How is global prosperity achieved? Business owners get all the profits of our labor and maybe some of it trickles down? Workers get “prosperous” on crumbs?

I’ll be expectantly awaiting for my prosperity in the mail.

I wouldn'tve asked a stranger in a park in Serbia about a statue, but I do recognize that:

- I'm not thinking for myself almost at all when writing code, just orchestrating the work.

- I don't google to learn about topics/questions that come up, i just ask Claude for a summary.

- I don't reach out to people around me if I can just write a prompt.

And it feels like I'm consuming so much more information but retaining only the surface levels of it.

Seems to me like the library functions as it should. It behaves like a property testing library: it tests properties.

The cases where we built something out of steel and it failed are _massively_ outnumbered by the instances where we used it where/when suitable. If we built something in steel and it failed/someone died we stopped doing that pretty soon after.

That's what's happening though. Someone is writing a prompt, generating some slop and then directing bots to collect money that will never make it to real artists.

If they were getting too small of a slice before, now it's even smaller.

> But at that point, if the music really is that good, does it matter?

We're very far from "that point". The point we're at right now, which we need to tackle is the one in which we're drowning in slop.

I'm not personally against using AI tools to write code or help someone generate music, but right now it just impedes, devalues and deplatforms the real stuff to make money from a system that hasn't caught up.

I get that there's a tradeoff. Rust requires you to be way more explicit about what you're intending upfront and that can, in the long term, lead to simpler code -- but there's no dimension (depth-wise or breadth-wise) that I'd call Rust simpler.

Yes, that's what the paper argues. Institutions at every scale (say, doctor's clinics, hospitals, entire healthcare systems) are very challenging to access compared to me asking ChatGPT. And it's not just the bureaucracy, but there's time, money and many other intangible costs associated with interacting with institutions.

> [Large bureaucratic organizations]that run everything and aren't held accountable

But they ultimately are. People from all types of institutions are fired and systems are constantly reorganized and optimized all the time. Not necessarily for the better -- but physical people are not black boxes spewing tokens.

Individuals' choices are ultimately a product of their knowledge and their incentives. An MLM's output is the result of literal randomness.

> run the world breaking up families, freedom, and fun

There's lots of terrible institutions vulnerable to corruption and with fucked up policies, but inserting a black box into _can't_ improve these.

> where truth is determined by policy

The truth is the truth. Regardless of what policy says. The question is, do you want to be able to have someone to hold accountable or just "¯\_(ツ)_/¯ hey the algorithm told me that you're not eligible for healthcare"

Having super accessible machines that can make anything up and aren't held accountable run the world is going to break so many systems where truth matters.

Over-regulation being what, minimum wages? Coverage for basic social safety nets? ‘Cause that’s what we lost.

> It goes like this: (well intended) regulation => raise price of doing business => fewer startups => less competition => incumbents enjoying practically monopoly => incumbents behaving like monopolistic a-holes.

Bell system was broken up into seven different companies, thanks to regulation. It’s _lack_ of regulation that let telecoms merge together into behemoths. There _are_ small ISPs and telecoms in the US, they just can’t compete due to the size differential.

> In China. You forgot "in China". … Good luck promoting environmental regulation there.

Right, let’s jump for a Tu Quoque. China is destroying the planet so who cares what we do ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I’m not blind to the existence of plain bad regulation, regulatory barriers and capture — but the overwhelming majority of these arguments have just been used to make regular people’s lives’ worse.

“Cheap housing isn’t being built in the UK because regulation makes it more expensive!” -> remove regulations -> there’s still no cheap housing but anything from 1990s onwards is now also badly built.

As a construction developer I’m sure I’d say there’s still too much regulation though. Gotta bump those margins.

Deregulated gambling has had a horrible impact on individuals. Repealing Glass—Steagall led to a global financial crisis. Gig economy businesses are exploiting workers by the thousands through self employment loopholes. We have insane monopolistic pricing and practices in the US in eg the telecom industry. Worst of all is that we’ve likely doomed the entire planet based on what is effectively too little environmental regulation.