This was such a thoughtful take on the conscious and unconscious mimesis we participate in by selecting these products and how it has a snowball effect on the fate of the products we choose or discard . Thanks for writing it .
You touch on this - but this tilted field shows up a ton in partnerships. I had no idea (until recently) how effective and efficient a sales channel that can be - and that it can make or break a company (especially a startup). You can get partnerships right and have a worse product, not as good inbound (or outbound) and still win. Crazy. Markets are not meritocracies.
This is something that's always seemed a little weird to me, that more companies in this world didn't try to play unfair with partnerships. It seems like everyone tried to be everyone's partner equally, and every company wanted to remain sort of neutral to the rest of the ecosystem (eg, "we love *all* database vendors!"). It seems like there could've been a lot of opportunity for people to play favorites and more openly say "we like X the best, we explicitly recommend them." I guess that's a risky strategy to take, but it never made that much sense to me that nobody tried it.
as someone interested in both tech and politics, I found this post particularly interesting due to the intersection of both topics.
In college I was student body president, my step dad was very close to our state governor, and after college I had an interesting stint as a "Campaign Manager" for a fellow college classmate running for US Congress, and a slogan / campaign issue that always got tons of mileage was criticizing "coastal elites" as being out of touch. Worked 10 times out of 10 and only grew more and more effective the more that we used it.
Is there a "club" in Washington, that makes many of the decisions, up to and including who even appears on the ballot as president? Of course there is. Can certain people, through money and / or influence, play an outsized effect on politics, policy, etc? absolutely. And as you said in your post, this same exact infrastructure works in Silicon Valley as well. I saw the Devin launch as well, I thought it was fantastic, simply because I've seen the applicability of code co-writers (particularly GPT-4) have helped me in my own coding, and as far as Devin (from the demo) showed the next evolution in this technology, it's definitely impressive.
What's interesting, to me, about all of this technology / AI innovations, is that I am also reading Karl Marx at the same time I am experimenting with AI, Tech, python programming, Machine Learning, etc. And the best connection that I can see between the two is Marx's assertion that a value of a commodity (in this example, coding) is the cost that it takes to produce that commodity. So if it takes a coder an hour to write a particular piece of code, or 100 hours to make a website, the cost of that code is roughly 1 hour (or 100 hours) of that coder's time, so lets say, $100 an hour, either $100 or $10,000. But, if we carry this through to AI, the cost of an AI to create a piece of code (or a blog post, or a tweet), is damn near $0 (I think ChatGPT is something like $0.00001 per 100 words or something very small like that), and THAT difference (the cost of production reaching near zero) could upend things significantly. Even if Devin AI is only able to achieve, say 95% of a complete project, and then an experienced software engineer finishes the final 5%, that drastically alters the landscape of coding / tech / science / society.
Yeah, though I suspect the effects of that will mostly be...weird. Like, the easy interpretation of it is that we can now make software businesses with way less money than we could before; you can have the billion dollar company with only a few employees, and stuff like that. Which, probably, it seems like some version of that will happen in some places. But it also seems that could also just lower the value of the things we're building.
For example, if it costs a million dollars to build an iphone app now, and in five years it'll cost $500 dollars, one effect of that could be that the million dollar iphone app now makes way more money. But it seems like the other effect could be that people will make apps that are worth $1000 - which isn't very useful, but is more than $500, so is worth it for somebody to make. And that like a messy thing, where you don't get a better world but just a more cluttered one. I'm sure there will be more hits that come out of that; it just seems like we're going to make a whole lot more flops too.
This was such a thoughtful take on the conscious and unconscious mimesis we participate in by selecting these products and how it has a snowball effect on the fate of the products we choose or discard . Thanks for writing it .
Thanks, I really appreciate that, and glad you liked it!
You touch on this - but this tilted field shows up a ton in partnerships. I had no idea (until recently) how effective and efficient a sales channel that can be - and that it can make or break a company (especially a startup). You can get partnerships right and have a worse product, not as good inbound (or outbound) and still win. Crazy. Markets are not meritocracies.
This is something that's always seemed a little weird to me, that more companies in this world didn't try to play unfair with partnerships. It seems like everyone tried to be everyone's partner equally, and every company wanted to remain sort of neutral to the rest of the ecosystem (eg, "we love *all* database vendors!"). It seems like there could've been a lot of opportunity for people to play favorites and more openly say "we like X the best, we explicitly recommend them." I guess that's a risky strategy to take, but it never made that much sense to me that nobody tried it.
As long as you pick a winner - or happen to share an investor with a winner. 😂
Hi Benn,
as someone interested in both tech and politics, I found this post particularly interesting due to the intersection of both topics.
In college I was student body president, my step dad was very close to our state governor, and after college I had an interesting stint as a "Campaign Manager" for a fellow college classmate running for US Congress, and a slogan / campaign issue that always got tons of mileage was criticizing "coastal elites" as being out of touch. Worked 10 times out of 10 and only grew more and more effective the more that we used it.
Is there a "club" in Washington, that makes many of the decisions, up to and including who even appears on the ballot as president? Of course there is. Can certain people, through money and / or influence, play an outsized effect on politics, policy, etc? absolutely. And as you said in your post, this same exact infrastructure works in Silicon Valley as well. I saw the Devin launch as well, I thought it was fantastic, simply because I've seen the applicability of code co-writers (particularly GPT-4) have helped me in my own coding, and as far as Devin (from the demo) showed the next evolution in this technology, it's definitely impressive.
What's interesting, to me, about all of this technology / AI innovations, is that I am also reading Karl Marx at the same time I am experimenting with AI, Tech, python programming, Machine Learning, etc. And the best connection that I can see between the two is Marx's assertion that a value of a commodity (in this example, coding) is the cost that it takes to produce that commodity. So if it takes a coder an hour to write a particular piece of code, or 100 hours to make a website, the cost of that code is roughly 1 hour (or 100 hours) of that coder's time, so lets say, $100 an hour, either $100 or $10,000. But, if we carry this through to AI, the cost of an AI to create a piece of code (or a blog post, or a tweet), is damn near $0 (I think ChatGPT is something like $0.00001 per 100 words or something very small like that), and THAT difference (the cost of production reaching near zero) could upend things significantly. Even if Devin AI is only able to achieve, say 95% of a complete project, and then an experienced software engineer finishes the final 5%, that drastically alters the landscape of coding / tech / science / society.
Yeah, though I suspect the effects of that will mostly be...weird. Like, the easy interpretation of it is that we can now make software businesses with way less money than we could before; you can have the billion dollar company with only a few employees, and stuff like that. Which, probably, it seems like some version of that will happen in some places. But it also seems that could also just lower the value of the things we're building.
For example, if it costs a million dollars to build an iphone app now, and in five years it'll cost $500 dollars, one effect of that could be that the million dollar iphone app now makes way more money. But it seems like the other effect could be that people will make apps that are worth $1000 - which isn't very useful, but is more than $500, so is worth it for somebody to make. And that like a messy thing, where you don't get a better world but just a more cluttered one. I'm sure there will be more hits that come out of that; it just seems like we're going to make a whole lot more flops too.
I also think of Kudos bars. Your substack is fantastic.
Thanks, really glad you like it! (And glad I'm not alone...)
Wow I got about 2 sentences into that link on cluttercore before I bailed.
The pictures alone were enough for me to have a mild panic attack.
What makes you think coding is a commodity? In any case it would be code, just like the commodity is oil, not oil drilling
I'm not sure I follow? I wasn't trying to say that, and not sure I even know what it means for coding to be a commodity, though now I'm curious.
It would be funny if some party pooper brought modal logic into this game we are living within.
I don't think I understand?
Humans and their silly little stories can be torn apart with it.