I can recognize the short comings of AI code but it can produce a mock or a full blown class before I can find a place to save the file it produced.
Pretending that we are all busy writing novelty and genius is silly, 99% are writing for CRUD tasks and basic business flows, the code isn’t going to be perfect it doesn’t need to be but it will get the job done.
All the logical gotchas of the work flows that you’d be refactoring for hours are done in minutes.
Use pro with search… are it going to read 200 pages of documentation in 7 minutes come up with a conclusion and validate it or invalidate it in another 5? No you still trying accept the cookie prompt on your 6th result.
You might as well join the flat earth society if you still think that AI can’t help you complete day to day tasks.
We use Coinbase as an org, we were targeted in early Feb 2025. Caught by person handling the accounts who is paranoid enough to reach out to the org contact on the other side.
I run fleets for windows machines, servers, w10, w11, from a Mac.
What Microsoft has done to windows 10 and 11 is ridiculous.
Why is my taskbar still crashing in 2025. Why does opening task manager spike my cpu to 100%. Search its 2025, search still broken. OOBE experience is a joke.
For crying out loud I don’t even care if you make the entire gui rest based and hosted in azure it would perform better than the trash running now.
At this point the Azure management portal has a higher SLA and uptime than my task bar.
You dislike them because they don’t benefit you indirectly by benefiting society at large.
The incentive structure is wrong, incentivizing things that benefit society would be the solution not judging those that exist in the current system by pretending altruism is somehow not part of the same game.
I agree that the system itself is dysfunctional, and I understand the argument that individuals are shaped or even constrained by it. However, in this case, we are talking about people who are both exceptionally intelligent and materially secure. I think it's reasonable to expect such individuals to feel some moral responsibility to use their abilities for broader good.
As for whether that expectation is "selfish" on my part, I think that question has been debated for centuries in ethics, and I'm quite comfortable landing on the side that says not all disapproval is self-interest. In my own case, I'm not benefiting much either :)
I just don't think so, these exceptionally intelligent people are masters at pattern recognition, logic, hyper-focus, task completion in a field. Every single thing will tell them don't go against the flow, don't stick your neck out, don't be a hero, don't take on risk. Or you will end up nailed to a cross.
To me this is an insane position to take or to expect from anyone, its some just world fallacy thing perpetuated by too much Hollywood.
I am going to flip the script for a minute. I am a killer, driver, pilot, mechanic one the best ones out there, I beat the game, I won. So let me just stop and change the world, for what?
> Every single thing will tell them don't go against the flow, don't stick your neck out, don't be a hero, don't take on risk. Or you will end up nailed to a cross.
Except the situation is more like monkeys and a ladder. The ones "nailing them to the cross" are the same ones in those positions. This is the same logic as "life was tough for me, so life should be tough for you." It's idiotic!
> So let me just stop and change the world, for what?
This is some real "fuck you, I got mine" attitude. Pulling the ladder up behind you.
We have a long history in science of seeing that sticking your neck out, taking risks, and being different are successful tools to progressing science[0]. Why? Because you can't make paradigm shifts by maintaining the current paradigm. We've also seen that this behavior is frequently combated by established players. Why? Because of the same attitude, ego.
So we've created this weird system where we tell people to think different and then punish them for doing so. Yeah, people are upset about it. I find that unsurprising. So yeah, fuck you, stop pulling the ladder up behind you. You're talking as if they just leave the ladder alone, but these are the same people who end up reviewing papers, grants, and are thus the gatekeepers of progress. Their success gives them control of the ladders and they make the rules.
[0] Galileo, Darwin, Gauss, Kepler, Einstein, and Turing are not the only members of this large club. Even more recently we have Karikó who ended up getting the 2023 Nobel prize in Medicine and Akerlof, Spence, Stiglitz who got the 2001 Nobel prize in economics for their rejected work. This seems to even be more common among Nobel laureates!
There is a difference between being selfish in the sense that you want others to contribute back to the society that we are all part of, and being selfish in the sense that you want to compete for exclusive rewards.
You can call this difference whatever you want, don't pretend that they are morally or effectively equivalent.
Sure because you had to distribute sales and place product. You shifted marketing off to the retail location and distributor and you still controlled the price / mark up.
Pizza is already sold, the last mile delivery should have zero impact on its retail. Right now the last mile delivery has a near monopoly on retail of a restaurant. Pretending that toast/grubhub/seamless somehow benefit the customer is pure rubbish.
The average person in America is living paycheck to paycheck and has negative equity.
20 years ago you couldn’t see in Shanghai. Trump pulled back the clean air act, it’s not hard to see a trend. It’s also not hard to buy a ticket and see it yourself.
Great point, I almost wrote that they’ve cleaned up pollution (of all types) by a lot and also are accomplish some impressive feats by regreening and pushing back desertification. Amazing things can happen when you get your peoples basic needs met (ie, they can focus on higher level stuff).
60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. It depends on which Americans you are looking at if you want to understand who capitalist ownership is benefiting.
There is a ton of money being siphoned off with zero place to put it. When sv collapsed why does Roku park half a billion dollars in a bank account. Roku has 8th of Mazda’s net worth parked in a bank account… there is unchecked capitalization for the sake of the share price, this money is doing nothing except buying up competition.
The Roku example perfectly illustrates the deeper issue here - we're seeing a systemic breakdown in capital allocation that goes beyond the passive/active debate.
The real problem is a feedback loop: large companies get cheaper capital → they can afford to hoard cash and make defensive acquisitions → this reduces competition and innovation → which paradoxically makes them even "safer" investments → reinforcing their cost-of-capital advantage.
Meanwhile, the "missing middle" gets squeezed from both ends. Small companies can access some capital through VC/growth equity, but medium enterprises ($10M-$1B revenue) face a brutal gap. They're too big for most VCs, too small for institutional debt markets, and banks are increasingly consolidated and risk-averse.
(I am so personally familiar with the missing middle in my day job)
This isn't just about market efficiency - it's about market structure. When a streaming company parks $500M in bank accounts instead of investing in content or technology, that's not rational capital allocation. It's defensive positioning enabled by cheap capital and regulatory capture. There are many many lazy companies sitting on a cash machine structure with no decent ideas on how to grow.
Some potential fixes:
- Tax policy that penalizes excessive cash hoarding; eliminating the tax deduction on interest would encourage companies to hold less cash by making cash more expansive
- Regulatory limits on horizontal acquisitions above certain market share thresholds
- Public development banks focused on the missing middle (like Germany's KfW)
- Capital gains tax advantages for investments held in companies under certain size thresholds
The irony is that this concentration might ultimately hurt passive investors too - less competition means less innovation and slower long-term growth across the entire economy.
Nearly every startup I've talked to recently (last year or so) has been cash flow positive after just series A (or sometimes after just a seed round!)
Companies are pursuing smart business strategies and prioritizing healthy rates of growth over "hire everyone we can and figure out how to make a profit later". I'm seeing a lot of very focused businesses that are meeting customers demand right away and solving real problems. They aren't billion dollar problems, but they are profitable problems to solve. I wonder how the startup ecosystem will change if VCs start seeing 60% of companies making a healthy profit after a couple years, vs the historical trend of waiting a decade and hoping 1 company strikes it big. 60% of companies growing 10-20x ROI seems ... Not bad?
One problem of large mega corps is they don't even bother to go after new ideas that aren't multi-billion dollars markets. It used to be Microsoft would make a bunch of senior engineers filthy rich, they'd go boot strap a new company, and if the idea took off, Microsoft would aquire them again. Some people in the 90s/early 2000s pulled that off multiple times!
If some business is defensively buying off all the competition, that’s an easy ATM for a serial entrepreneur, especially if the large business is price gouging: found a competitor, grow it e.g. with some like-minded funding, sell it at a premium. Wait for the clauses of the contract to run out, and rinse and repeat.
The defensive acquisitions can work on domains with gravity effects to a degree, but those are domains are far from being the total market.
> found a competitor, grow it e.g. with some like-minded funding, sell it at a premium. Wait for the clauses of the contract to run out, and rinse and repeat.
Unrealistic, that strategy has no history of success. MariaDB tried... still wimpy.
> The defensive acquisitions can work on domains with gravity effects to a degree, but those are domains are far from being the total market.
Not so. Market size and inertia, connections, red tape and political weight are always present, fundamental forces of "gravity". They are the total market, at least the part of it that matters.
More importantly, even if your strategy of "feeding the machine for personal gain" did work, it amounts only to feeding the machine without changing its nature or direction. That strategy can benefit few individuals but it can't fix any of the issues discussed here.
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