Look at bandcamp. They unionized successfully. Then the company got sold (again), and everyone but the union leaders (and prominent members) got job offers from the new parent company. Basically got reverse-fired.

I still suspect part of the reason Epic sold them is to ninja-bust the union (or at least get it out of the way).

I don't know.

> Look at bandcamp. They unionized successfully. Then the company got sold (again), and everyone but the union leaders (and prominent members) got job offers from the new parent company. Basically got reverse-fired.

That seems like something that should be illegal, if it's not already. It seems like a paper maneuver.

It should probably be expected that employers will play dirty, which is one of the reasons why I think the unions need to be hyper-focused on worker and workplace issues to the exclusion of all else.

Edit: last news i see on their mastodon are from April 2024 and seems they negotiated some severance pay for the laid off workers and that it; so I guess the union busting was successful?

Can you tell me where you work, and are you hiring???

That collapse didn't happen.

I think the record single instance uptime on a customer site was most of a decade, running a TV station.

If the factory workers don't show up for work, your factory's output immediately drops to 0%. If none of your software engineers show up, most of your company's code will continue to run, some of it in a degraded state, for a while. (How much depends on your sub-industry, and how much you're outsourcing to AWS). And if you can get 5% of your workers to show up, you might be able to handle 90% of the on-call load.

Also initially they had a lot of breakage.

And, for now at least, advertisers on twitter can't sell products to these bots. So lost money.

- the insane frothing hype behind AI is showing me a new kind of market failure - where resources can be massively misallocated just because some small class of individuals THINK or HOPE it will result in massive returns. Even if it squeezes out every single other sector that happens to want to use SDRAM to do things OTHER than buffer memory before it's fed into a PCIE lane for a GPU.

- I'm really REALLY glad i decided to buy brand new gaming laptops for my wife and I just a couple months ago, after not having upgraded our gaming laptops for 7 and 9 years respectively. It seems like gamers are going to have this the worst - GPUs have been f'd for a long time due to crypto and AI, and now even DRAM isn't safe. Plus SSD prices are going up too. And unlike many other DRAM users where it's a business thing and they can to some degree just hike prices to cover - gamers are obviously not running businesses. It's just making the hobby more expensive.

There's too much group-think in the executive class. Too much forced adoption of AI, too much bandwagon hopping.

The return-to-office fad is similar, a bunch of executives following the mandates of their board, all because there's a few CEOs who were REALLY worked up about it and there was a decision that workers had it too easy. Watching the executive class sacrifice profits for power is pretty fascinating.

Edit: A good way to decentralize the power and have better decision making would be to have less centralized rewards in the capital markets. Right now are living through a new gilded age with a few barons running things, because we have made the rewards too extreme and too narrowly distributed. Most market economics assumes that there's somewhat equal decision making power amongst the econs. We are quickly trending away from that.

At least before there was a certain common baseline derived from everyone watching the same news and reading the same press. Now they are just as enclosed in their thought bubbles as everyone else. It is entirely possible for a tech CEO to have a full company of tech workers despising the current plan and yet that person being constantly reinforced by linkedin and chatgpt.

I remember first hearing the phrase "yes man" in relation to a human ass kisser my dad worked with in like 1988.

It's very easy to unknowingly surround yourself with syncophants and hangers on when you literally have more money than some countries. This is true now and has been true forever. I'm not sure they're more out of touch, as much as we're way more aware?

I think you're underestimating a bit. We must implement AI because they were able to sell it so good that they got billion $ investors (see all the money coming from Qatar/saudi arabia etc). That's a lot of money coming in that allows to innovate/etc.

I swear that every 5-10 years, corporate CEOs all get together in a secret meeting where they all agree on the next buzzword technology. They invite Harvard Business Review and the tech press to give them their marching orders. Then, finally, the white smoke comes forth from the chimney indicating the next bubble buzzword has been chosen, and the industry goes bananas over it for 10 years for no reason.

It "could be anything", but the current AI trends/updates are really impressive. This is why they are investing.

If we reach a limit in the next 5 years, so be it. But it's driving and pushing for a paradigm shift in the way things work - search, coding, tooling, etc. It touches almost anything people do, not a specific group of people, but society as a whole.

Perhaps a better approach to anti-monopoly and anti-trust is possible, but I'm not sure anybody knows what that is. Khan was very well regarded and I don't know anybody who's better at it.

Another approach would be a wealth and income taxation strategy to ensure sigmoid income for the population. You can always make more, but with diminishing returns to self, and greater returns to the rest of society.

Don't pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel and bandwidth by the exabyte-second. Or at least, don't do it a month before an election.

That being said, Kamala's refusal to run on Kahn's record definitely helped cost her the election. She thought she could play footsie with Wall Street and SV by backchanneling that she would fire Kahn, so she felt like she couldn't say anything good about Kahn without upsetting the oligarchs, but what she was doing was really popular.

Well, assuming they haven't revived the cartel.

This is in the right spirit but you want two things to be different about it.

The first is that the threshold for a given industry doesn't make sense as a dollar amount, it makes sense as a market share percentage. Having more than 15% market share should be a thing companies don't want, regardless of whether it's a $100 trillion industry or a $100 million one.

And the second is that taxes create a perverse incentive for the government. You absolutely do not want the government to have even more of a financial incentive to sustain and create more of the companies of that size. What you want is to have fewer of them.

So, what you want is a rule that if a company has more than 15% market share, the entire general public is allowed to sue them into bankruptcy for the offense of market consolidation. Which also removes the problem where they buy off the government prosecutors, because if they commit the offense then anybody can sue them.

who bears the costs of this suit?

And who determines what makes for a good market share size to be the threshold?

And by having such a rule, an industry that would have higher efficiency to when consolidated would not be able to (but you wouldn't know). It's a bad set of policy imho.

A better way would be for gov't to increase competition by adding supply, or demand, whichever one is the bottleneck to competition. If a company, such as AWS, is getting a lot of marketshare, but their profit margins is still high, then the gov't should incentivize competition by funding or giving loans to businesses that want to compete with AWS.

However, if AWS's profit margins, even at high market share, remains very low (e.g., amazon's commerce side), then there's no need for the gov't to "step in" at all, as there would be no incentive for any competitor to try enter the market due to low margins.

The goal is to not have it happen, because the company is going to see that they're only slightly below the threshold and voluntarily split themselves into smaller pieces and buy themselves a safety margin because if they don't everybody knows the lawsuits are going to vaporize them once they exceed the threshold.

> And who determines what makes for a good market share size to be the threshold?

Anything in the vicinity of 5%-15% would be fine.

> And by having such a rule, an industry that would have higher efficiency to when consolidated would not be able to (but you wouldn't know).

This is extremely rare and the circumstances where it happens aren't a mystery. It's when entering the market has extremely high fixed costs but then the unit cost of usage is negligible, e.g. it costs a huge amount of money to install water and sewer but then the incremental cost of someone washing their hands is insignificant.

For those things you either have the government do them, or if it's a private company then it's a regulated utility which is completely banned from anything that even vaguely resembles vertical integration as the price of being allowed to have more than the threshold amount of market share.

> A better way would be for gov't to increase competition by adding supply, or demand, whichever one is the bottleneck to competition.

The problem is generally caused by the incumbents capturing the government and then enacting rules that inhibit rather than increase competition. That's why you need anyone to be able to initiate the lawsuit, so they can't capture the government department which is supposed to be thwarting them because then it's the entire public.

so why not solve this issue directly? Transparency, auditing and public awareness etc are needed to prevent regulatory capture. Public apathy are the reason why it is currently "easy" to do capture regulators.

The fact is even if a law suit is possible from anyone in the public, no one is going to pay to do a law suit (which has costs), when the result doesn't net them more profit. So unless the law suit enables the accuser to wholesale take a piece of that company as private property from the owners - which no law currently would allow nor have precedents for - why would anyone expend private money for a public good?

And in any case, i don't the apathy going away, even if the law suit was free. Because currently, the same apathy is allowing regulatory capture in the first place. So solving public apathy first, and foremost, is the solution.

It's mostly easy because the people doing it are good at lying. When they create a rule it isn't called the "mandate this company's product rule" or the "increase fixed costs to lock out smaller competitors rule", it's sold as a safety measure or consumer protection or some other pretext, even though the effect is to raise costs to the benefit of the companies getting the money or exclude competitors to the benefit of the incumbents.

Or they simply don't prosecute antitrust violations, and then there is nothing to audit because there is nothing happening, meanwhile people are kept distracted with other things.

> The fact is even if a law suit is possible from anyone in the public, no one is going to pay to do a law suit (which has costs), when the result doesn't net them more profit.

It does net them more profit. The premise is that having more than the threshold amount of market share is a strict liability antitrust violation, which allows any customer or prospective customer (i.e. anyone) to sue them for it. The person who files the lawsuit would get the money, the same as someone who sues a company for pollution or fraud.

The point of letting people sue you for polluting or fraud or, in this case, market consolidation, isn't to make plaintiffs rich, it's to deter the thing you don't want companies to do. The goal isn't to have a lot of lawsuits, the goal is to have companies not want the market to consolidate and actively prevent it because if it happens they'll get sued.

> So solving public apathy first, and foremost, is the solution.

Apathy is cyclical. People don't care until the problem gets bad enough, then they care enough to demand change and make it go away for a while, then they stop caring until it gets bad enough again.

But you don't want people to have to die or get severely abused before the problem gets addressed. What you want is to change the structure of the system to prevent it from getting that bad to begin with, by making sure that the power to nip the problem in the bud (i.e. stop market consolidation at 5% or 15% instead of 50% or 90%) is held by someone who will actually exercise it, which can be accomplished by granting that power to everyone affected, which in this context is each and every member of the public.

That's not really a convincing argument. The government is the body for setting up the economic rules, it is not bound by it. The government doesn't have revenue or profit. Money is created by the government, it doesn't have a value yet. The direct financing of actions through taxes is not done for the government, but a way for the government to project the costs of the governmental action into the economy. Sure, there are a lot of idiots now-a-days, that think a state should work like a business and make profits, but they are misled.

When a new law is proposed, the Congressional Budget Office prepares a report on the impact it will have on the budget.

Now suppose a new law is proposed that will remove an existing unfair advantage of large companies over small ones, causing more small companies to form and take market share from incumbent larger ones. If large companies pay a 50% tax rate and small companies pay a 10% tax rate, the CBO analysis will show tax revenue going down. Then in order to make up the shortfall at a given level of deficit spending, the government would have to raise taxes or reduce spending, both of which are unpopular, so instead the bill gets tabled and the huge companies retain their unfair advantage. That's the perverse incentive we don't want to see.

> Money is created by the government, it doesn't have a value yet.

If the government can create an unlimited amount of money with no drawbacks, why don't they just send everyone a check for a trillion dollars? If they can't then whatever they want to spend in excess of what they can get away with printing or borrowing has to come from tax revenues, and then what happens when you set up an incentive structure where the government gets more money to spend the bigger they allow companies to get?

> Sure, there are a lot of idiots now-a-days, that think a state should work like a business and make profits, but they are misled.

This is a straw man. The only people who think the government should make a net profit are the people trying to build some kind of sovereign wealth fund. The US government isn't doing anything even resembling that -- it has been running massive deficits for decades. It's to the point that interest on the debt is now a major component of the budget -- we're now spending about as much on interest as on Medicare.

Chip fabs used to be like book publishers; you don't have to own a printing press to be an author. Carver Mead even described his vision of the industry that way.

Nowadays you have to get your cell libraries and a large chunk of your toolchain from the fab. Of course it's laundered through cadence+synopsys, but it's still coming from the fab. You have to buy your masks from the fab (heck they aren't even allowed to leave the fab so do you really own them?). And on and on.

For the record I don't agree with the "exponential" part, but otherwise this is an underappreciated and powerful technique.

I can still make a book like that in my basement. People do this as a hobby now. You can still build chips like that in your garage. People do this as a hobby now.

These things DO NOT SCALE... you cant have 10,000 people running printing presses in their basement to crank out the NYT every day. A modern chip fab has more in common with the printer for the NYT than it does with what you can crank out in your garage.

Let's look at TSMC's plant in AZ. They went and asked intel "hey where are you sourcing your sulfuric acid from. When they looked at the American vendors TSMC asked intel "how are you working with this". Intels response was that it was the best they could get.

It was not.

TSMC now imports sulfuric acid from Taiwan, because it needs to be outrageously pure. Intel is doing the same.

Every single part, component, step and setup in the chain is like that. There is so much arcane knowledge that loss of workers represents a serious set back. There are people in the production chain, with PHD's, who are literally training their successors because thats sort of the only option.

Do you know who has been trying the approach you are proposing? China. It has not worked.

https://www.youtube.com/asianometry probably the best rough and ready education you can get on the industry.

The complexity of actual fabrication was always, and still is, entirely within the foundry. But in the early days of that model, designs could be more easily handed off at the logical level, leaving the physical design to back end companies, which makes designs much more portable between foundries. (The publisher analogy.) What's changed is that the complexity of physical design has exploded, and you can't make the handoff at nearly as high a level, and there is much more work that depends directly on the specific process you are targeting. Much more work at the physical level falls to the fabless semi companies. So it is much more work to retarget a design to a different foundry or process.

> https://www.youtube.com/asianometry probably the best rough and ready education you can get on the industry.

I would take anything from that channel regarding China with a pinch of salt.

You can absolutely manufacture a convincingly-professional, current-generation book in your basement with a practically-small capital investment.

You cannot manufacture a convincingly-professional chip (being generous: feature size and process technology from the last two decades) in your basement without a 6-7 figure capital expenditure, and even then - good luck.

The latter would have to be backstopped by taxes on individual income.

I think this is actually the long tail of "too big to fail." It's not that they're all thinking the same way, it's that they're all no longer hedging their bets.

> we have made the rewards too extreme and too narrowly distributed

We give the military far too much money in the USA.

I don't think there is even a good solution for that. Govt could essentially sponsor some competition but that's easy to go from "helping to market" to "handouts for incompetent"

~ themafia, 2025

(sorry)

On a more serious note the military is sure a money burning machine, but IMHO it's only government spending, when most of the money in the US is deliberately private.

The fintech sector could be a bigger representation of a money vacuuming system benefiting statistically nobody ?

It's also the case that none of the CIA, NSA or DHS budgets show up under the military, even though they're performing some of the same functions that would be handled by militaries in other countries.

We also have "black appropriations." So the total of the spending on surveillance and kinetic operations is often unknowable. Add to this the fact the Pentagon has never successfully performed an audit and I think people are right to be suspicious of the topline "fraction of GDP" number.

At least not in the data set I use:

https://www.usaspending.gov/explorer/agency

Comparing budgets by adjusting for inflation doesn't make any sense. A budget that served a country of 218 million in 1976 would, when adjusted for inflation, serve a country of 218 million in 2026. Percentage of GDP is what you want to look at.

Budget-to-GDP ratio in the US is close to 40%. (On that note, you should really consider federal + state combined rather than just federal.)

In early 1900s this same ratio was around 5-10%.

It has been increasing pretty much everywhere during the 20th century. It has made me wonder whether much of the prosperity we've seen and felt might not be a result of this ever-increasing percentage. Essentially we're spending more and more and that makes it feel like we're progressing faster than we are. Eventually it's going to have to stop though and I dread what happens when we do.

I don't see why we'd eventually have to stop this level of spending. The debt is unsustainable, but that's a policy choice to keep taxes too low for the level of spending we've chosen.

https://www.cbo.gov/publication/59946

In theory I guess this creates a demand that should be satisfied by the market but in reality it seems like when the wealth is too concentrated in the hands of the few that call all the decision the market is unable to act.

But the power concentration is a strong reason. That level of wealth is incompatible with democracy. Money is power, and when someone accumulates enough of it to be able to personally shake entire industries, it's too much.

It's avoidable by formalizing the execution of power. The head of state is very powerful, but he can't create laws or anything. That all needs to be done be the parliament, which is several hundred people.

Sure, the US does it differently, yet the parliament seems to often just not do anything and let courts legislate instead. Then you end up in this weird situation where the supreme court positions end up being extremely partisan to set the "correct" precedent.

Either way there's a lot of power in the executive in either system.

What you're saying basically boils down to: kings are inevitable, might as well choose them by economic success instead of the more old-fashioned approaches. I reject the first part.

First, if the people can incentivize the government enough to tax the wealthy with outrageous amounts, then those same people will demand regulation on everything whenever something goes wrong. You end up with a poor country this way. Second, the wealthy can just leave or influence the policy to be changed.

Also, the irony is that the US is already one of the best countries when it comes to taxing the wealthy instead of the poor. You don't have a 20-25% VAT that applies to everything you buy. You have a progressive income tax and your payroll tax (that avoids the progressive part) isn't a giant ~30% of gross income. You don't have giant excise taxes on things like gasoline that makes everything more expensive (including food). You also generally don't have punitive taxes on things that poor people buy a lot of, like sodas and similar.

The list above are things that are done by (a lot of) European countries. Our "welfare states" don't exist because rich people pay a large share, it's because everyone does.

A centralized authority capable of so severely restricting the economic freedom of the most powerful people implies a far greater concentration of power than the one you're fighting against. You're proposing to cure the common cold with AIDS.

Yes. That's the idea. Make the largest concentration of power an elected body auditable by the commons and whose actions are formalized by a bunch of rules, that they can choose, but still need to stick to.

So, billionaires are bad because they can use their money to enter into voluntary deals with other people, which can lead to them achieving goals we don't like. Therefore, we create a single point of concentration of power with totalitarian control and dictatorial powers, that can take resources from people they don't like and give those resources to others they do like.

And these people with totalitarian control over the commons and dictatorial powers over the commons and the most powerful lever on everyone whatsoever and especially on everyone with huge amount of money, will continue to be electable and auditable by the commons because... I don't know, probably because they feel like it, there is literally no other reasons or incentives for them to do so.

"Big money give a human to much power, so let's take all that power from EVERYONE, concentrate it in ONE PLAСE, and add to this power dictatorial powers and totalitarian control over society. Some might argue that this is the exact opposite of the stated goals of the whole undertaking, but they do not take into account the insurmountable protection in the form of MAGICAL RULES with the help of which society will be able to control all of this"

What matters to power is people, not places. Having power concentrated in one place, made up of hundreds of people who are elected and can be replaced, is fine. Having power concentrated in one or a few people is where things go wrong.

But yeah in the end companies behave in trends, if some companies do it then the other companies have to do it too, even if this makes things less efficient or is even hurtful. We can put that onto the human factor, but I think even if we replaced all CEOs with AIs, those AIs would all see the same information and make similar decisions on those information.

There is pascal's wager arguments to be had: for each individual company, the punishment of not playing the AI game and missing out on something big is bigger than the punishment of wasting resources by allocating them towards AI efforts plus annoying customers with AI features they don't want or need.

> Right now are living through a new gilded age with a few barons running things, because we have made the rewards too extreme and too narrowly distributed.

The usa has rid itself multiple times of its barons. There is mechanisms in place, but I am not sure that people really are going to exercise those means any time soon. If this AI stuff is successful in the real world as well, then increasing amounts of power will shift away from the people to the people controlling the AI, with all the consequences this has.

The only saving grace is that it can die and others will scoop up released resources.

When country level planned economy dies, people die and resources get destroyed.

Ideally. Realistically in market with only few companies around it makes it even less competitive.

That's the case in a healthy competitive market. Once you have a monopoly or an oligopoly, you get into central planning territory.

Economists have concepts and models for monopolies and oligopolies — and the way they operate are quite different from the practice of central planning.

I’m talking from within the frame of economic concepts, and I’m striving to use words as understood in the field. At times I value metaphorical thinking, but here in the case of economics, we don’t need to bend words when other fitting concepts are readily available and battle-tested.

An example: If someone calls corporate consolidation “central planning,” they’ve lost the ability to analyze it properly. The relevant questions for oligopolies (strategic behavior, barriers to entry, tacit collusion) are completely different from central planning questions (calculation problems, information aggregation, incentive alignment).

When technical fields have already solved a conceptual problem through careful definition and model building, importing loose metaphorical language degrades analytical clarity.

If you want to point to or propose a different model than the usual economic dogma, I’m all ears, by the way.

The claim isn't that it is exactly like central planning like a state, but very similar through the view on the whole society. You have a powerful caucus, no longer bound by reality (competition), making decisions, that they think are good, which effectively set the pace for the whole economy field. Whether this caucus formed through rigged elections or by inheritance of companies isn't all that relevant. It would be quite a different story, if the state would enforce its monopoly on (political) power and governing, but it refuses to do so now-a-days.

> The relevant questions for oligopolies (strategic behavior, barriers to entry, tacit collusion) are completely different from central planning questions (calculation problems, information aggregation, incentive alignment).

The observation on these oligopolies, that are now larger than some states is, that they seem to lack in their strategic reasoning and are more built on vibes of their leader, which is subject to blindness due to sycophants, much like in an authoritarian regime. Also they tend to treat the whole market as their internal planning problem.

> but here in the case of economics, we don’t need to bend words when other fitting concepts are readily available and battle-tested.

I think a majority of commenters on HN are not as well-versed in Economics as you, so would value elaboration on modern monopolies. I think they differ a bit from classical monopolies in their amount of ties to the government and interference into elections. Not that lobbying isn't typical for monopolies, but modern monopolies seem to not need to lobby anymore, but simply do and dictate.

Yes, there are several problems with oligopolies and monopolies. You referred to one: a kind of blinkered irrationality. Also, capable and strategic self-interest can threaten free markets.

I don’t expect readers here to have the equivalent of a US bachelor degree in economics (though I think this is likely to be a valuable skillset to learn in one’s free time).

Still, I’m hoping they can recognize when they’re stepping into an unfamiliar realm and pay attention to the feeling of “seems like economists are using certain words in particular ways that I should dig into rather than treat them as known vocabulary.” Achieving this level of self-awareness is probably hard for many. To build a deep sense of intellectual honesty and self-awareness of one’s cognitive limitations, I think one can do worse than working closely and intensely with others who also care about these traits. Mentorship helps.

Back to Econ… It also helps to remember in much of economists, these terms are founded in mathematical models. So the interpretation might be subjective, but the mathematical model (the operations) are formalized.

And of course I will grant firms use hierarchical coordination mechanisms internally (managers allocate resources by command rather than prices).

I suppose my angle here is to be clear that firms are typically a kind of hybrid entity: they mix various coordination mechanisms (prices and hierarchy). This makes them quite different from centrally planned economies.

Next, to avoid a definitional stalemate and talking past each other, let me try a different angle. If you want to predict what a company will do next, what mix of models do you use upon?

If I were to predict a company’s production choices, I would model them as being very sensitive to costs and changing dynamics to maximize profit . I would not do that when modeling a centrally planned economy. For that I would use longer time scales and do long supply chain analysis in the service of a social welfare function. See what I mean? What am I missing from your POV?

You describe politics not market economy. It was fully present in communist, state wide, planned economies.

If you want to add “politics” to your causal map, that’s fine too. Reality is multi-factor. I do not deny that leaders make (to varying degrees) political and-or command-and-control decisions. This was already baked into the conversational context. Please take the conversational history into account.

I wouldn’t phrase it this way — to me, this implies unpredictability and/or a lack of rationale. Perhaps you simply mean “internal managers at companies do not necessarily price resources using market mechanisms” which I would agree with.

Many fields of study give insight to the various kinds of distortions that arise from human psychology and negotiation, etc.

Exactly, same as in centrally planned economy.

It's a form of "centralized planning", except it's not centralized at all.

No, it's pure capitalism where Atlas shrugged and ordered billions worth of RAM. You might not like it but don't call it "centralized planning" or "Soviet era".

We have been living on the investment of previous centuries and decades in the West for close to 40 years now. Everything is broken but that didn't matter because everything that needed a functioning physical economy had moved to the East.

AI is the first industrial breakthrough in a century that needs the sort of infrastructure that previous industrial revolutions needed: namely a ton of raw power.

The bubble is laying bare just how terrible infrastructure is and how we've ignored trillions of maintenance to give a few thousand people tax breaks they don't really need.

All the infrastructure will be useless when the data centers move to the next city/state offering a tax cut.

You are being obtuse for the sake of AI doomerism.

Is it?

The British didn't industrialise Indian for a reason.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De-industrialisation_of_India

This resonates deeply, especially to someone born in the USSR.

You can blame irrational exuberance, bubbles, or whatnot markets are ultimately individual choices times economic power. Ai, Crypto, housing, Dotcom etc going back through history all had excess because it’s not obvious when to join and when to stop.

If it was a couple billion dollars of memory purchasing nobody would care.

It happens more often than you might expect.

The Onion Futures Act and what led to it is always a fun read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onion_Futures_Act

Except that these corporations will almost certainly get a bail out, under the auspices of national security or some other BS. The current admin is backed by the same VCs that are all in on AI.

It's a little ironic but to call this a market failure due to resource misalocation because prices are high when high prices is how misalocation is avoided.

I'm a little suspicious that "misalocation" just means it's too expensive for you. That's a feature, not a bug.

That's basically what the rich usually do. They command disproportionate amount of resources and misallocate them freely on a whim, outside of any democratic scrutiny, squeezing incredible number of people and small buisness out of something.

Whether that's a strength of the system or the weakness, I'm sure some rearch will show.

The only way the massive planned investments make sense is if you think the winner can grab a very large piece of a huge pie. I've no idea how large the pie will be in the near future, but I'm even more skeptical that there will be a single winner.

The more I dream about the possibilities of AR, the more I believe people are going to find it incredibly useful. It's just the hardware isn't nearly ready. Maybe I'm wrong but I believe these companies are making some of the largest strategic blunders possible at this point in time.

Technically speaking, this is not a market failure. [1] Why? Per the comment above, it is the individuals that are acting irrationally, right? The market is acting correctly according to its design and inputs. The market’s price adjustment is rational in response. The response is not necessarily fair to all people, but traditional styles of neoclassical economic analysis deaccentuate common notions of fairness or equality; the main goal is economic efficiency.

I prefer to ask the question: to what degree is some particular market design serving the best interest of its stakeholders and society? In democracies, we have some degree of choice over what we want!

I say all of this as a person who views markets as mechanisms not moral foundations. This distinction is made clear when studying political economic (economics for policy analysis) though I think it sometimes gets overlooked in other settings.

If one wants to explore coordination mechanisms that can handle highly irrational demand spikes, you have to think hard. To some degree, one would have to give up a key aspect of most market systems — the notion of one price set by the idea of “willingness to pay”.

[1] Market failure is a technical term within economics meaning the mechanism itself malfunctions relative to its own efficiency criteria.

There are potentially undesirable tradeoffs and a whole new game of cheats and corruption, but you could frustrate rapid, concentrated growth with things like an increasing tax on raised funds.

Right now, we basically let people and companies concentrate as much capital as they want, as rapidly as they want, with almost no friction, presumably because it helped us economically outcompete the adversary during the Cold War. Broadly, we're now afraid of having any kind of brake or dampener on investments and we are more afraid of inefficiency and corruption if the government were to intervene than we are of speculation or exploitation if it doesn't.

In democratically regulated capitalism, there are levers to pull that could slow down this kind of freight train before it were to get out of control, but the arguments against pulling them remain more thoroughly developed and more closely held than those in favor of them.

Care to share some keywords here?

Yeah I know HN is going to hate me for saying that.

If a big company and a few small companies all have identical costs for producing a product, society is better served by having it produced by the few small companies than the one big company.

Once "better served" is quantified, you know the coefficient for taxation.

Make no mistake, this coefficient will be a political football, and will be fought over, just like the Fed prime interest rate. But it's a single scalar instead of a whole executive branch department and a hundred kilopages of regulations like we have in the antitrust-enforcement clusterfuck. Which makes it way harder to pull shenanighans.

Why? That's exactly the circumstances where the mere potential for small companies to pop up is enough to police the big company's behavior. You get lower costs (due to economies of scale) and a very low chance of monopolization. so everyone's happy. In the case of this DRAM/flash price spike, the natural "small" actors are fabs slightly off the leading edge, that will be able to retool their production and supply these devices for a higher profit.

If that were true, "you're in Amazon's kill zone" wouldn't be something VC's say to startups. And yet, they do say that.

How so? Costs will be higher with multiple small products, resulting in higher costs for customers. That's the opposite of "society is served better".

We draw the line at monopolies, which makes sense.

Best to nip corpos before they gain more revenue than a nation state and become "too big to fail".

> Costs will be higher

Read it again, please.

well, assuming the scale couldn't be used for the benefit of society and not to milk it dry. but yes probably the best that can have a reasonable chance at success, eventually, maybe.

Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be the flavor of politics on tap at the moment.

Sam Altman cornering the DRAM market is a joke, of course, but if the punchline is that they were correct to invest this amount of resources in job destruction, it's going to get very serious very quickly and we have to start making better decisions in a hurry or this will get very, very ugly.

maybe AI cures cancer, or at least writes some code

I see people using "market failure" in weird ways lately. Just because someone thinks a use for a product isn't important, doesn't mean it's a market failure. It's actually the opposite - consumers are purchasing it at a price they value it.

Someone who doesn't really need 128GB of ram won't pay the higher cost, but someone who does need it will.

Currently we are still at the stage of extraction from the upper/middle class retail investors and pension funds being sucked up by all the major tech companies that are only focused on their stock price. They have no incentive to compete, because if they do, it will ruin the game for everyone. This gets worse, and the theory (and somewhat historically) says it can lead to war.

Agree with the analysis or not, I personally think it is quite compelling to what is happening with AI, worth a watch.

And if the market crashes or takes a big dip then temporarily eBay will flood with high end stuff at good prices.

Sucks for anyone who needs to upgrade in the next year or two though !

As someone who advocates that we only use capitalism as a tool in specific areas and try to move past it in other, I’ll defend it here to say that’s not really a market anymore when this happens.

Hyper concentration of wealth is going to lead to the same issues that command economies have where the low level capital allocations(buying shit) isn’t getting feedback from everyone involved and is just going off one asshole’s opinion

I would call that market manipulation(or failure if you wish)--in a just society Sam Alton would be heading to prison.

It’s a classic ‘tulip bubble’.

The actual underlying models of productive output for these AI tools is a tiny fraction (actually) of the mania, and can be trivially produced at massive quantity without the spend that is currently ongoing.

The big bubble is because (like with tulips back then), there was a belief in a degree of scarcity (due to apparent novelty) that didn’t actually exist.

You can literally be an expert in everything relevant - and your mail will still not get delivered just because you're not google/mailgun/etc.

I was trying to do a very simple email-to-self use-case. I was sending mail from my VPS (residential IP not even allowed at all) which was an IPv4 i'd had for literally 2+ years to exactly only myself - my personal gmail. I had it all set up - SPF, DKIM, TLS, etc etc. And I was STILL randomly getting emails sent directly to spam / showing up with the annoying ! icon (grates on my sensibilities). I ended up determining - after tremendous, tremendous pain in researching / debugging - that my DKIM sigs and SPF were all indeed perfect (I had been doubting myself until I realized I could just check what gmail thought about SPF/DKIM/etc. It all passed). And my only sin was just not being in the in-crowd.

Incredibly frustrating. The only winning move is not to play. I ended up just switching from emails-to-self to using a discord webhook to @ myself in my private discord server, so I get a push notification.

And this was just me, sending to myself! Low volume (0-2 emails per WEEK). Literally not even trying to actually send emails to other people.

In my opinion, the pragmatic solution I use is:

1) use a specialized distribution (I use yunohost but there are others). This makes configuring SPF, DKIM, TLS and more a breeze

2) use a reputable relay to send your emails (I use OVH but again there are plenty of other choices)

Of course it means you are not "pure" because emails you send will go trough a 3rd party (the relay) but it solved the delivery issue entirely for me, so that I can continue to benefit from all the other benefits of self-hosting.

I can literally just go write a script that uses headless firefox + mitmproxy in about an hour or two of fiddling, and as long as I then don't go try to run it from 100 VPS's and scrape their entire website in a huge blast, I can typically archive whatever content I actually care about. Basically no matter what protection mechanisms they have in place. Cloudflare won't detect a headless firefox at low (and by "low" I mean basically anything you could do off your laptop from your home IP) rates, modern browser scripting is extremely easy, so you can often scrape things with mild single-person effort even if the site is an SPA with tons of dynamic JS. And obviously at low scale you can just solve captchas yourself.

I recently wrote a scraper script that just sent me a discord ping whenever it ran into a captcha, and i'd just go look at my laptop and fix it, and then let it keep scraping. I was archiving a comic I paid for but was in a walled-garden app that obviously didn't want you to even THINK of controlling the data you paid for.

this is absolutely not the case. I've been web scraping since 00s and you could just curl any html or selenium the browser for simple automation but now it's incredibly complex and expensive even with modern tools like playwright and all of the monthly "undetectable" flavors of it. Headless browsers are laughably easy to detect because they leak the fact they are being automated and that they are headless. Not to even mention all of the fingerprinting.

I think he means the JS part is now easy to run and scrape compared to the transition time from basic download scraping to JS execution/headless browser scraping. It is more complex but the tools haven’t been as evolved as they are now a couple of years ago.

I made a web scraper in Perl a few years ago. It no longer works because I need a headless browser now or whatever it is called these days.

Web scraping is MUCH WORSE TODAY[1].

[1] I am not yelling, just emphasizing. :)

Happy to see Scoped Values here though. That'll be big for writing what I'll call "rails-like" things in Java without it just being a big "static final" soup in a god-class, or having a god object passed around everywhere.

However, you still have concurrent code. The example given uses futures rather than async/await, and so the thread blocks waiting for these other threads to complete.

The Java alternative to async/await is the virtual threads. Since they are not GC roots and the stack is a chain of heap-allocated objects, the idea is that they can have significantly lower overhead in terms of memory usage for small tasks. Rather than the compiler generating heap objects to store intermediate state, it just uses a virtual thread's stack.

However, even without async/await syntax you still have equivalent concepts. Since the compiler doesn't have native structured concurrency, it is emulated by putting tasks in lambdas. You fork off subtasks, and do a blocking get() to resolve the futures for their results. Heavy use of fork(), run() and get() aren't necessarily better than async and await keywords.

One concern I have is that Java virtual threads are supposedly preemptive, not cooperative. This means you will have less guarantees around concurrent modification than you would with a typical async/await system running cooperatively on an executor. Several languages willing to make more core changes around adding async/await have gone as far as to also integrate actor functionality to help developers write concurrency-safe code. I don't see Java being able to provide developer help/diagnostics here like other languages can.

My favorite parts of TPL Dataflow are using Channels + Encapsulate to create custom blocks, backpressure, and parallel execution while maintaining ordering. Great library. I sometimes wonder if it would be possible/useful to implement a TPL Dataflow 2.0 on top of Channels.

Your remark on the adult/child/fetus/etc line is always one that I felt was under-examined in the context of the political discussion around abortion. And indeed most of the successful reasoning around abortion focuses less on the morality of a very specific kind of abortion, and more on the fact that you can't ban "true" abortion without also banning (or making dangerously more legally fraught) "aborted for reasons that give clear moral justification" - life of the mother, nonviability of the fetus, and so on. And even pro-choice people don't touch philosophical examination of "abortion for no reason except that the mother doesn't want to have and raise the baby." I mean, for obvious reasons. The public would be unable to have any kind of actual debate, and it's far too tied to things like "what is the nature of the self" (which I think is what's at hand in the AI discussion) and questions about the existence of God and of course the enormous can of worms of metaphysics.

My point with all this is that I suspect two things:

1) humans/industry/politics are not going to dig into the philosophy here in any real way

2) even if consciousness is a purely physical phenomenon, I somewhat doubt GPUs can do it, no matter how complicated.

I think if we ever really get down to it, it'll be the reverse direction. We'll "copy" human minds into a machine and then just need to "ask the people if they still feel the same."

https://philpapers.org/archive/CARCAT-33

Huh? This is discussed all the time.

Google functionally controls just enough of a monopoly via chrome that they can generally do whatever they want (and not do whatever they don't want to do). So that standards still mostly can't do anything google isn't enthusiastic about dumping dev time into.

And they're just barely not enough of a monopoly that they can't just go wild and actually turn the browser into a locked down capital-P Product. Safari and Firefox (in that order... much to my chagrin) are holding them back from that.

So browsers just kind of hang out, not doing too terribly much, when obviously there are strong technical forces that want the browser to finally finish morphing from a document viewer to an application runtime. Finally fulfill the dream of silverlight and java applets/JNLP and so on. But nobody wants to bother doing that if they don't get to control it (and firefox doesn't have the dev power to just trailblaze alone in OSS spirit).

So instead the js people just have to plow along doing their best with the app-runtime version of NAND chips since the incentives don't want to offer them anything better at the browser/platform level.

Crazy statement. Any API not supported by Safari might as well not exist.

WebSQL? WebUSB?

It seems like Safari bends towards whatever is in common use, at least within a few years.

I really hope that never happens if only because the web dev on ramp will discourage anyone without preexisting technical chops.

No other GUI runtime or framework delivers true cross platform implementation. HTML, CSS and js are as open and as standard as it gets.

GTK sucks in its own ways and is not international standard.

This is a good thing! It keeps salaries high and keeps the dilettantes out. I am sick of getting my work devalued by morons

There are too many people trying to build "tech" who shouldn't be. We need more gatekeepers

In the last 10 years, 3D NAND memory has scaled 10x (in bits per unit area). So… maybe not the best analogy?

I think the main problem for me is that these companies benefit from copyright - by beating anyone they can reach with the DMCA stick - and are now also showing they don't actually care about it at all and when they do it, it's ok.

Go ahead, AI companies. End copyright law. Do it. Start lobbying now.

(They won't, they'll just continue to eat their cake and have it too).

So far, case law is shaping up towards "nope, AI training is fair use". As it well should.

Copyright law is a disgrace, and copyright should be cut down massively - not made into an even more far-reaching anti-freedom abomination than it already is.

This is absolutely not true.

Yes, but https://radiologybusiness.com/topics/artificial-intelligence...

Nine years ago, scientist Geoffrey Hinton famously said, “People should stop training radiologists now,” believing it was “completely obvious” AI would outperform human rads within five years.

If we expect a technology to completely solve a problem as soon as it is launched, only a few in history could be considered a success. Can you imagine what it would be like if the first radios were considered a failure because you couldn't listen to music?

E.g. - I was considering a 3D printer but I had heard they were expensive, messy, complicated, it was hard to get prints to come out right, etc. But it turned out I was anchored on ~2016 era technology. I got a simple modern printer for a few hundred dollars and it (mostly) just works.

What it isn't, at present, is an investment in the future. I'm not making these virtual interns better coders, more thoughtful about architecture, or more autonomous in the future. Those aspects of development of new hires are vastly more valuable than the code output I'm getting in my IDE. So I'm hoping that we land in a place where we're fostering both rather than hoping that someone else is going to do the hard work of closing the agentic coding gap and growing maturity. Pulling an Indiana Jones style swap could be a really destructive move if we try to pull the human pipeline out of the system too early.

Just paying attention to near term savings runs a real risk falling into that trap.

It's well known that these fresh employees are not going to contribute to velocity of a team for at least a year. They're investments. I've seen levelling docs specifically call this out.

"It's prone to spiraling off into the weeds, makes silly mistakes, occasionally mangles whole repos (commit early, and often), and needs very crisp instruction and guidance"

This describes a team of juniors. If it's describing an entire team, then everyone above mid-level needs to be fired.

I will say that I think "the bottom of the market getting eviscerated" is going to apply to software devs too. There is now very little point in hiring someone who already only produces slop as their best output. The main people who need to be afraid of AI in the next 5 years is probably offshore and near-shore people, and perma-juniors who have done the "1 year of experience 10 times" thing.