That is an extreme claim (in the sense of surprising, remarkable, unusual, and one that needs a lot more support than ordinary claims).

It is inadequately defended here. The argument that it violates fair exchange is tautological.

Why should they get ownership of the business? When you get a mortgage for your house, the bank doesn’t permanently own part of your house after you pay it off.

Because the VCs are funding the startup on extremely favorable terms?

If the startup fails, the founders can just walk away. They are not personally liable for anything. They can (and often do) subsequently form another startup, often funded by the very same VCs who funded the one that just failed!

If, OTOH, you fail to pay your mortgage, the bank takes your house. And they make hard for you to get another mortgage from any bank by reporting the foreclosure to credit ratings agencies.

You absolutely can keep the equity (and surplus) for yourself… but you will need to personally guarantee the loan. You may need to declare bankruptcy if the startup fails, and all that entails.

VCs are happy to throw away money on 99 failed startups precisely because they are entitled to the continued surplus from 1 successful startup. Banks are happy to make failure to pay extremely unpleasant for you because they are not entitled to any surplus from business loans which lead to successful outcomes.

And why is this a good thing? I think the past decade and the current bubble point to this being a bug, not a feature. What I mean to say is that VCs seem far too eager to throw money at ventures with untenable business plans or that lack any edge over competing firms, which is a waste.

Ok, well, I personally really like driving a car with zero tailpipe emissions, and the cleaner air that comes from it (Tesla).

I think it’s awesome having a little rectangle in my pocket that sends text messages from anywhere on earth and summons an encyclopedia (Apple, Google, Starlink, Intel).

I enjoy talking to (and seeing) my friends and family while they are thousands of miles away (Cisco, Apple, and many others).

I think it is fantastic that we continue to find new labor-saving methods of farming so that fewer people need toil in the fields (the current batch of ag-drone and ag-AI startups).

This is like asking “well, why do we need that science mumbo jumbo anyhow?”

But this comment only makes sense when starting from a whole bunch of assumptions, which happen to be true right here and now, but are in no way universal.

Let me make a comparison: "If to someone it makes sense to carry a flamethrower to the grocery store to defend against thieves, what exactly is wrong with that?" What's wrong is a society where that kind of defense is necessary! We shouldn't be debating whether the individual should carry a flamethrower to the grocery store, we should be discussing how to improve society so they don't have to.

Also, rich people don't get to create a problem and also claim credit for solving it (with money).

Edit: much better analogy.

Yeah, like I said, you completely missed the point of my comment. Here, let me fix the analogy for you:

A: The fact that people drive cars on roads is a bug, not a feature.

B: A bug where? Like, in people's minds for thinking that driving cars on roads is a practical mode of transportation?

C: People should be able to walk to work.

Do you see how C's reply to B is a non sequitur? It doesn't answer the question that was posed, it presents an irrelevant "should", and even if one is generous enough to grant that people should be able to walk to work, it doesn't make choosing to drive cars on roads for other purposes an irrational decision. And, and, it most certainly doesn't make it irrational in the world we actually live in.

EDIT:

>We shouldn't be debating whether the individual should carry a flamethrower to the grocery store, we should be discussing how to improve society so they don't have to.

I don't appreciate being told what is or isn't okay to talk about.

To borrow your analogy: there is, in fact, major issue in people driving cars on roads. This is why many cities elect to reduce car use by means of policy. This is accomplished because there's a dialectic where "should" translates into "must." It's called governance.

I have not failed to do it, I have chosen not to do it. I asked a specific question and received as an answer something that's totally irrelevant. I am decidedly not interested in whether "it would be possible to have a system where startups to require less funding, for example, by UBI, or normalizing bootstrapping". It has nothing to do with my original comment, and I'm not going to engage with it.

This is the same reason the bank asks for an independent valuation of a house (and requires the buyer to maintain insurance) before releasing the money to pay for it: The value of the collateral needs to plausibly match the value of the loan, so that the value of the loan can be recovered in case of default.

The only way this works is for the founder to personally guarantee the loan. Which means the founder needs to have sufficient personal assets to keep the bank happy. It also means the founder risks personal bankruptcy if those assets are not enough to cover the loan if the startup defaults.

The company will have some value left on default. E.g if it's a software company it will have the IP for the software etc pp

Now wherever that's enough for anyone to be willing to take that risk with the loan is another story and thus I could now quote my previous comment in its entirety

Failed startups don’t have value left at the end. They go until they run out of money. Then they liquidate the office furniture to make the last payroll. Sometimes they don’t wrap up early enough and the founder and board members are personally liable for it.

Nobody wants to buy the custom software needed to run “The pets.com for GenAI” because it would be cheaper to start from scratch than to understand the codebase and make it do what you want.

Companies like 23-and-me that accumulate valuable data while going bankrupt are the rare exception… but banks/VCs do not know a-priori which ones will be that exception! If they did, they just wouldn’t make the bad loans in the first place!

> Now wherever that's enough for anyone to be willing to take that risk

Well, but it clearly isn’t, right? So everything else you wrote is sort of irrelevant.

I mean, why don’t you lend a startup $1000 on the condition they pay you back $1500 in two years[1] if they succeed and nothing if they fail? Pass the hat around your neighborhood and I bet you could fund a few real startups!

Except that.. oh.. when it’s your money on the line, suddenly you realize those are very stupid terms. You lose the whole $1000 90% of the time, break even 5% of the time and make a +$500 profit 5% of the time. The math isn’t mathing here.

So you’ll want to very carefully vet the founders and their plan. Be very picky about who you fund. Maybe you’ll ask them to personally guarantee some fraction of the loan. Suddenly, your highly moral terms look exactly like the business loans that approximately 0% of startups use because VCs offer them a better deal.

[1] Any more than that would be usury, which is immoral, right?

I acknowledged as much... In both comments even.

There's a subtle difference and it shows by how we even see wealth. We associate wealth with utility to society. That is, after all, why we create economies. We want to reward those who make society better.

But that's where there's been a disconnect. We figured out we could make money without pushing society forward. We'd historically refer to those people by different names... worse than that, we are focused on the short term. Silicon Valley has perfected the hype cycle. You get in cheap, pump up the price, sell, and do it all over again. It does not matter if it is vaporware, it matters that you can make a profit.

The problem is alignment. The economy is not aligned with its intentions.

Do we see much innovation these days? Is there even an incentive? No doubt there's innovation, but people are claiming it is accelerating. I'm unconvinced we're innovating faster than we did in the 90's. That decade changed society more than the 00's and 10's, even with the advent of the smartphone.

Unlike the author, I'm actually in favor of capitalism, yet I firmly believe that an economy still needs to by well regulated. There's very few economists who believe such regulation does not need to exist (we listen to partisans more than actual economists), and I've found even the most staunch free-market believers (often not actual economists) will have concessions. It's no secret that an unregulated market is not a free market. An unregulated market is a market regulated by the largest entities of the market.

It is probably no surprise that those who cannot think long term are unable to realize that the rise in popularity of socialism is due to the abuse of capitalism. Most people do not have a strong foundation in economics (why should they! They're spending years learning other skills than years reading textbooks, analyzing, and going to school). But people do know our system isn't working. Is it really more cost effective to build bunkers and buy private islands than it is to make the lives of the people better? I doubt it. But that's the same myopia I've discussed in my entire comment. The problem is how myopic we've become

They also have several older articles directly targeting insider trading by politicians.

So yeah, even though on first skim I think I agree with the thrust of this article, I think you're right it's poorly defended, assuming it's at all for an audience outside of people who already think this way.

I get that the status quo has huge issues, but can we have some new ideas maybe instead of continuing to try to revive late 19th century ones that have repeatedly and disastrously failed?

Maybe some people get that impression because they've conflated "Marxism" with general socialist urges or even cultural "left" wing identity politics, but that in fact is proof exactly of the opposite. It's never been more heretical to advocate for wealth redistribution or dismantling or restricting parts of the capitalist market, even in the context of a total ecological crisis brought on by industrial production and exponential growth.

It's not even on the table of discussion in any western country, so I am not sure where you fear comes from. That a claim like this could be made shows me exactly how far to the right we've drifted since e.g. the 60s. That someone like Mamdani could be smeared or red-baited as a "Marxist" for advocating for rent control is hilarious really.

(But frankly I'm not here to debate the merits or get into a drive-by debate with your half-formed opinions, nor was that the aim or thrust of what my comment above was about.)

I'm not sure how to square this statement with reality. Which countries were Marxist? The obvious "communist"/"socialist" country was the USSR, but it was Leninist/Stalinist.

Oh, ok. Anyways.

First section of Capital Vol I is all about "surplus value" and exploitation, with a heavy dose of the labour theory of value. It has nothing to do with "initial accumulation" at all, it's about ongoing extraction of surplus value in production, and no, Marx doesn't call it "theft" -- he calls it "exploitation" (which to him is actually somewhat of a value neutral world describing a technical process, actually).

Whether it's a defensible position in economics or philosophy is a whole other discussion. There's nuance.

Also I assuming you mean "citing", not "siting"

But that's indeed not what you were saying.

Marx’s writing predates the US civil war. When you “own” someone and then “own” their labor the fruits of that labor aren’t yours any more than the person. By that reasoning, if you then use the fruits of that labor to buy a house it’s a stolen house.

Obviously, nobody would take that kind of deal. But what if regular loans were just flat out not made available to you? Like, if tomorrow, banks as a class individually decided they would only accept payment in this sort of lifetime wage equity. Then it's not really a choice anymore. One of the options has been taken away from you. If I take a fair deal and have one of the counterparties flat out remove some of the negotiating options - even if they were not the ones taken - is it still a fair deal?

In other words, the argument that fair exchange has been violated is based on the idea that market power can be a form of coercion. If you don't agree, then you can argue that every possible counterparty deciding to only offer you a bad deal is perfectly acceptable and non-coercive. "Natural shorts[0] are not coercion", in other words. But why stop there? I mean, even in outright theft, where I'm holding a literal gun to your head and demanding payment, you could still choose to eat lead. We can redefine theft and coercion down to excuse any behavior we want on libertarian terms. The tautology is not with the argument, it's with fair exchange itself.

[0] As in, "thing you need to exist". You have a natural short position in food, drink, and shelter.

Weird analogy. It's more like "what if you borrowed money to buy something, didn't have to return it, but if you made money with that thing, you give the lender a cut, forever".

Because the point is: it's not a loan, you don't have to pay it back, and you're not on the hook for it if things go wrong. That's the big upside and why lots of people do that instead of getting a loan. Because loans are available, but people don't want that risk and are willing to give up some of their ownership to avoid it.

The workflows we have are not quite right for it. Coding has always been 10% coding and 90% debugging but I think the rate at which we generate the 10% will grow exponentially.

This means that the debugging has to grow. We will generate errors at an unprecedented rate.

LLMs trained on previous errors and methods won’t catch them. They’ll be more complicated and spread out over the code.

We need new tools to visualize the code and track errors. I think what it means to be a programmer will change. More testing, thinking and less klocs.

The projection from current SOTA is that coding LLMs replace 1 senior dev + 5 junior devs with 1 senior dev + LLM.

Ergo, there will be fewer junior dev positions and senior dev salaries can capture some of the additional value they deliver.

Whether that's offset by the increase in senior supply as junior -> senior conversions happen...?

The two areas that will likely expand demand to absorb those junior devs are:

(1) Integration engineering (i.e. poorly-documented interface to poorly-documented interface)

(2) Testing (because if kloc are cheap, there will be more money to validate -- and it will make people feel safer to have human-in-the-loop before sign-off / production).

Coding LLMs are always going to be better at things well-represented in their training sets. Which is to say, the most popular languages, API styles, apps as of todayish.

So, other things will be the best use of human time.

Thanks - I needed a good laugh.

For really obscure issues or bugs, I had to scroll through seemingly random StackOverflow results (or Experts Exchange, ha) looking for exact issues that I had, weeding through answers that weren't relevant, things based on older versions, etc. Now you give the context to AI tech stack, data, and your source code, explain the problem with the error message, and ask what might be happening and that shaves a few hours off the old way of trial and error. Even if the 1st answer isn't totally right, a few follow on questions will help narrow it down.

A junior dev does negative work. And with corp dev/enterprise dev the difference in price between a junior and a “senior” dev is only about $70K. The gap is even smaller with remote work even if you hire in the US. There are plenty of developers in low cost of living areas who would be glad to work for relative peanuts.

As far as where will the next generation of developers come from? That’s a collection action problem

I remember those years, I hope they are still around.

The average tenure of a developer is 2-3 years. Almost no one stays at a company for 6-7 years

As a manager, the chance of you staying at a job for 6-7 years are slim and staying in the same position is even slimmer. Besides, you are going to be measured by your quarterly or at most yearly “OP1 goals” or equivalent

In the same way that we don't get the volume of true hackers that the 70s-90s produced, because of the locked-down computing experiences most kids were introduced to from 00+.

As GenX/Millenial senior, I am not going to stay long here, no matter what money I am offered. If cornered I would rather sell organic produce, honey, wood work, be handyman to my local community than spending any more days on debugging fruits of MBA-driven AI lunacy.

I copy pasted a part of my code into Claude.ai to help me add a few lines. It completed that part and also rewritten another few lines. I asked why it did that, explanation was that I missed a edge case.

LLMs are good for writing boring parts of code and also helpful for catching bugs.

Perhaps it could be better, but a lot of people would pay a lot for a single good job offer. And you accepted it.

I will say though the social aspects in specific are completely value-free, IMHO. It's just business-Facebook. I've never read nor made a single post on LinkedIn, and can't envision a time I would, and every post I've seen elsewhere screenshotted seems fucking unhinged.

So like, these features: professional networking, private messaging, as an archive of your work history: sure. Those work and are good. Everything else where it tries desperately to be a social network nobody asked for: garbage. Bin it. Could probably cut the operating cost of the website by 96% if you did, too, with the added benefit of not needing to send me dozens of fucking emails begging for engagement.

Subjectively, yes. I sent this around my peers and they said it helped them find new authors/papers in the field while preparing their manuscripts.

| Is this more useful in certain domains?

I don't think I have the capacity to comment on this.

Example: the 4o or Claude are great for coding, summarizing and rewriting emails. So which domains require a slightly better model?

I suppose if the error rate in code or summary goes down even 10%, it might be worth $180/month.

I made a very exhaustive question to ChatGPT o1-preview, including all information I though is relevant. Something like good forums question. Well, 10 seconds later it spew me a working solution. I was ashamed, because I have 20 years of experience under my belt and this model solved non-trivial task much better than me.

I was ashamed but at the same time that's a superpower. And I'm ready to pay $200 to get solid answers that I just can't get in a reasonable timeframe.

(Now I think if of the idiom, when did we switch to 9-6? I've never had a 9-5).

Anyway, one other insight I would add is that the issues tend to come up at the interface between the systems. Your automation has to get some input and send some output and both those are pain points. That’s why we sometimes prefer imperfect monolith software.

1. find a good text book in the field as narrowly construed as possible, and just browse the table of contents.

This will give you a quick map of the field, and a place to put all the info you gain.

2. Read the management discussion in the 10k of a public version of the company you work at and 2 leading customers, and the transcript from the earnings call.

Fastest way to get up to date on challenges.

YES! Management's Discussion of Risks section of 10ks is amazing, and really easy to read.

I think it's nuts to work at a public company and NOT follow your employer's 10ks and earnings calls (at least on and off, or at least when newly hired as well as for context any time there's Big Corporate News)

It really helps cut through management's BS when you can just read how they're describing the situation to the shareholders rather than the spin for internal audiences. It's the One Secret Trick that will give you an idea of what the motivations and interests of your company's leaders are, as opposed to what they claim or you guess that they are, which then ends up being super useful for say, judging which project has a better likelihood of becoming important, how to sell things internally, etc