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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 10, 2026

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I actually think that @Corvos has a point. Imagine that you are a modern self-employed digger without any boss. You probably utilize some sort of capital in form of excavator, that in turn utilizes labor of probably millions of people from iron ore processing to electronics. You are only good at operating this highly specific piece of machine, you would be nothing without it, you are "parasite" on labor of all those workers that produced the capital you now use. CEO like Elon Musk is just high-tier version of this digger. He is good not at operating a single machine, but at operation of huge gigafactories and software houses. That is his level of expertise, these companies are his capital and he is best in the world operating them.

Moreover, there is no world where position like that does not exist. You could be in Soviet Russia and you will have a local party boss managing the factory, who is subject to some planning committee that collectively represent Elon Musk on steroid as they produce 5 year plan for the whole economy.

What LLMs do specifically, is that they are just another vector of showing how intellectual property is nonsensical category. The solution is easy, the intellectual property belongs to the person who was first and fulfills any number of invented arbitrary rules for intellectual property (e.g. that it cannot be mathematical formula etc.). If it does not fulfill these criteria, then this app is freeware just as if you xittered some new mathematical formula. If it does fulfill these criteria then the app is his by virtue of being first and everybody else is plagiarizing his work. And it does not matter if it is an app or music or whatever.