Closi

Quantity of shelves stacked isn't a typical measure of value in an organisation.

If a CEO can help lead the team to make shelf stacking easier (e.g. pre-sortation, introduce self ready packaging, lower delivery quantities to reduce need to work overs, reduce planogram changes etc) and that reduces headcount, that's real value.

The point: executive pay at the largest companies has grown wildly disproportionate to the value any one executive adds, especially next to the people who generate the actual output.

Disagree with this statement.

Take Walmart (as a boring example):

- 'People who generate output' cost: likely c$70bn per year in USA

- CEO 'Executive' Compensation: $27.4m

CEO compensation is probably 0.03% of the workforce cost.

Arguably a good CEO will add more value than a 0.03% increase in 'people who generate the actual output'

Disturbing? In what sense? Other news sources are paywalled and UK citizens have to pay in tax.

This is genuine, noob question: how is this different from AWS?

AWS owns the hardware, and doesn't write a lot of the software.

AWS actually is kind of the opposite - it often takes open source software (e.g. Apache, Mongo, Kubernetes) and then makes money off it by hosting it itself (with some enhancements etc).

If they do develop their own software (e.g. with S3) they don't give away the source code so others can deploy it, as that's part of their secret sauce.

In this scenario, where they would be offering the open source model and then offering the same model hosted, there isn't really a moat here - they would be leasing the hardware from a company like AWS, and adding a margin, but it woudl be trivial for another company (or Amazon) to take their same model and offer it for the same price or less.

This analysis doesn't actually prove the title, as it only considers founders that have gone to OpenAI or Anthropic, however even if it did it isn't particularly suprising.

Sam Altman was the president of YC, so it's not particularly suprising that he has hired lots of talent from YC - these are people that are pre-qualified because he has seen their work before outside of a job interview (better the devil you know than the devil you don't).

This happens everywhere - person leaves company A to company B and then poaches the best talent from company A. Obviously in this case the talent are founders rather than staff members, but still.

State where the value is then, without just stating features that cause lock-in.

You can't blindly just call me an idiot and say there's loads of value without stating what it is (I mean you technically can, but it's not a brilliant way of getting your point across).

The reason the 30% rate is sustained though IS the abuse of market power with the PMFN clause, which ensures that competitors cannot price lower.

Everything else is an attempt to stay the primary shopfront. Sure you can sell your game and give away steam keys - but you can't sell it for a lower price than on Steam, and we still want you to encourage your users to come to steam and buy things. We will give you free matchmaking - just not for players who have bought on another platform, so if players buy on another platform they can't play with their friends. This is just a way to stay default, not some sort of charity.

Yet somehow they have convinced lots of gamers that they should get c25% of all transactions for offering very little value and that that's a good deal (taking payments, serving games, having refunds(!) and adding a chat panel isn't big and complicated in 2026).

They are like everyone else, abusing network effects to achieve excess profits, unnecessarily taking £12 from a £40 game sale just so that Gabe can get another yacht (despite already having 4). I don't see why this is needed? If the market was efficient and this wasn't down to monopoly power and network effects, the fees would equalise, the £40 game can drop to £35 so people get cash back in their pockets, while the developers still get more money, and epic's store and steam would STILL be a gravy train. But they aren't the good guys - if they have a chance to cement their power or get an extra few bucks by being anti-consumer they will.

I'm not sure on that:

1) Lots of people think they are partly complicit in all the skins trading/gambling that children do, which is basically skirting gambling laws. This has culminated in a current lawsuit in New York which claims they broke gambling laws.

2) They also currently have a large antitrust lawsuit going on, due to them requiring Most Favored Nation pricing while setting a 30% commission fee vs 12% on competitor platforms, which exploits market position and artificially raises game prices to Steam's benefit.

It's 100% about control - it's the same in the UK.

Last year it was about having to scan your face to verify your age to access porn (to protect the children). They said: It's not about control, it's about protecting children.

Last month the same government announced they will use the same technology to prevent access to Youtube and Twitter without giving over your ID and confirming who you are... Still under the 'protecting the children' banner.

Blame language evolving over time rather than OP, octocopter is a widely-used term for '8 propellor drones'.

A nit pick with your post - you use the word 'ambiguous' but really this is from the latin root 'ambiguus' so we don't need the supurflous 'o' in between the two u's.

I have no doubt this is an effective way to end up with a bunch of finished tracks. But I can't help but feel that it is missing the point.

It depends what your goal is - if your goal is to have an enjoyable hobby, then yes, it's probably missing the point.

If your goal is to have the best outputs, then that might involve a different creative process.

If your goal is to make (good amounts of) money, then the popularity of your music is actually important. Writing music that will be popular is a skill in itself, which is probably a different skill to just writing the music that you find the most joy and satisfaction in writing. Writing music that brings you joy and hoping others find the same joy in it might work, but I suspect the musicians making the most money are often working hard to write what the market wants/accepts rather than just what brings them the most joy. There will be exceptions to every rule however.

I mean the first point in the article was also:

“Robots are actually more alive than we are” is a core belief in our society

I absolutely do not think this is a core belief - If anything, the core belief is that 'being a human is special' and that robot's aren't really alive in the same way, because they don't feel human emotion.

Not only is the populace primed to treat artificial intelligence tools as living peers, they’ve been trained to hate or dismiss anyone who doesn’t

This doesn’t meet my personal experience, but curious to hear if others see something different! The prevailing opinion in the UK at least seems to be that it’s some non-living magical tool assistant.

As this assumption seems to be the basis of the article, I’m not sure on its validity.

What is a moat if not something used to protect the castle?

In this case it stops people copying your IP

I’m assuming there are other revenue sources (eg transaction charges).

'I think [...] I think [...] maybe [...] maybe [...] maybe [...]'

Sounds more like a vague prediction of what the future might be like rather than an iron-clad claim.

I don't see why you can't do that?

There's plenty of things that cost money that legislation forces companies to do anyway, regardless of if there is a 'funding source' or not.

Although this particular one is from the FCA so presumably is taxpayer funded anyway.

If you have the full outputs, it might make it easier for competitors to distil the model or reverse engineer the full process.

It may also be that misaligned responses can be in CoT which OpenAI does not want to show to users.

Not really.

Coding is probably solved, at least to a large extent, but that doesn't mean engineering is solved too.

This is like someone saying that the wright brothers solved sustained/powered human flight, and another person saying "well if that's the case, why do planes still crash? obviously flight isn't solved.". Well, there are always improvements, but planes can fly and llm's can code.

I'm working on an open source and customisable/configurable warehouse management system.

As it's open source and built with a codebase that's easy for LLM's to work with, users can download it and tailor it to their business/operational requirements, although it also has out of the box 'industry best practice processes' so you don't have to reinvent the wheel and can only focus on writing the 10% custom stuff which differentiates your business.

As all the processes are flexible, you can also do proper 'continuous improvement' with your staff - something traditional WMS products struggle with.

No link because I'm finalising it at the moment, but if you are interested please reply!

I think we are more broadly talking about what the user interface is going to be in the future and how people will interact with a computer - many people already want to interact with ChatGPT to get answers rather than navigate to a website, or want to prompt ChatGPT to generate a leaflet rather than design one in Microsoft Word, so 'Agentic PCs' is just an extension to that.

Seeing how we are responding to AI or the copilot button on pc's... I _dare_ to suggest this "Agentic era" is nothing more then wishful thinking

Depends who 'we' is - I've seen plenty of non-tech people in the real world begin to use ChatGPT as a primary information source rather than the web (rightfully or not!)

I suspect that 'we' might not be the true early adopters here, similar to how quite a lot of the most technical users in the 80's thought GUI's were a waste of time.

I don't think that's quite how it works - I think they are saying that they have a framework contract so they will have had to provide some list prices, but that doesn't affect the overall contractual terms.

Yes - the legislation itself needs ripped up and replaced with common sense procurement that follows industry norms.

As someone who bids for these contracts, my outsider view of the procurement process is that it seems to spends so much time and effort being fair and impartial, that it actually ends up:

* Giving too much information to suppliers (i.e. who else is bidding and how much the government will pay) - These things are never given in private sector contracts but you are often told with a public sector procurement process.

* Being a checkbox excercise, with scorecard criteria that can tip the balance that don't have anything to do with how well the company actually does the job.

* The procurement process itself can say to companies 'we are hard to deal with, uncooperative and don't really know what we want', which will obviously influence pricing. I've seen tender documents say silly things like you will be disqualified if you can't make an in-person meeting about the tender given 24 hours notice. Tender documents often contain 49 pages of waffle and almost zero specification of what is actually expected to be delivered (while this is common in the private sector too, it's much worse in the public sector in terms of how poorly defined tenders are).

* Often they have classic procurement footguns, like mandating cost down initiatives throughout the contract which everyone on the sales side knows means 'build in extra margin in years 1 & 2 to fake cost down to year 3'

* The process is so 'fair' that it ignores who will actually do the job for the best total value (mix of quality and cost). This is maybe a little subjective, but often you can end up with what appear to be bizarre awards from an outside perspective.

Their medium value purchase system is a waste of time too - I work for a small business that does government contracts and you have to pay the government just for the pleasure of bidding for contracts.

Then every bid has it's own unique weird things, where often you are told who you are bidding against and sometimes even how much the government wants to pay!

The scorecards are often weird, will do things like ask you to write mini-essays with word limits where you get penalised for being over the word count, or where 20% of the bid points are based on a combination of diversity and impact on the local community/environment rather than on who will do the job best at the lowest price.

The entire process is completely broken, and has no reference to good/standard procurement processes in the private sector.

why would I need someone to tell me 'I agree with you', 'go ahead

You might not, but that's just an example where a different style of communication might help some people. It's great that you would be happy without validation, but I can safely say some people do flourish when given it! Lots of people need to be given a bit of confidence, particularly when they are new to a role, and in my experience that's easier over a call.

As another example if I ask people on Slack how busy they are I will often get a different answer compared to calling them and checking in, asking if they need support, particularly if I can hear that they are stressed.

Or while on a text chat someone might say they understand a problem, on a phone call it's much more natural to get them to play it back to you so you can work out when they miss some nuance.

This ignores the human side of things - people want relationships, empathy and sometimes just to be listened to.

A call with your manager where they say "yes, I agree with everything you said - go ahead and do it, I trust you" can mean much more than the same thing said in a text message.

Nvidia doesn't own fabs, but TSMC is doing a massive global fab expansion.

But it's also easier if you have a market cap of 2 trillion and are worried about your competitors scaling to meet demand.

Although on the flipside, let's pretend it's 2017's and you are Nvidia selling GPU's for Bitcoin - maybe demand will dry up at some point? Do you stop scaling production as this might be the max of the market, or do you follow the market and increase production?

It's always easier to see the right move in hindsight!