https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2026/02/27/the-i...

from the same author

Not necessarily UBI; one just needs an adequate day job. Then the hobby could be creating value with no expectation of any direct return: writing a blog, writing and giving away music, writing open-source software, doing any volunteer work, etc.

I guess then you disagree with the previous blog post, The Insane Stupidity of UBI, which says free money for all just makes prices go up.

I see your post as a pretty strong refutation of OP's premise.

Unless for those who can afford not worrying about money, of course.

While I think you are not wrong, these are excuses to continue doing useless things

money is a judgement of value to society and a motivator to only allocate work in a useful way.. wouldn't UBI, even if coupled to actually producing _something_ will lead to a lot of useless stuff being made?

"Don't worry about money" is something a lot of companies do. They can just try to create value first, then look for profits later (albeit often though "enshitification").

This bias towards creating value makes them more moral than mere mortals, creating huge amounts of innovation and surplus value.

I care less about receiving the money and more about the implications people have regarding money.

For example, when I'd joined a company I did not get any travel expenses. They expected me to pay the 200 euros a month myself. I'd suggested it and they shrugged it off. The company is now firing people and others are leaving.

The current company just has a default rate of money you get per km. They don't need to, but they know people want this and will ask about it.

Its a small example but it gives you a view of how a company operates

> I have found that the less you care about money the easier it is to acquire.

That sounds cool but hasn't been my experience at all. I used to care about money, and used to earn well. These days I care less about money (which I can afford to, precisely because I used to care about money) and earn an order of magnitude less.

The problem is that you have to acquire money first to care less about it

> This strategy is highly effective but it's also difficult to tolerate as an ordinary advanced ape. Watching others play less noble games and obtain easier wins can be discouraging over time.

A noble man that spends all his time jealous of the things the men without scruples have is not so much far from doing what they did. It's also what the men that did it before him told themselves "why play the right game if everyone else doesn't".

> You have a right to perform your prescribed duty, but you are not entitled to the fruits of action. Never consider yourself the cause of the results of your activities, and never be attached to not doing your duty.

I have a hard time interpreting that as what geohotz is saying. If anything it seems to promote rent seekers by telling you - stick to your lane and don't complain. I.e. the caste system

Only if you're stuck in the comparison trap. The point isn't to compete about who can offer more value - the point is simply to offer more value (or create more value) than you consume. That's it.

What others do is actually irrelevant to the argument.

If what you are good at can be easily automated... be curious, grow, and get good at other things you can provide more value in. These are usually adjacent to what you're already good at.

Also, the timeline isn't 'the next few years' or 'the past', but 'your entire life.'

Is it? If "others with AI" deliver what you consume, it should also make it easier to deliver more than you consume because what you consume becomes cheaper.

Maybe a part of the anxiety is the realization that much if what was delivered by well-paid people before AI is actually not something the very same people want to consume?

>> If others with AI will deliver that value cheaper...

That's the most interesting thing - in 99.9% they don't. All their value is negated by lowering code base quality, pushing slop to prod ("but code reviews..." - don't help sorry, unless you spent a long time getting to understand a problem - simply reading a solution gives only false confidence that you understood it - you didn't, not fully). E.g. see all the outages at amazon, cloudflare, etc.

Quick short term wins lead to big longer term losses - and this is already happening.

The issue is - its basically impossible to make decision makers see this as this requires many years of expertise in tech, and it is very not obvious, and sounds like you just don't want to rely on AI to replace you etc etc.

While selling AI is easy - "look! it did this feature in 5 minutes! so much productivity".

True, creating value isn't sufficient. But if you're creating value, you don't need that community; that community needs you. That doesn't mean it'll be easy to leave nor that you won't lose a lot by doing so, but it's better than being a leech. Leeches can only survive by finding another victim to suck blood from, and at some point that merry-go-round is going to run out of horsies. Pardon the mixed metaphors.

"just"

I mean at this point, for that to happen it definitely isn't a matter of intelligence (it can fix errors later and learn from them), it's only a matter of memory and proper harness. Once memory it's solved for good, then recursive self-improvement is inevitable.

> we are at our best when we have deadlines and clear targets to reach

I'd argue we are at our best when those deadlines and clear targets are intrinsic rather than extrinsic, and that intrinsic motivation of that sort is actually more efficient than extrinsic, as it keeps you going much longer.

But yes, that's not always possible and depends greatly on your circumstances.

However, it is often much more possible than people allow themselves to think.

All of those are only zero-sum if you pick a conserved metric. Land ownership is zero-sum if measured in square meters. But say someone buys up land that is parched, dead, and empty. They use it by planting moisture-retaining crops and windbreaks and growing food, or running a business of benefit to the community. Now overall everyone is a little better off, despite 0 square meters being created.

Influence is even more so -- it's common to have situations where nobody is truly paying attention to anyone else. The people with good ideas can't get any traction, and the whole organization just spins in circles, lurching from one externally-imposed crisis to the next. If the people who gain influence use that influence to promote others who are worth paying attention to (and thus they gain influence), everyone benefits. But if you measure that in terms of how many minutes each person gets to speak at the All Hands, it's zero-sum.

I feel a strong impulse to conserve all of your matter towards the inside of a locker.

Most games are either negative-sum or positive-sum. Very few are zero-sum.

You misunderstood. All geohot is saying is the same thing Scott Galloway constantly says - your job is to create surplus value. Provide more value than you take, over your lifetime, not over any specific one period, either.

The argument is that if you do that, returns will naturally come your way.

The issue is that many people never provide surplus value at all; some can't, and that is obviously completely acceptable (people who are disabled, have medical conditions, or who for some other reason cannot). But those who are able and choose not to provide surplus value are who he's talking about.

You may not agree, and that's okay, but that's the argument.

That's not what he's saying. At a company level he's saying that if they make more profit than they add value they have an indefensible business model and will eventually lose to bigger players.

At a personal level you can live your life similarly, add value where you can. You can do that by joining an organization that adds value as well.

People volunteer e.g. playing games for free, spending considerable time and effort. The point is that the process is enjoyable by itself.

When it starts to feel like work, it starts to feel like needing wages for it.

Unlike profit-seeking, which creates value, rent-seeking redistributes existing resources, often through lobbying for subsidies, tariffs, or favorable regulations, causing economic inefficiency and higher prices.

So geohot's argument is that Anthropic, for example, who want to regulate AI (presumably favorably for themselves) are such an example. I don't actually think I agree, but I agree that the behavior looks similar on the surface.

Do you think e.g. the AI/LLM boom is all rent seeking? Do you think there's no positive value for the world on the recently announced e.g. MacBook Neo and that it's purely a monopolistic activity? Those are 2 clear recent examples of big players making massive benefits for the world, and I'm okay if they get X% of that value as company valuation.

Building tools and services to reduce hassle and friction for others is great. However, what often happens is that you end up creating and building a moat around that hassle. Think about how companies like TurboTax lobby the government to not build electronic tax filing stuff.

Cory Doctorow explains the dynamics well in Enshittification. First they turn against their users, then their business partners, then their employees. The layoffs you are seeing are just stage 3 enshittification. If you work at a company like this, my advice is to quit ASAP. At least then you leave on your own terms.

> Which companies are playing 0 sum game and which are not?

Most of the US ones are. Anthropic is the worst offender.

The Chinese AI model providers like DeepSeek are not.

Yes, but I make it more precise into two points:

1. Build tools/libraries that empower superior execution performance. If you can execute faster than others you have more potential free time than them. This is a form of compound interest. I do this for myself but my output is not exclusive to myself.

2. Be operational. Create products that are always more durable than what is trendy, but when something does break return a resolution as rapidly as possible, provided excellent regression testing. Be constantly healthy, healing once injuries are found, and constantly aware of new injuries.

I find most people cannot do those two things. Most people cannot measure things and a great many people fear novelty.

You discarded the context within which he made that statement.

You've constructed a strawman; geohot never argued you shouldn't ever receive returns. He argued you shouldn't worry about them, which is not the same thing. His argument hinges on the idea that creating surplus value will bring you returns, but worrying about what those returns are is pointless; those returns, as you say, could be monetary, happiness, fulfillment, power, etc.

And I would argue Elon (himself) stopped creating surplus value quite some time ago; some of his companies still do (Neuralink, SpaceX) but companies like Tesla and Boring are explicitly rent-seeking at this point. Tesla disrupts traditional, rent-seeking dealership models, but it simultaneously utilizes lobbying to secure favorable policies and economic advantages, with the goal being to block out other upstarts and competitors from competing.

And no, I do not count either the non-working Optimus or robotaxi as 'surplus value.'

>Take Elon Musk — tremendous positive-sum deals with people everywhere, and all together, that's what got him to the top.

Ah yes, "tremendous" positive-sum deals like:

>Musk admitted to his biographer Ashlee Vance that Hyperloop was all about trying to get legislators to cancel plans for high-speed rail in California—even though he had no plans to build it.

https://time.com/6203815/elon-musk-flaws-billionaire-visions...