I would like to propose a cap on net worth.

Realistically, if you have 300M, you and your direct family are settled for life. So, I want to propose 1B cap on net worth, if its more than that for 12 months straight, surplus goes to government, if your net worth is down after that, government obliges to return it partially to make it to 1B.

People, who are eager building things and innovating, will keep building regardless, power hungry will try to find other ways to enrich themselves, but eventually they will give up (e.g. having 10 kids, each with 1B net worth)

Not forcing a scarcity of necessities like housing would be a start.

Peer competition is what makes everything work. You need scarcity of necessities to force people in to the system. Recent rulings allowing the criminalisation of homelessness are pushing this further. Your existence is default-illegal unless you work to outbid your peers for housing.

Be realistic, demand the impossible.

The same but less rigged would be a good start. I feel like people ask your question as a gotcha because they can't wrap their head around a system more nuanced than "cancerous capitalism" or "potato famine communism"

Something like we had in advanced western europe and the US between ww2 and the late 70s seemed much more balanced while not requiring a complete system change. Most people would be fine if we sprinkled a bit of socialism on top of the gigantic pile of capitalism.

Stuff like housing, energy, transportation, shouldn't make you live paycheck to paycheck forever. Just the fact that people are slowly starting to talk about 50 years mortgage should be a wake up call.

Most people would be happy knowing there is something a tiny bit better coming, rather than knowing they will never make it out and will kept getting fucked a tiny bit more year after year. My grandparents had objectively a harder life than mine, but their life was improving every year, mine is stagnating at best, and usually I'm losing purchasing power year after year, while being relatively well paid for my country

It's always the same: workers need to unionize and form a political power bloc. Then, those most impacted—the majority—have an array of options, which are well explored in the annals of leftist and socialist political theory.

This is not at all to say that more conservative or reactionary theorists are wrong about how the world works. In fact, I think they're usually more right about what's really going on abstractly.

But, the working man doesn't need to know what's really going on. They need to win the war, and there's a ton of tactical advice written down—hard won lessons by those who built the modern world through the labor movement.

The place to start is with the usual suspects. Verso Books, The New Centre for Social Research, histories of the labor movement, and new political commentators like Josh Citarella.

"Let us finally imagine, for a change, an association of free men, working with the means of production held in common ...."

We should all hope so. It's clear that mass surveillance, the vast psyops architecture including social media platforms, autonomous drone warfare, Starlink & Neuralink, the whole Silicon Valley project in general is intended to have everyone eventually so discombobulated and "interfered with" that they can't even tell they're experiencing exploitation that should cause discomfort and radicalization (and quickly dispatch the few stragglers who can). It's either social rupture or total oligarch victory in the class war and a 10,000-year Thielreich.

The numbers of hours that they work relative to the average wage laborer bears absolutely no relationship to whether they are the beneficiaries of an exploitative socio-economic arrangement. But they all certainly work much less than the laborers in the most precarious positions who are forced to work multiple gig economy jobs to make ends meet, yes.

Exactly. My main interest in remote Claude Code is to maintain state continuity from all client hosts. I have a lot of laptops and mobile devices and I don’t want to manage my git and cloud connections for each. Setup and rebooting are pretty disruptive to short bursts of inspiration or iteration.

>> only software will be completely replaced because it is verifiable

the thing most (especially non-devs) don't understand is that if software can be automated - 99% of all knowledge work will be replaced, as software is the ultimate automation.

There would be absolutely no issues automating accountants/lawyers/etc etc etc. Sure few will be left but 99% can be automated when software is that advanced.

Not only knowledge work, also a massive amount of blue collar jobs. AI already can guide you how to fix a lot of things or analyze issues with plumbing/electricity/you name it.

So if software goes down - everyone will go down.

> I believe this new wave of zeal is being somewhat driven by an Anthropic astroturfing campaign.

Yeah I've sort of noticed this on X for the brief time I was on there this weekend. The Claude Code creator was hyping it up to the moon, and when people called him out for it he said he would feel the same way if he wasn't making 1000 racks a year with it. Sure mate.

What people don't realise is if tech progresses to the point where everything is automated, the marginal cost of everything will basically go to zero. It would be better to give away food and shelter for free if it keeps things peaceful. And if not, people have revolted for far less.

That being said it's a complete utopia and once this bubble pops we are basically going to be where we were, but with excellent natural language parsing and generation, with some useful code generation and introspection tools, writing assistants, etc. Which will be great, but not world changing.

I don’t think doing that will change anything. Only real options - without a career shift - that I’ve identified are to work for companies building something that’s never been built before, or building a SaaS that serves a niche.

Maybe you can recommend some of those models? I'm honestly bewildered - what is open and not?

How stopping using hyperscalers models on their infra would "get as much of this capability into the open as possible"?

Either "we" create models better than commercial state of the art (by using whatever means).

Or we use open models AND fund organisations building such models (could be by purchasing service from these orgs or donations - in which case would these orgs be different than hyperscalers?).

But i dont see how just hosting the models on some private servers would give us an edge?

Or, use the best tools to make the best products you can and stake your claim before all the low hanging fruit is picked

Have fun trying to afford the necessary hardware to run open models acceptably. The big labs are trying to make sure we won’t be able to in short order.

What tool do you use, which languages? Could you give us an example of something you’ve built and how you did it 25 times faster?

Part of being in a union tends to be lawyering up and "nailing down" exactly what everyone's duties in detail and what fair compensation might be, and what terms / conditions might be etc.

Personally I don't think they're a great fit for the software industry where the nature of the job and the details are continuously changing as technology evolves.

Before I get into it: what careers do you think are most compelling? Especially if you think all white collar work is going to be undermined by this technology.

I wrote this up a bit ago in my essay fragments collection. It's rough and was just a thought I wanted to get down, I'm unsure of it, but it's at least somewhat relevant to the discussion here:

LLM or LLM-adjacent technology will never take over the execution of work in a way that approaches human where humans continue to guide (like PMs or C-suite just "managing" LLMs).

The reason is that spoken language is a poor medium by which to describe technical processes, and a well-enumerated specification in natural language describing the process is at-least synonymous with doing the work in skilled applications.

For example, if someone says to an LLM: Build a social media app that is like Tinder but women can only initiate.

... this is truly easily replicatable and therefore with little real business value as a product. Anything that can be described tersely that is novel and therefore valuable unfortunately has very little value practically because the seed of the short descriptor is sort of a private key of an idea itself: it will seed the idea into reality by labor of LLMs, but all that is needed for that seed's maturation is the original phrase. These would be like trade secrets, but also by virtue of something existing out there, its replication becomes trivial since that product's patterns are visible and copyable.

In this way, the only real outcome here is that LLMs entirely replace human labor including decision making or are tools to real human operators but not replacements.

Big tech laid off 150,000 people last year despite constantly beating wall st expectations and blowing more money than the Apollo program on a money losing technology with the stated goal of firing even more people. Totally insane that most people I talk to still don’t think they need a union.

The "world at large" mostly consists of workers, so things that are beneficial to workers are also beneficial to it.

> your elevator stops working when the elevator operator is sick

Can you point somewhere outside of US where this is the case with unions?

So do you believe that the gains from this technology will be broadly distributed? Or will capital capture the majority of those gains?

“I’m a special rockstar guru ninja 10x dev, being held to the standards of the normals will just hold me back from my true potential”

And yet it is still possible to maintain work-life balance, given the right job at the right business, even after the invention of email.

I was juggling lots of simultaneous agents when trying to use up the $250 free Claude Code Web credit Anthropic gave me and it was exhausting.

> Small quantities of poisoned training data can significantly damage a language model.

Is this still accurate?

Join a union.

Chinese are way past 996 and onto 007