A CEO is not "just a really well paid worker", don't be ridiculous. If you have the power of hiring and firing, or have enough money to not have to work for your subsistence, you are not a worker in any leftist sense.

Yeah and a lot of far less powerful people got fucked over from the crash. Is that what a successful, functioning economy looks like to you?

Keep peddling that capitalist realism. “There is no alternative!” The market may not misallocate capital, by definition, but it very clearly and routinely misallocates resources. Let me guess: you’re doing relatively well for yourself?

>Let me guess: you’re doing relatively well for yourself?

Let me guess, you sit down next to Kobe Bryant and start by saying you're going to tell him about winning basketball?

Are you saying that you’re right because you’re rich? The equity of the economy is not very similar at all to a game.

I know what i'm talking about, and you don't. That does not come from me being rich, it comes from me being raised as a far left-socialist, and being on the spectrum, and then studying economics and finance in graduate school and realizing what was true and what was wishing. Capitalism and free competitive markets solve exactly the problem that centrally planned economies are explicitly trying to solve but always fail to. Not only that but with predictable results. As you can now see, I not only have a heart and I have a brain, and I have education. And I have the inculcated capacity to read the socialism no matter how its hidden and between what lines.

you tried to dismiss me by saying "oh but you're doing well" as if that meant anything. You brought it up, not me, but inasmuch as it does means anything, it suggests I'm winning the race that you purport to be an expert at.

I do not come from wealth, my family is largely working class. I have grown my wealth dramatically because I understand how the market works. I didn't know a priori what would happen, I just took what they taught me in school and applied it with extreme discipline and without fear. Turns out that works.

>The equity of the economy is not very similar at all to a game

the economy is about efficiency, and supply meeting demand, and fair exchange of factors and products for pareto optimality. that is what equity should mean but it's not what you mean by it. Your equity lifts only some boats and at the cost of lowering and even sinking others. Nobody can prove except by simple observation that your equity does not in fact lift boats.

Hilarious; such ugly arrogance. Of course it “works” to the extent that you describe, otherwise we wouldn’t be in exactly the situation that I’m against. Where you came from doesn’t matter at all. The system is working for you so you are for it.

You assume too much, that I am going to argue for centrally planned economies or something. I never claimed or implied I was an expert, or to what degree I’m “winning the race” (what a horrible way to think about human society!). I think it’s either an absurd failure of imagination or simple invested ideology, that we have to have either hardcore “free” markets (free for who?) or strict Soviet-style planning (typically with the assumption that we have only the knowledge and technology from that period too, for some reason). I think we can do a lot better than both.

Your impressive-sounding words about efficiency quickly fall apart for anyone who has actually looked at the dirty end of capitalist processes. Inefficiencies abound; the market optimises for only money which a lot of the time is a stupidly poor abstraction of the stuff of life that actually matters. And that abstraction enables and justifies untold cruelty and exploitation.

If you were a sort of capitalist-pessimist, saying that you didn’t like it but this seemed to be the least-worst option, I’d think you were woefully unambitious, but at least some way understandable. But you arrogantly defend this system, and brag about how your massive brain managed to exploit it. Welcome to HN, I guess.

economic efficiency does not refer to productive effiency, it refers to having prices that allow people to make optimal purchase decisions, and whether competition ensures prices will reflect costs.

so, according to you, you are not arrogant, you just legitimately know what's best for everybody else, and you are virtuous to boot?

writing tip: take all the emotionally charged words out of your prose, they don't have the effect you think they do.

I knew you were speaking more technically about economic efficiency, but what does that matter when the real processes are often so inefficient? Or when it results in so many bad outcomes?

I won’t be taking “writing tips” from you; my words are an expression, not pure calculated rhetoric. I never thought I was going to change your mind, I wanted you to face a teeny tiny bit of resistance.

Expressing an opinion and making observations is not arrogance. I said “I think” and “I’m against”, I never claimed any virtue, I didn’t brag, and I didn’t tell you that you don’t know what you’re talking about. According to me, I just have a view about part of the way the world works, that’s it. Reading tip: get better at it.

“Sign in to play”, Google auth only - no thank you. Close tab.

Exactly. A detailed-enough spec is just code that you can’t run. If models and agents got to a point where doing a good job in Claude Code plan mode meant that I didn’t have to keep an eye on them in implementation, then I would be interested in some bigger spec-driven thing like this. That is still far from the case today for me.

This makes no sense. LLMs and agents benefit from (good) abstraction as much as humans do.

Sure, just doesn't have to be npm or build dependent IMO

LLM agents are also very capable of using npm and build systems, and also get the same benefits from them as humans do. For very very simple things (again, just like for humans), it may be viable. But in anything non-trivial I would be horrified with a codebase that was just LLM-spaghetti-DOM-manipulation.

False dichotomy. We should tax the lot of them until they are not wealthy any more.

Of course running a vegetable shop is political. Politics is the question of who gets what. There have been countless societies across history, and still exist many, where the political formations meant the very concepts of “shop”, “business”, or even “employment” per se were foreign.

Why do so many people talk as if we have to increase the rate of code production without limit? In “It’s the only thing that scales”, you assume that scaling is good. Clearly LLM code generation has sped up a lot of things and that’s very useful, but there has to be a limit to this, otherwise humans gradually lose our claim to be doing anything like “engineering”. But I know, capital’s hunger can’t be sated, we’re all in service to the feedback loop.

I think it would illustrate more to expand the abbreviations. In almost all these uses, it’s just a short version of the “obvious” dictionary-definition apology. For example, point two’s “sorry?” is short for “I’m sorry I didn’t hear you, can you please repeat that?”. It puts the blame for the conversational stumble on the listener - whether or not that’s correct - to smooth it over. Point three is short for “I’m sorry to interrupt you or mildly inconvenience you, but could you do this small thing for me, a stranger that you have no obligation to?”. And so on.