Being the rockstar doing all the technical work can also be performative. I'm currently working on a CTO team that is supposed to "disrupt" a big org. There's a lot of emphasis on demoing and sketching things out a mile wide and an inch deep. I think there's some merit to it but a lot of it is kayfabe.
Ultimately the "last 80%" of boring business logic actually needs to get built and the day to day operations have to happen. It can't be all AI prototypes and vibe coded demos.
This is what financial capitalism and "democratizing finance" has meant in practice. Rich people have access to different types of investments, and by the time those trickle down to common investors the juice has all been squeezed out. Whatever the trend is, by the time you hear about it the market has already been arbitraged by faster investors with more resources.
We are not going to come up with a market-based solution to fix income inequality. The solution, as much as people in the dwindling middle class resist it, is a strong social safety net coupled with a hard reset on taxation and housing policies. Nobody should be homeless, nobody should be allowed to starve, but you might have to accept that your 401K goes down in exchange for a government guarantee of housing and food.
This is hard for people to accept because they currently have equity in their home or a 401K to save them from starving. But those are transient, individualistic solutions. You can lose your house. You can lose your 401K. Society should be taking care of each other in a broader way than letting everyone accumulate a little, private pile of money.
I didn't even mention venture capital because the win rate is so low. When you have billions already, then maybe you can buy $10M lotto tickets that get pitched to you. If you're a regular guy and want risk exposure like that, you can buy penny stocks.
Everyone is so fixated on the winners, that they completely forget (or aren't even aware) that there a many many times more losers.
I think people understand that there are losers. What they are complaining about is that the losers can dump $10M on a lotto ticket and not feel any pain when it disappears. If all those with money are are placing huge long-shot bets and cashing out when they win then what does that say about the state of the system, and markets in general? I don't know exactly, but I don't think it's good.
What if I told you it's common for people to add that now to AI writing in an attempt to make it appear human-written? You still have to go on sentence structure and looking for AIisms.
TFA says he's using it for storyboarding. This doesn't seem like a huge deal, but film is a visual medium! The closer your pre-viz and storyboarding looks to reality, the more you're going to tend to stick to it when you're actually filming.
You want your rough drafts to have a roughness that conveys your level of confidence. If your AI first draft looks polished people may feel more pressure not to deviate.
I find these hand-drawn Taxi Drivers storyboards very charming even though they obviously don't map cleanly to shots in the film. This is what you're giving up if you just tell an AI "give me a close up of Travis Bickle's face"
I'm not a fan of AI but this seems like a legit use for it. Story boarding is basically film prototyping, and one of AI's legit uses seems to be prototyping.
Even if there's no door charge, you know that this is part of an ongoing effort to eliminate any place where the "wrong people" might congregate. Eliminating third spaces for youth and poor/homeless people. It's like putting a bar across the middle of a bench so people can't lie down - it's meant to punish poor people and it also makes things worse for everyone else, but our society finds seeing poor people to be the least comfortable thing possible.
I run a niche retail store and there are two sides to this.
Most of our business is selling low-price, entry-level products. There's a 80-20 distribution of people getting into the hobby versus people upgrading after a couple years. Consequently most of our floor space and inventory is devoted to high margin, quick turnover, entry-level products.
In my experience the floor space is less of an issue for high end products than the capital expenditure to bring in the inventory. On the consignment side we only take products aimed at the remaining 20%. These are specialty items we wouldn't have in regular stock. It's a win-win because we don't have to deploy capital to bring the product in-store, but we do have space to showcase some higher end used product.
Also, from the customer side, people ask at the higher end, don't they? Beyond a certain level, it's more of a search and a quest than just browsing. So you mainly have to show that you have connections for certain things. Why does this sound like drugs now?
I know this from a few friends who are deep into tabletop and boardgames, and they would regularly work with the one or two small stores around to get some special, expensive item (to help keep the shop afloat).
Yeah, in my experience the people who want niche stuff are willing to work with you and have a "high touch" experience. Where the people who want entry-level stuff want turn-key, sane defaults.
The annoying thing is people with lots of money and no experience who want the special expensive thing but they want it now and they don't know what options they want. I'm sure other fields are good at separating fools and their money but niche hobby retail isn't the Audi dealership, we're not just trying to upsell you for fun.
The myth of the Supreme Court having any check on executive power was disproven by the "switch in time to save 9", where Owen Roberts agreed to stop obstructing The New Deal so FDR wouldn't implement court-packing and term limits. That was almost 90 years ago.
Why is this a bad thing? The New Deal literally created a society that allowed the country to flourish for a solid 50 years before neoliberal economics took hold.
I like the New Deal! My point is that the realpolitik of the court being subservient to the other two "coequal" branches goes back almost 100 years.
Marbury v Madison established judicial review in 1803 but there is no enforcement mechanism. The switch in time shows that practically the Court is subject to the political pressure of Congress and the President.
The Clinton impeachment and the lack of Trump impeachment show (imo) that there is effectively no rule of law in the United States anymore.
Congressional representation is subject to gerrymandering for partisan and racial reasons, and majority control of Congress gives you broad power to pass laws and punish political enemies. Controlling both Congress and the Presidency gives a single party the ability to completely ignore any constitutional boundaries.
America's experiment in multi-racial democracy has failed and their international influence will continue to wane as it has since the 80s. It seems like something that happens "slowly, and then all at once", like bankruptcy.
If the government guaranteed basic human needs are met for every person (food, shelter, healthcare) there would be less of a need for giant pools of public money (pensions, insurance) sloshing around.
Mass index fund investment is basically socialism but stupid. My retirement money is going to get invested in the SpaceX IPO against my will. The market is not efficiently allocating capital, it's structured to allow elites to skim off the top while forcing middle class people to subsidize them.
Where the do you think the government gets their tax money from if not the market? That is like saying we shouldn't kill animals from meat, we should just buy it from the store.
The government needs money to buy products from the market. If the government controlled the means of production, they wouldn't need money because they would just make things themselves.
In a hybrid scenario where there is still a market, we would ... collect more taxes to pay for this stuff? It seems like you came up with a pithy response and tried to back up into a critique that doesn't make sense.
I had a customer do something similar with a thousand-dollar product. They had signed for delivery and provided no evidence, but banks always side with the customer.
Ultimately the "last 80%" of boring business logic actually needs to get built and the day to day operations have to happen. It can't be all AI prototypes and vibe coded demos.
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