there is no consumer choice in a natural monopoly. that's why it's called natural monopoly.

Well, wouldn't it have to become a public good / public utility then? Isn't that what we're all talking about ITT?

I don't think that contradicts what the person you were replying to said. Specifically, they said break it up or make it public. If there is no option to break it up, then making it public is the only option.

then that's not a natural monopoly and not a good example of what is being discussed.

They said transit as a class of natural monopoly and I showed a counter example where there are private companies entering a space where the natural monopoly already exists.

No, you misunderstood the point of the poster and decided to bloviate about unrelated things.

sounds like bullshit. I'm actually glad that the people that hold this view are getting out of the way, they are the people that gatekept open source and made it annoying to work with. Do I miss having to wait for months to fix a trivial bug because I first need to convince 15 people that the fix is even necessary?

No, not really.

yeah you got it. they really can't. I'm a product manager, I'm STRUGGLING to create a harness for product work, the llms models just can't model a user's mindset very well and make very obvious bad choices that seem to be consistent (and getting worse with the new generations). That doesn't bother me, the code is getting better, but the work to talk to users and understand what needs to be built is still far from being conquered by AI.

general "agenticness"

At this point this is some sort of IQ test right?

I wish AI solved the problem of writing like shit. It REALLY bothers me how bad AI writing is and I'm not at all negative about the technology itself. I love AI, I just don't like the side effect of all this garbage content being regurgitated on the internet right now.

I'd hope it doesn't get solved, because it's one of the few signals I have to the person behind the screen.

> I wish AI solved the problem of writing like shit.

Until it does, it falls on the human publishing that slop to polish it up.

the readme is cringe and painful to read. please take a minute to tone the claudisms down.

definitely on my todo list - I was educated in the American south so you might regret this!

Write it in English to the best of your ability and then use it with a prompt along the lines of...

  Identify parts of the following readme that need to be looked at for consistency, tone, grammar, punctuation, and capitalization issues.
  This is to be a readme file for a project on GitHub used by technical people who are familiar with any jargon being used. 
  Suggest any changes to those by identifying the full passage the fix is in along with the correction.

Note that this works to identify the issues and have you change them to what would be correct for what you're writing without having it do the writing for you and inserting the "claudisms".

I usually tell it to write like Anthony Bourdain if he was a high school dropout who taught himself python when he was 14.

The difference is telling it to write (giving it the task of writing all the text) and having it offer suggestions for how you write to correct things.

Having it offer suggestions for you helps preserve your voice in writing the text and avoid the various things that make it feel like its written by an AI.

I often write a brief, then have the LLM interview me, then have another LLM edit.

I doubt it, bad grammar is better than AI-speak.

we southerners prefer 'colorful' or 'alternative' grammar :)

if you live in a place where tomatoes still have some flavor try this: cut a couple tomatoes in small cubes / triangles, add a tablespoon of olive oil, a teaspoon of red wine vinegar, a dash of tabasco, crumble some good tuna in it (like Tonnino or Ortiz) and sprinkle some oregano and salt on top. Goes well with crusty bread, preferably toasted.

That was my fathers' go to summer meal in Italy and I can't think of anything else I'd rather eat when it's hot outside, preferably with a cold lager.

why everyone spells it "tobasco" when it's "tabasco"? Is that an american thing?