Eric Barroca @ebarroca

Socialists imagine a class struggle. In their made-up fantasy the CEO is in competition with low level workers, the wealthy entrepreneur is stealing from the underpaid nurse. In reality, workers do not compete vertically they compete horizontally. Entrepreneurs compete with entrepreneurs. Investors outbid each other. CEOs are benchmarked against other CEOs. Nurses are hired from a pool of nurses. Etc. The CEOs pay has no correlation to the entry level workers. The Football star on £300K a week isn’t linked to the person selling drinks in the stadium. A biotech entrepreneur raising VC capital isn’t paid relative to a cleaner. What is linked is the demand and supply dynamic of each role. If a company places an ad for a qualified truck driver and 150 people apply for the role, then the company knows it does not need to increase wages for that role. If the company has an open role for months, it is forced to look at the compensation package. Same for a CEO. A board representing shareholders would like to hire a CEO for a lot less if they could. Their dream scenario would be to hire a CEO who brings in institutional investors, attracts top executives, drives innovation and growth, keeps margins steady and is a good public face for the business even under pressure. It turns out there aren’t a lot of these people looking for work and if you want one you have to pay more than other companies are offering. The class struggle isn’t vertical it’s horizontal. CEOs are in competition with CEOs. Retail workers are in competition with retail workers. Demand and supply dynamics set the price. Sure you can say that a CEO want’s profitability and would like wages to be lower BUT it’s not up to the CEO - demand and supply tension sets the price of workers. An Airline like RyanAir would like free pilots if they could get them but they can’t… so they pay the market rate. The reason incomes are rising at the top and falling at the bottom is not class warfare. It’s technology and globalisation. Technology makes basic jobs simple, remote or fully automated. At the same time tech makes executive roles more leveraged, more important and more valuable. A CEO used to run a smaller organisation. Today a CEO who’s 2% better on a $5B company is generating $100M more. Seems sensible to try and pay a few million to get $100M. Globalisation has put workers from all over the world in completion with each other - downward pressure on wages. Globalisation has given CEOs more market opportunities to explore - upside opportunity to unlock. The rich are not very interested in buying houses that poor people own. The poor are not buying up the homes the rich want. They are separate groups living separate lives. Try finding the genuinely rich people whose strategy is to hoard normal residential homes - it barely exists as a thing. About 85% of landlords are people who own 1-4 properties. Super-landlords (100+ properties) are 0.2% of landlords and own a tiny fraction of the 30M homes in the UK… and they’re heavily taxed. Class warfare isn’t real. It’s an imagined war in the minds of socialists. Demand and supply dynamics are real. To the degree it is measured in class, it’s a horizontal competition not a vertical one.

Gary Stevenson @garyseconomics

2 days ago

There's a difference between normal people spending money and really rich people spending money. And it explains why our economy is failing.

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Very much agree. The speed to the model drive the attention and iteration speed. And avoid being bored and context switch :)

Farzad 🇺🇸 🇮🇷 @farzyness

2 days ago

I think AI has just hit a gigantic threshold, and Grok 4.5 is the PERFECT example as to why that is. One of the hardest parts of working with AI is iterating on a project or task that you're working on. As the models have gotten smarter (and more expensive), it's taking longer

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Agreed – and the underplayed part: the right context is an architecture problem, not a prompt one. It comes from a content layer that assembles the exact slice a task needs – right version, right clause, related record – not from cramming more into the window

Aaron Levie @levie

2 months ago

This is true of all agents, not just coding agents. Probably the biggest challenge that most companies run into in their agent strategy is getting agents the right constrained context to work with for a task. Too much information or conflicting sources, and the agent can easily

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The full piece on agent-washing in enterprise content – and how to read it straight from the API: ebarroca.substack.com/p/enterprise-c…

Most "agentic" enterprise products fail one test: the API returns a response, not a run. No create-run, no state, no tool-call history, no resume, no audit. No trail, no agent.

This is the whole thing. The chat window is the easy part – the 9 minutes of logs, the retries, the escalation rule are the actual company. Agent reasoning is just a while loop; production intelligence is everything around it

GEOFF @geoffwoo

4 weeks ago

ai hot take: the impressive demo is no longer impressive. watched a founder show 9 minutes of agent logs, 14 failed retries, one escalation rule, and a before/after invoice. that was the company. the shiny chat window was just the lobby.

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Atlas Shrugged made simple: 1. Society runs on a small number of highly capable producers – industrialists, inventors, engineers – whose work everyone depends on but takes for granted. 2. The system starts rewarding need over achievement: the more capable you are, the more you’re expected to sacrifice for those who aren’t. 3. Success gets treated like a debt – taxed, regulated, resented – until the most capable start asking why they bother trying at all. 4. One by one, led by a man named John Galt, they simply withdraw – walking away rather than keep propping up a system that punishes them for producing. 5. Without them, the whole structure collapses, revealing that the “automatic” prosperity everyone assumed was actually being generated by specific, irreplaceable people. 6. Atlas is the Titan from Greek myth, condemned to carry the sky on his shoulders forever – Rand’s stand-in for the producer class, holding up civilization while getting blamed for it. 7. “Shrugged” is the whole argument in one word: Atlas doesn’t fight, doesn’t protest – he just quietly sets the weight down. Nobody realized the sky was being held up by anyone in particular, until the day it isn’t. You don’t want us? We just go…🤷🏻‍♂️

Krzysztof Szczawinski 🇵🇱 @Kristof_Poland

a week ago

The Road to Serfdom made simple: 1. Plan the whole economy: someone must decide what gets made and who gets what, since people don’t naturally agree on one set of priorities. 2. These decisions are too big and detailed for normal democratic debate, so power shifts to a smaller

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@temporalio The clever prompt is the easy 20%. Everything you listed – durable orchestration, per-decision audit, human-in-the-loop – is the actual product, and it's the part no demo ever shows

AI doesn't add a feature to enterprise content. It changes the primitives – the repository and the process engine. The category finally has the machine it needed. It shouldn't spend the moment selling paint. ebarroca.substack.com/p/enterprise-c…

Read the IBM / Hyland / Box / M-Files contracts and a spectrum appears. IBM has a real loop, wired over FileNet. Most expose invoke, ask, extract, or a saved "agent" config. The agent label moved faster than the content layer.

For 30 years the content category promised software that could actually read your documents. It couldn't. Now it can. And the industry is mostly using the moment to relabel the old stack "agentic." How to tell the difference – from the API, not the pitch.

@hwchase17 Subagents are the right primitive for decomposing a complex process. The spawn is the easy part – the value is context isolation per subagent and how you roll up their results without the parent drowning in tokens

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Gov official should never speak this way. They are administrators for the people will. This is mafia level bullshit. Let alone targeting the most consequential entrepreneur of the century

Gavin Newsom @GavinNewsom

2 weeks ago

Don’t worry, we’ll be taxing trillionaires even more. Time to cough up after all that California corporate welfare!

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Israel made peace with Egypt in 1979, and hasn’t attacked it since. Israel made peace with Jordan in 1994, and hasn’t attacked it since. Saudi Arabia never attacked Israel, and Israel hasn’t attacked Saudi. Maybe Israel just defends itself against enemy belligerents.

Holy shit. Dan Bongino drops some absolute truth bombs! On why this attack on the Jews means an attack ON EVERYBODY in Western Civilisation. “I’m not even Jewish! I’m Catholic!” He nails it. A must listen. It’s a war on the West.