But what happens when the bill comes in? That's my biggest fear. I heard on a recent podcast that it is a great time to be a micro-entrepreneur, and I think that's true right now because AI is so cheap. But AI companies are hemorraghing money. What happens to those micro-entrepreneurs when the price goes up? Are we going to live in a world where only large, rich corporations can afford to competitively develop things? Maybe so, but it is depressing to think about.
For the plebeians (like me), I think hand-coding skills will always be relevant and necessary.
It's unclear whether the price increases we saw for ride sharing (for example) will come to AI. There's plenty of competition and not much in the way of lock-in. And by the time the bubble is over, the underlying costs may have dropped due to improved algorithms.
It might be more like personal computing in the 80's, when Moore's law resulted in both more usage and cheaper prices as the tech improved.
Or it could be an awful lot of productivity. We have to think bigger. What would the world look like if every programmer were a 10x (or whatever) programmer?
In the 90s, you would have said the exact same thing about linux on the PC.
Free software ultimately has time on its side. As long as a project has enough mindshare to keep its momentum, it really is unstoppable in the long run.
Where Linux shines is the absolute for-profit cloud/server world.
Open source has places where it works really nice, bazaar is better at "wider" stuff (having an active community, etc), while cathedral is more deeper/better at vertical integration, etc.
As you noted, fan fiction is legal. You just can't make a profit from it, which I think is fair. Also, IP laws force people to come up with their own characters and their own twists on old stories. I would argue this is a good thing. Inventive ideas like Pokemon may not exist if people could just reuse other people's IP to make a buck.
> Inventive ideas like Pokemon may not exist if people could just reuse other people's IP to make a buck.
This doesn't make sense because people invent ideas all the time without intention of making money off it - such as the plots of fan fiction, which you yourself noted. Fan fiction represents untold tens of thousands of human-hours of effort.
Depends on the country. Many countries don't have fair use laws; thus, fan fiction is technically illegal there. In practice though you're not likely to be sued unless you're making a significant amount of money or damaging the brand value somehow.
> fan fiction is legal. You just can't make a profit from it, which I think is fair.
The term "fair" is intellectually imprecise.
In a policy context, appeals to "fairness" often serve as a rhetorical proxy for subjective preferences rather than an objective moral framework.
When centralized systems attempt to institutionalize "fairness" as a primary directive, the resulting information-calculation problems and rent-seeking often lead to catastrophic externalities.
Consider the extreme end of state-mandated equity:
- The Henan Plasma Scandal: In the 1990s, a government-backed "plasma economy" intended to alleviate rural poverty through "fair" compensation led to the pooling and reinjection of contaminated blood, infecting an estimated 1.2 million people with HIV.
- The One-Child Policy: A "fair" distribution of population growth led to forced abortions, mass abandonment of female infants, and a 30-million-person gender imbalance.
In the specific context of IP, the "fairness" of restricting profit from derivative works is a misnomer. US copyright law (17 U.S.C. 107) relies on Fair Use, which is a balancing test of market harm and transformative value, not a moral judgment on what an author "deserves".
Denying a creator the right to profit from their labor is simply a protectionist market intervention; calling it "fair" merely obscures the economic trade-off.
> When centralized systems attempt to institutionalize "fairness" as a primary directive, the resulting information-calculation problems and rent-seeking often lead to catastrophic externalities.
Sounds like you’re focusing on Eastern society examples and some are a stretch. If you believe “institutionalized fairness” is unequivocally wrong, what do you think of the more Western “DEI”? It’s a standout example of “equity”.
Is your opinion that DEI results in the same kind of bad outcome? Do you think that Western societies can pull off “institutionalized fairness” better than Eastern ones? Are you drawing a biased picture by highlighting the failures without putting them in the larger context along with any possible successes?
DEI is fine. The problem isn’t the goal of treating people well; it’s the structural error of trying to institutionalize "fairness" as a top-down directive.
Whether it’s an AI or a government, centralized systems are remarkably bad at optimizing for vague moral proxies because they lack the local feedback loops required to avoid catastrophe.
Western history is littered with these feedback failures. The British government’s commitment to an ideological "fairness" in market non-interference during the Irish Potato Famine led to 1 million deaths. Their wartime resource distribution in the 1943 Bengal Famine killed 3 million more. Even the American eugenics movement was framed as a "fair" optimization of the population; it sterilized 64,000 citizens and provided the foundational model for the Nazi T4 program.
In the context of IP, claiming it’s "fair" to deny a creator compensation for their labor is just a way to subsidize an abstraction at the expense of individual incentive. When you replace objective market signals with a bureaucrat’s (or an algorithm’s) definition of equity, you don't get a more just system- you just get a system that has stopped solving for reality.
The stated goal is always to treat people well. The unstated goal, if there is one, is hard to determine.
So you cherry picked some bad outcomes which just happen to be from the same part of the world, didn’t provide context for your reader to understand if that outcome is the rule or the exception, when asked about other things that fit under your wide brush “argument” your comeback was a weak “except that, it doesn’t count” (half of Americans voted for the guy who stomped on DEI so your “treating well” argument isn’t shared by a democratic majority for better or worse). This on a fresh account screams hidden agenda.
And n the wider topic of fairness, it’s hard to formally define what fair or unfair are. But you know it when you see it. The way copyright law works today is a prime example of unfair to “everyone else”.
> Inventive ideas like Pokemon may not exist if people could just reuse other people's IP to make a buck.
Ironic.
Pokémon drew inspiration from a number of areas including Ultraseven, which had the concept of the main character having number of capsules containing miniaturized monsters, which come out and return to their original sizes when the capsule is thrown into mid-air.
> Purpose-driven institutions built around transparency, cooperation, and accountability empower individuals to take intellectual risks and challenge the status quo.
I am not sure if I am off-topic, but I am having a lot of trouble with this statement. Institutions are often opaque, and I have never belonged to an institution that empowered me to "take intellectual risks and challenge the status quo." Quite the contrary.
Last-mile services like roads, electricity, water, and telecommunications are natural monopolies. Normal market forces fail somewhat and you want some government involvement to keep it running smoothly.
It's someone asking to open up a communication channel after they (Mozilla) had already overwritten another person's work to the point that person is no longer willing to participate in the organization. What is there to talk about?
The volunteer was kind to list their grievances before bouncing. A lot of people would have just quietly quit.
> Do you think Trump's being paid by ByteDance to lift the ban?
There is never a need to be that direct. Republican and Democrat donors tell politicians what positions to take. Trump doesn't need to take money directly from a company. He takes it from his donors, who in turn take it from the company in some form.
In this case, the theory is that billionaire Jeff Yass (an investor in Tik Tok) has "persuaded" Trump to flip his position.
rbanffy's comment was exactly as direct as I specified, and I'll reiterate their comment for posterity - "I’m sure they expect the issue to be resolved by paying the incoming president".
My understanding now is that now we've shifted from "ByteDance pays Trump to flip" to "American businessman Jeff Yass meets with Trump and convinces him to flip"
I hope you can understand that as a non-American observer I see a lot of distance between those two claims and find myself confused when they're treated with equivalency.
How out of touch with general politics are you? This is how things are done, globally, in every democracy, since forever, you just need to look close enough. I can see similar type of corruption all over Switzerland for example where I live, mostly in public projects and decisions. Locals mostly don't see anything, so everybody is happy. You just have to have a keen eye for corruption, which is easy for somebody coming from eastern Europe since there its ingrained in the system(s) and permeates every aspect of societies.
Non-democratic places have more direct path for bribes but otherwise its same.
I’d say I’m generally fairly in touch with global politics, it’s a bit inflammatory for you to ask, truthfully.
I think that local level corruption in my small town in Canada or in yours in Switzerland is pretty markedly different from what’s been originally presented, which is that DJT was paid directly by ByteDance to adjust his position.
I said that ByteDance expects that paying Trump will make everything go away. From his comment on an executive order, it seems clear he’s willing to go over a law passed by the Congress.
It doesn’t even need to go through Jeff Yass. It can just be a new Trump resort and casino getting expedited approval in Hong Kong, or some other place. Imagine the business opportunities being POTUS will bring to him and his family. The possibilities for corruption are endless.
It doesn't take much imagination; he spent 4y as POTUS and most people agree it was to his personal benefit. I'm not aware of this leading to expedited approvals for Trump resorts in other countries, but it seems you're more familiar with his dealings than I am.
I'd still love your clarification though - do you still stand by the claim that Trump is being paid to reneg on his position re. TikTok, as per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42755872 ?
For the plebeians (like me), I think hand-coding skills will always be relevant and necessary.
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