greg_V

Well, since the Luddites smashed the machines because they ended up impoverishing them while delivering shoddier quality goods and concentrating the profits in the hands of the few, I'd argue that's an argument worth considering these days.

But they were crushed and defeated, and their name became a shorthand ad hominem to disregard arguments that make one side of the debate uncomfortable.

Because understanding how things work is not the same thing as understanding who it works for and why.

We were promised a borderless world and instead got one without boundaries.

Tbh, a lot of EU protectionism vs. US tech seems not to keep the competition out. In fact, with the amount of free press US startups get and the size of their coffers, they can simply roll over the local competition in EU markets most of the time.

What it's terribly good at is adding burdens that the US giants don't face early on, slowing down the early growth between 28 fragmented markets. I don't know specifically about how China works, but the question is proving product-market fit, and for that, you need a lot of users fast.

In the EU, it's a different battle country to country as the media environment, the markets, the regulation etc. are all fractured.

Google is already killing itself. The search experience has been getting steadily worse and worse on one end, but on the other, they're slowly strangling the incentives that were offered to publishers (ranking, traffic & monetization) to develop content for the "open web as dominated by Google".

Now, everyone who's running a website for a living is doing platform-native content for traffic and pairing it up with a newsletter-backed website or straight up investing in brand advertising campaigns to have access to their own audiences still, without relying on Google to deliver them.

My guess is that we're in for the second wave of Big Aggregators, but it's tough to say what the technological twist behind it will be, so it's not just a reddit 2.0.

Also his criticism is very specific. Most of contemporary anti-capitalist or marxist thought that gets published is very, very abstract and hence toothless. It's easy to entertain radical ideas as long as they don't pit you against your employer.

Another thing that I hear from time to time is an argument along the line of "it just predicts the next word, it doesn't actually understand it". Rather than an argument against AI being intelligent, isn't this also telling us what "understanding" is? Before we all had computers, how did people judge whether another person understood something? Well, they would ask the person something and the person would respond. One word at a time. If the words were satisfactory, the interviewer would conclude that you understood the topic and call you Doctor.

You call a Doctor 'Doctor' because they're wearing a white coat and are sitting in a doctor's office. The words they say might make vague sense to you, but since you are not a medical professional, you actually have no empirical grounds to judge whether or not they're bullshitting you, hence you have the option to get a second or third opinion. But otherwise, you're just trusting the process that produces doctors, which involves earlier generations of doctors asking this fellow a series of questions with the ability to discern right from wrong, and grading them accordingly.

When someone can't tell if something just sounds about right or is in fact bullshit, they're called a layman in the field at best or gullible at worst. And it's telling that the most hype around AI is to be found in middle management, where bullshit is the coin of the realm.

The tech anti-intellectualism is different though. Like you see these kinds of posts that approach the subject as if no one ever has seriously studied it, and the tell is always that there's barely a scholarly work cited, but there's plenty of metaphors to describe how say, sociological phenomena work by way of "it's just like XY tech or business model."

Like I get the acclaim, if you're raised in this environment, the business tech vocab will feel more familiar. Is it a good / better way to describe the world than the established scientific field? No.

But reading the "Peasant and his body" by Bourdieu instead would not have the same... social coinage in tech as reading the influencer of the realm.

Tried to conduct a survey last autumn to learn about people's experiences with using AI SDR products. We pretty heavily promoted it in sales spaces, and got a jack total of less than 20 fills, with an overwhelmingly negative sentiment, echoing the comments you'd see about this space on reddit / linkedin etc.

Vaporware the whole lot of them, with spoofed ARR numbers to trigger investor FOMO.

Anecdotal backup: as a child I had a horrendous dust allergy that led to multiple hospital visits. To mitigate the problem, my mom became a clean freak, trying to keep our apartment dust-free. The allergy persisted until I grew up and moved out on my own without having a vacuum cleaner. Living in a messier environment led to the allergy basically disappearing.

I mean if you're publishing a book, especially a tell-all one, you'd go and talk to sources familiar with the matter who can independently verify whether the statements are true or not to shield you against defamation lawsuits.

Publishing anything dodgy about the biggest tech executives on the planet without that would lead your company getting nuked from orbit

you could have the same site, but running different servers to serve different timezones / locales. kind of like old-school video game servers

Spammy rewrite of a Ted Gioia post from last week: https://www.honest-broker.com/p/how-we-lost-the-flow

The number is not the amount of buildings, but the amount of drones you have when you build the building

That's a fairly accurate assessment of marketing theory. Rory Sutherland's Alchemy talks about this in more depth.

Oil is a special commodity in the sense that it's as important to civilization as water is to humans. It's also special in the other sense that we have geopolitical strife over who gets to extract it, sell it and to which market...

I don't see how a chatbot meets any of those criteria

They have a 180 million users who are contributing no net revenue but are probably costing them significant amounts.

The math comes down to the fact that they raised enough money to stay in business until they have to raise even more money.

And a 180 mil users might seem like a lot in two years, but with the free media coverage they have... even if their free to premium conversion rate is pretty dismal, the "have you heard about them" to "active free user" rate is also very bad!

Or another way to look at it, is that everyone and their mother has heard of them, and in 2 years they've only convinced that many people to pony up cash. Plus they have a massive churn problem with people quitting premium after 1-3 months.

No screen before bedtime/no screens in bed is like the easiest health improvement hack that anyone can implement.

With that said, anecdotally I can vouch for the "no screen in the first hour" suggestion the article is making. I've been working for home for the past few years, and I feel more sluggish since I just move to my laptop first thing in the morning, instead of having that preparation-breakfast-commute routine. Granted I live in a walkable city so commute doesn't mean what it means in SV, but it's the same idea.

I run market research as part of my job, and yeah, you'd be surprised. PH still has a lot of users and not just from the indie hacker community, but there are a quite a bit of people who look at it daily to see if something cool or relevant pops up that they can use in their jobs.

Bingo. All the small shops who were doing actual reviews got wiped out, and this blog is basically documenting the new age of parasite spam eating the web and raking in millions.

The story is that it goes against google's guidelines and yet it continues to outrank sites that are within google's guidelines.

ahrefs by the looks of it

Same. I live in a poor neighborhood but it has two dope parks, a swimming pool, cool places. The map tells me I'll get murdered at the streets I cross literally every day and night

Twenty odd years ago when I was moderating a forum as a teenager, we had to proactively nuke memes (or demotivationals as they were called) because the images ran up our server costs, which we were paying out of pocket money.

Now everyone can stream HD videos from their pocket with a push of a button from anywhere.

The entire infrastructure was reengineered in a span of a generation, completely changing the economics of how it works. It used to be a communal garden or occupied spaces: now it's a gigantic shopping mall.

"no no, it's not that the technology has reached it's current limits and these companies are bleeding money, they're just withholding their newest releases not to spook the normies!"

The number one use case for this will be to beat KYC checks, which means KYC procedures will get more annoying and bothersome for everyone else!

With how the market is looking as of today, the next YC batch might have a promising carrier pigeon startup and a ridesharing blip services that monetizes with ads!

They need search for different reasons: it's their biggest moat against Meta by being the start page of the internet for a great many number of people. A whole lot of browsing sessions start with search and end with search, and this way Google can claim attribution for virtually every traffic a website gets outside of direct hits.

This keeps people developing content to please Google and running ads on Google platforms to get more traffic.

out of all the metaphors the author could've used. why not just go with a gardening example? friendships grow like trees, they need tending and they grow stronger with age.

especially because we're all familiar with friendships that turn out to be purely transactional relationships like with drinking buddies which fizzle out as soon as the activity itself is no longer welcoming. treating friendships literally as investments encourages surface level transactional relationships, which is the opposite of what you'd want to be happy!

It's a convoluted way of saying "use value" vs. "exchange value".

A million dollars is a million dollars, or it's a house. I don't need a million dollars but I do need a house or I freeze to death. I can't eat a million dollars worth of food but I need to eat food every day or I die.

Gambling is seen as immoral because it's about extending your exchange value capabilities, although most people who gamble are poor as dirt and a winning bet is often about paying your utility bills and having a day out over being able to do neither (while losing bets contribute to being unable to do either).

Insurance is seen as prudent because it acts as a fail safe over your use values, be it your health, housing, employment, etc. Social security is basically a system of spreading the odds over the population, forcing everyone to do the small bets to contain the catastrophic outlier probabilities - in theory.