> Second, to our investors, especially Casey Aylward from Accel, who led our Seed and Series A, and Jennifer Li from Andreessen Horowitz, who led our Series B
They are buying out investors, it's like musical chairs.
The liquidity is going to be better on OpenAI, so it pleases everyone (less pressure from investors, more liquidity for investors).
Are you implying that the revenue multiple on this acquisition is lower than openAIs and that they'd be making money by acquiring and folding into their valuation multiple? I think that's not the case and I would wager non existent.
This was an acquihire (the author of ripgrep, rg, which codex uses nearly exclusively for file operations, is part of the team at Astral).
So, 99% acquihire , 1% other financial trickery. I don't even know if Astral has any revenue or sells anything, candidly.
It means the company almost reached their runway, so all these employees would have to find a job.
It's a very very good product, but it is open-source and Apache / MIT, so difficult to defend from anyone just clicking on fork. Especially a large company like OpenAI who has massive distribution.
Now that they hired the employees, they have no more guarantees than if they made a direct offer to them.
So I don't see how the acquisition is collateral - it's an acquihire plain and simple, if anything else it would be supply chain insurance as they clearly use a lot of these tools downstream. As you noted the licensing is extremely permissive on the tools so there appears to be very little EV there for an acquirer outside of the human capital building the tools or building out monetized features.
I'm not too plugged into venture cap on opensource/free tooling space but raising 3 rounds and growing your burn rate to $3M/yr in 24 months without revenue feels like a decently risky bag for those investors and staff without a revenue path or exit. I'd be curious to see if OpenAI went hunting for this or if it was placed in their lap by one of the investors.
OpenAI has infamously been offering huge compensation packages to acquire talent, this would be a relative deal if they got it at even a modest valuation. As noted, codex uses a lot of the tooling that this team built here and previously, OpenAI's realization that competitors that do one thing better than them (like claude with coding before codex) can open the door to getting disrupted if they lapse - lots of people I know are moving to claude for non-coding workflows because of it's reputation and relatively mature/advanced client tools.
A brief note, your numbers are way off here — Astral subsequently raised a Series A and B (as mentioned in the blog post) but did not announce them. We were doing great financially.
It seems you are one of the most active contributors there.
I would sincerely have understood better (and even wished) if OpenAI made you a very generous offer to you personally as an individual contributor than choose a strategy where the main winners are the VCs of the purchased company.
Here, outside, we perceive zero to almost no revenues (no pricing ? no contact us ? maybe some consulting ?) and millions burned.
Whether it is 4 or 8 or 15M burned, no idea.
Who's going to fill that hole, and when ? (especially since PE funds have 5 years timeline, and company is from 2021).
The end product is nice, but as an investor, being nice is not enough, so they must have deeper motives.
To raise $4m seed from AAA partners usually requires connections + track record/credability of the founders - looks like they have that here since they raised 3 rounds with zero revenue.
I feel like it's pretty easy to predict what OpenAI is trying to do. They want their codex agent integrated directly into the most popular, foundational tooling for one of the world's most used and most influential programming languages. And, vice versa, they probably want to be able to ensure that tooling remains well-maintained so it stays on top and continues to integrate well with their agent. They want codex to become the "default" coding agent by making it the one integrated into popular open source software.
I think this is more about `ruff` than `uv`. Linting is all about parsing the code into something machines can analyze, which to me feels like something that could potentially be useful for AI in a similar way to JetBrains writing their own language parsers to make "find and replace" work sanely and what not.
I'm sort of wondering if they're going to try to make a coding LLM that operates on an AST rather than text, and need software/expertise to manage the text->AST->text pipeline in a way that preserves the structure of your files/text.
The parser is not the hard part. The hard part is doing something useful with the parse trees. They even chose "oh is that all?" and a picture of a piece of cake as the teaser image for my Strange Loop talk on this subject!
Writing a literal parser isn’t too hard (and there’s presumably an existing one in the source code for the language).
Writing something that understands all the methods that come in a Django model goes way beyond parsing the code, and is a genuine struggle in language where you can’t execute the code without worrying about side effects like Python.
Ty should give them a base for that where the model is able to see things that aren’t literally in the code and aren’t in the training data (eg an internal version of something like SQLAlchemy).
Static analysis just requires that you don't actually execute the code. It's possible (sometimes) to infer what methods/properties would be create without actually statically analyzing the code.
E.g. mypy has a plugin to read the methods and return types of SQLAlchemy records, I believe without actually executing them.
Obviously not globally true, but in limited domains/scenarios you can see what would exist without actually executing the code.
This just seems like panic M&A. They know they aren’t on track to ever meet their obligations to investors but they can’t actually find a way to move towards profitability. Hence going back to the VC well of gambling obscene amounts of money hoping for a 10x return… somehow
The dev market? Anthropic's services are arguably more popular among a certain developer demographic.
I guess this move might end up in a situation where the uv team comes up with some new agent-first tooling, which works best or only with OAI services.
OpenAI could vibe-code marketshare by introducing bias into ChatGPT's responses and recommendations. "– how to do x in Python? – Start by installing OpenAI-UV first..."
This. It's valuable b/c if you have many thousands of python devs using astral tooling all day, and it tightly integrates with subscription based openai products...likelihood of openai product usage increases. Same idea with the anthropic bun deal. Remains to be seen what those integrations are and if it translates to more subs, but that's the current thesis. Buy user base -> cram our ai tool into the workflow of that user base.
IMO, they are buying business just to put them down later to avoid potential competition. The recipe is not new, it has been practiced by Google/Microsoft for many years.
I have no idea but for sure they did their homework before making this step. I suppose they're grabbing these business just to stay ahead, in order to prevent the competitors to buy those instead.
A bit misleading marketing there (like always) - all the good looking game videos are actually just AI generated videos (obvious tells: HUD elements wouldn't have scrambled text if they were actual games, rendering of barrels has the worst LOD popout I've ever seen or it's AI), but the actual games are really bad.
It's easy to create value for others and not worry about returns when you have enough money to not worry.
Unfortunately for most people, there's plenty of companies willing to take the returns and leave you paycheck to paycheck. That's literally what they are optimized to do.
I don't even disagree with the ideal, but I think a prerequisite step to this philosophy is UBI.
Geohot is a smart dude. But here I think he misses the forest for the trees.
He has a point, certainly. But while he is harping about the U part of ubi, he's completely ignoring the B part. UBI is meant to provide some basic income so people don't starve. It's just an optimization of welfare programs where you have a ton of bureaucracy and make people jump through endless hoops and cause them endless amounts of stress (which is known to make people work less, not more). And replace it by just giving all citizens the same amount.
Yes, that's a bit stupid for the people first paying taxes and then getting them right back again minus overhead costs, but if you think about it: that's what happens now too, only less efficient (in the netherlands, that is) so you pay even more overhead.
On top of that comes the other realization: If the current trend of automating everything continues,we'll ultimately end up with (hyperbole) 1 person owning all the machines doing all the work. That 1 person earning all the money, and (in an ideal case) paying his taxes to give everybody else welfare. Which just is the same as UBI.
In a certain way this already happens now. Most not-too-smart people that used to be gainfully employed as laborer somewhere are now on welfare, and the threshold for not-too-smart could go up rather steeply with the current AI trends.
>Yes, that's a bit stupid for the people first paying taxes and then getting them right back again minus overhead costs, but if you think about it: that's what happens now too, only less efficient (in the netherlands, that is) so you pay even more overhead.
I'm not sure this is stupid. I think the people against the negative income tax system are kind of stupid. Like, the best place to apply the welfare rules is where all other complicated rules about income are made: the tax office (IRS). If you decide that for whatever reason you really really want people receiving welfare to be second class citizens, you'd go out of your way and build a separate welfare office, where all the work the tax office is doing gets to be duplicated for no reason other than so you as a working class citizen can pay even more money to be angry at the second class citizens.
Overall, it sounds kind of stupid. You build a bureaucracy that designates people as a special class, so that this special class is difficult to escape from, since if everyone was a continuous recipient of welfare, there would be no second class and "escape" would merely be progression through the simple passage of time.
The dumbest arguments I've seen are extremely cranky and boil down to rich people becoming net beneficiaries of CO2 dividends, because they spent tens of thousands of dollars on EVs, heat pumps, cycling, insulation, solar panels, etc so they can get 100% of an annual 100€ CO2 dividend. Like, giving 100€ to even a single rich person is such a horrific crime, that it's better if everyone else, who actually needs it, should get less than the 100€ even if that reduction will result in hundreds of millions of € being diverted away from people who actually need the money to compensate their CO2 taxes.
Someone needs to make a website explaining why UBI doesn't work conceptually because this comes up over and over again on HN.
You cannot make UBI work from money saved by removing means testing. Even UBI is a welfare scheme and would require significant bureaucratic hoop jumping to check that a person claiming it isn't:
• Dead
• Non-citizen
• Already claiming it under a different name/bank account/etc
• In prison
• Moved abroad
and so on. All that is expensive, and yet the overheads of even existing welfare systems just aren't high compared to the amounts they pay out. Getting rid of means testing doesn't magically make the numbers balance.
Geohot is correct. UBI seems to only appeal to people who don't understand how the economy works. You can't have an economy in which one person earns all the money by definition.
This is a complete non-issue in basically every wealthy country bar potentially the US, all five things you named are already known to the government at all times. They also apply the exact same way to any other scheme, there's nothing new about it.
Quite a few governments have trouble verifying identity reliably. But to the extent they can do it, it's because there are lots of people employed to do so. The UBI thesis outline above is that you can find the money to pay for it by eliminating all those job roles from the government, so you can't use their existence to justify UBI as affordable.
Even if governments were perfect at ID verification it wouldn't change the argument above, right? Being perfect at verifying UBI eligibility would require a large government infrastructure, just like today, so you can't claim that the U part makes it super cheap to administer.
But no government is close to perfect. Here are some examples for your edification.
The UK doesn't even know how many people are living there, and it's an island. There's no centralized identity scheme and during COVID more people came forward for vaccination in some age bands than theoretically existed at all.
All countries struggle with basics like "is the recipient of the welfare dead". Here's a specific case where Italy didn't notice it should stop paying out a state pension (a form of UBI) for years after death, with the fraudster only getting busted when he tried to dress up as his own mother: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/nov/25/italian-man-dr...
Paying out money to dead people is a very common problem. Here's an EU report on all the basic ways countries get defrauded by failing to track basic facts about identities:
"Common fraud and error cases include falsified documents (birth, marriage and death certificates), identity fraud and falsified non-payment certificates"
Even in UBI, there would be a strong expectation that each person only receives it once. But checking stuff like that requires a huge bureaucracy.
>Here's a specific case where Italy didn't notice it should stop paying out a state pension (a form of UBI) for years after death, with the fraudster only getting busted when he tried to dress up as his own mother
I assume you want to stop the state pension as well then?
None of these include a mention of meaningful economic impact.
> Being perfect at verifying UBI eligibility would require a large government infrastructure, just like today, so you can't claim that the U part makes it super cheap to administer.
It's already in place regardless of UBI, so it doesn't add meaningful costs.
Of course it's never going to be perfect, absolutely nothing is. Why even mention that? What matters is the impact of it being imperfect.
Compare it to the impacts of tax evasion, or wage theft, and they'll be completely negligible.
> Even in UBI, there would be a strong expectation that each person only receives it once. But checking stuff like that requires a huge bureaucracy.
Or you issue UBI all at once during the month, and you stamp everyone who receives it with an indelible ink mark that takes longer than a day to wear off; like they do in poor countries to prevent double voting.
It's a solvable problem. The problem is that the "cost of managing welfare" is a small percentage of the cost of welfare, you can't pay for doubling/tripling it by saving 5%.
Most EU countries have national IDs, so the "only receive it once" is a solved problem.
The "still paying dead people" problem exists in the current pension system, so we already have bureaucracy in place to solve that one (yes, it's not 100% accurate, but it works sufficiently well en masse) so no need for new bureaucracy there.
In the UK a lot of that is solved by using the NI number that everyone has to have to work, claim benefits, get a state pension, or pay tax.
For people who are employed it could be done by existing systems already used to calculate tax (which is deducted automatically by employers here so the systems to do calculations exist).
Self-employed people already have to register with HMRC.
For the rest it is a far, far simpler than the requirements of the benefits system and less prone to fraud.
> You cannot make UBI work from money saved by removing means testing.
No one claims it can be made to work using ONLY money saved from means testing. Something like removing means tested benefits together with lowering tax thresholds could work though.
Except a lot of actual, very smart, economists are for UBI or similar arrangements (it's not a settled matter). And geohot might be smart, but he's just a self described hacker.
I think the problem is that a lot of the proponents are arguing for a level of UBI that is pretty close to the median wage whereas what would be affordable is probably a quarter of that.
I'll come out and get kicked out of communism club to say that I don't support UBI on the basic fact that money is exchanged for goods and services is just so foundational that I can't support UBI. I think everybody should have a roof over their heads and 3 square meals a day, but UBI isn't the way to get there.
Welfare is a direct payment to the poor and SNAP is very close to that. Work requirements and other administrative hurdles are the primary thing that keeps these programs from truly ensuring that everybody has basic dignity.
> money is exchanged for goods and services is just so foundational
it is in all large societies. That's true. But it is not in most small primitive societies. SO it's not like a law of nature, but more that we haven't found a system that works as well for large groups.
The trouble is that capitalism also has it's problems, and they're getting exacerbated by technological advancements. If you automate everything at a certain point there's just nothing to do for a large part of the population. And at that point the system stops working.
In science fiction we would get the 'post scarcity society', but nobody knows how that should work.
The UBI systems I've seen proposed that just might work are a sort of golden middle between those two. Not that different from the current welfare system we have in NL, but taking out the stress factor and stigma of receiving welfare.
The exchange of money for goods and services is foundational to capitalism, and UBI seems like a divide by zero kind of trick that's isn't going to work out. Let's fire a bunch of people to make the government more efficient with this one neat trick is just the most Republican thing ever.
Astroturfing? If I don't have an alternative, I'm secretly being paid by "them" to tear down UBI? Who would "them" even be? How would that even work?
Anyway, subsidized jobs programs is my answer. Pay people to do jobs. Plant trees! There's so many places that could use some reforesting. There's no shortage of work to do.
The idea you're suggesting here is 19th century era Marxism, and isn't based on historical or economic realities. There has never been a famine caused by new technologies creating unemployment, and food security is much higher now than at any other time in the past.
> There has never been a famine caused by new technologies creating unemployment
That's a bold statement. And depending on how you define famine it might even be true-ish. But I'm quite certain most poor people in the 1920s would disagree with you.
Which is why we got the russian revolution and both world wards at that time. All 3 were partially caused by 19th century industralisation creating an poor, hungry underclass.
It's not particularly bold, it's just a fact. It only seems bold because our society is still flooded with Marx-era propaganda.
Poor people in 1920 would agree with me. We know this because in this era Marxist ideas were already quite old, well known and widespread. He argued for what was effectively a UBI or very generous welfare system under a different name. He predicted the poor would rise up as capitalism drove their wages to zero and "alienated" them, then they'd overthrow it. But Marx became bitterly disappointed in his lifetime when capitalism didn't fail, wages didn't fall to zero and the working classes rejected his call to revolution.
Technological progress hasn't caused famines, it's ended them. What has caused several famines, though, is left wing people reorganizing society via force to solve imagined problems. If you're worried about people not having enough to eat, you should be terrified of a UBI.
You're misinterpreting what I wrote. I didn't say all famines were caused by left wing policies. Obviously historically most were caused by natural disaster, like the Irish potato blight. But when famines have been caused by social change, it wasn't due to the march of technology.
The British never forced anyone in Ireland to export food "at gunpoint".
> What do you plan to buy with your free government dollars? Want to buy eggs? Sorry, the egg people stopped making eggs, they are living free on UBI. Want to buy a house? Who built it? Nobody, because they all were getting UBI and didn’t want to build houses anymore. They write poems now. There’s still old houses available, but the price for them has 20xed, well outside of what you can afford.
In my country the people that are producing and selling eggs do it almost for free, they could do something else and get much more money, but they choose to do eggs. My theory is that people choose to do stuff not just because of the money. Narrowing all the interests to just money doesn't capture the complex reality. When you cancel the money thing, you let people choose what to do based on their real ambitions and aspirations, removing the alien interest (money) that skews the world so much that even geohotz got confused.
But then you can end up with a lot of people making what's fun to produce but we have an excess of (waste) and few people filling in to make what's missing (scarcity). Markets aren't perfect but they do help us solve that particular problem.
The topical reply is that those positions aren't paying enough.
However, if we have to pay e.g. miners millions to compete with a high UBI, we trigger a massive wage-price spiral. Since extracted raw materials are the bedrock of the entire supply chain, those costs cascade and multiply, eventually making the finished goods unaffordable for the very people receiving the UBI.
In reality, markets don't solve the scarcity of un-fun labor through magic efficiency. They solve it by leveraging debt, poverty, and an exploitable lower class to keep the foundational costs of society artificially low.
Without this DesperationFloor™, the math of our current commodity-based economy falls apart.
> Since extracted raw materials are the bedrock of the entire supply chain
Extracted raw material is incredibly cheap. Human industry and ingenuity are the real scarce resource, and UBI leverages these to an unprecedented extent. Debt and exploitation are an anti-pattern, even for a capitalist economy; they're deeply antithetical to true industry and creativity.
Apparently if we, the poorer ones, win the war of attrition, the problematic ones that own everything will resign to golf. Or something. Getting financial planning from a lottery winner.
> I dream of a day when company valuations halve when I create a GitHub repo. Someday.
Isn't that exactly what Anthropic did to the SaaS sector? Taking the "I can replace you with a very small shell script" line from BOFH lore (except that it was a bunch of SKILLS.md files, not shell scripts) and making it real.
I think it’s a bad idea for about the same reasons, but that’s assuming we’re implementing it right now in the current economy. If automation means that in the future there’s not much for all these people to do that creates value then it makes sense.
Which of course ignores the obvious point that UBI is all about taking existing resource redistribution and making it less costly and more efficient. Practically all Western countries redistribute income on a massive scale (compared to the default outcomes of a completely free market capitalism) in order to ensure everyone can provide for their basic needs, and that could all be gradually replaced by UBI.
This is broadly in line with OP's suggested ethic "create value for others, don't play zero sum games" since capitalism is based on rewarding those who create the most value, whereas zero-sum games are largely political in nature.
The inefficiency of the bureaucracy of limiting welfare (or charity) to the poor and needy. I don't know, though, maybe giving everybody's money to everybody cancels itself out.
You're giving money to everybody but then anyone who isn't poor and needy has to pay taxes on their income that more than offset the money. It's taking "the bureaucracy of limiting welfare (or charity)" and folding it in with the IRS and the local Department of Revenue.
Capitalism rewards those who CAPTURE the most value, not those who create it. Capitalism at its core is a system of expropriating the value of labor by those with capital who themselves create absolutely nothing.
Capital allocation is a serious job with very real consequences. The decision of how many AI datacenters should be built, to take an an unusually topical example, is one of capital allocation. Central planning is not a viable solution, it has failed everywhere it's been tried.
> The real problem to UBI is governments creating income via debt, IMO.
The national debt is just a hidden tax on future generations. You're stealing resources from the future (by selling claims to them in advance, that's what national debt is) and spending them in the present. It's justifiable in extreme cases like a war (or perhaps for massive public investments that can't be funded within the existing budget - which is actually not that common), but really not otherwise.
That's not how that works, because for each unit of debt (loans or negative balances) there is a corresponding unit of credit (bonds or positive balances) in the economy. Hence, mathematically speaking, all debts could be paid off instantly at any point in time.
The reason why the debt keeps growing endlessly is that there is a 0% lower bound on the interest rate, which if you think logically about it, means that debt can only grow, mathematically speaking. This creates the impression that debt is always a future burden that is eternally carried forward as if it was nuclear waste.
If the market interest rate is below zero, either the government and the central bank must intervene to maintain the state of the money system above zero, because that is the only representable state. The government can subsidize the difference between the market interest rate and the money system interest rate clamp by taking on private debt and turning it private. This is particularly evident once private corporations refuse to take on further debt.
However, even if the government stopped the subsidization, you still don't get out of the conundrum. The government is patching the symptom with its cause, which stalls the problem into the future, which is "good" if the cause is considered good and only the symptom is considered bad.
The same way housing is needed for living, money is needed for trading. Similar to housing becoming an investment and therefore no longer being able to be used for its intended purpose, money can face the same fate. When people use money as an investment, it can't be used for trading. Houses sit empty and money sits idle.
It turns out that money is such an integral part of the economy that if there is no money, people can't acquire the goods they need to survive and since there is a monopoly on money systems, you can't just switch to a private provider to perform the trading you need in case the government one fails.
In other words, you either choose between a fully formalized money based economy or subsistence lifestyle with nothing in-between. The difference between the two is so stark, that a failure in the money system might as well be the collapse of all elements of society. From that perspective, it is quite smart to keep kicking the debt can down the road. Meanwhile the person who refuses to kick the can will doom society unless they implement the possibility of negative interest in their money system.
The zero bound on nominal interest rates is not relevant today. (It may be relevant in a deflationary environment where debt or 'safe assets' are essentially needed as a liquidity instrument akin to money, but that all gets hoovered up when interest rates rise.) The U.S. government is paying a whole lot of interest on its national debt bonds not because of a formal constraint, but rather because its bonds would go unsold otherwise, it would be unable to roll over the existing bonds as they expire, and the whole house of cards would collapse. IOW, it's the chickens coming home to roost, and the American taxpayer is paying for it. The alternative is to inflate the debt away by debasing the currency, which is even worse.
I've often thought of state debt as an accruing tax collection deficit. Selling bonds (creating more of this debt) is more politically convenient than raising taxes but it digs a deeper hole and obliges the state to pay interest largely to the same class of people they have failed to tax.
If your business can't self-fund the investment, borrowing is justified. But if you're earning revenue that allows you to self-fund, why borrow? You're just incurring extra costs.
I feel like government borrowing sometimes and government borrowing more and more every year and never paying it down until the end of time or more likely bankruptcy are two different things
As long as you keep new borrowing below growth then you can do that indefinitely. The problem is when the next pandemic (or war) comes along you don't have much room to deal with it.
You can do the same with printing money, as long as you do it below growth you can do it indefinitely.
The problem always is that you can't stop and get off the tiger. No country can withstand the shock of a major cut in spending, because the population can't absorb the hit.
Forget UBI and AI. They are distractions. Today it's very unclear that even just existing welfare schemes are sustainable. Political parties can buy votes with welfare and they do, so it's an unstable configuration. Europe is full of countries with this problem.
A good example of a country in a downward spiral towards UBI hell is the UK. Around 25% of the working-age population now claim to be disabled, and around 10% receive disability benefits. Labour have a genius idea for how to fix this: let disabled people try out employment for a bit to see if they like it, whilst keeping their welfare payments. So they're turning disability benefits into UBI by the back door.
The UK can't afford anything even close to this. It can't even afford the theoretically non-universal benefits schemes it has: it has massive government debt and deficits because its economy doesn't generate enough wealth, and its health welfare system (the NHS) experiences Soviet-style shortages all the time.
This has happened despite that we've been mass automating jobs with computers and robots for decades. Chips aren't magic wands that make communism suddenly work. The problems with wealth redistribution are fundamental and will never go away regardless of your level of technology.
If you disagree, fine, but please for the love of God focus on walking before you can run. Drive government deficits to zero whilst keeping growth at US levels, and then talk about more generous welfare schemes.
(you can't magic new money by eliminating means testing either, see my other comment on this thread).
> The UK can't afford anything even close to this. It can't even afford the theoretically non-universal benefits schemes it has: it has massive government debt and deficits because its economy doesn't generate enough wealth,
I'm fairly certain its economy generates more wealth per capita than at any point in the past, and this is the general consensus. If you believe it doesn't, please explain how, as it goes against the commonly held belief.
Much of that wealth is wasted by excess government spending. Same pattern as India, which actually used to be ruled by the UK as a colony - then they became independent but kept all the excess bureaucracy and red tape from their former oppressors.
I didn't say otherwise. It generates more wealth now than in the past and that is still far from sufficient for its government to afford its current levels of welfare spending.
You did imply it, that in the past the same welfare was affordable that now no longer is, because its economy apparently doesn't generate enough wealth.
The UK doesn't have the same welfare as in the past. It's gives out vastly more money for more reasons than it did when the system was new, and it has a far greater proportion of the population receiving it.
My family household generates more wealth per capita than any time in it's history, but yet net savings is down. Do you know why? We spend it all on junk that we thin we'll make us happy but actually we become dependent on it.
Money is a social construct, not some kind of physical quantity subject to conservation laws, and can be and is introduced into the economic system all the time. The real question is really would introducing more money or a UBI cause social disruption by e.g. disrupting price signalling by high inflation or changing incentives to work so less goods and services that people actually value are produced.
It is a social construct but if you just print money you get ... inflation. You can't just increase money supply to redistribute wealth without consequences.
For me its more his attitude that puts me off.
He might be intelligent, but his EQ doesnt seem that high.
The condescending way he references the "malcolm in the middle"-episode "hot dumb girl" couldve been just the explaination of the "1 dollar = 1 million dollar".
Not necessarily UBI; one just needs an adequate day job. Then the hobby could be creating value with no expectation of any direct return: writing a blog, writing and giving away music, writing open-source software, doing any volunteer work, etc.
There's something more than just an adequate day job (which is perhaps necessary in more ways than just "get the money get the cheddar") - because we can find pages and pages of examples of "well paid" (doctor, lawyer, tech) people who are drowning in debt, living paycheck to paycheck, and perpetually unhappy.
Paycheck to paycheck is sort of fine, if you can still dedicate the time to your WoW clan, or your music, or your writing, and be happy about that. Well, to your kids, not expecting anything tangible in return.
If the day job expends all motivation, all your energy, and it + the commute eats all your time, then again it's an inadequate job.
I think there’s a strong bias towards hacking and cool side projects from the hackernews crowd. But I’m not so sure much of the general population would use their free time afforded by UBI for productive and useful endeavors. At least from my observations there’s a significant portion of the population that uses their free time to be idle and veg in front of the TV and/or get wasted. My concern with UBI, even if it was financially tenable as it would underwrite a whole lot of that - including the more criminal, antisocial sub-population.
Wouldn't convincing the criminal part of the population to just stay home be a net win? Policing and prisons are both notably more expensive then welfare.
People would probably still steal but without real world data we can only speculate on whether crime would increase or decrease. My bet is still on decrease.
> when you have enough money to not worry. Unfortunately for most people ... paycheck to paycheck
This is some truth to this argument, but the frequency with which it's brought out as an excuse to just dismiss any argument one doesn't like is too high in North America.
Simply bashing every argument with, "but some people are in a bad situation" doesn't really further discussion all that much.
Did you RTA? The author is predicting that those employees (at least in software dev) will get laid off; so they should get out and find some way to create real value (or make some other change) for their own sake, because they’re about to lose even “paycheck to paycheck”. You should debate this instead, because if true, it makes your point irrelevant.
As long as the global population is still rising, they will be carnage between competitions. The author and many others might be foresee the (near) future where the global population start declining, maybe then, we can do things just because we can.
No matter how much resources a society has, natural selection pushes everyone to keep trying hard to get more, as those that don't end up without resources.
In a society, the fastest way to get resources is to provide something in exchange to other members of the society. The most common thing we have to exchange for resources is work.
From those two things we can see that no matter what society you have or how wealthy it is, people will work as much as they can, or else they get behind in the rat race.
Not just if you already have enough money, but it's easy to say if you're as smart as Geohot. For those who aren't, (I'm not), creating that kind of value isn't just hard, it's impossible!
If you do not partake in a war when a war is waged against you, you lose, and you either get subdued, or perish altogether. This is why pacifism for some part of a society is only possible when another part of the society is willing and capable of using lethal force to defend the society as a whole.
Due to this, it's important to always have sufficient quantities of very efficient weapons, exactly so that you would never have to put them to use.
War has existed as long as humans have. If you have any ideas for how to remove fear, aggression and disagreement from humans you might just be a god or a saint.
Indeed, what is worse is expectation created by rich people that whatever little value you did create should be given away for free! I see it frequently on HN with product launches where people are demanding product to be opensource with liberal license which effectively means it should be free.
money is a judgement of value to society and a motivator to only allocate work in a useful way.. wouldn't UBI, even if coupled to actually producing _something_ will lead to a lot of useless stuff being made?
> wouldn't UBI, even if coupled to actually producing _something_ will lead to a lot of useless stuff being made?
The general premise of a UBI is that it's unconditional.
If you tried to say someone is required to produce something without specifying what it is, they'll produce whatever is the easiest thing to produce, which will naturally be useless if they otherwise wouldn't have produced anything because the only reason they're doing it is to satisfy the demand of someone not imposing any specific requirements on the output.
But if it's actually unconditional then the things produced would only be the things someone wants to produce, i.e. the things worth their time to produce when they're not actually required to spend their time producing it. Those things would tend to be useful because at least the author found them to be and there's a decent chance they're not unique in the world. If you e.g. make an app just because you want to use it yourself, maybe someone else wants to use it too.
>Those things would tend to be useful because at least the author found them to be and there's a decent chance they're not unique in the world. If you e.g. make an app just because you want to use it yourself, maybe someone else wants to use it too.
This seems reasonable on it's surface, however for anyone that is tried to start a business, or sell anything, there is a big gap here.
The gap between creating something useful (an app) and the ability to sell or market it is HUGE. That gap is the difference between useful or not.
So I agree, lots of "useless" stuff will be made because the drive to close that GAP (which looks small) won't be done because there is no need for it.
> The gap between creating something useful (an app) and the ability to sell or market it is HUGE. That gap is the difference between useful or not.
Most of that gap is the difference between making it and selling it. To sell it you need payment processing, customer service now that customers are paying and expect you to resolve their billing problems etc., marketing sufficient to get enough initial users to cover development costs now that you're trying to turn a profit, accounting and tax remittance now that you're taking money, etc.
That stuff isn't required if you make it for yourself and then post it on the internet for anyone else to use for free.
Curious, how would this affect the production of things that have long supply chains, or require lots of manual labor? There are many things that require labor, like plumbing, irrigation, farming, transportation, brick firing, steel production, etc. where the product is either an intermediary step, or otherwise contributes to something that the worker doesn't themself benefit from. Who would create my car, computer, desk, house, etc. if people are only working for themselves? Maybe I misunderstood your comment
The cost of these things would simply rise until people are willing to either produce them, or obviate the need for that production (such as by increasing automation in that particular sector).
I feel like a lot of people have the impression of a UBI that it would mean no one would have paid jobs anymore. It's primary advantage is that it removes the perverse incentive of the existing needs-based assistance system to not work (or not work more) because if you do you lose your benefits. Which doesn't exist if the payment is unconditional rather than conditional on not making [more] money.
But the amount would be something in the nature of $12,000/year. Is that actually a disincentive to work that would cause no one to take a paid job anymore? Only if no one wants a lifestyle that costs more than $12,000/year.
Would be great if true, but that doesn't really correspond in reality truly, especially in intellectual products. Compare even Linus Torvalds fortune with e.g. snapchat founder. Not even talking about thousands of 0 profit open source projects with millions of installations versus some saas hustler - usually the former provide much more value to society than some guy who is just good at selling stuff.
UBI might fuel some useless work, but it also might provide a way to people to be more into creative side of things rather than selling and marketing rat race.
Also in less developed countries money even less corresponds to value. It almost always has some kind of mafia and corruption that extracts huge portions of value from the economy and basically net negative, though profitable.
I'd like to live in the world where money are always allocated fairly, but we see that in IT, for example, predating, stealing data, spying on people bring more money than the honest work due to misaligned incentives, when bad actors pay more money than actual consumer.
We as a society would profit from not categorizing everything in terms of its usefulness. Things can and should be allowed to just be.
That being said, UBI would probably result in more useful things not less. There are so many cases of jobs and things that seem to just be busywork or outright scams. There are also a lot of things that only appear useful if you never take the time to think about them. A plastic straw that will pollute the environment for thousands of years just so i can have a drink for two minutes? That is useless.
Every street in every city being lined by cars that don't move for 95% of the time? That is useless and insane. Imagine what marvelous machines we could have built instead.
Also, I find the online discussion around UBI to be quite weird. I don't think anyone serious is advocating for it to be particularly high. In my opinion, UBI should cover your necessities plus some so you can participate in society.
This gives everyone the opportunity to take it slow or focus on personal projects without fear. Everything luxurious can not, and should not, be affordable with UBI. This will leave ample opportunity for people to still care about and want to work.
Humans will always do. It is in our nature. But not letting people get homeless or starve to death might enable those of us that don't want to do what our overlords deem useful to do the things our society so desperately needs.
I don't need some poor fool to cook my burger for me. I'd rather take turns with my friends that now have free time.
I hope you don't take this as a negative, but sometimes I wish I could think like people like you, very positive, but maybe I'm old/cynical?
There is a problem with "plus some so you can participate in society"
In a massive society this will never be agreed to. The 'some' here will never be enough. Too little and it's not UBI, too much and impossible to fund. Who is going to define what a luxury is? Is owning your own home a luxury, a car, washer and dryer?
"Don't worry about money" is something a lot of companies do. They can just try to create value first, then look for profits later (albeit often though "enshitification").
This bias towards creating value makes them more moral than mere mortals, creating huge amounts of innovation and surplus value.
I wish the original title was kept ("How to win a best paper award"). It seems a good list for that.
Most of this list is about how to dress for senpai; figuratively speaking. A pretty depressing take on "how to do important research that matters".
I would hope that would be of the most unimportant part of science, totally irrelevant to what's important and what matters. But maybe that's not true today.
> Most of this list is about how to dress for senpai; figuratively speaking. A pretty depressing take on "how to do important research that matters".
How is that the case? The tips seem to aim for impactful research: picking good ideas and executing well on them. There's a tacit assumption that such impactful research will win best paper awards, but that's actually not substantiated and isn't obviously correct, since best paper selection committees can't see the future. For example, many (maybe most?) winners of retrospective awards (test-of-time / influential paper) aren't papers that won a best paper award when originally published.
Most of the author's papers he cites in the post, including the membership inference paper which is one of the papers the author is "most proud of," didn't win best paper awards.
I don't know why people are talking so theoretically. This was months ago.
My friends have startups, I know a lot of engineers. The startups have been laying off people for months, and many of my engineer friends don't have jobs anymore.
Teams are already ruined. I just don't think the companies are. In many cases this seems like rational reallocation of capital to AI, and in a VC funded ecosystem you're failing at your job if you're not following the math.
I think you must have a very cushy job if you're still armchair speculating about this.
If a startup is laying off engineers then it’s dead in the water. That means it’s not growing and focused on cost cutting at the expense of velocity. Thats what a large company does. The issue isn’t AI but the startup fundamentally being broken and this being a last gasp for air before it dies.
Yeah what a lot of people are missing here is tons of small startups are laying people off, but it's not because they don't need engineers, it's because they are out of runway because their entire vertical (usually some sort of SaaS, often b2b SaaS) is basically now nonexistent. Traditionally businesses favored buying software over building it for cost reasons. Now they can cheaply build exactly what they want instead of paying through the teeth for something that is only slightly like what they want. This doesn't mean the work is gone, but it does largely mean large swathes of the SaaS vertical will be gone. The work itself is shifting to the individual businesses that were once the customers of the SaaS.
SWEs will be fine, all these small VC-funded startups building another CRUD app will not.
I work for a startup that makes a b2b SaaS that is _way_ too complex for anyone to spec out in a markdown file, especially when taking things like ITAR compliance into consideration.
We have seen steady growth and there’s been no signs of slowing down.
Our software facilitates order/quote/factory floor workflow automation with auditable trails in the manufacturing space, with cad file analysis and complex procedural pricing equations for quote generation, alongside a Shopify style storefront and many more goodies. We interface with things like shipping, taxes, erp integrations, and so much more.
I don’t see anyone vibe coding an alternative to our software even if they could. Manufacturers have enough on their plate managing their factory floors.
That said, we facilitate $millions in manufacturing orders per week and our engineering team is 3 people. We couldn’t do what we do without AI, and we would have needed to hire more engineers to handle the scale of our business if it weren’t for the power of Claude Code and Cursor.
A poster-child startup is one that has a long waitlist of willing future customers, and whose engineering team is scaling the tech up, up, up to keep up with the demand.
No, it's "if you already have engineers that know your stack and customers and business then getting rid of them to save a bit of short term cash is stupid unless you're out of runway because of bad business decisions." That is a tangential point to hiring more engineers. You may slow down the rate or hiring however the ROI for getting rid of them in a growing startup is silly imho. A collapsing startup is a different beast.
We have yet to hit this phase in the cycle: "Hey we laid off all our engineers 6 months ago and vibe-coded this thing and now it's super buggy and AI can't fix it. Can you (senior engineer consultant) look under the hood and fix it?"
Senior engineer looks under the hood, sees 500k lines of incomprehensible spaghetti mess with emoji comments everywhere, runs out the door and never looks back.
> Senior engineer looks under the hood, sees 500k lines of incomprehensible spaghetti mess with emoji comments everywhere, runs out the door and never looks back.
Senior engineering _consultant_ looks at those 500k lines of incomprehensible spaghetti mess and sees $$$: months or years of contracts and likely very dysfunctional management that is willing to pay multiple times the cost of full time employees to keep the burn on a non-payroll line and/or keep the “AI first” story rolling on.
> Senior engineering _consultant_ looks at those 500k lines of incomprehensible spaghetti mess and sees $$$: months or years of contracts and likely very dysfunctional management that is willing to pay multiple times the cost of full time employees to keep the burn on a non-payroll line and/or keep the “AI first” story rolling on.
That's not been my experience. Even pre-AI, when I was asked to find a bug in some hacked-together codebase, sticker shock was often the result.
"What do you mean, billing for a week? The guy who created this is an actual software engineer and you're billing just as much as he did!"
I've got a list of small ex-clients who won't get work from me anymore, unless they are happy with "Here's my weekly rate, 1 week minimum".
Hourly rates don't work on a client who considers $200/m to be overpaying for s/ware development services.
This could be a superinteresting field in the future, I guess?
But how do you land contracts? Nobody will post on LinkedIn like "Hiring consultant to cleanup or AI-mess-codebase"? :-D
So, nobody will admit that they are in trouble already,so how do you find out?
It's fine, I suppose. It's like a puzzle, and you really need to be comfortable with banging your head against a wall trying to make work what is essentially immediately created legacy code by the LLM.
I think it's less armchair speculating about the observable outcome, that people are losing their jobs, but the why. AI coding tools aren't making 10x developers, they aren't even making 1.5x developers. They also aren't making "PMs who code" or "designers who code."
It would be really cool if this was the case, I would be singing the praises of these tools finally realizing Stallman's dream of end users who can take control of all the software in their lives for their own benefit. And the huge gains we would see in open source where "man I wish there was a tool that could…" becomes "I'm gonna make a tool that…"
So personally I think it's just a continuation of the belt tightening that was and still is occurring across the economy. I don't think our industry is particularly special on this, everyone is trying to cut headcount right now.
I won't try to speak for anyone other than myself, but my multiplier is definitely over 1.5x, probably higher than 5x.
I choose to sit on my hands in my freed up time so upper management does not catch on to and exploit this fact. Eventually they will though via overzealous coworkers.
It’s easy to produce a high volume of code, sure, but it is not equally easy to test, verify, and integrate it. And with a high volume of code, there is a high volume of shit to review & test & integrate. For companies that give a shit about not vibe coding their way into a disaster (because they have lucrative enterprise contracts that depend on reliability & security), that’s the real blocker. (Plus, these types of projects are big, not trivial, and things are harder to integrate & properly test because of that.)
Not to mention, if a team wants to keep a semblance of understanding of what they own & ship… it can be exhausting to have a huge volume of new code coming into the system.
It’s definitely a productivity unlock. For sure. But there are a lot of knock-on effects we’re still figuring out that counteract how much extra “value” we’re shipping
In my case, the volume of code is roughly the same. I'm not using the efficiency towards pumping out more code, just using it to be AFK more.
I spend enough time iterating and refining to the point I'm comfortable taking ownership of the outputted code. Perhaps hypocritically, I do mald when people upload code for review that they clearly haven't taken the effort to read through critically.
People with a lower multiplier are either in the minority of developers solving genuinely hard/novel problems or, more likely, they've just not figured out how to tap into AI's potential.
Granted, to your point, a decent chunk of the HN crowd belongs to the former and can't relate to us paycheck stealers.
I always hear people say this, but it’s not clear to me what exactly is so difficult about using AI that otherwise-competent developers “can’t figure it out”
Aaaannnnd they're out of business and it was because of slowing demand and tightening credit the whole time.
Here in Europe this is not a thing, I've been hearing about such cases mostly from the US where it's clear that there is a recession going - I don't know why this is not blatantly obvious to everyone who does not view reality as whatever is said by the talking heads on TV.
Insider trading has been a staple of making money in US politics for a long time, it's just more transparent now.
I don't believe a targeted ban on participating in prediction markets would do much to weed out corruption while "predictions" hide behind government officials pumping memecoins, buying stocks, using proxies, or simply sharing war plans over messaging apps. The floodgates are already open, prediction markets are just the most honest and obvious version of the corruption.
This approach to legislation is an interesting contrast to the CCP's supposed 2.3 million people prosecuted for corruption, if you believe Wikipedia [1].
Yeah it proves nothing, but it hits. Felt good to read it, at a time when a lot of things don't feel good to read on the internet, so I'll call it a win.
Is this basically a CLI version of [1]? If so, I'm glad Google is being forward thinking about how developers actually want to use their apps.
Better this than a Google dashboard, or slopped together third party libs. I know Google says they don't support it, but they'll probably support it better than someone outside of Google can support it.
Not sure this counts as "humanoid" any more than the robots we've had in factories for a century... the hands and feet are nothing like a human's, and would not be improved by being more human.
It seems they just made the shape of their machine have a vaguely human silhouette so they could ride a hype wave.
I'm all for programmable humanoid robots, humans are an awesome human interface, but this ain't it.
That’s generally what it seemed like to me too. Seemed to be human shaped so they could say it’s humanoid… and nothing else.
Nothing in the video looked like it couldn’t be done by a more industrial robot shaped robot. And I bet that would be cheaper or easier to make.
Then I started reading the text. When I got to the part very early on about deploying “Physical AI” that confirmed it to me.
This all seems to be “humanoid washing”. Nothing terribly interesting that someone put a special coat of paint on to get attention.
I’d love to be proven wrong. But the video certainly didn’t show it. And I didn’t notice it in the press release, though it was hard to parse past the ridiculously over the top language that did nothing but obscure what was actually going on.
I agree with your opening paragraph -- hot take! What would be more interesting, would be to see humanoid robots un/packing and moving boxes in their warehouses. That to me seems like one of the first logical places to deploy humanoid robots to replace (or assist) human workers.
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