> Do you see how you are making the same mistake? If you earn the millions you wanted then you will still be just as well off as you would have been before you found out about someone earning a trillion.

It’s not the same mistake. I’m doing fine. I have completely tuned my life and aspiration to my income. I need know more and I am personally satisfied. But forget morality and “who has enough”. Money is just not moving sufficiently in the system. And even traditional capitalists are sounding the alarm on this. It’s not about how much Elon Musk has compared to me. It’s looking at the total distribution of money.

But like all the rules about the economy and capitalism not being a zero sum game are dependent on moderation and a set of rules. AI companies really are sucking up all the capital leaving less money for smaller firms.

Depending on how AI companies tie themselves to the government, you could see bailouts and inflation that make us all poorer.

The thing about capitalism, is that there used to be a lot of things like say - stock buybacks that were implicitly immoral or against norms.

JD Rockefeller aside from starting a monopoly had deals with the railroads most people at the time found immoral and this was either against or before the concept of common carrier.

So like - there are a lot of ways in which - I want to be a sort of economically conservative capitalist. I want to live in a world where we have a set of rules that create a level playing field. But we’ve had this slow drip of deregulation and norm breaking over the past 100 years, and yet debates of socialism vs capitalism still sort of come down to oversimplified debates of “are you meritocratic or not”.

And then cap this off with the fact that business wealth is extremely concentrated in the magnificent 7; capitalism isn’t capitalism without competition. I forget the name of the group, but there are even though leaders on the right that see that like wealth is not currently distributed the way any reasonably moderate person - left or right - idealizes it to be. It feels like we are so far from the colloquial definition of - “someone has a good idea, invents it, sells it to people, and gets rewarded”.

On some level, if Elon musk sold 100 million cars and pocketed 10k each, I might not care if he was a trillionaire, but we need to realign incentives with tangible value and not financial games.

Yes, I have nothing against rewarding merit. I just also believe that those who are rewarded have a sort of a duty towards the rest of society.

And you can't really say that, because instantly you're attacked with "so you want Elon's money!" - I don't. I'm not even a US citizen. Not even a resident. But I also see the Starlink trails from my balcony and there are three Teslas parked in front of the building I live in right now. It's global.

I just believe owning $100B+ worth of assets, paying less % in taxes than the average Joe, while taking out loans against said assets is... corrupt. Not legally, but morally.

I really like Porsche. Then again, I made friends with a homeless guy a couple corners away. He's been on the streets for two years, can still make his way back.

I can't imagine sitting in a 911 without having first made sure he has a roof over his head.

And I'm not trying to signal virtue here, this is an anonoymous account after all.

> Consider the opportunity cost of snacking and seek the meal - the textbooks, docs, papers, manuals, longform. Allocate a 4 hour window. Don't just read, take notes, re-read, re-phrase, process, manipulate, learn.

I think it’s more of a bell curve. Andrej and I clearly have different definitions of fun, if he doesn’t think deep learning is fun. In fact I’d say I’ve only learned anything when I’m having fun. I might add almost every time I’ve sweat it’s been out of fun. I’ve never gotten a good workout from “vegetables” (though I like vegetables). Being miserable might work for him, but I don’t know if this advice is generalizable (his point is not entirely terrible, but maybe taken a little far. I think the problem is less “is this entertaining” and more “is this deeply enganging”

I’m not sure how to grok your response here. If cancel culture doesn’t concern you then fine?

Ignore their words entirely and pay attention only to the real world effects of their actions, whilst concentrating on your own plans and adjusting accordingly.

I don't say it as a gotcha. I say it to make clear that its an assumption baked into these laws that (a) I'm not sure a strong majority of people agree with and (b) creates further precedent for more government control over our lives and our children.

Edit: why is it you know these decisions should be made but you can't do it yourself? Do you not trust yourself, like an alcoholic avoiding one drink because it turns into 12, or do you not think you're capable of making the right choice at all?

> A lot of people say this is dumb because teenagers will figure out a way to bypass it. Good! That’s what teenagers are supposed to do.

So the teenagers bypass it and use other sites while us adults are handing our IDs over just to use basic websites?

How is this good?

I’m becoming something of an accelerationist on this issue. I think we’re at a dead end with like 5 companies controlling most of the internet. If this pisses people off and encourages them to get active politically or create new modes of communication. Great!

Freedom has to be more than “you can choose any walled garden you want!” We need more spaces that aren’t mediated.

I feel like we’ve accepted this terrible definition of freedom, out of fear it could get worse, not because we love what we have.

But not to worry, I feel comfortable having contrarian views, because my one vote isn’t going to radically change the world.

You're basing everything on a flawed assumption: That the regulations will be most difficult for the big websites, but not be an impediment to small communities.

It never works that way. The more regulations you add, the harder it becomes to have a small community on the internet. The big companies can spend money to comply and lobby. The small communities cannot.

We are already seeing this. There are websites blocking the UK because they can't afford to comply with all of their laws. Even websites that try to block the UK are getting threats from Ofcom for not ID-checking their users: https://www.reddit.com/r/LegalAdviceUK/comments/1rk690v/i_ru...

The end game of your accelerationism isn't a utopia where we're all back to small communities.

The end game is that small communities die out because the only companies who can navigate, comply, and lobby are those 5 companies you hated. You're cheering on the consolidation of the internet.

There’s a reasons I described it as accelerationism. I think whatever the next thing is probably hasn’t been invented yet, but I would hope the discomfort of exclusion might inspire it. It only works if enough people feel left out - I.e. all under 16s

But yeah, it’s not without risks.

But there’s two sort of self-identified reasons for freedom of speech.

One is to get the best ideas on the table. I’m a little suss of this one (when taken to extremes) because speech that costs nothing is just noise.

The second is to make sure everyone has an outlet to express themselves so they don’t rebel. And while I certainly don’t want to see violent rebellion, I think maybe a bit more social and political rebellion wouldn’t be the end of the world.

The typical medium for the internet today, even among many people who would have been computer nerds in days of yore, is the smartphone, i.e. primarily a consumption device. I can't see people becoming so pissed out that they would overcome the limitations of the phone and actually create bold new modes of communication. Just using an alternative prepackaged app like Signal is way out there for most people.

Despite propaganda to the contratry, meatspace is still an option.

I get that many of us were all technologists here. But it’s a weird inclusion because - it seems to imply that this was your red line and when you became aware that this administration might be racist and nationalist?

I don’t think export controls on large language models would enter my top 50 in terms of actions this administration has taken to show that.

> it seems to imply that this was your red line and when you became aware that this administration might be racist and nationalist?

If you read my blog you should have seen plenty of content before to get an idea why my red lines are. I even have a separate blog on that entirely: dark.ronacher.eu. My line is not here.

If Musk sold a 100 million cars at $50k each and pocketed 10k of that, I’d be mostly fine with that.

But so much of the value he’s generated is hype, speculation and regulatory capture, and even if you don’t give a shit about the poor, from a more traditional business / right wing perspective his gains are not sufficiently distributed across the economy. The number of companies going public has tanked. Like wealth consolidation is impacting traditional avenues of mobility. All the things we say we want from capitalism are suffering.

It seems like at some point we completely divorced wealth and number go up as moral indicators on their own, without stopping to ask if these really were doing all the things we said capitalists did like creating jobs.

I think a while ago, Musk realized that hype was a more reliable wealth extraction than exchange with society, and it’s pretty fucked if we aren’t alarmed when incentives become this misaligned.

Anthropic really sped run their “don’t be evil” phase.