What do you think about the idea of workplace democracy? [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workplace_democracy

I think it’s a weak form of a mutual cooperative - which unfortunately doesn’t have the ability to defeat a state-billionaire backed corporation in the market.

I guess I don't know what you prefer, I'm guessing anarchy in the academic sense?

But I want to add, that workplace democracy would be turning the billionaire owned companies into democracies themselves. That is the goal of economic democracy at least, changing the fiefdoms into democracies can't be a worse system.

I don’t prefer anything

At the most basic biological level the human species can’t organize action larger than a few hundred people in any kind of coherent way.

There are no coherent organizations that are larger than a few hundred people.

It is a biological impossibility for the human species to maintain long lasting (thousands of years) groups that can have social structures that last long enough to encode genetic fitness changes at the rate of environmental change.,

We do not have the ability to comfortably maintain coherent heirarchies, and subordinated structures, around a coherent epistemological grounding.

Humans are not eusocial.

I just fundamentally don’t see any future for the species level organization whatsoever

Keep fighting the good fight. Asking for evidence should be the bar in conversations and too many people are willing to bend the truth to push their narratives (that the rich elites deserve everything, you were born a serf).

David Graeber wrote a great book called "Dawn of Everything" that really explains how newer techniques in anthropology have upended what we believe about modern humans.

There were 10,000+ people settlements found 30,000 years ago. The idea that humans have only developed "civilization" the last 5,000 years goes against what it means to be human. I mean we still have the same brains we did 200,000 years ago. People have always been smart, and more importantly, the book argues that humans have resisted nobility + kings since creation.

It's never cut and dry as it seems.

There should already be a single priority for a company...

Why is the bar so low for the billionaire magnate fuck ups? Might as well implement workplace democracy and be done with it, it can't be any worse for the company and at least the workers understand what needs to be done.

You think a company the size of OAI should have a single priority? That makes no sense, that’s putting all their eggs on one basket.

All their services depend on their models. Their main priority should be that. If they're too thin, it gets affected.

What can openai do that, even if their models lag behind, will let them keep their competitive advantage?

There are many reasons:

1. ChatGPT has a better UX than competitors.

2. Some people have become very tied to the memory ChatGPT has of them.

3. Inertia is powerful. They just have to stay close enough to competitors to retain people, even if they aren’t “winning” at a given point in time.

4. The harness for their models is also incredibly important. A big reason I continue to use Claude Code is that the tooling is so much better than Codex. Similarly, nothing comes close to ChatGPT when it comes to search (maybe other deep research offerings might, but they’re much slower).

These are all pretty powerful ways that ChatGPT gets new users and retains them beyond just having the best models.

> What can openai do that, even if their models lag behind, will let them keep their competitive advantage?

Regulatory capture. It's worth noting that an enormous amount of time and energy has already been allocated in this exact direction.

Most of the credit being throwing around isn't coming from traditional banking companies, mostly private credit being utilized.

Private credit isn't really unregulated.

If you're interested in learning more I believe Matt Stoller has written a few articles about the private credit markets.

Only other relevant thing to add is that Ghostty is also written in zig and makes for a good showcase of the language.

This was the case before AI tho, people were copying coding patterns from companies randomly even without understanding. I mean there was an interview with some DoorDash architect that literally stated that whatever their architecture was just fad chasing at that moment.

Every company I've ever worked at (from ISPs to health insurance to finance) every organize was just copying the fad of something else.

At the time I felt like it was because that was "the best way" but it was more likely do to engineers not having the freedom to actually explore good solutions. The made up constraints imposed by organizations against their workers are rarely for the benefit of the company.

It's not a surprise to see this being the case, most companies on the planet are ran like centrally planned dictatorships with the results being obvious in retrospect.

Yes, it was the case. AI just magnified the severity by an order of magnitude or two.

Those workers can be counted on two hands at most for 99.99% of public companies.

What about the vast majority of workers that are doing the grudge work that keeps the company afloat? Do they not deserve a say in the direction of the company? Do workers not deserve democracy in the work place to decide their own fates? Why should this be left of to centralized communist dictatorships (boards + executives)?

Why should I listen to the snake oil peddler? Finding real neutral critiques isn't hard.

Doesn't rinsing your mouth out with water solve this?

Nowadays the advice is not to rinse so you don't rinse away the fluroide from the toothpaste.

I can’t imagine not rinsing after brushing, with your mouth full of toothpaste