Playing warframe today for the first time in seven years and completely unexpectedly encountered the song we sing at solstice. The game puts all of its Good Story Tokens into that one 30s cutscene so this was more shocking than it sounds

Completely different. The software vulnerabilities we're finding with the most recent codex models are crazy. 

Isaac Newton probably sounded like a 9/11 truther in his day

Stumbled upon to this from the ACX blog. I'm flabbergasted that Eliezer believed this book.

I get this feeling using codex like it's deliberately hard to parse it order to prevent me from understanding what's going on

It's similar but not the same. You can correctly compensate people for innovation and this is still a problem.

You are ignoring the point the hypothetical is attempting to illustrate in order to quibble with practical details of the stories I tell in the post. My point is that new businesses (even productive ones, with few negative externalities) typically make money through siphoning the value of other businesses and also creating value. In some cases the ratio is highly positive (i.e. the companies I list), in most cases it is not.

If you need a more "realistic" example of a business that is almost entirely and clearly predicated on redirecting money from other businesses, see the high frequency trading industry.

I agree that that's a benefit of capitalism, but it's a point orthogonal to the one I'm making.

Let's say we ban this activity!

I'm not saying we ban this activity! I'm just pointing out inefficiencies in our present society. I actually don't know what the solution to this is. 

I disagree with consumers only being "mildly priviledged by competition" because the alternative would be monopoly or oligopoly and arbitrary pricing power by incumbents

Certainly, what I mean to say is that these particular instances of competitive behavior I've highlighted result in little benefit to consumers, not that competitive pressure is useless. But it is the case that a lot of competition in capitalism that is just entrepreneurs wastefully wrestling shareholder value from each other, and I'm not sure why I haven't heard of this criticism before.