• 0 Posts
  • 76 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 18th, 2023

help-circle

  • In 1962 Phillip K Dick put out a book called “Man in the High Castle.” In it there was a scene that stuck out to me, and seems more and more relevant as this AI wave continues.

    In it a man has two identical lighters. Each made in the same year by the same manufacturer. But one was priceless and one was worthless.

    The priceless one was owned by Abraham Lincoln and was in his pocket on the night he was assassinated. He had a letter of certification as such, and could trace the ownership all the way back to that night.

    And he takes them both and mixes them up and asks which is the one with value. If you can no longer discern the one with “historicity,” then where is it’s value?

    And every time I see an article like this I can’t help but think about that. If I tell you about the life and hardship of an artist, and then present you two poems, one that he wrote and one that was spit out by an LLM, and you cannot determine which has the true hardship and emotion tied to it, then which has value? What if I killed the artist before he could reveal which one was the “true” poem? How do you know which is a powerful expression of the artist’s oppression, and which is worthless, randomly generated swill?



  • Okay, to be clear, are you arguing that the dichotomy we are choosing between is Notch becoming a billionaire or a corporation reaping the benefits of his labor? I think if those are the options, I prefer the universe where Notch is a billionaire, lol.

    I don’t think that’s what you’re saying, but I’ll admit I’ve read your comment a few times, and couldn’t really latch on to what you point was.

    But to just free associate off of what you said, I think there’s a lot of value to many in the safety of a job vs the life of an entrepreneur. I’m in that situation myself. I know I could easily make 1.5-2x my current salary if I just stood up and LLC and did all my work as a 1099 employee. I’d be able to keep all my current clients and basically nothing would change. I could set my own hours and not have a boss to answer to. But it comes with a lot fewer safety nets, and it means that all the unpleasantness and risk of “running a business” would all fall on me.

    Am I running the risk that I could build a billion dollar product and giving all that surplus capital to my company? Sure. But the odds of that are terribly low, and honestly, it’s a gamble I’m more than willing to take to avoid having to deal with the overhead and risk of striking out on my own with no top cover.


  • The issue is that becoming a billionaire has more to do with being lucky than it does with direct exploitation.

    If everyone in the US chipped 5 dollars into a pool, and it was randomly given to one person, that person would be a billionaire.

    And yes, they have a huge concentration of other people’s labor represented in that cash. But the person who won the pool isn’t a bad person because of that. They didn’t exploit anyone themselves. Just because someone somewhere at some point under capitalism was exploited, that doesn’t lay the moral condemnation at the feet of the lottery winner.


  • Sure, but that argument is specious as hell, right? Like, if everyone in the United States decided to give you a $5 bill, does that instantly make you a bad person who exploited labor to get where you are?

    “There is no ethical consumption under capitalism” is simply a rhetorical device to outline the flaws in the system. It completely breaks down when used as justification to villainize someone.

    Your position could be equally stated as, “anyone who has more money than me is a worse person than me, and anyone with less money than me is a better person than me.” It’s a misuse of the “no ethical consumption” idea on its face.


  • A fair point. It’s been a while since then. I didn’t recall that.

    That said, he’s just an easy example. There’s a few other people who could be used. There’s a billionaire who was an early Bitcoin adopter for example.

    And it certainly would have been possible for Notch to become a billionaire without hiring people. The company only had 25 employees in 2014, and was doing $330million in revenue every year. There’s certainly a path he could have tread to still becoming a billionaire without hiring anyone.

    It would have been harder, taken longer, and not been as profitable for sure, but doable.


  • Sure, but if that’s the argument, then everyone who has ever bought a laptop that shipped with Windows on it is equally guilty.

    Perhaps even moreso. Those people are giving money to Microsoft. He took a billion dollars away from them.

    But like, this is classic motte and baily. Your initial position was “all billionaires exploit labor for profit,” but when under scrutiny you just retreat to “there is no ethical consumption under capitalism, so he’s guilty by virtue of simply participating in the system.”


  • You’re moving the goalposts though, you realize that right?

    Your initial position was that you have to have exploited people to be worth a billion dollars (with an implicit “directly exploited,” since if you can’t make any money without indirectly exploiting people, which would make your point even more pedantic than I’m being.)

    Other people later exploiting others to profit off your product is irrelevant. Hell, it’d be irrelevant if you made your billion dollars and then started exploiting people yourself. You still would have, in fact, become a billionaire without exploiting people to do so.






  • Do you do those things because you truly get enjoyment out of them, or are they simply your drug of choice to help you cope through to the next day?

    Those are all things that can be enjoyed in a healthy way certainly, but if it’s just “wake up, work, binge internet, sleep,” every day, then I’m afraid you have a problem. Maybe not a full blown addiction, but at least an extremely unhealthy coping mechanism for some deeper underlying issues.

    This is something that you can work on though. Ideally with the help of a professional therapist who can help you identify why you feel the need to cope in this way and help you start breaking those destructive patterns in your life.


  • You say you don’t like anything or give up on everything, but what does that look like? I assume that you don’t spend 8+ hours every day staring at a blank wall. You must do something to fill your time.

    But if you are truly finding it difficult/impossible to be interested in the world around you, then your issue isn’t that you don’t have a girlfriend my dude. It sounds like you’re suffering from pretty severe depression.

    And I hate to break it to you, but untreated mental illness is definitely a mood killer, and not just with the ladies. You’re gonna need to get yourself into a better place, or you’re gonna drive more than just romantic partners away.

    But I’ll tell you, you’re awfully fatalistic for 35. Women tend to pretty holistically prefer guys in the 33-40 bracket. You’re not past your prime in the slightest. A little self confidence and a little investment in the world around you, and I think you’ll find that you will attract people no problem.

    And hey, maybe I’m wildly off base. I know I’m making a lot of assumptions based off a very small paragraph. And maybe I’m reading you super wrong. If so, I apologize.

    One thing to keep in mind though. The idea of a relationship and sex you have in your head? That’s a fantasy. Both are great things certainly, but when I was younger I feel like I built them up to be something deifying in my head. That once I had them, all my greatest desires would be met, and that life would be finally “complete” for me.

    Understand that relationships are work. Fulfilling work, but work nonetheless. They require just as much “sticking to it” as any hobby that you haven’t stuck with, if not substantially more. And let me tell you, you’re absolutely not going to want to do it all the time. It requires a lot of dedication and perseverance.

    And don’t build up sex to something more than it is. Its great, certainly, but I promise you’re putting it on a higher pedestal in your head than it deserves.

    But all that to say, right now, you’re in love with the idea of a relationship, not the reality of one. I’m confident that you’d find the reality to not be what you’ve dreamed of it. And the problems and struggles you have in your life are rarely made easier by adding more work and responsibilities.

    Take care of yourself and get to a point where you love yourself and the world around you as it is, and I think you’ll find that the rest of this will kind of take care of itself.