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Epic games beat Google and the state of big tech adulation
Last night, I saw the news of Epic Games beating Google over their anti-competitive, so Apple-like rule for skimming 30 percent of all in-app purchases. I won't describe the finer points, I am not a lawyer, never good to misrepresent things. There is an almost rosy perception of big tech online, partly because they have cannibalised and own all of the internet. There are beliefs about finance wagies being soulless ghouls who do it for a quick buck, but hey, not our tech bros, they fight the good fight.
Lets look at some of them, I dont even need to write much about them, apple is against your right to repair or use a decent os like a linux distro over whatever garbage they mandate in their walled gardens, microsoft will cannabalise games and has anti trust lawsuits before, google wants to be apple going by this lawsuit and meta, despite making something far less useful than any of these has been involved with literal spyware app, now offering billions for vaporware, whose revenue might as well be less than the total comp llm engineers make.
I get that rationalists are based in SV. You can go on Hacker News and see people posting accounts of x founder being better than y, how Steve Jobs was a hero, even though his daughter's book would have you want him banished, given the extent of abuse. Power/status/money corrupts, I get the drill, what I do not get is the level of adulation people have for firms, founders, products, and services. We have entered into a territory where financial houses are worried about the AI bubble bursting since most of ChatGPT's revenue is still paid users, not api calls. For the layman, API call revenue is a business using ChatGPT's service for their own product that a supposed consumer will pay for, vs paid users, which is you paying them 20 dollars a month. I post this not to chide LLMs, which are a good piece of tech, the internet was great, even though dot com bubble happened, however, we walked into this one way faster for technology that demands money anytime you scale up, though I will leave the bizarre spending decision to a later thread.
Paul Graham, the old wholesome man of the internet, writes glowing essays that are mostly truthful whilst laundering the reputation of these people. Google/Meta/Apple/ whatever is amazing. Here is my account of their hard-working, smart founder who fought evil incumbents, deliberately ignoring the inescapable spyware we are forced to deal with. The internet is worse now than 15 years ago, increasing numbers of smaller entities get bought off to create this monopolistic hellscape, where the people who hurt you are shown as benevolent people who create value. Not against startups, I am not a communist, this is not a post out of envy.
Last night, I tried deleting my Snapchat account. Well, once you click on delete my account, it shows you a bullshit error and makes you try again after three days, just that the error never gets resolved. Snapchat does not even have a customer care email; the only way to raise a ticket is to dm them on Twitter, get them to send you a custom url and hope that they actually generate a real ticket.
There are no real heroes; we have mostly choices between competing factions of shades of black, all of whom have grown so large that they are competing with each other despite starting off in different industries. The worst part is that they have zero power beyond what the zeitgeist tells them. Zuckerberg flips between a guy who loves China and a libertarian nerd hero. Investors on Twitter suddenly discovered the truth of 2010s Republicanism, and some Sam Hyde references were added to not seem totally fake. Israel exists to serve Israelis, the British Empire existed for Britain, and these firms don't even have any loyalty. The UK recently started an age verification for internet usage that these people complied with.
Politicians are usually seen as ruthless, evil people, which they are in every case. I am not here to cry about "libs are silent" but for the valley champions, there are many who have similar inklings that get quashed by media brainwashing. My writings skills are pedestrian on my best day, seeing the rot of what I was told to admire would have helped me.
All big tech is evil. Monopolies are bad; they are amazing if you are a founder. I would love to start one and get an exit, it would still be a bad deal for society. Rationalists online, there are plenty I see over on ssc and even at times on sneerclub who are pro some xyz founder. I would be wary; Stallman's criticisms are correct in most cases for these services. I do not have to agree with his communism to see the presience in his warnings, the same way I do not have to be a white nationalist to see why people take issues with east asians posting dinner table photos bragging about their college degrees.
Edit - will add links
I might be typically-minding, but I think that most big tech companies are seen at least slightly negative by rats in general.
Apple and Google are obviously rent-seeking with their digital walled gardens. Apart from that, Google is an ads company, while Apple is making hardware for a slightly cultish consumer base. I prefer Android over iOS because the former is mostly open, but recognize that OS X is less of a walled garden than most Android devices are. Microsoft did a great job of becoming mostly irrelevant for me personally, which is much better than I expected. So far, they have failed to completely ruin github.
Reddit is a cautionary tale about what happens when you let a single company control a bit platform. Facebook was always mostly terrible.
Musk deserves a paragraph of his own. For someone who made his money with fucking PayPal, he really did some good for a time. Both Tesla and SpaceX were exactly the kind of companies society should want. Hell, he was Scott Alexander's go-to example of "high positive impact human" a decade ago. Of course, since he bought twitter, he has had a ton of negative impact on the world as well. Since xAI, I wish that whoever is writing Musk's role would try to write a realistic villain with actual coherent human motivations instead of just a Sieg-Heiling comic book caricature.
Speaking of LLMs, there is a sentiment among rats that many AI companies are actively working on extincting humans. Personally I hope that we will get wiped out by 'Open'AI with its callous disregard for safety rather than by Musk trying to build Grok from his own ego, the former seems slightly more dignified. Anthropic is probably one of the better ones as far as alignment vs capabilities is concerned.
Uber and Amazon are providing a useful service for customers, but it is apparent that their prices are caused by having people work in terrible conditions.
Most companies which I actually consider net-positive are not tech giants. Substack is filling a useful niche. Discord is still slightly useful despite working hard on enshittification.
I agree that monopolies are bad. If a company wants to grow from 0% market share to 5%, its incentives are likely aligned with broader society. If it wants to grow from 30% to 90%, the opposite is the case.
I'm not sure Tesla and SpaceX are actually "effective". Tesla did certainly do a lot of good in making electric cars "cool" but the product on offer is far shittier and more expensive than Chinese or even US automaker electric cars. SpaceX is a classic case of overpromising and underdelivering. It can't even do something the US government could do in the 1960s consistently.
AFAIK, Tesla’s battery and motor tech is very competitive, and sees use in aftermarket retrofits. That can’t be a huge market, and I suppose it could be a political or branding statement, but I take it as evidence that their fundamental parts are decent.
It’s the interiors and user experience that has always bothered me about Teslas. Fragile paneling, that big ugly screen… I could tell a story where Tesla was able to surpass legacy automakers in their core design, but failed (or chose not) to compete on making it feel luxury. That’s the kind of decision I could see Musk making, especially when pressed for time and money. But perhaps it’s too tidy .
Must just be a different perspective. I have a fairly new Tesla (2022) and the interior is, in my mind, perfection. None of the stupid buttons everywhere. Just a clean invocation of what you need to drive. There isn't even an "ON" button because you don't need one. Get in the car, hold the brake, get in drive. No off button either, just leave, and it turns off and locks behind you.
By comparison, I got in my buddy's luxury car, and the saturation of useless controls is mind boggling. There is a dial for turning up and down the intensity of the fog lights. How in the world is this an affordance that needs to be in front of a driver? Why should that take up space?
It's not that I'm even against twiddling. But the beauty of software interfaces is that you can put all that stuff in a searchable place.
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