It might be a bias in terms of the probability of events, but I'm not so sure this is a market inefficiency in terms of actual trading strategy. If true odds are 1% and the event is priced at 4%, I can sell NO for a 3% edge... but lose 100% once out of a hundred. Doesn't seem worth it!
I would emphasize misinformed, not uninformed. If Policy X has 30% of people politely supportive, 20% of people politely opposed, and 50% of people incandescently furious about it, you're going to mistakenly think it has majority support.
This is exactly the reason I used to be almost exclusively an r/all browser back when reddit was worth using. I didn't want a curated feed tailored to my beliefs. I wanted to know what was going on. Then in ~2015 free speech was killed, and it seemed like every new feature added was one that increased censorship. Like post locking wasn't a thing the petty tyrants could do. Now they lock posts and sticky their midwit opinion at the top of the thread, and ban whole communities with racist biases. So I strived to be less of a redditor and quit completely when they killed Apollo & third party apps. No use for the site anymore.
I'm not sure there are many causes that have "50% of people incandescently furious about it", except maybe heavily diluted positions like "corruption = bad". Even just based on voter turnouts. If you see this kind of activity, it's most likely representative of the terminally online class and not actual people.
Well, your heavily diluted position is actually a great example. One of the running threads of the current administration has been that they do not think corruption is bad and routinely engage in open bribery. Tim Cook gave the president a gold bar on national TV!
But people who criticize this are almost invariably enraged about it. And so I’ve encountered otherwise informed people with this kind of attitude towards “rage politics” who either don’t know about the issue or assume it must be exaggerated because people are so mad about it.
People absorb politics from our social environment. We judge what's good and bad, what's controversial and uncontroversial, based on our models of the political discussions we've heard among peers and what we imagine they'd say. Every Twitter user I know comes to believe that the political dynamics on Twitter are a reasonable approximation of the political dynamics in the US, no matter how much they repeat the mantra that Twitter isn't real life, and this leads them to repeatedly overestimate how much people support crazy niche positions or care about esoteric issues.
I agree, it's amazing how many Twitter users get their sense of politics warped by the platform, and I think this is a big part of the reason why it's appropriate and important for those of us who realize this to loudly and vocally shun the platform. I've called out friends and acquaintances in person who still use it, and I'll continue to call it out online (for example, any HN post that is a link to Twitter).
VC can spend all the money in the world and it won't matter if the cost of switching providers is effectively zero.
If I want to switch from Windows to Linux, I have to reconsider a whole variety of applications, learn a different UX, migrate data, all sorts of annoyances.
When I switch between Codex and Claude Code, there is literally no difference in how I interact with them. They and a number of other competitors are drop in replacements for each other.
> people might luck into something genuinely good and worth sharing from time to time.
A) it would be impossible to find in a sea of AI generated slop
B) even if it were to be recognized as good, it would be instantly copied by other AI’s such that it would be very shortly thereafter be also considered slop
For any work to gain traction with an audience, there needs to be scarcity. Art and artists are valued because they are unique in some way, something about it or them cannot be replicated by others. The ability to instantly produce a piece of “art” negates any artistic value, at least as far as audiences are concerned.
Nothing about AI mindshare is durable. As Anthropic tightens rate limits and/or raises prices, everyone will move to something else.
This week I’ve been hitting CC rate limits, and I switched to Codex with virtually no disruption to my workflow. It’s not good for Anthropic that I was able to do that!
One of the things I’ve been wanting to see is basically an estimate of their minimum revenue to meet investor expectations, too. I’ve heard people talking about using even cheaper local models aggressively to save on tokens and it increasingly makes me wonder if they’re caught in a vice where prices need to go up but if they raise them they’ll just shed usage to the competition, especially since at least Google has a much longer runway.
Both companies have the same issue: the unit economics are bad, and there’s no moat.
I’ve been primarily on Claude for the last 6 months or so, but have been hitting rate limits. I switched work to Codex seamlessly, just like I could switch to any other provider seamlessly
The unit economics at this point are about utilization. Their cost is well below what they’re charging, but only when there is enough traffic to keep the GPUs busy. So the game is about increasing demand to level the load.
GPT has negligible moat because they gave up on all their integrations. Claude code is starting to develop one as people start to build things that require Claude Code specifically, not just any LLM.
> Claude code is starting to develop one as people start to build things that require Claude Code specifically, not just any LLM.
I hate to be a "source?" guy, but I'm curious if you have any examples of this. Skills and MCP are really the only extensions on CC itself I'm aware of, and these are both supported in Codex.
Things like Dispatch / remote sessions is something CC has that Codex does not, but these features are quite easy to replicate (and I expect Codex to do so in short order).
I agree that’s a great question which I don’t really know the answer to. These tools have been moving in lock step for some time now. One will innovate and within 2-3 weeks the others have that feature. Where I sit the mind share all seems to be going to Claude though. The moat develops when people build something that only works on one - even if the others have the same features it doesn’t matter unless they’re literally binary compatible. Skills are just prompts at the end of the day with nothing more specialized than a file naming convention.
Having written several orchestrators I’ll say that the code to invoke the tool is pretty equivalent but it’s the details that matter. Exact CLI flags and json fields.
Curious if you agree that local is where Apple's bet is long term - it's out of reach now, but I found the jump in capability for the top line laptop interesting. Presumably chip development hasn't focused all that much on running LLM's for all that long, I'm wondering what kind of jump we'll see two or three releases down the line.
reply