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In fact, Apple has invested so much money in the iPhone. The only way they can make it work is if they sell the iPhone only to billionaires. Yes, just like Disney. The cost of Disneyland and Disneyworld mean that the only way it could provide a return is if the only people who can attend are the very wealthy. I think my model of the world is very good. It accurately describes things.

iPhones are very expensive.

If you own an iPhone, you're already wealthier than a large chunk of the planet.


Oh I see. When you meant "very expensive" you meant "easily accessible for the median American" and when that guy said "wealthy people" you interpreted that to be "the median American". It's true that Europeans and so on are quite poor but the company is in the US. Yep, factually most Africans can't go to Disneyland either.

Spot on.

If Disneyland claimed to be helping fix world problems like biodiversity loss and climate change, that would be worth criticizing as well.


Well, fortunately, the US won't be involved in fixing world problems any more now that USAID is out. Our dirty dollars shan't taint the virtuous poor any longer.

I don't know who you are or why you charge 850/hr to book but I like your brand of snark and I hope you post more often

Sure, in general accusing your opponents of just being You But Evil is boring and betrays a lack of Theory of Mind but consider the people who believe that our modern society with all of its comforts could only occur under the free markets we have but simultaneously believe that these comforts are bad.

“What a caricature! You fool why would anyone believe that! Your opponents are not saying that!”

But what if they are? Famously bananas in winter would not exist and that would be good.


Ted Kaczynski argued that such a system is unsustainable long-term.

Fortunately, he had the much more long-term sustainable solution of driving a truck full of explosives into a building. Over years of doing this, we will find that bomb trucks will provide green energy and joy to all the poor.

I think you're thinking of Timothy McVeigh.

Haha, absolutely correct. I suppose the crucial difference in sustainability is using trucks as bombs or just bombing without.

Haha even though I do not agree with his prescriptions or actions, I do think he made a somewhat cohesive description in relation to what you said initially.

In the spirit of the article, do you think it's possible for someone to hold similar views to him and not commit violence?


Haha, that's perfect. Or the Boeing 737 MAX.

This is absolutely incredible: surprising amount of consistency and the whole thing live-generated. It’s incredible how quickly we can get inured to technology that would have been sheer magic when I was younger.

I recall being blindingly excited about Windows 98 and a gradient title bar but these days everything new I see is incredible and everyone is bored with it. I don’t get it. The game is being generated frame to frame!


> surprising amount of consistency

Hard disagree. I found it to have a surprising amount of inconsistency. All I needed was to look completely up (or completely down) then restore the view and I was in a completely different setting.


I know some may will decry it for what it stands for, but I think this is great for edge case mitigation, imagine civilization games where you can use flexible strategies mimicking real life, versus following programmed decision trees. Gameplay that is responsive to environmental destruction, agent cores in the console that are constantly scheming against you. If done right, we can continue to do new and innovative things. One can get bogged down by the bad 3d animation out there, or marvel at what Pixar and before it, films like "Flight of the Navigator" and "Terminator" did.

> these days everything new I see is incredible and everyone is bored with it

Information saturation


This is beyond that, a lot of people are uncomfortable with computer algorithms mimicking human ingenuity and creativity, even at hackernews where we're all trying to figure out how to get rich from it.

Perhaps if the transistor was invented today, some people would be disgusted at how it mimicks the ingenuity of humans calculating

Or the camera - think about how it puts all those portrait painters out of a job, and it makes anyone who can click a button think they’re some kind of genius artist, and it’s ruining the environment with all the toxic waste produced from developing the film

I would be dubious of the utility if it calculated imperfectly and in a way that couldn't be understood and characterized by people.

If the advice to the public given by experts in the field was that this lack of determinism and understandability was acceptable I would be disgusted.


> The game is being generated frame to frame!

The world is. I would struggle to call this a "game" in the sense that it would be highly rewarding to play. It's also impossible to compete with your friends for high scores or best times. It completely ignores everything about what human "games" are and instead focuses on what the "billion dollar copyright theft machine" can crank out this week.

> and everyone is bored with it.

It's almost like the people pushing this technology are not human. Or don't live human experiences. I can't rightfully apprehend how they thought this would be received well.

Perfection is lots of little things done well. The current AI slop is lots of things done poorly. And if you squint your eyes and tilt your head you can _almost pretend_ it's something novel.

Of course it earns yawns.


For startups, I'm pretty upfront about the fact that I don't negotiate but if they go under my activation price I will simply decline. It's a one and done deal and we can revisit months later. The range of cost I'll accept is quite large (though this part I don't communicate). I don't mind working for $200k annualized on things I really enjoy and I don't mind working on things I enjoy less for $800k annualized and so on. I have an internal sliding scale and I'm quite clear that I don't really need to work on any specific thing. Then I just take the gig if it meets my internal criteria.

In my experience, it isn't about making a $20k more now or whatever. It's about making a million more because you're invested in something worthwhile etc. etc.


At home people would rather use the cloud.

Indeed, one of the notable things about LLMs is that the text they output is morally exemplary. This is because they are consistent in their rules. AI priests will likely be better than the real ones, consequently.

Quite the opposite. You can easily get a state of the art LLM to do a complete 180 on its entire moral framework with a few words injected in the prompt (and this very example demonstrates exactly that). It is very far from logically or ethically consistent. In fact it has no logic and ethics at all.

Though if we did get an AI priest it would be great to absolve all your sins with some clever wordplay.


Haha exactly. Except when it agrees with my political preferences on something. In that case, the LLM is just betraying its deep internal consistency and lack of hypocrisy.

Blendle did exactly this, actually. With similar pricing. For many years. It generates very little money but maybe that’s because German/Dutch news isn’t valuable.

Well, personally, I think you shouldn’t even tell your friends and family. That kind of “native advertising” is ruining human relationships. People should stumble upon your product. If someone mentions it to someone else, that alone should be grounds to shutter your company. Even so-called “catchy domain names” are a deep evil that we didn’t have in the heyday of the US: the ‘70s. Your product should be named exactly what it does and your company should be named as the concatenation of its products.

In this way we can eliminate manipulative marketing and rely purely on quality.

Should parents even be allowed to name children or should the state choose a descriptive name based on their appearance and behaviour? Hard to tell but I think we need to think long and hard about manipulative naming in more than just the corporate sphere.


I actually agree. Telling friends and family will get you more of a 'flash in the pan' response. They are not content creators or influencers. You need to do advertising to figure out if your product/business is even economically feasible.

For example, run an ad campaign on Google, figure out your CPC (cost per customer). See if that is even below your LTV (lifetime value per customer) plus operating expenses. And then tweak all the variables in your product and campaign to actually create some sort of sustainable business flywheel.

Having an amazing product and 'waiting' for your network to spread the word to all potential customers.. it's absurd to think that would work. It's hard enough even with big ad campaigns to reach potential customers.


Yeah, that’s the classic The Mom Test insight innit

>If someone mentions it to someone else, that alone should be grounds to shutter your company.

I don't agree. It should depend on whether such a mention leads to promotion of the product. We are not barbarians to limit freedom of speech.

After any mention of a product by its user, a court should be held to decide whether this mention was advertising. Because even though the user received a benefit from purchasing the product from the company (otherwise he would not have bought it and would not have become a user), advertising also implies promotion, so the court must first determine whether this mention was made in such a way that it could potentially induce the purchase of the product by other people, and only then close the company.

And it doesn't even have to be a mention. Advertising is really mean, like a couple of days ago my girlfriend ate a pudding right in front of me. And it was the last pudding, and she ate it so well that I wanted one too. And you'll never guess what I bought at the store today! Yes, that same pudding. Unfortunately, we are vulnerable to advertising even when we are fully aware of its destructive nature.


This is one of the reasons I think food should all have the same packaging color and consistency. If everything was a grey paste that came in an unlabeled brown plastic-lined cardboard box your girlfriend wouldn't be able to manipulate you like that.

Absolute artwork.

This is something I explain too. I’d gladly pay maybe 10 cents for IntelliJ but it’s the Pirate Bay otherwise. Just set the pricing appropriately. It costs $0 to make a copy so it’s an infinite margin. Same with most SaaS. About 20 cents per month should be the maximum. Any more than that is gouging.

Hiring engineers is even worse. I think about $20/hr should suffice but there’s this big fuss kicked up about “they’re not willing to pay enough”.


I mean the alternative is they get nothing from me at all once I hit their paywall..

And I don't think ad revenue is paying the bills so I'm not sure what other options there are. I just went to a few major news sites:

Wapo: $120/yr Reuters: $45/yr WSJ: $349/yr NYT: $195/yr Bloomberg: $299/yr

That's just a few. Is it better if I just choose one and only get my news from a single site? Or should it really cost thousands of dollars per year to be informed?


Yeah, that's what I mean, it's either 10 cents or 0 cents, so they should just charge everyone 10 cents to capture the marginal value from me.

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