And soon we expect everyone to have a mech suit, and only a handful of companies can make one, and they rent it to you and can revoke it at any time.
And what happens when they've saturated the market? Prices go up to the maximum the market can bear, and then they'll extend into other markets. Why rent the model to build a profitable company with when you could just take all that profit for yourself?
> Why rent the model to build a profitable company with when you could just take all that profit for yourself?
You're describing a standoff at best and a horrible parasitic relationship at worst.
In the worst case, the supplier starves the customer of any profit motive and the customer just stops and the supplier then has no business to run.
This has happened a few times in the past and is by 2026, well understood as a way to bankruptcy.
That has always been the beauty of free markets - it's self healing and calibrating. You don't need a big powerful overseer to ensure things are right.
Competing with customers is a way to lose business fast.
For example:
- AWS has everything they need to shit out products left, right and center. AWS can beat most of their partners and even customers who are wiring together all their various products tomorrow if they wanted. They don't because killing an entire vertical isn't of any benefit to them yet. Eventually they will when AWS is no longer growing and cannot build or scale any product no matter how hard they think or try. Competing with their customers is their very last option.
- OpenAI/Anthropic/Google isn't going to start competing against the large software body shops. Even if all that every employee at TCS does is hit Claude up, Anthropic isn't going to be the next TCS - it's competing with their customers.
> That has always been the beauty of free markets - it's self healing and calibrating. You don't need a big powerful overseer to ensure things are right.
If by "self healing and calibrating" you mean 'evolve to a monopoly and strongarm everybody to do exactly what you want whilst removing all pressure on the quality of your product', then yes, that is the "beauty" of free markets.
That is the stable state of free markets. Antitrust regulation and enforcement only barely manages to eke out oligopolies and even then they are often rife with collusion and enshittification.
> evolve to a monopoly and strongarm everybody to do exactly what you want whilst removing all pressure on the quality of your product
This certainly isn't true of small businesses and the local mom-and-pop shops in your area.
For free markets to work, small businesses need the ability to thrive and starting one should be exceptionally easy.
What has unfortunately happened in a lot of developed countries, is that in order to regulate the very large companies you're upset about, governments have made it nearly impossible to start small businesses to act as competition. That makes it even easier for companies to consolidate and evolve into a monopoly, strong-arming everyone - the exact opposite effect of what those regulations were hoping to fix.
Are there small businesses in your area like the 1 or 5 person HVAC or cleaning or landscaping or breakfast company that you disdain as much as you disdain UnitedHealthCare?
Always the same nonsense. Simple question: do you think in a fully free market, without any governement intervention, those mom and pop shops would not be bought up or merge?
The truth is that consolidation is an attractor. If it hasn't happened yet in a market, it will. Economies of scale give an undisputed advantage. If there is anything I'm upset about, it is about deluding people by vilifying the only thing that prevents feudalism (and massive abuse of humanity for profit) from happening.
You and I are debating: do free markets naturally inevitably trend toward permanent monopolies, or does free-market competition constantly disrupt incumbents?
The reason why Silicon Valley is the hotbed of such innovations, large booming businesses is regulators haven't yet got their hands into software.
In comparison, more regulated industries like BioTech, Education, Finance, Oil, Gas, Infrastructure is a joke.
The Biden administration had started the ball rolling on shackling up AI and LLMs: regulating, enforcing, mandating bottlenecks. It would have been kneecapping ourselves - essentially placing on ourselves the very sanctions we now place on China! The U.S. wouldn't need China to invade Taiwan to bring down our economy, we would willingly do it to ourselves! The push to regulate AI through mandatory reporting thresholds and compliance bottlenecks for large compute runs is the exact type of barrier-to-entry that kneecaps open-source disruption and entrenches the current giants. Hopefully these illinformed suicidal tendencies are on pause, for now.
I CANNOT for the life of me, understand why we would think, placing any limit on our creativity and productivity is a smart decision but I digress.
> do you think in a fully free market, without any governement intervention, those mom and pop shops would not be bought up or merge?
Is there a regulation right now that stops BigHVAC from acquiring your local, community 1 to 5 person HVAC company?
We don't have to engage in hypotheticals. I already asked you "Are there small businesses in your area like the 1 or 5 person HVAC or cleaning or landscaping or breakfast company that you disdain as much as you disdain UnitedHealthCare?" and I don't have a response yet.
> The truth is that consolidation is an attractor. If it hasn't happened yet in a market, it will. Economies of scale give an undisputed advantage
Mathematically, probabilistically, a software engineer will make way more risk adjusted money working as an employee at the MAG7 than starting their own startup, yet, every month, we have software engineers joining and creating startups.
A similar mindset makes your HVAC tech start their own or continue to run their own even though mathematically, probabilistically, economies of scale would give them an undisputed advantage - but that, consolidation isn't free. An even remotely skilled operator understands that and what that entails.
The moment a big, consolidated HVAC company raises prices or provides terrible service, a smart technician can buy a van, print some flyers, and steal their customers. Free markets allow the mom-and-pop shop to constantly respawn. Infact, Gavin Newsom has managed to distort the HVAC market in California by making it really onerous to operate refrigerants that does make it pretty hard for mom-and-pop shop to constantly respawn. This is why you will notice a lot of PE picking off HVAC companies in California!
By your logic, the world would have stopped at Sears, Blockbuster, and IBM. Yet, the first two aren't even a thing in 2026 and I don't want to comment on the IBM of 2026.
There are even more examples than these that obliterates the tired "consolidation is an inevitable endpoint" argument. A reasonable person would immediately acknowledge that size does not guarantee survival in a market where innovation is permitted and the entry fee is low.
The "feudalism" that you apparently abhor is actually caused by government intervention. When governments heavily regulate industries (like education, healthcare, finance, infrastructure), they make compliance so expensive that only massive, consolidated corporations can afford the lawyers and lobbyists to survive. Regulation protects the consolidated giants from the mom-and-pop startups!
I must deal with reality though - your sentences suggest companies always consolidate and the only way is to counter that with regulation. You really believe in this and this does hold true in heavily regulated industries but then you need to ask why does the same not hold true for industries with low barriers to entry and permissionless innovation?
Here's a thought experiment: Before the AI boom, the MAG7 rivaled the GDP of entire nations and dominated global market caps. They certainly don't need AI and LLMs to stay happy - infact Google, who invented transformers, is now rivaled by OpenAI and a swarm of startups founded by the very engineers who left Big Tech to disrupt it. This isn't the only time this has happened in tech!
So why are they now rushing to outcompete each other, over multi billions of dollars, to the extent they are self-sacrificing staff to freeup capital to invest into compute?
Your reply leans on the observation that there are still small shops in the HVAC market specifically and that there are still markets without full consolidation.
Yes, there is a difference in markets and yes, the height of the barrier of entry makes a big difference in how fast consolidation happens. Yes, regulation can heighten the barrier of entry (but also lower, although less common).
You see instances, moments in time, and conclude that the systems don't evolve in a certain direction. I say that 'Big HVAC' will in the future outcompete all the small shops; that it hasn't happened yet says nothing. You said "a smart technician can buy a van, print some flyers, and steal their customers", but this is only true if they can do so more cost-effectively. Your example leans on the consolidated company doing their job terribly, rather than more efficiently than the small shops. It is true that a low barrier of entry reduces the leeway such a consolidated company has in treating their customers badly, but it is not a guarantee. People regularly do choose the big boys over smaller outfits for a variety of reasons (liability, chance of warranty, etc.).
> By your logic, the world would have stopped at Sears, Blockbuster, and IBM. Yet, the first two aren't even a thing in 2026 and I don't want to comment on the IBM of 2026.
You're naming companies in industries that have become even more consolidated than when those companies were the behemoths. Don't you see that "some big player existing" isn't a stable end state? I never said that being big guarantees survival. Big fish can be eaten by even bigger fish. Yes, there can be disruptors, but they very quickly gobble up the entirety of the previous players to become an even bigger player. It's about market share distribution as a whole. Companies simply have a constant incentive to cooperate, merge, and consolidate to extract higher profits from customers. That never goes away by itself. That is not immoral, but it is amoral. They are behaving rationally and in their self-interest.
Think about what price-fixing, cartels and generally 'market-distortion' is. It is nothing more than cooperation for mutual benefit between companies, which is why it keeps happening over and over and over and over again. It sucks for the customers and society, but for the companies it is fully rational.
You need to seriously think about what happens if all government regulation goes away. Don't handwave it. Really think about it. And I don't mean "they'll dump toxic waste on manatees to raise profits" (they will, but that is not the point). I specifically mean anti-trust regulation and regulation that impacts the barriers of entry to markets. Think about the evolution of players in the markets and what they would do to become fitter (increase profits). Do you really, really don't see consolidation happening? You talk about Silicon Valley as being untouched, but we've had years of the main startup strategy being to work towards being bought by one of the deep-pocketed tech giants. Consolidation was the explicit goal.
I guess the best way out of this would be to have a data driven visualization of the distribution of market share among producers and its evolution through time, to see to what extent such consolidation actually happens. Somebody should vibecode that. Maybe using a frontier AI model made by a local mom and pop shop (zero barrier of entry from government regulation there! :-P).
First, let's agree we will never invoke Godwin's Law. I think we need to establish atleast some common ground at this point. Here are my proposals:
- At the end of the day, a business is an activity that allows a person(s) helping another person(s). Even in a strictly amoral environment, voluntary trade is a positive-sum game where both A and B gain positive utility: A provides a positive utility to B by giving up something A had but B didnt (B has more than before) and B compensates A for it by giving up something B had but A didnt (A has more than before).
- Due to the profit incentive, there will be scammers, grifters and similar people who are not interested in the "helping" part but rather the "profit" part
- A more powerful person can dominate a weaker person
- Societies, of which organizations/companies are part have hierarchies of people
- A person "higher" up the hierarchy has control and influence over a person lower down that hierarchy
- A significant motivating factor for a person starting a business is independence (be at or towards the top of their local hierarchy) and ownership (be at the root of their local hierarchy)
- The person paying the money out of free will has control and influence over the person accepting the money out of free will in exchange for the help
- Regulation is the forced injection of a very large organization asserting themselves into the premier position of the hierarchy (For example: If regulation bans a specific chemical solvent, the supply chain must either shut down, find an alternative, or go "to the black market"/"go underground" where the regulatory authority cannot inject themselves)
- Regulation is hard to change and it's entirely a legal construct
- Regulation is rarely deprecated (For example: there are regulations in place that were written for an era where people would start their cars by hand although its been decades since anyone has actually done that)
- Normal people don't understand legal constructs any better than they can understand multivariate calculus or multithreaded, concurrent code
- Competition is great for customers. Anything that increase competition should be encouraged.
- We must treat customers as adults who are not challenged nor disabled. To keep our discussion manageable, we will ignore those scenarios where customers are not adults or otherwise challenged and disabled
- There are economies in scale but barring regulation or hostile takeovers, scale can only be achieved by willing, cooperating parties (For example: Say there are 3 phone companies in the US: A, T and V. If either one of them wanted to have majority stake in the "one" merged company, short of the other two conceding willingly, that "one" merged company will never exist)
- Inefficiencies can hide better at larger companies
- Larger companies are risk averse although surprisingly they are in the best position to absorb risks - aka Innovator's Dilemma (For example: Google invented transformers but management decided against it because they were afraid of hallucinations affecting search result quality. 3 engineers at OpenAI read the transformer paper and the rest is history. Google is still playing catch up!)
- A significant motivating factor for a person starting a business is independence and ownership that allows them permissionless innovation
- Innovation is an overall gain for humanity which is why society rewards innovation and penalizes rent seeking.
- People can use knowledge to do both evil and good
- Humanity optimizes for the good of people over time
If you disagree with any of the above, let me know which, ideally with supporting arguments.
Now back to our discussion:
> I say that 'Big HVAC' will in the future outcompete all the small shops; that it hasn't happened yet says nothing
It seems like you prefer rejecting evidence that doesn't support your hypothesis. My recommendation is you do the exact opposite. I'm engaging with you precisely because your take is absolutely counter to mine and I a know for a fact, because I have done this before, that my understanding will be much improved at the end of our conversation. It will provide me even more clarity than I have.
> Yes, regulation can heighten the barrier of entry (but also lower, although less common)
and why do you think it's less common for regulation to reduce the barrier of entry?
> You're naming companies in industries that have become even more consolidated than when those companies were the behemoths
So your argument is:
- Sears: Retail is now even more consolidated
- Blockbuster: Entertainment is now even more consolidated
- IBM: Software or Hardware is now even more consolidated
> They are behaving rationally and in their self-interest
You're conflating the rationality and self-interest of an entrepreneur with that of an employee.
Moral and company alignment aside, a researcher in LLMs might not care much whether they go work for Google or OpenAI or Anthropic. They might not even care whether they go work for Alibaba or Bytedance. OTOH, sama is definitely not going to work for Google or Anthropic and it's absolutely in his rational self-interest to behave that way.
There are even more inconsistencies in your writeup but I think this is a good checkpoint for me to allow you to reflect.
I also suggest we continue this over email (details in profile). Thank You for continuing to engage, I appreciate your POV.
Like I said, I’m factoring in the price when you include shipping and taxes to Europe. If I wanted to buy a Playdate, it’d cost me close to the price of those consoles here.
This reasonably means AI contributions where a human has guided the AI are not subject to copyright, and thus can't be supported by a project's license.
At least a monkey is an unambiguous autonomous entity. A LLM is a - heck of a complicated - piece of software, and could very well be ruled a tool like any other
It's still early, but this is absolutely going to be precedent used in a software related case, and it's going to lead to fun times with SOX/PCI style compliance issues, where developers will have to attest that merges did not use AI so compliance can ensure repos don't pass a threshold where there's too much LLM code.
SaaS is dead because large chunks of the industry can't do work or understand their codebase without depending on a proprietary AI model from a single provider.
And you thought GitHub or us-east-1 outages were bad.
GitHub outages are most likely entirely unrelated to anything AI, and 100% caused by their move from on-prem hosting to Azure.
They have a very unusual workload in that they need to write to disk a lot more than what is typical, making them harder to host for a generic cloud provider. And also Azure sucks so bad it's almost impressive GitHub has any uptime at all!
Recipes are a weird counterexample. Everyone I know Googles them because they're written up by chefs with specific styles and sometimes have user reviews. Asking ChatGPT will get you algorithmic food nonsense, it has no idea if those ingredients will combine or what the outcome will taste like.
just this week my daughter has used claude twice to get a recipe for a cake (was great) and also suggestion on how to make variation of smoothies that fits her taste while my wife has asked claude for recipe for some orso chicken mushroom thing (was not that good). googling the same will also give AI answer too (chicken mushroom orso was similar, cake totally different)
At least once a week I ask Claude what to cook with the last ingredients from my last trip to the groceries. I'm still to be disappointed by the results, although every time one of the three or four of its suggestions seems completely off my taste.
The simple answer is that atproto works like the web & search engines, where the apps aggregate from the distributed accounts. So the proper analogy here would be like yahoo going down in 1999.
Does Google Reader help you make sense of it? It’s more like each app is like its own Google Reader. And indeed you were able to access the same posts via other apps at that time of outage.
Not the original poster but I do have some ideas. Official Bluesky clients could randomly/round-robin access 3-4 different appview servers run by different organizations instead of one centralized server. Likewise there could be 3-4 relays instead of one. Upgrades could roll across the servers so they don't all get hit by bugs immediately.
This is why I'm hoping fiatjaf has a recommendation here. I have a feeling he might have a proposal that solves this. But doesn't solve all of it, just some of it.
Google and MSN Search were already available at this time. Also websites used to publish webrings and there was IRC and forums to ask people about things.
It’s more of a concept of a plan for being distributed. I even went through the trouble of hosting my own PDC and still, I was unable to use the service during the outage
It's a shame what happened to this company. I used to really want a Tesla, but now the brand signifies your support for Musk/DOGE, they killed half their lineup, and they keep mentioning that cars aren't the future as they aim for driverless taxis and robots.
At least they opened the supercharger network. My mom picked up a Cadillac Optiq and even with her being on the other side of the country she was able to seamlessly transition to an EV.
I was able to drive across the US in the winter in an Ioniq 6 without using Tesla chargers. All but a couple were 350V, WY was the worst state (NY->WA), battery conditioning had charges ~200V for the first phase until charge levels became the dominant factor.
Ionna is 8 automakers building an alternative network
Hyundai has their EV platform which has been 800V for a couple of years, future proof for the lifetime of the car considering how slow EV rollout is in the US...
> All but a couple were 350V, WY was the worst state (NY->WA), battery conditioning had charges ~200V for the first phase until charge levels became the dominant factor.
Sorry but what? I can maybe understand “V” instead of “kW” (why?), but what does the second part mean?
EV batteries charge much faster from 10% or 20% to 60%, maybe somewhat higher than that.
Going from 20% to 80% typically takes as long as going from 80% to 100% and so standard advice is never to charge to 100% unless you absolutely have to.
Every model has a charging curve, which I've never seen a manufacturer provide but some reviews do their own.
You're right that the poster used V when they meant KW but the Level 3 DC Charging Curve graph shows what I think they're describing: their EV charged at over 200 KW until the battery reached about 46%, then it slowed significantly again at 62 or 63%. Maybe TMI, sorry if so.
That sounds wonderful. Our experience with an Ioniq 6 has been less spectacular. First of all, in winter the range drops from 520km to about 350km, and charging takes about 50% longer.
Then when we took a long trip we only found one or two charging stations faster than 10kW every 300km. Many of the chargers were not functioning, some were on private property (e.g. car dealerships) and closed on Sundays, and none of them were rated at more than 100kW (and typically charging at about 70kW). The ones that were 100kW often had one or more cars waiting for them, so our 90-minute charge could have taken double that.
The only exception was a Tesla supercharger station, but my wife refuses to support Elon Musk in any way, so that was out.
This is in Southern Ontario, outside the Greater Toronto Area.
Absolutely waste but with insufficient accountability. I don't understand how or why shareholders haven't sued him into penury. Taking political positions as a business figure is inherently fraught with risk, but then taking extreme political positions, openly flaunting drug use, and suggesting human decency is weakness is bloody weird and insane that will only lead to hubris. I don't want to know a CEO's religion or politics because these should be private matters.
Covert bigots with self-awareness are more worrying than the overt ones lacking it because they try hard to pretend to simulate normal civility while knowing their symbols and ideals are still widely repugnant that they avoid any association with them while accumulating legitimacy and political power.
People lacking empathy and believing they are better than others indeed represent the tao of fascism, and cannot be bargained with or appeased into cooperative, pro-social participation. Neville Chamberlain made that mistake that plunged the world into a more costlier war.
Might I also suggest that expressing self-fulfilling prophecy, learned helpless, demotivating doubt and doom is both untrue and doesn't help advance individual or collective power, hope, or change. IOW, the "we're cooked" pattern behavior people fail to see how their selfish compulsion for unfiltered self-expression harms the cause of change and harms others by demotivating them.
Because while Musk is certainly running Tesla into the ground, without him it would sink even faster. Without his hype jacking up the share price, it's just a carmaker with 2.5 models, cratering sales, fast obsoleting tech, and no new models in the near pipeline.
All the shareholders can do is hang on to the ride for as long as they can.
I finally test drove friends BYD Sealion 7. Yes interior is very nice, soft materials, etc (to a point where it almost feels tacky). Drive felt much softer than my mid-gen Model Y (almost too boaty and rolly but thats is completely fine for a family car).
The software is not great tho, really misses the point and I can see why people hate touchscreens. No single pedal driving (idk perhaps they haven't enabled it), no phone as key, no profiles, engine start/stop button.
Overall I'd say people are sold on features without looking in depth what you get with Tesla. And Tesla still outselling any other brand here in NZ.
Hope I can try out Zeekr 7x performance in couple of weeks. I heard a lot of good things about it.
And what happens when they've saturated the market? Prices go up to the maximum the market can bear, and then they'll extend into other markets. Why rent the model to build a profitable company with when you could just take all that profit for yourself?
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