jongjong

I lived in 3 EU countries (The Netherlands, Germany and Malta) .

> They seem to feel a lot happier and healthier.

On average I would agree. I didn't see extreme poverty like I saw in the US and cost of living is a lot better when you consider that quality of everything is higher; especially in terms of food.

> They have better social mobility,

My experience is that this is not the case. Germany had almost no mobility at all. Even startups are structured in such a way that you can barely even see the CEO, let alone talk to them and society is structured to protect incumbents through regulations and bureaucracy.

Yeah but that's quite lucky. A lot of people lost money on Bitcoin too.

I got pretty lucky with one of the (EdTech) startups I was early employee at giving me shares and it grew from nothing to over 1 million active paid subscriptions. Also, I joined a crypto project which rose to $4 billion valuation (joined at like $300 million valuation) but I was only able to get about $30k out of that in spite of hard hustling and leading one of the most important teams. Literally I put pressure on them to get a raise for 1 year and eventually had to quit to show I was serious.

I self-taught myself coding at 14 and have been working non-stop including nights and weekends and saving everything I could.

My net worth now is only $80k liquid at 36 years old. $130k if you include my illiquid retirement fund. So to me, $70k at 33 on a median income looks incredible. I'm not based in the US though. Maybe it's easier over there.

The median is actually surprisingly high. How did someone who is in their early 30s and has been in the workforce for only about 10 years and presumably has university debt, manage to accumulate $68k?

That's $7k per year, which they have to save from the surplus after paying their rents, groceries, healthcare, university debts and everything else.

This is a crazy big number. I think the problem for them now is how people are going to be able to afford to keep buying their products in the age of AI job replacement? They'll have to massively increase their prices and become more of a luxury product and manufacture fewer units.

Yes you're right. I get triggered by that type of thinking because I've been struggling against the hurdle of attention monopolization for almost a decade. So when I encounter developers who don't even know this barrier exists, it's very frustrating.

Worst part is when they used to leave their cushy big tech job and then the algorithms helped them drive traffic to their new startups. It's like people get a special flag on their projects when they are ex-FAANG which helps them get discovered. I don't know if this still happens now though.

The same could be said about any social media or content hosting and discovery platform.

Maybe they got a bribe from some intelligence agency to leave it open a little longer.

IMO, the real reason they were laid off is because our economic system is broken. It's wealth concentration for those in the center of the scheme and deprivation for those in the periphery.

Rapid technological improvement is just a convenient justification for letting people go. It sounds a lot better than the real explanation "The system is broken and we need to keep optimizing money flows to sustain the scheme to control inflation." The system destroys value faster than technology can create it; which is quite an impressive feat because technology opens up massive capabilities; but look at reality; AI is being massively misallocated. People are just following the incentives.

Mark my words; the business model for AI, if the current trends continue, isn't going to be about "robots making everyone's lives better"; it's going to be about "AI agents which patch vulnerabilities that AI agents themselves created."

This is the reality we're heading into. No amount of amazing technology is going to solve that problem if it follows the incentives and rules of the current economic system.

If the government paid people to dig holes and fill them up again over and over, we'd probably have super-intelligent tractors and excavators by now.

Yeah this is a bunch of nerds trying to solve a socio-political problem with technical solutions...

Yeah well we're just the plebs and we use whatever big tech forces us to use and whatever they allow us to discover through their discovery platforms and recommendation engines. About your Fastmail example specifically; All non-approved email services are blocked; if you try to set up your own service, all your outbound emails on behalf of your customers are marked as spam by big tech. Seriously, try to setup your own SMTP email service.

Every service has a moat; sometimes a technical one (I.e. block competitors as spammers), sometimes the moat is regulations (Are you SOC2 compliant?); other times it's just a business contract between people who belong to the same club.

Specifically, they pay for the cronyism aspect of the service. They pay because they're friends with the founder (or the decision-maker expects kickbacks now or in the future or at the very least; they share the same VC and are doing someone a favor), not because they need the features of the software. The features are only there to provide narrative support (I.e. justification for the money being paid). You can see that this is the case when the software gets really bad and there exist free open source solutions, the company has self-hosting capacity, but the company keeps using the expensive, clunky SaaS solution founded by their buddies... Then sometimes they jump ships to their buddy's SaaS company and get a nice fat salary as a reward for having helped to create the parasitic dependency.

The OccupySaaS people are delusional thinking that the system works well enough and is honest enough that a solution exists within the confines of that system. Same delusion the Occupy Wall Street folks had. Didn't work out for David Graeber, did it? The tech sector is fully and thoroughly owned. We're not heading towards feudalism. It's already tech feudalism. The tech landscape has been fully monopolized. You can't do any business in tech without the approval of a tech overlord.

There is 'how the situation looks' and then there is reality which is 100 times worse.

It makes sense to me and I'm saying this as a strong believer in AI and its ability to add value.

The system itself doesn't reward value creation. I've been saying this for years. I've seen many smart people waste their time on bureaucracy; their intelligence was being wasted; so I'm not surprised at all that now that we have AI, that its intelligence is being wasted as well.

The bottleneck is an allocation issue, not a capability issue.

The current reality is that a lot of very bright people are currently working for big tech in bureaucratic roles and not allowed to focus their attention on 'risky' problems which would deliver real value if resolved.

The current system prioritizes monopolization and is designed to try to ensure that all innovation happens within big tech. It is sacrificing potential innovation which could have occurred much faster outside of big tech in order to ensure that any gains are captured by big tech... But it's sacrificing an enormous about of efficiency.

I hope big AI companies can use their political leverage to try to open up opportunities for people who want to innovate outside of big tech. That's aligned with their long term interests.

I think AI companies are convenient structures which could allow big funds to benefit from decentralized innovation. Could create real win-win scenarios. But those AI companies have to stop pursuing the corporate and government money and prioritize small customers and support small tool makers (or at least lobby the government to stop hindering them with regulations). Also, bootstrapping should be prioritized because VC money mostly creates moats.

Reminds me of a comment I wrote a few weeks ago where I said that North Korea would become a rich country soon and developers would start moving there to live to avoid prosecution.

Yes and anyway, open source is immoral now because your free work will be absorbed by corporations using AI and weaponized to suppress fellow independent software developers who have to compete against the AI and the corporate-controlled 'open' project; driving down the value of human labor in the process and further entrenching monopolies.

You're not helping fellow developers by giving them tools to 'make their lives easier' anymore; now you're helping people who don't care about software at all and just want to make a quick buck to monopolize the industry using your free labor.

And anyway, the whole market is monopolized at the attention layer now. The only people whose software is going to make any money are suits with business connections; not independent folks. Literally the people who contributed the least to the open source movement will make the most money.

It is the greatest theft of intellectual labor in the history of mankind. It steals not only from the contributors who are conned into working for free, but from their peers through centralization and deprivation of opportunities.

> Copyright has always been a system that upholds the hegemony of the powerful, it enriches corporations at the expense of the working class.

This is not true. I've never heard of a 'working class' person getting sued for copyright infringement. People who run a business to make money from copyright infringement are not working class and those few small timers who are infringing among family and friends would never be pursued; there is a 'fair use' clause after all in the US and the issue is re-distribution, not consumption.

The problem is not that copyright protects the powerful, it's that copyright is not enforced to protect you if you're not powerful. As is the case with AI. The problem is lack of enforcement so the idea that copyrights oppresses the working class is completely backwards.

I'm an open source developer myself. One of my projects has about 6k stars on GitHub. Open source is dead. It was never 'open' anyway because it was always the big corporate-sponsored projects which got all of the attention.

Frankly, open source is immoral at this stage. Just a con to convince gullible fools to give away their time for free for AI to use. Given the new reality, author is essentially a scammer trying to steal people's time (though perhaps unwittingly).

I'm not saying this as an insult. I do consider my past self to be a gullible fool, even before AI, though you have to recognize that I was a lesser kind of fool. Now the exact mechanism of theft of your labor is right there in front of your eyes! What a fool you have to be to write open source code now!

There are other ways to make code 'source available' where people can pay a contribution to participate and can become shareholders of a shared venture or member of a club. Paying contributors is the only moral approach. It's satanic that open source folks have flipped this basic, obvious moral reality on its head and it reveals deeply distorted personal values. Many played right into the hands of the people they claim to oppose.

Sorry to hear. That is a very young age to get that type of cancer. Must have been incredibly difficult and traumatic.

When my wife was diagnosed with stage 3 bowel cancer earlier this year, she was essentially prepared to die. She didn't even cry once. Her father had died from the same cancer at around the same age as her (early 40s), in the most horrific way imaginable. Her father used to work for the Soviet military in charge of a team of people who worked on propaganda so he was a strong believer in communism and he was devastated by the collapse of the USSR; his entire world had fallen apart. But then bowel cancer finished him off. My wife was in her teens at the time and she said he was extremely angry and not himself for years until he died. The chemo made him extremely sick, destroyed his body, and he had to have a colostomy bag. Years later, after my wife met me, we experienced a lot of hardship together; just one episode of bad luck after another... Like, almost every aspect of our lives which we didn't control. So by the time she got her cancer diagnosis, it's as though she was expecting it.

It turns out that she has a relatively rare genetic condition which increases the probability of bowel cancer by about 10x... These cancers are known to respond very poorly to standard chemo (and likely explains her father's horrible death decades earlier). This is where our luck finally turned though. We got lucky, possibly for the first time since we've been together. Her cancer turned out to be a kind which is highly responsive to immunotherapy. The most recent trial for the relevant class of drugs showed an unprecedented 100% complete response in about 40 patients (Dostarlimab). Moreover, that same class of (very expensive) drugs became available for her exact case, on the subsidized public list in my country, just one month prior to her diagnosis. After her first month of treatment, the tumor had shrunk by like 50% in diameter. Now, 5 months later, there is no evidence of cancer on the MRI.

I feel like the experience has completely changed my wife's perspective of life in a fundamental way. Before this, she lived her entire life expecting that things never get better and all news is bad news. Systems decay, collapse and people die.

These days I often think about the ancient Chinese tale "The old man lost his horse." It's insane how little control we actually have over the most important aspects of our lives and how something terrible (like a tumor which doesn't respond to chemo) can become a positive (but responds extremely well to immunotherapy). Also, it's quite inspiring to think about how people identified this horrible class of the most untreatable cancers in existence and decided to do something about it, and now it seems like they've become the most treatable of all cancers, with the fewest side effects too. It's a testament to the good things innovation can create when people focus on the worst problems, the worst injustices of human existence.

We can never know who won any election because it's physically impossible to count millions of votes accurately. This is an unsolved problem. The risk of double-counting or missing votes is close to 100%.

Anyone who implies that it's possible is lying. People could do an experiment; just try to organize 100 groups of people to count only a few hundred thousand votes. You will get a different number every time you count. At that scale, there are too many moving parts. Too many variables; smudged marks (or overly faint marks) invalidating ballots, ripped ballots, fraudulent ballots, accidents leading to loss of ballots, ballots getting wedged inside machines, identity theft enabling multiple-voting, corrupt officials, corrupt media...

Just try to get 1000 random people to agree on any basic, uncontroversial fact. Impossible. Now convince me it can be done among hundreds of millions.

Whenever they do a re-count, they end up with a different number. They have probably never even once counted votes accurately in the history of any nation.

I wouldn't be surprised. A lot of people don't even rinse off the soap.

>> Where did that wealth come from?

Clearly, the money printers. How else could there be such an enormous gap between those last two bars?

Yes but I'm thinking about just the yield on that last bar.

Given that the Shiller P/E ratio is now 40 (under 3% of the value of the assets), the yield is actually a pretty small fraction of that last bar... but even then, I'm saying one year's yield could exceed the worth of all the others if things continue.

But IMO, it's already the case that the economy is centered around the free money/proceeds received by top 0.1%. This is why we saw all that nonsense with COVID, DEI, Wokeism, etc... This is what happens when a small number of elites decide to spend a bit of 'spare change' on politics and social activism. Imagine how bad it's going to get after that wealth has compounded in 10 years...

With this kind of wealth distribution, there's no point doing any job which services regular people. Everyone should become an informant, bodyguard, lobbyist or propagandist for a rich person. That's going to be the only kind of job that pays in the future.

Look at that last bar; consider just the annual yield or interest payment on that wealth; soon, it's going to be more than all other bars combined. If people understood the situation, they would all stop working and start making lists of who these people are and work for them. That's the only logical (legal) thing to do. Every other job or career is a waste of time.

Actually my current machine is 5.5 GHZ with 28 cores but core count only really matters if you have a lot of parallel workloads. Most of my CPUs are idle the vast majority of the time. Raspberry Pi 5's 2.4GHz Quad core doesn't seem so far behind when you consider the physical size difference.

I remember programming ATMEL ATMEGA8s and being amazed as how much I could do with them, so to me, the fact that devices of that size can approach even half the clock speed of a cutting-edge computer, and have multiple cores, is mind-blowing.

This is true but I don't see that alternative approaches prevent an owner class from developing. It just creates a different kind of owner; a more politically-oriented one, with an incentive to manipulate the political system to their benefit to increase their stake in it. People then strive to become stakeholders of the state itself. I don't think that's a better form of ownership.

I'd rather capitalists be distracted pursuing land ownership rather than pursuing ownership over the machinery of ultimate power and control.

If you remove tangible forms of ownership, people will try to claim ownership over intangible things instead, like state power.

The idea of investing my hard earned money to build on land I don't own sounds incredibly foolish. You're completely at the mercy of the counter-party. You don't own it, they own you!

It's kind of insane how the higher end Raspberry PIs are almost as powerful as my PC tower. The price is quite low and developer friendly too. Really great products. The lower end products are awesome too.

It's one of the few products I look at with awe and which makes me feel good about the tech industry.

I managed to build a WiFi temperature sensor (which can be substituted with any analog sensor) which streams its data to a web platform (I also built), encrypted over HTTPS (with CA certificate verification), using a $10 Raspberry PI Pico W; built in a single weekend. I can connect it to my phone's WiFi hotspot from anywhere and stream data to my web platform where it displays a realtime chart. $10.

Maybe, but at least they're not depleting my access to opportunities like platform rents do! In the old days, I could still find opportunities in my social circles to earn money to cover the rents because they still had money.

Platform rents are worse because they extract wealth by centralizing awareness, centralizing opportunities and literally shrinking the pie whilst concentrating wealth for those in the middle. They prevent me from finding opportunities which would allow me to pay the rents which they extract from me and my social circle! My social circle has no money so I can't rely on them! Only way to make money is a bs bureaucratic job working for a monopolist.

It's worse, satanically worse! Mark my words, with the current approach we will be forced to go either UBI route or start charging people proportionally to their incomes using universal digital ID to check. And the 'AI taking jobs' narrative is already in place to provide a phony justification!

Opportunities are depleted systematically from the periphery. "I make my own luck" is bullshit when when the entire system is working 24/7 to ensure you don't get any! The average elite ignores more life-changing opportunities in their inbox, every minute, than I'm exposed to in a lifetime!

Literally, elite rent-seekers took all the money and now there is no more to take! The system is now trying to saddle people will useless debts! Getting them to spend it all on their useless junk (pointless gender studies university degrees, ads for their marketing/lead acquisition startups, fake magic internet money, junk bought on credit cards...)! And then forcing them into bankruptcy for a few years, move onto someone else, then when that first person's bankruptcy period is over, repeat!!! They do the same thing with shell companies; saddle them with debt, funnel the money to the beneficiary company, let the shell default on its debt, then repeat. This is the backbone of the modern economy. It's utterly insane! The system is completely broken!

This article is clearly about Geoism; its traditional interpretation. In its essence, Geoism should be about rents, not about land specifically. Of course they couldn't have known about tech platform monopolies back then, but they are very much about rent extraction and a far greater concern than land is nowadays. I feel like such articles are a distraction and would lead to even bigger problems. Essentially prepping to dispossess middle class land owners.

It's absurd in this day and age to be discussing land rent-seeking when the cause of most of our modern problems is platform rent-seeking. Frankly, it's disturbing how twisted people can get. Of course there was no talk of Geoism when land rents were the main problem and main mechanism of rent extraction; only now that elites have found a different way to extract rents, now it's OK to discuss the (now) lesser evil of land rent-seeking and distract away from the new variant of the problem.

They probably did it on purpose so that the professors would sue Anthropic later and make a lot of money.

How about all the copyright MIT licensed open source software? When does it become discovered that they were scraped for training without authorization and without giving attribution?

I avoid participating in any market unless I have to, these days.

Crypto is a scam within a scam. It was created to act as a 'good cop' to the 'bad cop' which is the mainstream system. But they are two sides of the same scam. Same kind of game of Republican vs Democrat. Everywhere you turn, there is a scammer waiting to take your money.