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This sentiment is good and important.

What we lack today is a vision that the future doesn't have to be shitty.

It really doesn't.

In the 2000s, we had technical optimism. The change was when the ad-supported model took over. Tech became a force for manipulation.

I don't think the big change can come from simply open source without incentive. I could be wrong.

More traditional business models where the end user is the customer would go a long way against cynicism. As would non-VC models where tech can exist without profiting 100x or dying.

The only change that needs to occur is in culture. We just need to think that these models are worth trying and to talk about our success in them. There are many great examples of small tech businesses that are not cynical.

The end result is a productive 'race to the bottom' that Hotz is talking about. Lots of small companies competing with lower and lower margin and better and better products. A real market aligned with the customers. It's too bad he took VC so he cannot ethically participate.

Still, with a lot of his open software, he is an agent of the change he wants to see in the world. That's definitely worth something.

There's multiple problems here. 1. The thing that needs to change is not culture, it's literally the supreme court that has to change because the change in the 70's as the court transitioned to judge rehnquist's ideas is what caused the current problem. Prior to that we had a robust antitrust department that was going way too hard (they were breaking up regional gas station chains, so instead of saying "just don't do that" we went the exact opposite end of the spectrum into very wrong territory and allowed massive multinational monopolies/oligopolies).

2. The productive race to the bottom is awesome but it also needs some changes to copyright/patents. Contrary to what Mr. Hotz thinks, they are not stupid, they are a good idea that has been utterly coopted and rebranded to maximize holder value (at the direct cost of total societal value). To fix it we need to change the law to require minimization of harm at a given increase in copyrightable/patentable output with wording directing the error to be on the side of less damage to non copyright/patent holders. Copyright is easier here than patents because copyright terms went full retard. We could cut them down to the patent term and I highly doubt we see more than negligible drop in creative output because most of the value is in those first 20 years for almost all creative works.

I'm not really sure I understand what's being proposed instead.

I agree with the premise that that comparison between Tiffany's and piracy doesn't hold, but

> It’s a lot more like taking a picture, which Tiffany’s probably encourages. Win-win cooperation.

That doesn't make sense. Pirating something means you gained the whole value of the product. In Tiffany's case that's not remotely the case. In fact, they will pay large sums of money to marketing companies to make sure you get a photo.

If the entire value of a product can be taken, there's no incentive for it to be created in the first place other than intellectual curiosity - as another commentator said: effectively academia.

Our society has never found a way to deal with digital products in a way that doesn't skew incentives

> If the entire value of a product can be taken.

But this is not really possible . People switch to identical products made by more ethical or value aligned distributors all the time.

Switching out music streaming services based on artist payouts, or banks based on their climate commitments, buying a game after pirating it to support development. I’m sure someone can think of even better examples.

I'd argue it is possible. If a person pirates an album of an artist, that person now owns the album as if they would have paid money for it (from back in the itunes times). Same for an ebook, a game, a movie, ...

You are describing mostly services, where the intellectual property of the product is of no interest to the buyer (e.g. the average Spotify user has no desire to access their codebase or recommendation engine).

Buying a game after pirating has no impact on the product you have today, you already own the intellectual property as is.

> I agree with the premise that that comparison between Tiffany's and piracy doesn't hold

The Tiffany’s example is naive.

1. Tiffany in that case equivalent to a reseller that get stolen activation codes.

2. Pirating is more like stealing something that has infinite stock. But once pirated there’s also similar product (with infinite stock) at 0$ so the value of the product could end up being lower due and result decrease in sales.

I’m all in gain-gain but the example in his post is also incomplete.

His comparison is certainly better, but it is still very wrong. I wish there were better and less biased comparisons in the debate.
I stand behind by the general statment but...

>... What’s shocking to me is how much everyone still cares about money

Sadly this is easy to say if you have enough of it to be happy - a lot of humans cant say that. (Saying this beeing happy ;))

Money is a useful tool for complex societies. It means I don't have to trade a chicken for a bag of potatoes. However, this tool has also been hijacked by those in power to maintain control.

In our current system, a box full of rocks painted to look like nickel can have the same monetary value as the actual nickel. See:

JPMorgan Had Some Fake Nickel https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-03-21/jpmorg...

Also the government can just make more money (i.e. to avoid defaulting), devaluing your own money in the process, like some sort of indirect tax.

I think he speaks of the people with enough money to cover their needs well. Elons Musks, Warrens Buffets and so on...

He is not a moron to think that a boy in a slum has not to worry about money.

There's an episode in Lower Decks where a civilization is burning money since they have "replicators" and you can just make anything. Assuming you have free energy (sun) and automated manufacturing, maybe that could be possible but I wonder if the concept of money ever goes away. I still believe in merit eg. why try if you get the same pay as doing less. And doing it for fun... But this is why open source Linux devices have broke cameras (no drivers).
> Then people figured out how to monetize it. It was a race to extract every tiny bit of value, and now we have today’s Internet.

Most of us know the 'invisible hand' as the thing that sets optimal prices, but this monetization and extraction of value is also part of its work.

George accidentally posted his investor update to his blog
Dying
> The best outcome of AI is if it delivers huge amounts of value to society but no profit to anyone.

geohot should use language better imho - this idea of his is called a commons. And i do think that AI could be a commons. But as with most commons, there's always a tragedy associated with it.

Unless the gov't makes sure such a commons is kept clean, and available to everyone, this tragedy will always happen.

> Then people figured out how to monetize it. It was a race to extract every tiny bit of value, and now we have today’s Internet. Can this play out differently with AI?

But i think today's internet was better than back in the 2000. Now i have a video platform for which there's next to zero lag, plays high definition, and most importantly, free for me to use (not to mention it became a source of revenue for a lot of creators).

The old internet still exists, if one chooses to visit them. It's just like the wild west still exists, if one chooses to live that way. Except nobody _wants_ to.

So for the AI to be a commons, like the implied commons that the internet could've been, another entity would need to be solely responsible for, and regulate it.

It is worth reading back on the origin of the phrase 'tragedy of the commons'.

There is little evidence that commons always have a tragedy associated with them. The term itself was coined in order to facilitate a transfer of commons from the communities which looked after them to the crown and the gentry. This process was called the 'enclosure'.

The degradation of the land was not due to the self regulating commons, it was and is due to the commercial imperative for continuous and rising returns on the capital investment. The commons version of the internet was great early on because there was no commercial imperative. Though the commercial imperative creates more throughout (just like with farmland), it also destroys the landscape and the communities which supported it.

No, that isn’t a “commons”. And a commons in terms of the “tragedy of commons” isn’t well defined either. And the “tragedy of the commons” isn’t well supported either.

For example, sunlight. Sunlight delivers huge value to society but profit to no one. According to your claims that is a “commons”. And according to your theory unless a government manages sunlight it will always result in a “tragedy of commons”.

But we can even extend this to human created stuff. Especially scientific and mathematical knowledge. Lots of knowledge has been created that benefits everyone but does not deliver profit to anyone. For example calculating the area of a rectangle or a triangle.

These things still fit your definition of a “commons” being things that “deliver huge value to society but no profit to anyone”.

> Sunlight delivers huge value to society but profit to no one. According to your claims that is a “commons”. And according to your theory unless a government manages sunlight it will always result in a “tragedy of commons”.

or perhaps the tragedy hasn't happened yet. And in any case, humans barely harvest the sunlight at the moment. So it might yet happen in the future. What if by building a dyson swarm, the sunlight becomes owned? Would that not be a tragedy then?

> These things still fit your definition of a “commons” being things that “deliver huge value to society but no profit to anyone”.

And we get increasingly fewer and fewer of these knowledge today imho, thanks to a tragedy called IP law.

So i do claim that my definition of commons is inline with the idea of commons, and that tragedy of the commons can (and probably will) still happen.

Well, access to sunlight is already a problem in high density residential areas. When you're surrounded by tall buildings in every direction, it's hard to get sunlight in your house.
And this is covered by building codes (and labor codes in case of commercial use).
I wanna post this here because someone on HN must know: What really happened to him at RIT? I know people who were with him in the freshman class and they used to troll him on IRC(or maybe it was DC++?). I heard that he managed to hack their security system or something to that effect and they gave him an out: leave the university and we wont press charges. Always wondered if that was true. Its been like 18 years right?
Still waiting for Geohot to fix search at twit... x
The same George who sold iPhone exploits to Chinese grey market firms for a bit of extra cash? It's hard to take his points seriously here, and to be honest he has always skated erratically from point to point in his career. He already had plenty of opportunities to make enough money to realize these effective altruism-esque ideas.
> It’s a lot more like taking a picture, which Tiffany’s probably encourages.

This comparison is absolutely wrong. It's more like having a 3d scanner / printer that replicates the Tiffany merchandise to the atomic level at cost 0. Something that Tiffany will fight to death, if it existed.

People must always have an incentive of profit or they won't put maximum effort, and you don't get all the necessary resources and investments.
This is a cultural specific value system. For example you can be motivated by work life balance, or what’s good for the tribe.
Funny how it's always money motivated people who say this. Working class folks put resources into others all the time. It's never the guy driving an Audi that stops and helps the broken down/stuck car just to help.

This saying is just money motivated people assuming how the world works (when in fact all the worker bee's making the world work don't operate this way, just look how many at a factory put in extra effort to do their step right/better when there is no financial motivation, only satisfaction of doing things right).

Not many people can get down to brass tacks like geohot
Interesting, George, but maybe you could look a bit more closely at the current moment and come up with something more relevant?
> Except it isn’t and Joe Biden is a senile moron. Because when you smash the windows and grab the stuff, Tiffany’s no longer has the stuff. With piracy, everyone has the stuff. It’s a lot more like taking a picture, which Tiffany’s probably encourages. Win-win cooperation.

Having a picture of jewelry is not even remotely close to having actual jewelry. When you pirate something you destroy its value, that's basic supply and demand. Sure, everyone has the stuff, but it's now worthless. Great for the consumer obviously but terrible for the producer.

I don't think that's what the words value and worth mean.

It seems obvious to me that the value of a book teaching me something is not its price, and if that book was free it wouldn't be a worthless book.

insisting on monetary value as the only benchmark of worthiness looks to me as a kind of misguided religion of Capital.

https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Agalmics

"The neocommies still think in terms of dollars and paranoia. Manfred is so angry that he wants to make someone rich, just to thumb his nose at the would-be defector" - https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/acceler...

I'm not certain trying to immanentize the eschaton is the wisest maneuver, but welcome to the agalmic future I guess.

sounds like academia — everyone benefits, no one profits; most eke out an existence
Aside from comparing me buying some software or a movie and then sharing it with my friend being compared to "piracy" - like a Somali pirate taking over some Tom Hanks type's ship, one question is how is it theft?

The answer is that it is common sense. A worker created that thing, imparting value onto it, and they deserve to be compensated. Common sense to most people.

Except, I guess this is unknown to most, but this is the exact opposite of the stated theoretical underpinnings of the capitalist economy we live in. Which is that the value of a good is determined by what people will pay for it, as subjective theory of value. The idea that someone worked to put value into a commodity and deserves compensation is actually the foundation of Marxism. Most arguments about why "piracy", to use their PR phrase, is supposed to be wrong are at the bottom of things, Marxist ones.

The one who provides the best tools for knowledge workers for free with enough mind-share and time are already at the finish line in the race to zero.

This is why you are seeing lots of AI startups running up the application layer instead of the foundational layer which that has been reduced to $0 thanks to open source and free AI models.

Only a matter of time to see that as AI models get better, the so-called AI startups building on top of third-party AI model APIs will be easily copyable and not many of these startups will survive.

> Every loser and grifter will be gone from technology because there’s nothing to be gained there. They can play golf all day or something.

On top of that, the increase in so-called "AI startups" in the application layer are a mere survival of the fittest testbed for larger companies like OpenAI to see who is worth copying.

It is another scam.

Biden was right. The rest of this reads like stuff you would write if you were on speed, in seventh grade, or both and thought it was profound.
he will have to look further ahead.
Written by someone who is probably already disgustingly rich
I don't see how AI generated open source software alone can replace services that require resources.
hmm (in disagreement)