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It’s a problem for capitalists, not the people themselves

The people want cheaper prices, affordable housing, affordable healthcare

Capitalism has decided that these problems aren’t worth solving. Instead, we must optimize for spam and slop (and call it “distribution”)


I feel like one mental model here is that the attention is limited and under capitalism capital aggregates in the hands of few. Their attention is limited to things that immediately better their position, the most capital-efficient thing to do is to gather more capital.

Cheaper prices, affordable housing, affordable healthcare are less capital-efficient. If you're Walmart, sure, you would like to lower prices as much as possible. But your leverage really isn't as big as finance or tech. If you're a politician, you might also pursue those goals, but your attention and leverage really isn't as focused as that of the money machine.


OpenRouter’s founder jumping from NFTs to AI has to be studied. Seriously the goat of sector rotation

The router part makes sense, it routes tokens between providers. The open part makes less sense, I fail to see what exactly is open about openrouter, maybe because I can use multiple models? or opensource models are available? Not sure.

Tokenrouter! (already taken).


I think 4.7 was an awful model in actual use. I never got anything out of it and it was frustratingly weird. This feels more like an attempt to course correct and isn't a real bump

I think they overtrained on scientific papers or such as it would spout really sophisticated sounding nonsense with a ton of complicated verbs and adjectives. 4.6 was definitely better in that regard. The more I use these tools the more I think they’re not actually that revolutionary. I mean it’s still amazing what they can do but they have very clear limitations it seems.

it was also astonishingly lazy. Would just ask me to write test scripts. I asked it to create simple UI buttons for testing some basic functions so I could share it with a client, and it gave me curl commands instead - and then defended it by saying that the UI is wasted work

Frustrating because if I have a tool, I expect a tool to do what I tell it to do. Tools shouldn't have any opinions on how they should be used


Just hire people and pay then a fair wage and let everyone get richer together ffs

When did American capitalism become such a zero sum game


When the powers that be decided labor didn't matter and the only thing that mattered was capital.

One will never get rich on wages. The only way to get rich is through asset manipulation and rent-seeking.


If you're in a market where a competitor can cut their costs to produce the same quality product, end customers don't know (and if they knew, 95+% of them don't give a crap) how rich you've helped your employees get.

If someone else can make it more efficiently, there's a powerful force for you to also have to improve to match that efficiency.

"Why is the airline experience so much worse than 50 years ago?" "It's massively cheaper per seat-mile, and consumers in aggregate reveal that they prefer the cheapest price that online travel searches, so airlines deliver to that preference."


It's always been this way. America has just been able to coast on being the only remaining major economy after WW2, and exploited the rest of the world instead. That exploitation of the rest of the globe has been mostly optimized now, so those shareholder returns are now coming at the expense of the 90% of Americans who aren't sitting at the table.

I think this is quite reductive. America certainly benefited from being one of 2 major powers after ww2. But unlike the USSR it invested in the world heavily. It rebuilt Allied and Axies manufacturing, and do a lot to revitalize the world economy. They got rich in the process but its not like they did nothing. They invented the internet and cure a ton of diseases. Setup a global order of trade that generates real prosperity.

I guess while I agree that American shareholders do reap incredibly benefits coasting is not really something america does. America is more than just shareholders too. You dont grow the world economy by coasting and you dont make up 25% of the world nominal GDP while only making up ~1/25 its population by coasting its inconsistent with reality.


And pretty much everything you mentioned that made the USA the leading world power has been atrophied over the past decades

I don't won't to rant politically but I think you are confusing Donald Trump's America Alone with all previous Republicans and Democrats. The idea of us abandoning all alliances and deals for ???? is relatively novel and stupid. The brand of tax cuts and austerity (which are republican coded in my opinion) are what destroyed the UK economy and greatly damaged the US economy (we were more obstinate to full Austerity than any EU country the EU made bad economic decisions in required balanced budgets with rigidity). But we never did abandon our allies completely and step of the world stage. This is what sets a republican like Reagan apart from Trump. I think they are both terrible on the economy but Trump is just a disaster for US alliances and soft power. If the role were swapped than I think their is an incredible likelyhood we would have lost the Cold War. Its just not the same republican party its far far worse strategy.

I know we also argued that WW2 is what allowed the US to coast but I'd argue that New Deal programs that made demand and things cheap (like electric think TVA). This arguablely fuels American industry as it rushes to fill in the WW2 demand. All this investiment happend before WW2 even started and I think doesn't get nearly enough credit for allowing the US to 1 not become facists and 2 allows the US to step in and support the large demand of ww2 and post war. If we didn't invest in the nation we would not meet post-war demand and be much poorier today.

Finally, I don't want to be nilhistic or depressed if we can observer that we did things better at one point we can still choose a future that is better regardless of what mistakes we make today. We can make better choices albet it limited from today's options that will actually allow the US to raise people higher out of poverty. I don't agree with the idea of betting against Americian ingenuity in the long term it tends to lose.


Can you think of a point in history when it wasn't.

Despite all of the problems that exist were still the best off.


I’m also detecting a vibe shift in AI content

The mood has gone quickly from “this is cool” to “screw AI and any business that wants to use it”

This is particularly clear among the taste making class


I use AI as an amateur producer simply to get ideas

I would NEVER EVER consider using AI in something I actually release to listeners

I don't care if its good or bad. If I'm making someone listen something, it should've been touched by my hand - even if that means turning a knob in a DAW


Good. This should be done everywhere. I have ZERO interest in watching an AI movie or an AI song or an AI video

Genuinely don't care if its good or not. It's not for me


is it me or ever since AI coding became the norm, there have been way more outages with otherwise reliable services?

I get downtime on Supabase every few weeks. Even Cloudflare. And now Github


Yes, because that caused the usage of the services to skyrocket, GitHub runs on Azure and Azure is experiencing capacity strain due to AI, so GitHub's services are struggling to auto-scale

GitHub’s data architecture (lots and lots of projects in a hierarchical distribution with immutable, highly transaction-based data elements) ought to be easily shardable to allow for massive scale-out. Especially a decade after acquisition by Microsoft. Even a major increase in activity (which was surely predicted internally years ago, given the marketing around AI) should be easily handled by a company with their resources. These repeated failures are indicative of massive mismanagement and misinvestment.

Microsoft has been letting GitHub operate independently since up to very recently. Seems to imply the problems could be systemically GitHub’s and Microsoft is now stepping in and correcting the ship.

Per a report that came out the other day, the GitHub move to Azure has been slowed down (i.e. I don't think it's done). But maybe you have newer/better info than me

GitHub’s instability started when they announced they were wholesale migrating to azure. They’ve been struggling with uptime since before the enormous surge in agentic coding they’re seeing. I don’t doubt that AI has massively increased their load, but u think this is more suspect than that.

I think they’re referring to services using AI for coding and shipping bugs more often as a result.

They are definitely more outages but the question is if these outages are due to the providers using LLMs to build there products and are therefore not delivering the quality they did before or have LLMs enabled a completely new user base to create projects which they deploy in the free tiers of named providers and they simply cannot keep up with the growth and the new influx of free users is skewing their mixed calculations (free vs paid) so heavily that they cannot scale without losing money. I'd probably say it's a mix of both.

Enterprise software and support services have consideraby (in my personal experience) degraded over the last year.

Less care on process, or quality, more focus on "just ship".

I've also seen and heard from peers this happening in multiple smaller outsorcing companies.


Correct. There’s no incentive to be careful anymore when you can just prompt an LLM to fix it

No but everyone is pretending that everything is fine. Actually, no, no one is pretending anything. No one cares, really.

Not just you, but uncertain whether it's due to unreviewed slop going to production, or increased demand due to slop generation.

> is it me or

No, of course not.


No, it's not just you. It is fairly obvious what's happening - the same old Entshittificators now have a great tool to up the speed of entshitification by 100x - thus these crappy outages every other day.

Indian bureaucracy thinks extremely short term. The state prioritizes extracting revenue over all else. So many baffling short-term decisions over everything from corporate tax breaks to a incentives for global events like Formula 1.l

You really can’t expect the same bureaucratic setup to think in terms of the decade+ it would take to be competent at something like chips


Indian bureaucracy exists to enrich themselves for their next ten generations. The bureaucracy itself promotes, recruits incompetents. There is no way to reform such a bureaucracy.

The whole system needs to be dismantled while an alternative system gets built; given the nature of Indian politics (freebies/jobs/reservations to certain groups; monthly stipends to certain groups by borrowing money while at the same time looting public funds), it is impossible.


As an Indian, my quality of life would be improved more by the Indian state first figuring out how to make functional roads and garbage collection systems

India needs to first figure out the absolute basics


The way you pay for it is by producing goods that other countries want to buy.

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