[ChicagoBoy11]

His point of Omega doubling-down on the things that would progressively harder to establish a moat on made me think about what we have been seeing with higher ed. It seems the "smart ones" definitely read the book that making the "education better," in a world where it is mostly free, was a fool's errand, and now the margins that they all compete it stray far, far away from the quality of the schooling. I work in K-12, and see the same things happening here too.

P.S.: It is odd to me to have such a length pg essay been up for such a long time with just a handful of comments. Did something happen? I would've expected a wealth of discussion on a post like this by now.

[randallsquared]

I think there are a number of reasons for this, but a couple come to mind. First, pg seems distant from YC now (to those not at office hours, I guess), and rarely publishes new essays, so he's rarely discussed or present in the minds of commenters here. Also, pg has the fortune or misfortune to write in a way that feels like some LLM writing, when he's writing well. I haven't gone back to earlier essays to check this notion, but I think he's going out of his way to break up thoughts into less likely sentence fragments, now, which give his recent writing a choppier, less well-written feel, with standalone sentences like

> But you could recognize one from across the room.

and

> Or maybe not so lucky.

and starting a paragraph with

> For men, at least.

[zahlman]

> pg has the fortune or misfortune to write in a way that feels like some LLM writing, when he's writing well.

It pains me to think how simplistic some peoples' LLM writing detection heuristics are (or at least appear to be). Prose such as in TFA is really obviously human-written to me. It's using those choppy sentences properly. It doesn't strike me as "less well-written" at all; the resulting contrast is clearly very intentional.

Although, of course, what you describe is still a couple levels above "Behold, what doth mine Ctrl-F espy but U+2014 EM DASH! Hie thee hence, O wretched automaton!"

[KaiserPro]

Omega's entire brand was accurate tool watches. The megaquartz was peak luxury for someone that wanted accuracy and style https://chronomaddox.com/omega_megaquartz_2400.html

yeah they were force merged with ETA, longines, Hamilton and eterna, which basically dominated the swiss watch industry .

Patek Phillipe was all about just being expensive with other people's movements. They were the balenciaga of watches (subjective view point there.)

[doron]

case in point - the "ivy league" schools are some of the most established "Brands" in existence today.

They are not really in the education business anymore — they're in the exclusivity and signaling business

[fragmede]

The something that happened was ChatGPT. Enough commenters didn't like the idea that everything they write publicly online is fed in as training data for AI that there's been a shift in this site's community. That, and everyone got laid off, either for section 174 or AI reasons, but Twitter employees are no longer collecting that fast paycheck and posting here. I'm sure a data scientist could make a good analysis of if what I'm saying is backed by actual data, but that's my feel based on spending more time on here than is healthy.

[zahlman]

> Enough commenters didn't like the idea that everything they write publicly online is fed in as training data for AI that there's been a shift in this site's community.

Pardon; your theory is that this attitude was prevalent among people who like discussing pg's writing, and that they have left in favour of a new crowd that doesn't care about pg but is also pro- the AI companies?

... Because that doesn't seem to line up with the general tenor of discussion in threads about AI companies doing things.

[fragmede]

Looking at the stats, there's been a huge influx of accounts. The theory that fits that isn't internal inconsistent is then there are multiple people using the sites that can be grouped into a set of people that don't care for pg, and a set of people that are pro-AI. How much of an intersection there is between those two groups, you get to imagine for yourself. The individuals in the group that see a PG essay, and go "Ooh, lemme dump my unfiltered opinion of him and not read the essay" and the individuals that won't bother with that link, and the individuals that comment on AI stories is a small set. The sata science query to prove me wrong wrong is left as an exercise for the reader.