time is AI going to free up for me? Can AI go to the grocery store for me, do my laundry, do my dishes? Can it let me clock out early? The spoils of AI do not go to individuals

AI, as it stands, only can save you time with non-human interaction “intellectual” tasks on a computer. So really not much

It's excellent for R&D.

It's not AI, but there's Doordash and Rinse if that's what you're trying to optimize for. The robots will be coming out, soon enough, and then we're all in trouble though.

> Do you think that AI could actually free up time in your life in other areas, so that you could spend more time doing the things you love.

Personally, I don’t believe that would be the case. Jevon’s paradox mixed with the natural tendency to exploit others. One could argue that technology -in general- didn’t really save people time by itself, it’s regulation - a social construct, and I am counting both cultural and legal enforcement of them as well- that did. Just look at how workers in countries without your European-style protections fare. Wikipedia’s article on the Chinese 996 [1] has a nice map for deaths due to long working hours by country, notice the dominant colours for each quadrant of this (projected) globe.

Pre industrialised societies’ labourers were limited by daylight and travel distance. The modern availability and abundance of artificial lighting, mechanised transportation, and telecommunication means their grand kids are expected to -and often do- toil every waking moment.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/996_working_hour_system

That's the promise of every new technology. Although there's been massive progress over the past 50+ years, the amount of free time that people have has actually gone DOWN (https://clockify.me/working-hours)..."I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes"...we'll see

I think in a different society this could have been the case (possibly, assuming the hype is somewhat true).

But the way society is structured now? We still live in feudalism, just uplifted to modern levels of ”comfort” (if you take of your western glasses and look at the whole world. There are still people living in medieval conditions today in some places in the world).

The way it’s going it’s only going to make rich people richer, and give them more power to control this system and perpetuate it. I don’t see that drastically changing anytime soon, unless we do something about it on a societal level.

Direct consequence of industrial revolution was an INCREASE in workload. People worked MORE, not less. It required organization, protests, political pressure and even some bloodshed to get 8 hrs workday.

People that push for AI are not interested in making your life better.

No, because the machine consumes all of your time that it can take without literally killing you. If you manage to free some time somewhere, the machine will adapt and eat it up. We have so-called developed countries talking about raising the retirement age and cutting holidays, that's the "future" we are living in.

I don’t disagree with your overall point but developed countries are raising their retirement ages because they’re trying to stave off pension crises. It’s the surprising alternative to taxing corporations and the ultra-wealthy appropriately.

> the Vimes Theory of boots (rich people buy boots that last generations, poor people buy boots every year)

This made me think of a fascinating exception to this

Luxury-brand cars usually get turned over every couple years so as to avoid their inevitable maintenance cliff

It is an interesting exception.

The really rich people that I know of drive 10-year-old beaten-up Land Rovers, though.

I think there's a nouveau-riche slice of folks who buy "luxury" cars thinking that they confer status. There are brands like this in every industry, that adopt all the pointers of "luxury" except actual quality.

There was a study sometime back that suggested most American millionaires live in homes of modest or at least unostentatious size and drive used cars of American make. These days it'd probably be of Japanese make, as Toyotas and Nissans are relatively cheap and last forever. Having a lot of money and showing the world that you have a lot of money are completely different goals. You'll be flat broke if you join an MLM with 99.5% certainty, but if you're a good enough salesperson they'll loan out a Mercedes or something to drive around so you can show off how rich the plan made you and "edify your upline". You're on the hook for fuel and maintenance, though.

Maybe it's the Scots-Irish in him, but my father was always one to go for the luxury stuff, but still seek out the good quality stuff at as good a price as he can manage and fix it up if it were broken. He knows how to keep a Cadillac Eldorado on the road for 20 years or more, so of course he's going to spring for the fancy if a used one turns up at a good price. In the 80s he bought a small mansion that was in a quasi-dilapidated state but had been standing since the opening years of the 20th century. We renovated it inside and out, and today it's on the National Register of Historic Places (though my parents no longer live there).

> still seek out the good quality stuff at as good a price as he can manage and fix it up if it were broken.

I think that's a nice story to highlight, being able to do things well and preserving that knowledge

While there can be benefits for mass producing things, what actually is produced is going to be limited by what techniques are conducive to automation. So the techniques that are hard to automate are lost from the market of provided goods and then human capital for it also gets lost (can't think of any concrete examples off the top of my head, but maybe the techniques for some elements of clothing that are now only found in couture/custom pieces). Another related idea is how there are much fewer color variations in manufactured goods now, simply because it simplifies the mass manufacturing process.

> can't think of any concrete examples off the top of my head, but maybe the techniques for some elements of clothing that are now only found in couture/custom pieces

Maybe how clothes used to come with a decent margin on the hems so you could alter them, but now they don't?

> Toyotas and Nissans

You seem to have misspelled "Honda". ;-)

I don't have direct experience with Hondas, but I'm sure they're fantastic. My mom had a Nissan in the late 90s that she got with 100,000 miles on it and put another 100,000 miles on it before getting rid of it.

My admiration of Honda and Toyota comes from their hybrid offerings, probably the most practical kind of car to get.

EVs have the charging requirement, so it’s a lifestyle / home setup adjustment. Plus, other trade-offs like being way heavier due to the battery, and higher risk of being totaled if the battery pack is even slightly damaged.

Slight aside: I only recently learned how much easier it is to total an EV. A small accident can be fine for a gas car, but for an EV, if it does anything to the battery, and requires replacing the battery or going deep inside to try and figure out what’s wrong with it, it’s just not worth it anymore, and gets declared totaled by the insurance company. Not great! Felt it was worth including in my expected cost calculation for whether or not to get an EV.

And regular cars haven’t gotten MPG improvements in years.

So I have a good impression of the hybrid technologies they’ve developed! Though their electrification strategy seems completely different. Toyota/Lexus I think are in the hybrid lineup still. Whereas Honda went full electrification and shut down a lot of production so as to refit their factories. I believe one of the reasons that Honda sales plummeted recently, since they had just ramped down production.

Maybe that technology will be lost someday, I wonder how well-documented it is and if it’d be easy to ramp back up

I see this in my village. There is a good mix of private and social housing. The private houses tend to have modest cars whereas the social houses have something flash.

> But I hate Ikea furniture - it's made of shitty, flimsy, materials, and its design priorities are all based on cost and ease of transport, not on being great furniture that will last years and be an actual asset to the home.

I have seen/heard this a lot lately, but all the Ikea furniture I have ever had has been great. Among others, had a chair that was good for like 11 years lol

I think this is actually a counter-example of what you think it is.

Chairs should last generations. A chair lasting 11 years is not exemplary. A chair falling apart after a few years should be the exception, and a bad thing at that.

Again, Vimes Theory: rich folks inherit furniture that their grandparents bought, and maybe need to get it re-upholstered once in their lifetime. Poor folks have to pay for new furniture every few years because it falls apart.

My parents bought some really nice modern furniture when they married in the early 1960s. 5 houses and 60 years later (and a few re-upholsterings), it still looks and works as beautifully as ever. My brother will probably inherit it in a few years, then his kids; it will likely get another 60 years at least.

One of my friends has a kitchen table her great grandmother owned.

Neither of us (or our parents) are rich, but good, well made furniture used to be an investment. Now most furniture is disposable.

> Chairs should last generations. A chair lasting 11 years is not exemplary. A chair falling apart after a few years should be the exception, and a bad thing at that.

IDK, this feels to me more like an aspiration or desire about what furniture quality should generally be, and not really a description of what most furniture is actually like.

> rich folks inherit furniture that their grandparents bought, and maybe need to get it re-upholstered once in their lifetime.

I get that this is beside the point, but IDK why anyone would want their grandparents' furniture, aside from maybe a few choice really nice, antique-ish things. If I was "rich", I would rather buy my own furniture for the most part...

I think it's about quality rather than style. What do I know? I make ugly furniture for myself ;)

Stuff that has lasted two generation will be antique-ish (if not actually antique) and usually nice. It will have the quality it should, rather than the quality most furniture has.

All my grandparents' furniture is properly jointed and made of good wood.

Ikea has long existed before the Internet and over capitalization.

I have several Ikea pieces in my home, and I've had some for over a decade. If you build Ikea stuff properly, are selective in what you purchase, and use wood glue when constructing, then it lasts as long as anything else really.

Their flat packed designs are actually innovative. People can outfit an entire room by using a Honda Fit to transport.

Agree completely, as I said their design priorities are cost and transportability, and they provide a valuable service. Mostly I hate the shitty laminated chipboard half their stuff is made from. If you replaced that with actual wood, and some of the weird aluminium pegs with actual dowels or joinery, it'd be fine. But that's kinda beside the point; if you did that it would be more expensive and less easily transported, and therefore wouldn't fit their priorities.

And, of course, their bedside cabinets are the wrong size for my wife's bed, so I'd have to make one anyway.

And this is just an analogy; if you like Ikea-style Google Search, then great for you. I pay for Kagi because that Ikea-style Google Search doesn't work for me.

This dichotomy is so false.

However else you feel, AI is a force multiplier, and that can also REALLY benefit "Artisanal work + Small Business"

I feel like the "one person app creator" business is so much more viable than it has been since Web 1.0

Five years ago, to run your own solo business in this space, you had to know most of the following: taxes, legal, backend, frontend, devops, iOS dev, Android dev, and marketing and then pay through the nose for most of the ones you didn't. AI helps to paper over a LOT of those gaps... and you can spend more time doing the shit that matters to your business.

You also needed time and lots of it, which is perhaps easy to come by if you're a trust fund baby or independently wealthy and don't have to work for a living but if you have a job and/or family is in extremely short supply

I used to run an online community on the side and I spent SO MUCH TIME doing IT/legal/finance drudgework that could have been spent, you know, engaging with the community and actually improving the product... that "artisinal work" for a "small business" you think you love.

There are of course major major problems with AI, like environmental concerns and others, but dichotomies like yours are not the way forward. At least not a good way forward.

> However else you feel, AI is a force multiplier, and that can also REALLY benefit "Artisanal work + Small Business"

> Five years ago, to run your own solo business in this space, you had to know most of the following: taxes, legal, backend, frontend, devops, iOS dev, Android dev, and marketing and then pay through the nose for most of the ones you didn't. AI helps to paper over a LOT of those gaps... and you can spend more time doing the shit that matters to your business.

How is running a business in the way you've just described artisanal? You're basically saying we should be outsourcing all of these things to AIs, which is simply not artisanal.

I would say doing taxes is not at all an artisanal activity, and the fact that we expect artists to deal with it is not a great thing.

You'll surely understand if you ever take the plunge and run your own business.

You're going to have to spend quite a bit of time and/or money doing things unrelated to the actual product and CX.

Taxes, marketing, etc. The more you can streamline those other bits, the more time and energy you can spend actually improving the thing you are offering.

Again, maybe it's the kind of thing where you need to run a business, or at least talk to a business owner to understand.

As I understand it, we used to have the concept of "hiring workers" or "contracting for services".

The benefit of this was that when Internal Revenue called and said in lieu of a tax return, you sent a takeaway menu covered in pornographic drawings, you could reach out to the person you paid and expect them to take accountability.

Instead, we're getting :sparkles: You're absolutely right! I shouldn't have sent the taxman the Goatse picture, would you like me to try something else? :sparkles:

I miss when I would receive and email or something that I can easily tell that whomever wrote it is a clueless idiot. Now I have to filter the prose before reaching the same conclusion.

Those concepts still exist and I'd highly recommend them when possible.

We also had, and still have, concepts called "time" and "money" and perhaps you've heard that they're finite and often in short supply.

Particularly when "bootstrapping," another concept you can consider. This is when you start small and self-fund your own business. Seems pretty relevant because we're talking about small and artisanal businesses.

...

...wait, I get it. This is HN. All you people understand is venture capital funded shit. In that case, yeah. Build your prototype, do whatever you have to do to get $100M funding, hire 50 people, rent some offices, hire those workers and contract those services and burn $20M a month before you make your first sale. OK. Yeah. That's the only way. Don't forget the Aeron chairs and $500 stealth-wealth hoodies or whatever.

I'm almost certain there is biblical-level astroturfing happening to make camp (1) much bigger than it really is.

Otherwise, Schmidt wouldn't have drowned in a sea of boos at his commencement speech at UA.

I think there’s also a lot of people who haven’t quite realized what side they’re on. A ton of techies confused better than average pay with being part of the upper class and didn’t realize that the average CEO/VC views us roughly the same as the janitors except more expensive and less reliable. If you’re currently working at a stable tech job, it’s easy to focus on the cool things you can do and ignore how hungry those guys are for a massive cut in salaries, how much harder it will be to get an new job, and that trying to start your own company is harder than in recent decades with more established gatekeepers and LLMs being very good at copying a successful product.

New graduates haven’t known anything else and don’t have the money to be nostalgic about a party they missed.

> New graduates haven’t known anything else and don’t have the money to be nostalgic about a party they missed.

Respectfully disagree. New grads entering the workforce now started college in 2022. This was during the post-COVID "Great Resignation" when offers and employee leverage were at their peak and AI wasn't that useful.

Very different from the "use AI or your fired/blackballed" age we live in now.

I think we’re talking about the same thing but slightly differently: I was thinking more narrowly — someone who graduated this year certainly heard that their degree would be in demand, in many cases that’s why they chose it, but they know now that they’re not going to personally experience that favorable job market.

Exactly what I was thinking when a recent big bank CEO accidentally let his contempt slip out. He referred to mass layoffs as "It's not cost-cutting. It's replacing in some cases lower-value human capital with the financial capital and the investment capital we're putting in." [1]

That "lower-value human capital" isn't janitors - it's a wide array of highly skilled professions including software engineers and many others. Of course the guy who's at the top engaging in nothing but 'unfalsifiable' fuzzy actions, and could be replaced (sans his connections/corruptions) most easily of all, is ultra-high-mega-untouchable infinity value humanity embodied.

I really don't like what big business does to people, on the bottom and the top. The fact somebody could even use the term lower-value human capital without cringing at themselves, let alone to a reporter in public - that's one hell of a bubble this guy lives in. And now we're dumping "AI" into this bubble. WCGW?

[1] - https://news.sky.com/story/standard-chartered-to-replace-low...

One of the funny parts about all of this, is that janitors are likely less threatened by GenAI than information workers are.

Hell, janitors' work is less threatened by GenAI than most of the CEOs who are super-hyped about that very same GenAI.

David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs might actually work as a roadmap of sorts..

> One of the funny parts about all of this, is that janitors are likely less threatened by GenAI than information workers are.

But that's cold comfort, because janitors are already paid shit wages.

The insecurity about AI isn't exactly "will I keep my job?" It's "will I be thrown into a life of precarity as my skills are devalued?"

Janitors aren't threatened by GenAI, because they're already where the threats take you.

Where would information workers go after they get booted out of their market?

Every other market where they could transfer their skills to is threatened by the same hypothetical. And if they jump the collar colour divide, they’d have be limited to the least skilled ones, which includes Janitors.

Now perhaps that would still not threaten the job itself as much, but an increase in supply definitely won’t be good for the wages.

Is that so? What do janitors? They clean offices, right? What's in offices? Oh people. If no people are office workers, no offices need cleaning, no need for janitors. I think the economy is more complex than people think. It's not like "just be a plumber" is going help anyone.

Even that is very regional.

While tech pays well, in many countries it is seen as a regular office worker, with a similar salary level.

And if you are doing consulting is very much a gig economy job, if you're going on your own.

Yes. I’m reminded of the “temporarily embarrassed millionaire” trope thinking of the guys I knew who anchored on the high Silicon Valley salaries as their baseline rather than recognizing that those were an extreme outlier. That doesn’t mean people weren’t paid well but it usually wasn’t even, say, successful dentist level much less actually rich.

> A ton of techies confused better than average pay with being part of the upper class

False consciousness always strikes back.

> I think there’s also a lot of people who haven’t quite realized what side they’re on. A ton of techies confused better than average pay with being part of the upper class and didn’t realize that the average CEO/VC views us roughly the same as the janitors except more expensive and less reliable.

For all those coders who claim "coding is the smallest part of s/ware dev", they're in for a rude awakening when they realise that while it may have been a small part, it was the part that lead to high salaries.

After all, anyone who wanted to be a business analyst (i.e. spec a solution and hand it off to someone else for coding) could have had that job ages ago, but they didn't because it pays so poorly (even more poorly when all coders are moving into that role too).

Exactly what I keep saying. Yet, the reply every time is "my job is to solve problems, not write code."

Ok, bud; sure.

I didn't start my professional career as a BA 20 years ago that did exactly what most devs are being "gently forced" into doing now, but whatever.

Ok, bud; sure.

Its probably a situation where you cant choose what you actually want so you choose closest. For me that would be camp 1 but i hate big business because of all the obvious oligopoly market power abuse. Id go back to the 60s antitrust where they were breaking up regional gas station chains if i could because it was more correct than what we are doing. Most of the big guys on nasdaq and s&p need to be broken up imo

man... hacker news is making me sad here. The blatantly obvious stuff that leans left gets upvoted +5 and the blatantly obvious comment made by me directly before this one that leans right is -1. This place used to care more about the correct answer.

I think it was always about the left-leaning answers - while sharing right-leaning concerns, the consensus answer is always more legislation, closer administrative control.

> upvoted +5

Spot the (other) Slashdot refugee! (And why were you at the Devil's Sacrament, Mr. Danaris?)

yah, I was on there in the literal 90's and drifted away in the late 2000's. It's still in my rss reader but I never look at it anymore. Other places have a better smattering of news I care about and I never see tech or other things I am interested there first. It probably was going down hill at rob Malda was prepping to leave and then left but I noticed it in the quality of the output and drifted away more than anything. Did it turn into a virtue signalling cess pool along with reddit and the large portions of the web after I left?

Complaining about downvotes used to be uncouth, but whatever. :-)

For what it's worth, I'm pretty "left" - at least within the HN bubble - and I like the cut of your jib. I devoutly wish that the broader "right" cared even one iota about anti-trust / anti-monopoly enforcement.

There are plenty of people who care about the underlying concerns that "anti-trust / anti-monopoly enforcement" is trying to correct, but recognize that the only mechanism ever proposed for addressing those concerns usually involves concentrating ever more power into the hands of an even larger and less accountable monopoly.

The biggest error of the "left" in most of these conversations is treating political institutions as something uniquely well-intentioned and competent, rather than understanding them as just another set of institutions in society, subject to the same incentive structures, biases, and errors as everything else.

A lot of skepticism of political interventions doesn't necessarily come from refusal to acknowledge that there is a problem, but rather from the recognition that the proposed solutions often just represent even worse instances of the same sort of problem. I think a lot of the people who've tended to support political intervention may have operated under the naive assumption that giving the federal government expansive power to intervene into our social and economic affairs could only bring net benefit; hopefully, the behavior of the current administration in the US should be something of a wake-up call.

I agree with (very, very, nearly) everything you say - particularly about the naivety of the "left"'s assumptions about political interventions being necessarily well-intentioned and competent.

On the other hand, skepticism about political intervention over-corrects when it assumes or insists that government action can never be a net benefit. Even the first Trump administration produced one extraordinary success - "Operation Warp Speed" - though, ironically, their faction is too ideologically warped to claim it.

The only point of difference I would identify is that I think a democratic government is more accountable than the monied interests to which it is a necessary counter-balance - and that, historically, the US government has (albeit imperfectly) functioned as such. However, the current US regime is, as you suggest, endeavoring to place itself beyond all democratic accountability, so yeah: I can read the writing on that wall. The bitter irony, of course, is that the political movement which has delivered an historically corrupt and unaccountable executive has been built upon the support of naive skeptics. I hope they will recalibrate their assumptions accordingly.

> The only point of difference I would identify is that I think a democratic government is more accountable than the monied interests to which it is a necessary counter-balance

I'm not entirely sure about that. It makes sense in theory, but in practice, we often see vested interests successfully influence democratic processes to achieve ends that would be more difficult to achieve via pure market dynamics.

We've ended up with the worst of both worlds: institutions that derive their legitimacy from perceived democratic accountability, but with the functional mechanisms of that accountability reduced largely to performative rituals; meanwhile, the incentive structures and motivations that drive their day-to-day behavior derive largely from the influence of special interests or ideological factions.

I think public choice theory is largely correct on this, and many of the policies that are intended to pursue the public interest actually end up working against it.

Indeed. That's the failure mode into which several (at least) western democracies seem to be tipping. Russia, among other states, is all the way down that "performative democracy (only)" road.

Democratic accountability is meant to be the alternative to mass violence. The Demos will, in the end, have their say, and it's far better for everyone that it be through the ballot box than otherwise. Elites forget this, over and over throughout history, to their (or their descendants', if they're lucky) cost. That's the lesson I wish was more remembered, because I don't want to have to live (even if I do) through that kind of time.

And it just so happens that one of the things the new tech is good for is astroturfing.

Who would be payrolling this astroturfing in group #1?

Perhaps some of the same people and organizations who have poured funding into AI firms that have yet to attain profitability.

No, the narratives are flooding in all directions.

A group of 22 year olds are 'hissing' because they're upset, not because they have some magic insight.

AI is real, it is overstated, the value is not comping to Main Street.

> Otherwise, Schmidt wouldn't have drowned in a sea of boos at his commencement speech at UA.

That's assuming both that the audience there was a representative sample of the general population and that ~50% of an audience can't generate a sea of boos. The second one in particular is certainly wrong.

The graduation messages along the lines of well done for studying years but it's redundant because AI can do that might well get booed without any astroturf.

That was literally coordinated action. They distributed fliers at the event, and it was mostly due to his sexual assault allegations.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/ex-google-ceo-eric-schmidt-boo...

so why did the boos grow loudest every time he mentioned how AI is the future?

and why did that real estate lady who gave a speech at UCF get the same treatment whenever she (also) said that AI is the future?

Half of the booers boo because others boo.

(1) will continue to happen because of human behavior and the oligarchy. The oligarchy would love to forget that the time you could call a customer support representative that was native in your language, lived in your country, and actually knew things, more than the computer told them, actually existed. Human behavior forgets it because the Internet and software has added so much "convenience" to life and there's all these new shiny things everywhere.

Way back, finding music wasn't a problem. You went to the store. You talked to people. You didn't need to wait for weeks to get basic doctor's appointments. You could get customer support via an easy phone call. You could drive around and find things just fine.

The U.S. government and people have been more than happy to dehumanize people and themselves by handing over their lifestyles to corporations.

> very fast Innovation and disruption

I don't think people are innovating. They're certainly disrupting in destructive ways. But other than things like improvements in health care and safety in cars, how have things actually and concretely gotten better through all this so-called innovation that happens?

Category 1 will ensure that, if either category prefers to continue to exist, we may very likely need to find another planet to keep doing what we're doing. Category 2 on it's own seems much less likely to wreck life-support on our current planet.

I can see the initial appeal, but right now it would seem that those people that dig the fast innovation and disruption the most are clueless on how easy it is to wreck this system by accident. Remember how CFK's were once considered a wonderful invention, as refrigerators no longer needed to be the size of a building filled with highly volatile gas. A rather unfortunate side-effect turned out to be the difficulty of getting the particles out of the atmosphere again. By the time it became apparent that this buildup up there would have rather drastic consequences for life down here, products containing CFK's were already massproduced and life without these products was unimaginable.

Apart from all the obvious, and all the known ways in which Big Tech keeps pushing towards climate conditions excluding organic, mammalian lifeforms, it no longer seems very far fetched that somebody will accidentally accellerate us to that point. As the moving fast part is largely a tactic to avoid accountability for the breaking things part, the person doing the breaking may be just as unaware of the danger that has been created, as the people they've razzle-dazzled, that will eventually realize something has been broken somewhere along the way... and a quick look at advertisements, American style, teaches us how even unnecessarily dangerous practices (like adding lead to just about everything, instead of figuring out how to do the same stuff without it) can be sold for ages and ages, long after people have started to realise the danger that has been introduced.

No matter how fast you move and how much you break, turning another planet into a place where people could live (not even talking about the ability to indulge in cultivating societies) is something Big Tech is unable to achieve over the next couple of years, and it remains to be seen if it will be able to reach a stage where they could make that happen with some certainty. Meanwhile, only a decade or two ago, Big Tech did actually have enough proven technology, insight and expertise that would have sufficed to nudge living conditions on Earth back within desireable margins. A lot of the data may have been poisoned, knowledge and tech has been lost, but the chances of achieving that seem well within Big Tech's grasp - were it not for the apparent inability of certain parties to refrain from moving fast as they're breaking stuff.

Long before anyone is actually in any position to start terraforming on Mars, much of what Big Tech is actually capable of doing reliably now, will no longer be feasible nor within their grasp.

Apologies if I'm ranting, but no, I can't see both 'societies' continuing to exist and develop in their own ways. If group 1 could put the disruption on hold while fixing and rebuilding what is needed to keep our habitat fit for our species, and if some kind of safety mechanism would be invented to ensure that whatever they might accidentally break next, it will not be life itself,... only then could I easily enjoy and appreciate both ways of life.

I too am a musician and a, well, was a, tech person. I’m completely in the #2 camp. I enjoy AI music, AI art, but I enjoy originality more.

That said, I also think there’s an element of bullshit in the room where an LLM will look like it’s doing something profound but ultimately isn’t, or doesn’t work, or has no actual proof. This “hallucination zone”. They can still do great things but they need a solid hand holding to not get it wrong 20% of the time.

As an early web guy who gets off on tech and problem solving I have long hated the industry with a passion as I see it as a fundamental brain drain for society full of bullshit jobs and bullshit people. Including of course myself. I should welcome the automation and yet my heart feels ripped out as the emperor has been laid bare with 20 odd years going up in smoke as vultures pick at the corpses of the old guard.

That's basically what Marx & co. have been talking about. Just that there are no more aristocrats, bourgeois, proletariat.

Today there's just the ultra-rich in control of the government, media and now the machines, and then there's the 98% of us, that want dignity, a decent life, a little freedom.

It's high time we figure out our place in this ecosystem, and that there is a lot more of us "normal people". Yet, the vast majority still live in the "social ladder" utopia. The temporarily embarrassed millionaires. The American dream.

Most people I interact with IRL are a combo. AI + fast innovation = more small businesses. It's just an effective tool to handle other things and work on your actual job- which people have been paying a multitude of (increasingly SAAS) companies for for awhile now.

Now you can open a machine shop, write custom software to more easily track customers, orders, operations, set up a website and social media giving you more time to focus on making the parts. Heck, even using AI to track down hard to find supplies instead of spending multiple hours googling and calling people (these are real pain points).