Gatekeeping as a Service
What a Time to Be Alive
OpenAI just released openai/math, a repository of 722 manuscripts in 372 families, written by an unreleased internal model attacking open research problems in mathematics. Many of them even come with Lean proofs you can machine-check yourself. And this lands only weeks after a flood of new models: Anthropic's Opus 5.5, and OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra and GPT-6.1 Sol.
The math and art communities are in awe. Graphic designers are being replaced by people who just have ideas. Ideas are cheap now, but a novel idea is very expensive. Imitating is easy too. People are porting TypeScript to Rust and cloning so many apps: Adobe's toolkit, media editors, tools, you name it.
Back before 2026, "having the idea" was the whole business model. Nowadays, ideas are cheap. You can clone CapCut, you can clone Typora, you can make Zach King edits, you can solve Div. 2 E competitive programming problems, and much more!
Not many people have analyzed the business implications of this yet, but personally, I've been replacing all my products with a free, in-house, customizable clone of every app I want to use. CapCut? Dead to me. Streamer.bot? Dead. OBS? Half dead. Photoshop? Dead. Even Discord and games are dead to me, because building and exploring have never been this fun. Shit tons of dopamine entering my bloodstream.
i just generated an image in the style of a Monet painting using AI
please describe, in as much detail as possible, what makes this inferior to a real Monet painting
This is a funny one. Someone posted a real Monet Water Lilies painting, labeled it "made with AI", and ragebaited the whole timeline. Over 7 million views. Most of us can't tell AI and human paintings apart anymore.
Even music is getting better. Suno v6 is one of the best music generators I've ever heard. AI is so good at everything now that I, myself, prefer AI's work over some humans' in some fields.
Humanity is truly heading down a path no one expected.
Gatekeeping as a Service
Back around 900–1500 in Western Europe, kings granted land to noble lords in exchange for loyalty and military service. The peasants, called serfs, worked that land and handed over part of their harvest and labor to the lord in exchange for a place to live and his protection. They basically couldn't leave, because they were legally bound to the land.
From the 1500s, merchant trade and colonial routes started eroding this feudal farming system. Then between the 1700s and 1800s, the British Parliament passed thousands of Enclosure Acts. They literally put up physical fences and hedges around the commons, the shared land villagers used for grazing and farming, and handed ownership over to wealthy landowners.
Then came the Industrial Revolution: money and capital. Incredible new inventions like the steam engine, the spinning jenny, and coal-powered factories let companies mass-produce goods at speeds never seen before in human history.
Well, that goes on until the Great Depression and the world wars. But that's not what I'm trying to say here. What I'm trying to say is: to be at the top, you must have something that others don't. (This actually has nothing to do with my three-paragraph history of capitalism... LMAO.)
Okay, it kind of does. The commons used to be free for everyone, until someone fenced it off and suddenly it was worth something. AI just turned software, art, and music back into a commons. Anything you publish can be cloned by tomorrow. So the value moves to whatever is still behind a fence.
That's why growing an in-house skill, application, or secret that you have and don't tell people about is... a must-have.