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0 pointswmf10mo ago0 comments

If you use it, that means you received more value than you gave up. It's called consumer surplus.

0 comments

If I pay £200,000 for a car, I received more value than I gave up, otherwise I wouldn't have given the owner £200,000 for her car. No reasonable person would say the car was "free"...

JumpCrisscross10mo ago

> If you use it, that means you received more value than you gave up. It's called consumer surplus

This is true for literally any transaction. Actually, it's true for any rational action. If you're being tortured, and you decide it's not worth it to keep your secrets hidden any longer, you get more than you give up when you stop being tortured.

klabb310mo ago

It’s only true in theory and over a single transaction, not necessarily over time. The hack that VCs have exploited for decades now is subsidizing products and acquiring competition to eventually enshittify. In this case, when OpenAI dials up the inevitable enshittification, they’ll have gotten a ton of data from their users to use for their proprietary closed AI.

patmcc10mo ago

That's effectively every business that isn't a complete rent-seeking monopoly. It's not a very good measure.

edit: to be clear, it's not a bad thing - we should want companies that create consumer surplus. But that's the default state of companies in a healthy market.

buuuutwut10mo ago

“Use of prison facilities is explicit admission of guilt.”

It’s called prisoners dilemma when even the government is propping this up.

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