This. Without regular people, they have nobody to exploit. They could exploit more robots, but robots don’t have the same needs as humans. They could program them to have the same needs, but then that would just be going back to square 1, because then they’d have to pay the robots so they could buy the things they need.

First, I want to ask about these price-tracking websites, do they update in real-time? Do they get their information from confidential data or public data? Do they alert to changes and, in the case of say, applying for an apartment, time the application submission at exactly the right time? Do they collaborate with each other? See, I just learned about algorithmic price fixing and how companies in nearly every industry, every facet of life, give their algorithms access to vast amounts of data, both public and private, and these algorithms share their data with each other, allowing companies to indirectly collude and fix prices without human intervention. What can we common folk do against that?

I’m just saying, you’re mentioning search engines, and the author says

You had Google and a spreadsheet if you were organized.

So, how can I, with my spreadsheets and my search engine, possibly stand up to Big AI? David and Goliath was a nice fable, but now Goliath is back, and has friends, and laws protecting them, and all David has, is a sling and a single rock.

I’ll say one thing for this post and the resulting discussion, it’s caused me to fall down the rabbit hole that is AI price fixing. How else can it be that available residences increased but so did rent? And so did everything else?

What truly matters and is unaffected by consumer AI use is power - political and corporate power.

Corporate algorithms gave them that power, or at least have been helping them to maintain it for decades. The article uses the very real example of RealPage, whose YieldStar software was helping landlords manage over 3 million rental properties in the US by 2022. Ultimately it took ProPublica to pull back the curtain on a computed market where an algorithm was telling landlords how much to charge tenants for a majority of the market. And even then, I don’t think it’s stopped. Landlords are still coordinating rent prices across the vast majority of rental properties, and all the common folk has to help is, like the article says, “Zillow and a prayer”.

Also, so what if algorithms cost a lot of money? That’s not really an argument for why LLMs level the playing field.

It’s not just the money. It’s the knowledge and expertise needed to use the algorithms, at all. It’s knowing how to ask the algorithm for the information you want in a way that it can understand, in knowing how to visualize the data points it gives. As you said, there’s an entire field of mathematics dedicated to algorithm analysis and optimization. Not everyone has the time, energy, and attention to learn that stuff. I sure don’t, but damn if I am tired of having to rely on “Zillow and a prayer” if I want to get a house or apartment.

Yeah, idk, I’m pretty sure the author meant “SAP”, but then why SQL?

I don’t really think that’s true, because, again, idk why people here think this is all a bad take. It’s real simple. For decades, corporations and institutions have had the upper hand. They have vast resources to spend on computational power and enterprise software and algorithms to keep things asymmetrically efficient. Algorithms don’t sleep, don’t get tired, they follow one creed ABO, Always Be Optimizing. But that software costs a lot of money, and you have to know all this other stuff to know how to use it correctly. Then along comes the language model. Suddenly, you just talk to the computer the way you’d talk to another human, and you get what you ask for.

Wow. Don’t even know enough to elaborate, so you just use 2-word sentences like some asshole.

Is it, though? Consider that many organizations both private and public have been using algorithms since the 1990s, long before anyone knew what an algorithm was. They had entire departments dedicated to running optimization algorithms. Amazon has algorithms deciding what products to show you, what prices to charge, and how to route packages. Airlines have algorithms that adjust ticket prices hundreds of times a day based on data you didn’t even know existed, and health insurance companies have actuarial models that process millions of data points to decide your rates. And what have you got? A web browser with multiple tabs open, a spreadsheet program, and Google Search. Seems like a rather one-sided fight, no?

I, for one, would love to make friends with a White House staffer or intern, perhaps make friends with a couple. Not to pump them for anything as droll as classified Intel or state secrets. No, I want the hot goss, the tea, the interpersonal drama.

Trump’s Cabinet secretaries all hate each other. This, I know to be true. Their interns must see and hear a lot of it, I’d love to be in on it.

What’s funny is this guy has 25 years of experience as a software developer. But three months was all it took to make it worthless. He also said it was harder than if he’d just wrote the code himself. Claude would make a mistake, he would correct it. Claude would make the same mistake again, having learned nothing, and he’d fix it again. Constant firefighting, he called it.

The top comment on the article points that out.

It’s an example of a far older phenomenon: Once you automate something, the corresponding skill set and experience atrophy. It’s a problem that predates LLMs by quite a bit. If the only experience gained is with the automated system, the skills are never acquired. I’ll have to find it but there’s a story about a modern fighter jet pilot not being able to handle a WWII era Lancaster bomber. They don’t know how to do the stuff that modern warplanes do automatically.

What’s interesting is what he found out. From the article:

I forced myself to use Claude Code exclusively to build a product. Three months. Not a single line of code written by me. I wanted to experience what my clients were considering—100% AI adoption. I needed to know firsthand why that 95% failure rate exists.

I got the product launched. It worked. I was proud of what I’d created. Then came the moment that validated every concern in that MIT study: I needed to make a small change and realized I wasn’t confident I could do it. My own product, built under my direction, and I’d lost confidence in my ability to modify it.

I don’t know if you know this, but if the US falls, the whole world falls with it. There will be no turning back, no one will be spared. Who knows, maybe evolution will start over with another species, and they’ll do the same shit, over and over again until the sun burns out.

Because it comes down to the Presidential pardon powers. They can defy a blatantly illegal order, be dishonorably discharged, lose their pensions, healthcare benefits, pay, etc. or, they can follow a blatantly illegal order, and receive a pardon for it later.

I ask you, which one would you pick?

Yes, modernize zoning, and also include vacancy taxing. Apartment complexes will keep entire units empty and just jack up rents on the remaining tenants rather than lower rents to fill the empty units, and that must end.

This. I don’t think Miller knows just how much his own side doesn’t like him. He does have people over him with more power who keep him around because he’s useful, and they protect him because he’s useful, but once he’s outlived his usefulness, they’ll wash their hands of him.

There are approx 45,000 denominations of Christianity

Well, obviously that’s where the US Dept of Faith comes in and starts whittling that number down a little, by their denomination declaring the other 44,999 to be heretical. And because they’re with the government, they’ve got authority to stamp out heresy, violently, if need be. As for how it’s funded? Well, since we got rid of the IRS, taxes aren’t collected, but tithes are mandatory!

Oh, it’s not that they think those things are bad, just that they want to be the arbiters of who deserves those things. They’re not against social programs, they just want to put their churches in charge of them so they can police behavior.

I’m enjoying it. It feels like the game that Obsidian wanted the first one to be, but couldn’t quite get there, for whatever reason.