No cost, no value 2 ▲ jola.dev 48 minutes ago · Tech · hide · 3 comments “The value of a thing sometimes lies not in what one attains with it, but in what one pays for it - what it costs us." - Friedrich Nietzsche LLMs are incredible tools for generating code, and the frontier models can often build complete end to end apps with very little direction. We can have all kinds of conversations about whether the software they create is good, and what the definition of good is. But it is a fact that today software can be mass-produced by paying for tokens. You don’t really need to invest anything at all into it. You can just pay for a subscription, install the software, and start asking for things. LLMs make it trivial to build all kinds of apps, handle all kinds of tasks, do all kinds of work for you. They’re sold as something that removes toil. But we also lose something in the process. The value of things Things you create can have value in different ways. If you create something that is useful to other people, that save them time or bring them joy, then you… Log in to reply on the Fediverse. Comments will appear here. vrypan @vrypan@mastodon.social 21 minutes ago [-] This is so wrong in so many ways. First of all, let's define the terms:- cost: what you spend to produce- price: what you want to get back when you sell- value: what I get when I buy.In most cases (efficient markets) cost < price < value.But the value I get does not depend on your cost to produce it. vrypan @vrypan@mastodon.social 18 minutes ago [-] That's why most people who buy a house won't spend the amount on a Lambo or a Ferrari: the costs may be similar, the price tags may be the same, but the value a buyer gets is not.Oxygen has been of paramount value to humans for millennia, but it costed nothing to produce and had a price tag of zero. vrypan @vrypan@mastodon.social 14 minutes ago [-] The value I got from a cancer treating drug was not a function of the cost to produce it or its price. Actually, if you can develop and produce it for $0.1 instead of $1m, humanity as a whole will get more value out of it.
