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Do you think it's better if all companies with competitive moats have a collapse in share price? I'm not really understanding what you're implying here.

I don't understand. The court has ruled this already a year ago:

> Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly

What should be the effect of antitrust enforcement to a monopolists share price? We are looking at something structural after all.


Why should shareholders have to suffer just because the Google engineers were good at their job?

The verdict makes it's clear that Google got to its position via anti competitive practices which are illegal.

However, for whatever reason, the judge decided that penalty was basically slap on the wrist and finger wagging.


Everyone is free to make their own search engine. The consumers choose Google time and time again.

It was shown time and time again, defaults are what most consumers will use even if better alternatives exist. A ton of Bing market share comes from Edge pushing it so hard.

Google would not spend all this money with Apple/Firefox if they knew that customers would use Google without being forced into it. Since they won't change search engines, Google realized they need to force it.


Gen Z has been pretty good at ignoring the default and using ChatGPT for everything.

Because the overall well-being of a society is supposedly more important than a few shareholders' wealth?

Probably about 60% of Americans are Google shareholders.

Not saying we should favor share price over all else, but far more than a few wealthy shareholders will be the benefactors of this.


...owning some tiny percentage of stock, often not knowingly. Those same 60% would also benefit from having a less monopolistic Internet. Well, that's the theory at least.

I think a lot of regular users actually might prefer one company that makes all their choices for them so they don't have to deal with decision fatigue so often... the browser wars of the 90s and 2000s were not pretty, either...


Do you know of any societies in the world that have a high quality of life but don’t have wealthy shareholders?

They're not mutually exclusive? Especially with antitrust, where the whole point is to enable a healthier marketplace such that all shareholders of Google's competitors can also benefit (not to mention users).

It's not that high-QoL societies cannot have shareholders, it's that the stock market shouldn't take precedence over laws and regulations and anti-trust enforcement.


I know plenty with very low quality of life and very wealthy shareholders.

This is disgusting.

But I think this problem should be solved at the level of countries, not individuals.

Because individuals are always looking for a way to avoid taxes, they can disappear as a class, and there is not that much money if it is fairly redistributed among everyone.

In fairness, EVERY American should be taxed an additional 80-90% in favor of poorer countries. How can a country with a minimum wage of $10-20 an hour not share with other countries when billions of people make less than a dollar an hour?


There has never been any fairness in the world :shrug:

bluntly, because incentives for investors to benefit from anticompetitive practices should be removed, in order to deter those anticompetitive practices. regulation works when you let it.

Code is an asset of different levels of quality and importance.

Just find someone you usually enjoy being around and can ultimately start a family with, and who would be loyal. Too many people are over-thinking this stuff.


Another perspective if I may: People are used to the dating apps now which require just a few milliseconds of consideration before swiping yes, or no. That focus on essentially "hot or not" eliminates entire swaths of the dating pool to just those someone finds attractive. The worrisome part is that they take that mentality of "only swiping on ~10" that they've transferred it to the real world. Why bother talking to that man, or that women, when the app gives you thousands and thousands of infinite choice. Why settle when there's so many better ones to choose from?


That's one boring ass way to look at life


> Just find someone ... who would be loyal

That's much harder than you realize.

Something close to half of all marriages fail. Significant numbers of men and women cheat. Roughly 30% of children given paternity tests or even those who use ancestry services discover their assumed fathers... aren't. Significant numbers of men and women are abusive, both physically and emotionally.

People suck.

And, the rugged individualism (bordering on objectivism) cultivated so strongly within the US doesn't help things.

You may as well be telling someone not to be poor.


>Roughly 30% of children given paternity tests or even those who use ancestry services discover their assumed fathers... aren't.

Not true in modern contexts. Misattribution of paternity is much closer to 1-2%: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34288189/, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/237633127_How_Well_...

The 30% figure comes from men who already doubt paternity...obviously some strong selection effects there.

In addition, there are very strong cohort effects for divorce. For example, if you have a bachelors the divorce rate is more like 25%.


If you always store dates as unix seconds and display them as local time on the browser, you'll almost never go wrong. Most other strategies leave too much room for ambiguity.


There's infinite potential jobs. Doing anything useful is a job.


No, doing something people are willing to pay for is a job.


This isn't true because of the minimum wage: if people would be willing to pay you less than the minimum wage for something useful, but not more, that's not a job.


The minimum wage isn't the problem, it's wage stickiness generally. Also, unemployment predates minimum wage laws.

But wave stickiness is sorta just part of human nature.


The minimum wage makes it illegal to work if you don't have the skills for minimum wage work. I wish more people understood this


There is no credible evidence that reasonable minimum wages have lowered employment in practice[0], and there are theoretical reason to believe it can increase it[1].

That said, the Australian and Danish systems are the best because they're more flexible.

[0] This holds up to about 60% of median wages. You can imagine it'd lower the hours some people get before it entirely makes them unemployed.

[1] One is that it provides price signals to monopsony employers. Another is that it reduces search costs in the labor market by basically acting as a spam filter that gets rid of time-wasting job offers.


Curious what you think about the UK, then. A software engineer in the UK makes 45k GBP on average. A minimum wage salary there (at 12.21 GBP per hour) is ~22k a year. The wage squeeze between skilled professional and minimum wage surely lowers the amount of people entering skilled professions


Well it doesn't matter what I think, just what empirical evidence says.

That's because of agglomeration effects I think. "In the UK" is the keyword, if they wanted to earn ten times that they could move to Silicon Valley and do that. So you're left with people who don't want to uproot their lives like that.


That’s un-American!


It's a very well done wrapper that improves your coding productivity a lot.


The problem is that they have no moat and the underlying provider can easily cut them out.


I think you underestimate the difficulty in getting the tool chain running efficiently in the IDE. It's a significant moat and I suspect their spend is too attractive to cut them off from an API especially when most of the model providers are not exactly competing fully in this space yet or at least not with the same enthusiasm.


Interesting to see multiple posts here saying this. Pretty clearly it isn't true. The IDE is owned by Microsoft. The model is owned by Anthropic or Google or whoever. A business can't be made from a thin sandwich filling between the two.


Hey guys we have a guy here stating pretty clearly it isn’t true. He clearly is the authority on the topic because he said so.

The shell of the IDE is open source. It’s true there is some risk on the supply of models and compute but again none of those, except MSFT which does not even own any of the SOTA models, have any direct competition. OpenAI has codex but it’s half baked and being bundled in ChatGPT. It is in nobodies interest to cut off Cursor as at this point they are a fairly sustained and large customer. The risk exists but feels pretty far fetched until someone is actively competing or Cursor gets bought out by a OpenAI.

Again, what proof do you have that there is zero complexity or most being driven by the sandwich filling. Most of OpenAIs valuation is being driven by the wrapper ChatGPT not API usage. I have written a number of integrations with LLM APIs and while some of it just works, there is a lot of nuance to doing it effectively and efficiently at scale. If it was so simple why would we not see many other active competitors in this space with massive MAUs?


Not really, it's pretty hard to get the editor and code editing via AI working as well as they did.


If it's so hard, then why are there multiple open source projects that are just as good?


They're not just as good unless you are willing to spend huge amounts in API credits.


> and the underlying provider can easily cut them out

what? Do you think providers (or their other customers) don’t care about the business implications of a decision like this? All so that cursor can bring their significant customer base to a nearly-indistinguishable competitor?


The greater community, i.e. the United States, may have different preferences than San Francisco.


Local governments are under no obligation to help the federal government enforce federal laws.


Those officers are employees of the City, County or State, not the United States.


The supremacy clause of the U.S. Constitution says that federal laws are supreme over state laws. Therefore, it is illegal not to comply with federal laws.


Which specific federal law is being violated here by SB34?

The Supremacy Clause is regulated, in part, by the Tenth Amendment, which states…

> The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.


Eventually there will probably also be AI agents that prey on people using personalized strategies to steal their money.

AI agents, crypto, and viruses could all blend together to create really annoying things. For example an AI agent could infect your computer and then monitor your activity to see if you're doing anything suspicious, and then blackmail you.


Why stop at the digital if you can go further with biological? I think computer viruses will make the jump at some point and become part of an actual virus.

Cue Ghost in the Shell in 3... 2... 1...

My prediction is that at some point in time there will be an actual living Shiba Inu with some code of Doge in its actual DNA.


I only have a product that makes $6k per month, but from my point of view, the validation is how many paying users sign up per day. Even one per day can add up. Hope this helps.


If you can make 6k per month. You can probably get to 60k per month.


Could you share what worked for you? Is it B2B/b2c? I guess that matters too for the type of marketing to focus on?


What is being validated though? I'd say it's your marketing efforts more so than your product


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