I don't know. I feel like "price fixing until maybe there was a hint of competition" is pretty far from frictionless sphere, supply and demand economics.
Competition was possible but was not working. A fake news brief is the supposed solution. That's not really competition actually lowering prices. That's the price fixing regime blinking for an unsubstantiated reason.
It would be a different story if the friend's fiber laying company actually saw an opportunity and pursued it, but they didn't.
ISPs and other extremely capital intensive industries with a relatively fixed demand are always going to be warped markets. Nobody thinks they’re a spherical cow.
Despite that, the single mechanism that works so well in a competitive market, the threat of competition, (this time) worked just the same in a 2 person market where you would expect the inefficiencies of a price fixing regime and for all decisions and investments to have to pass through (and have funds allocated to) an army of lawyers, politicians and special interest groups.
That is objectively what happened and reframing it into a negative light is a choice grounded in emotion and not analysis.
Have you ever taken an economics course? Nobody finishes a basic micro/macro course without an introduction to game theory. Game theory is the EXACT reason that N=2,3,4 markets struggle with competition and provide insights into the regulation and “rules” needed for markets with very low suppler cardinality.
You thinking that anyone else expects a local ISP market to function efficiently and competitively is a failure of your own understanding, not of the system.
Some folks need to touch the hot stove before they learn but eventually they learn.
If AI output remains unreliable then eventually enough companies will be burned and management will reinstate proper oversight. All while continuing to pay themselves on the back.
It's kind of click bait tho. "I took 3 months and AI to build a SQLite tool" is not going to stand out. The 8 year wait gives a sense of scale or difficulty but that's actually an illusion and does not reflect the task itself.
What makes them more or less controllable? I know they can have specific triggers applied to them so as to delay vesting. Are options somehow immune to that or is it something else entirely?
Note that I’m speaking more about private companies than public ones. But an RSU is basically only liquid if the company says it is. Shares, out of exercised options, have a lot more flexibility.
Right, but that seems to be comparing unvested RSUs to vested and exercised options. Are options more strict about what games can be played with vesting triggers?
Well there's a survivor bias that I think plays into the quote.
If its a good idea that's obvious, it's already used widely. If its not obvious, you'll still have to convince people. None of that requires lots of lies, though.
As I’m reading this, I’m thinking about how in 1980. It was imagined that everyone needed to learn how to program in BASIC or COBOL, and that the way computers would become ubiquitous would be that everybody would be writing program programs for them. That turned out to be a quaint and optimistic idea.
It seems like the pitch today is that every company that has a software-like need will be able to use AI to manifest that software into existence, or more generally, to manifest some kind of custom solution into existence. I don’t buy it. Coding the software has never been the true bottleneck, anyone who’s done a hackathon project knows that part can be done quickly. It’s the specifying and the maintenance that is the hard part.
To me, the only way this will actually bear the fruit it’s promising is if they can deliver essentially AGI in a box. A company will pay to rent some units of compute that they can speak to like a person and describe the needs, and it will do anything - solve any problem - a remote worker could do. IF this is delivered, indeed it does invalidate virtually all business models overnight, as whoever hits AGI will price this rental X%[1] below what it would cost to hire humans for similar work, breaking capitalism entirely.
[1] X = 80% below on day 1 as they’ll be so flush with VC cash, and they’d plan to raise the price later. Of course, society will collapse before then because of said breaking of capitalism itself.
I suppose it depends on your perspective. I guess I mean broken kind of in the gaming sense, where a gameplay mechanic is 'broken' if you can exploit it to completely subvert the entire intended way it's supposed to work.
You could argue that capitalism was very not broken in 1960, when you could get a job at 18 selling shoes, driving a cab, or delivering milk or whatever, and support a family of five on your salary, save for retirement, and go on yearly vacations.
It's arguably somewhat broken today, when gestures around things are like this.
I'd say it would be entirely broken if AGI means a few hundred billionaires who have ownership stakes in an AI company simply capture all the wealth in the world while most of the rest starve, but the robots help you put down the peasant uprisings and farm and raise crops for you.
I agree with you though that technically, capitalism will still be 'going strong' unless the peasants are able to overpower the AI robot billionaire industrial complex and burn it all down.
Why are "tools" for local IO interesting and not just the only way to do it? I can't really imagine a server architecture that gets to read your local files and present them without a fat client of some kind.
What is the naive implementation you're comparing against? Ssh access to the client machine?
It's early days and we don't fully understand LLM behavior to the extent that we can assume questions like this about agent design are resolved. For instance, is an agent smarter with Claude Code's tools or `exec_command` like Codex? And does that remain true for each subsequent model release?
It’s a distinction that IMHO likely doesn’t make much difference, at least for the mostly automated/non-interactive coding agent use case. What matters more is how well the post-training on synthetic harness traces works.
Seems pretty promising. The language looks clean which I can't say for some of the alternatives.
The thing that I find so challenging about these types of systems is scaling up the richness of the playback.
Very quickly I find I need to integrate animations, lip sync, vfx, timed event triggers... For that you really need some kind of timeline. Delays don't cut it. So then these clean text driven systems are at best an early step in a large process or abandoned for a more integrated solution.
But I really do long for the ability to import simple narrative scripts like this even in a full production system.
One of these days I'll try to build the high production value system in a way that keeps both the full, in editor, narrative graph and the simple narrative script files alive and synced.
Nice. Something short of the full lift that might be useful is to add a reflection API along with the playback API. That way implementing import/export of .lor files to an engine format becomes a lot more appealing. Something to think about, anyway.
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