this is a fair response, and to be honest i was skimming your post a bit. i do think my point somewhat holds, that there is no “intelligence skill tree” where you must unlock the level 1 skills before you progress to level 2.
i think a more fair response to your post is:
companies are trying to make software engineer agents, not bloggers, so the optimization is towards the former.
making a blog that’s actually worth reading is hard. no one reads 99% of blogs.
i wouldn’t act so confident that we aren’t surrounded by LLM comments and posts. are you really sure that everything you’re reading is from a human? all the random comments and posts you see on social media, do you check every single one of them to gauge if they’re human?
lots of dumb bots can just copy posts and content written by other people and still make an impact. scammers and propagandists can just pay an indian or philipino $2/hr and get pretty good. writing original text is not a bottleneck.
yes, no one would put a large amount of money (say, $10,000) on let’s say a 1-year time horizon, “joe biden going to prison”, “barack obama going to prison”, “nancy pelosi, bill clinton, and hillary clinton going to prison”, “trump being put in office prior to the 2024 election”, and if someone did make such a bet, they wouldn’t be motivated by listening to a christian minister who regularly makes political / religious prophecies. surely no one would do that.
i don’t know why anyone who posts on a forum devoted to outright fringe beliefs and atypical personality traits (i say with all love and kindness, not to say that any of us are bad or incorrect for these beliefs, merely that they are objectively abnormal) is going to come out and make bold claims that there exists no such weirdo who is willing to do X for Y reasons.
the main point about the time value of money is interesting enough on it’s own, but the interesting, nerd-crack explanation is probably just not true. there are probably just crazy people who bet on the return of jesus christ.