If you go deep into the crypto world you'll find that this messaging resonates well with "degens" (as they sometimes call themselves).
They love this stuff, it signals how "pilled" you are. It may or may not have to do with a large proportion of them being high on drugs (weed, psychedelics, cocaine), in addition to obviously being terminally online and bubbled. They are also extremely anti-authority, because a lot of what they do breaks the law in bigger and lesser ways, especially tax/financial law.
And they often will drive millions and millions of dollars of crypto toward these ventures, often anonymously.
You have to read these kinds of things in the context of the target audience, which is very real.
I think "degen" for "degenerate gambler" refers specifically to those who make wild, all-in bets without any more research than a quick scan of twitter and telegram memes. Not those who would actually parse a multi-page manifesto document.
Alright we will see how long that lasts. If they want to enforce their “contracts” they will need a court (i.e. an authority) to order the opposite party to abide by their contract and if they don’t, police (i.e. an authority) will force them to court and enforce what the court says.
The idea with crypto is not to need courts, the court would be the "global computer", contracts (actual cryptocurrency term) are computer programs running in the Ethereum VM.
Bitcoin originally imposed this idea on payments, and Ethereum attempts to create this computational contract system for the non monetary consideration of contracts (the harder half of the contract).
There's a big difference between anti-authority and a-hole, knee-jerk opposition defiance disorder, but even if you're right wouldn't the people being asked to sign this contract be the last people to do so?
Don't say it isn't so!? The community founded on circumventing existing financial structures are anti-authority? Next you're gonna tell me anarchists don't like individual leaders, or that socialists care about healthcare.
Source: I suppose also "made it out" although it wasn't hard, I left my job, like any other industry. Worth knowing as well that the cryptocurrency ecosystem isn't nearly as "internally" aligned as some people want you to believe, there is a large range in weirdness in the ecosystem, not just what parent above shared.
Ethereum in particular has some history with that. A long time ago they espoused this principle called "code is law", and then one time the code for something called "The DAO" did something they didn't like, so they overrode the code. To this day the Ethereum consensus rules specify that a certain hardcoded transaction ID should not do what it literally says it does.
The transition from PoW to PoS is another example, espoused the open ideals of Bitcoin mining, right up until the moment they had gathered sufficient power and members, at which time they closed the gates of ascension behind them.
I like it, literally revolutionary, to my eyes BTC owes more to PoW than Blockchain. You start seeing it everywhere, related to Taleb's skin in the game concept, or costly signaling in zoology.
Probably 0 if I had a choice. But is global warming a problem that is exclusive to bitcoin? Or does bitcoin highlight and accelerate an existing problem that is already a problem through other means, like car/plane emissions and AI datacenters.
Whatever solution we come up with, will work against all sources of warming or environmental damage. Although if one of those measures is banning Bitcoin mining, I wouldn't complain about it.
> Next you're gonna tell me anarchists don't like individual leaders, or that socialists care about healthcare.
There's an irony embedded in both positions. Everyone cares about government, anarchists care about overthrowing the existing government in order to replace it with their own version. Similarly, everyone cares about healthcare, socialists care about other people paying for their healthcare.
Probably combination of "information laundering" and "betting market".
If you are making money (i.e. beating the "house") you are by definition laundering information, and profiting off of deniability. Everyone who isn't doing this is the sucker losing money on a betting market.
The funny thing is these companies want to be considered information laundries, because that's what serves the real customer (politicians, celebrities, etc). The people "betting" (i.e. losing) are the product.
>If you are making money (i.e. beating the "house") you are by definition laundering information, and profiting off of deniability. Everyone who isn't doing this is the sucker losing money on a betting market.
???
There's no allowance for skill? Even in financial markets, there's no reason to believe why people who continually beat the market must be insider trading. That's not the same as saying that people should be day trading, but that doesn't mean the reverse is true.
I absolutely can imagine a video game doing that, especially if there were some way to make the consumption be conspicuous.
In Tan's case, I think the "fun" thing is the right way to look at it. He gets to play at being a big shot developer and show off on Twitter, so clearly he feels he's getting some value from his spending even if no-one else does.
There is a more serious question about to what degree the AI vendors have a duty of care to prevent addicts from getting themselves into financial trouble - perhaps they might in future face the sort of regulation applied to high street bookmakers. I doubt Tan would fail any putative affordability test, though, so it would still be up to him to seek help for his problem if he feels its getting out of control.
Well, I run a number of apps that have users who appreciate them (I hope?) and they simply wouldn't exist without AI giving me the leverage to build them. So.. yes? What's a "return", anyway? It's worth it to me, obviously!
But you might have hit the nail on the head - yes, it's extremely fun and maybe that's the main reason after all. And FYI many, many people pay a lot more than $1k/m for video games.
Median average single salary in the US is ~64k a year. Spending ~19% of all income on a single hobby is completely out of the question for the vast majority of people.
If you claim it as a business/work expense (In Australia, that gives you a 47% discount), 1K is not even one day's salary for a well-paid dev and just about one day for an average paid dev.
Average base compensation for SWE is ~140k (in the US w/ the highest earning SWEs), so the average is roughly half of that. Earning ~275k is comfortably in the top 20% of all SWEs; 1k a day is easily in the top 5%.
It's even worse than that; the president has declared anyone using the term "AI" is the Enemy, and aiding the Enemy is a capital crime.
You could say the president is just joking about such things; I don't think this will actually be acted upon, but the political/legal situation is quite rough.
I hear they have great "AI" programs in El Salvador! If you say the right things you might even be selected for a free trip here. Such a bargain. And the weight loss plan their nutrition experts have put together is top tier.
Products get successful by being good, but after a certain threshold people buy a product because "nobody got fired for buying Salesforce". Which is not all that different from buying a product because "haha, fuck salesforce, they fired me".
You probably don't intend this, but the argument seems like "money talks, so why bother with ideals". How would you solve enshittification in the current market, if not introducing a bit of anarchy?
That's definitely not what I'm saying. I'm just saying build a better product and a better company that focuses on its employees. It's not that hard and there are plenty of examples all around. Also, revenge isn't exactly an ideal, it's actually quite the opposite.
Sama not too long ago said the "last resort" would be ads in ChatGPT, but maybe with cutting usage, there are more last resorts left. Maybe a useful signal for shareholders on when to bail (i.e. now).
> They give up the videogame reverse engineering market, which is a tiny future revenue stream and not worth much financially
Btw video games are by far the biggest entertainment industry in history.
If the way video games of the future are made is with AI, the logic might be reversed; giving up some lawsuits now, while missing out on large entertainment revenue in the long term.
But that's not at all what Anthropic is doing. Anthropic is not blocking people from creating video games with AI. Using Claude to create new video games is completely valid and unrestricted; they just don't want people to use it for reverse engineering existing ones, as that opens them up to massive legal liability.
I agree this is about money and they don't want to be legally liable.
But Minecraft is reverse engineered Infiniminer. Fortnite is reverse engineered PubG. LoL is reverse engineered DotA. This is literally how the industry works.
The next best thing is gonna be some degree of RE of existing stuff -- that's clearly what people want. Anthropic is just trying to placate the old guard, denying users what they want, and ultimately will be on the wrong side of history on this.
That's why I'm saying their move seems extremely short-sighted. They're locked in on the IPO at the cost of the future.
You are confusing game design inspiration with code/asset reverse engineering, which are entirely different things.
Taking inspiration from other games, i.e. implementing similar gameplay loops or mechanics from other games, is completely normal within the industry. Unless copyrighted, it's not illegal. Minecraft taking from Infiniminer, or LoL taking from DotA is industry practice. Claude doesn't prohibit this.
Reverse engineering, i.e. decompiling game binaries to extract source code and copyrighted assets, then generating derivative games using said materials, is grounds for a massive copyright lawsuit. Anthropic doesn't want a part of this. That's why Anthropic is preemptively prohibiting it.
Since you say you don't want to support it, any chance of an open source dump so others can do that?
This seems like a great starting point for someone else to take the reigns.
Thanks for your work regardless, I might end up using it. I agree this is a hole that begs to be filled. Hopefully not by another company peddling beatpacks.
Thanks! I'm planning to support the app for my use case and deploy any new feature to the web version regularly. I might publish the native app if there's enough interest.
Re: open source, I'm currently in a position where it would be really tricky to publish any kind of open source code, so that's not an option for now.
They love this stuff, it signals how "pilled" you are. It may or may not have to do with a large proportion of them being high on drugs (weed, psychedelics, cocaine), in addition to obviously being terminally online and bubbled. They are also extremely anti-authority, because a lot of what they do breaks the law in bigger and lesser ways, especially tax/financial law.
And they often will drive millions and millions of dollars of crypto toward these ventures, often anonymously.
You have to read these kinds of things in the context of the target audience, which is very real.
Source: I made it out.
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