Rent seeking refers to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking

Yes I know that, read your sibling post

I don't pay my employees based on inputs like how hard they work, I pay based on outputs.

Any other system of incentives would be insane.

Things are different if you're e.g. a lawyer and have billable hours.

I get this, but also genuinely interested to know how to measure outputs. For me it's almost impossible to get it objectively right.

Maybe this doesn't apply to your case, but how would you measure outputs of say product development, or any data related project. Lot's of things don't have a good measure of output before the thing is done. Maybe your product / analysis improves profitability by 10x or maybe it was a flop and lost money.

Tangential, but I'm also seeing the quality of measures going down, with AI it seems that the number of [emails|code|analysis] produced is again a good measure.

> I get this, but also genuinely interested to know how to measure outputs.

Measuring outputs or inputs (hard work) is always hard. Did someone get the thing that was asked done both quickly and correctly? Do they do this consistently?

I also find inputs harder to measure because someone could be in the office 12 hours/day, but on Facebook the whole time. They could also just spin their wheels doing 'fake' work.

I spend some time going through what programmers wrote over the past years and many of them were rewarded for getting things done quickly with no complaints.. The more diligent ones probably didn't last since they got things done correctly which takes a lot more time and thought.

It's why I said quickly and correctly. I think it's a cop out to say someone was slow because they were building it correctly. Famously, the old space shuttle software was developed very slowly because it had to be 100% correct at all times. Most software does not need that level of correctness. Part of a SE's job is to understand that.

I pay a lot of attention when someone claims to have solved a problem I suspect to be NP-hard. There are a lot of possible explanations, for example they may have an incorrect measurement function or they may have chosen a simpler related problem that isn't really NP-hard, or both.

Fast, quality, cheap.

Pick two.

You don't have to pick two exclusively. They are all connected sliding scales. Part of engineering is figuring out where the slides need to be.

Plenty of things are made fast, at high quality, and cheaply.

Some things just aren't very hard to make.

> I don't pay my employees based on inputs like how hard they work, I pay based on outputs.

It's crazy how many times I have to explain this to people, and it's usually when they ask me for a raise.

A burger flipper cannot flip 20x the burgers. There isn't really any way to produce more output flipping burgers. Even if you could, if there isn't a queue of people waiting to collect their orders, there isn't any point in producing more blindly.

The person responsible for designing the process that thousands of franchises use probably does make a lot of money.

> In reality, it feels like we are financially better off than we were before.

Are you financially better off or does it only feel that way?

If you were actually better off, why mention feelings?

I think the heart of what they're getting at is that while on paper they are bringing in less income, they have gotten off the hedonistic treadmill, and as a result, quality of life per dollar has increased dramatically. They are less stressed about finances than they were prior, even though their income is lower.

Sentiment is an important barometer in this case.

They may have less money but also more time for things they care about, and less burden and stress in daily life.

So it is going to be a feeling. Is their smaller income going much farther now in how it benefits them, if so they feel better-off

That seems non-financial.

On some level the feeling matters more than the reality, past a certain survival threshold.

The thing is, some people don't view "maintaining networks" as work, and it's something that not only comes naturally when they do it, but they actually do it naturally, automatically.

These people have a real advantage.

It's like how I may have a real durable advantage because I really enjoy reading about software, computers, etc, so I just consume a lot of information passively.

Or maybe how I get a lot of practice arguing or convincing people on reddit or space battles.com.

If someone viewed reading Hacker News as work, I'm not sure they'd EVER do it.

The ultimate connecting up of the dots would be brain implants that just give you knowledge with zero effort.

I don't know if I'd ever be comfortable with that, hopefully I'll just be retired or dead when that takes off.

Managing complexity, modularity, separation of concerns, were already critical for ensuring humans could still hold enough of the system in their brains to do something useful.

People who do not understand that will continue to not understand that it also applies to AI right now. Maybe at some point in the future it won't, not sure. But my impression is that systems grow in complexity far past the point where the system is gummed up and no-one can do anything, unless it's actively managed.

If a human can understand 10 units of complexity and their LLM can do 20, then they might just build a system that's 30 complex and not understand the failure modes until it's too late.

> People who do not understand that will continue to not understand that it also applies to AI right now.

I think this is mostly a matter of expectation management. AIs are being positioned as being able to develop software independently, and that’s certainly the end goal.

So then people come in with the expectation that the AI is able to manage that, and it fails. Spectacularly.

The LLM can certainly not manage any non-local complexity right now, and succeed in increasing the technical debt and complexity faster than ever before.

Jaywalking was illegal in NYC until 2025 but literally every crossing had people doing it constantly. This is not figurative, it actually is literal.

Including people doing it in front of police. Including the police themselves!

The law only existed for police to harass and fine blacks and Latinos. And indeed, that was how it was struck down.

It is critical to a just society that victims of unjust laws or uneven enforcement complain!

Yes, but there is a difference between:

1. Customers want to do something, you help them do it, but it's illegal.

2. Customers want to do something, you tell them you did it, but you were lying and defrauding them.

And

3. Customers want to do something, you help them do it, and nobody has done it before, so whether it's legal or not is kind of up in the air.

E.G. Uber exploited a legal loophole that distinguished the kind of taxi service you hail on the street from the kind of taxi service you call on a phone.

The latter were much less regulated, and usually much more exclusive and pandering to a richer crowd. Nobody really knew which kind Uber should be classified as, it was the first kind in practice (same customer base as normal taxis) but the second in theory (ordered, not hailed).

Is there? At the end of the day both boil down to breaking the law. It’s not better to break the law because someone paid you to do so.

Yes, I just described the difference.

It is clearly different because in one case you are not guilty of fraud.

Being guilty of a crime plus fraud is obviously worse than just being guilty of the crime.

Breaking the law by stealing a loaf of bread is obviously different to killing one million people but "both boil down to breaking the law" - I'm not sure that comment contains that much information.

This comment is pretty wild:

> In addition to what @The-King-of-Toasters said, the worst case scenario is really mild: A new version of windows comes out, breaking ntdll compatibility. Zig project adds a fix to the std lib. Application developer recompiles their zig project from source, and ships an update to their users.

Uh so what if the application developer isn't around any more?

The fact that they consider the worst case to be one where the application is still actively supported and the developer is willing to put up with this nonsense is pretty surprising. Not sure how anyone could believe that.