Pretty sure if it’s true that the 1% own 80% of the stock market, that’s a far bigger problem. Gen X is just a drop in the bucket by comparison.

Personally, I have given up, and have decided to give to the c-suite exactly what they demand, to the letter. That ends up as a bunch of AI written code that looks like it does what it does, with tests written to the best of AI’s ability, as fast as possible. I used to care deeply, and we were making strides climbing out of the tech debt that had been accumulating for years, but then AI came along and all hell broke loose.

Our productivity goals are impossible. There’s too much to actually review and figure out exactly what it does, so I just rubber stamp PRs as long as the tests look sane and are passing, and a once-over of the code doesn’t look like anything obviously malicious. It’s a gamble on several levels, but I’ve decided to care about code quality as much as the CEO does. The CTO just bailed out and they aren’t bothering to replace them, which is telling. If they don’t give a shit, why should I? They are already trying to push everyone out and replace them with AI anyway, so why not taste the results of the policy made by slop, for slop, sooner rather than later? Either way we’re out of a job.

After all, if this were a decade ago, they could have just hired a bunch of juniors and ended up with a bunch of spaghetti, basically roughly the same state as this AI code, and they still wouldn’t blink an eye. So what does it matter?

In the end, I see it as a wash. Either the models get better and can clean the mess up, or just figure things out and outright replace large swaths of nfg code all at once, so why do I care… Or the whole thing blows up, the costs are astronomical compared to just having humans do it, and we have jobs fixing the mess that AI left behind.

Even if/when the AI bubble bursts though, Pandora’s box has been opened. It’s been demonstrated that machines can write some semblance of code that compiles and executes along the lines of what a product manager dictates to the machine, as long as they can describe it well enough. Doing so seems to have astronomical costs hidden at this time, so for a while it may be prohibitive to bring things back to today’s scale. But it’s only a matter of time before someone revives it, like Steve Jobs revived the Newton ala the iPhone.

This is exactly it. All of the other answers in this thread are dancing around this issue without even knowing it. Some happen upon it, but move on like it’s a side item when it should instead be lit up with lights and sirens as the main event.

Regular people spend the majority of their income on the things they need to survive; food, shelter, energy, clothing, etc. The wealthy and ultra wealthy spend only a miniscule fraction of their money on the same things, so they put that pile of remaining money into investments/assets (stocks/shares, housing, etc), which make them even more money, which they put into more assets which make them even more money, and so on. But the money flowing to them doesn’t come from nowhere, it comes from YOU.

Collectively speaking, you go to buy a home, they outcompete you on the price, and then gladly rent it to you, all while jacking up the rent over time. They use that extra money from you to buy even more assets. You somehow manage to buy a home, but at a highly inflated price, the money is lent to you by… guess who. And they charge you interest every month, which is money flowing from you, so they can spend it on… even more assets.

Higher prices at the corporate owned grocery store because the shareholders demand even more dividends. Because goods at the store coming from corporate producers raised the price for the same reason. Because little producers that used to compete in the market are being bought up by big ones that can afford it because they pay next to no corporate tax. But who are the shareholders receiving the dividends? 80% (and rising) of the stock market is owned by the 1%, the people who already have more money than they could ever spend.

Now we’ve got higher prices for energy for a multitude of reasons, but a fresh new hell is it’s all being gobbled to power data centers. Whose ultimate purpose is an attempt to replace people’s jobs with “thinking” computers. Whether they’ll succeed or not is yet to be seen, but we do know it is being funded by billions of dollars that someone has… guess who again. If they do succeed, then that’s even more money sucked away from you in the form of lower wages at minimum. If it blows up in a catastrophic bubble, they will demand a bailout again, just like the sub prime bubble.

Our failure to tax the obscenely rich allows them to walk all over us, taking money from us which they use to build the machinery to walk all over us with even greater pressure, which takes even more money from us, and so on. It’s literally exponential, which is why nobody appreciates nor understands it.

You are not rich, will never be rich. The ones who actually are, are doing everything they can to keep you out of their club. You’ll know because you’ll be paying taxes and they won’t. Which are going to go up soon by the way, to pay for that bailout.

When I think of an automated system that can protect itself, ED-209 comes to mind for some reason.

Your writing is a pleasure to read. Thanks for this.

That’s just neat!

Through abusing the windows update mechanism, I think

Oh my God, I just checked and me too.

Np. Rereading it now, I’m sorry my wording was so firm and final, but my experience was so terrible I felt I couldn’t let it happen to another person.

I am almost convinced these things are actual scams just to make money no matter the costs, not just a poor product that underperforms. I think they persist because it seems so plausible that it could work, but it just flat out does not, and the manufacturers just don’t care as long as it still sells.

Had one of these over 20 years ago, along the lines of the one you linked. It was positively useless. Never again. The air in your home becomes saturated with water so quickly, and your clothes stop drying because the air can’t accept any more moisture. A lot of heat comes out of the vent, ice or an ice pack would be done in less than 10 minutes, you’d drive yourself insane putting new ice in to condense upon, even if it worked, which it doesn’t.

It might work if you put a couple of dehumidifiers in the room with it, but there is just so much moisture output from a dryer I am certain it would overwhelm them in short order because they are not built for that crazy level of moisture. Also, even though your dryer has a lint screen, a ton of lint makes it out anyway, quickly clogging the one in the kit, messing with the throughput. So you take the filter out of the unit so it can breathe, and lint gets absolutely everywhere. It sucks. Don’t do it. Live with the outdoor noisy vent until you can save for a heat pump dryer. Don’t waste your money.

Word. It’s our monetary system. As soon as interest is charged on something (or otherwise getting something for nothing), this is where things inevitably end up, it’s how the math works out. The wealthy remain wealthy because wealth, and they have even more now, accumulating at an even faster pace.

This is like those mobile ads for mobile games that don’t actually exist. They make fake gameplay footage of a game with a mechanic/idea that they speculate people might like, track the clicks to see how popular the idea is, then only build it once they think they have a guaranteed winner based on the click rate.

No doubt they are doing the same here, collecting stats on what people might like, if only it existed, then getting that thing made. Talk about outcompeting manufacturers. Again.

Every dollar spent at a company listed on the stock market is (mostly) a dollar whisked out of the economy that regular people function in, and into the other economy that’s used to syphon more money from the first one.

Neat. Please forgive my ignorance, but what is scratch?

As for your valve question can you rephrase your question another way and provide details? From skimming your website I’m unsure of where the comparison should begin (perhaps I am unaware of all the things valve offers).

Wtf. This sounds like a bias towards ADHD symptoms because of all of the ADHD people self-medicating with caffeine via coffee.

Novelty? Or necessity for the future when people are living out of their vehicles.

Yeah things ain’t looking so great https://youtu.be/vFb_hb_npV4

Cat: “That’s a nice cooktop you got here. T’would be a shame if this griddle fell on it…” 😼

This has inspired me. Thank you.

I want the AI bubble to pop, but as time goes on, I increasingly believe it will not. At least not without being tied to another major collapse.

Can someone who works for a large software development company confirm ?

I work for a large software development company that initially was very hesitant about AI anything, but has since gone whole hog because everyone else is doing it. To run our stack locally and debug interactions between services requires a machine that costs about 50% more than it did a year or two ago and they are not in stock at the moment. Storage and memory costs are insane. We are partially offloading the development stack to the cloud now, so expect to pay more for the server you rent as you compete with us for resources.

In the hands of a competent developer, anthropic’s models for instance, are pretty good in my experience. In the hands of an incompetent developer, they are a nightmare. Tuning base prompts has helped us stem the flow of garbage from weaker colleagues to a manageable level, and continuing that work seems to be improving things incrementally. I can foresee having a library of prompts for the whole organisation for each common thing we want to do. I expect that model owners will inevitably steal those prompts since they are in the position to observe them, and they’ll use them to improve models to where they better intuit what you are asking for and use better patterns by default. I also expect tooling to change to assist models, probably to the point that they will be AI first.

But it’s clear to me that everything is changing for better or worse, regardless of what anyone thinks of it. As for what corporate thinks, it remains to be seen if competence is valued, or if “close enough is good enough”, will suffice.

I don’t expect anthropic or anyone else in the AI space to stop iterating on models of any kind. I do expect anthropic’s (and others in the space) goal to be to get the models to a point where not using them will be a net disadvantage when trying to compete in the software development space. Then they will up the price, and use fiddling to keep the price just below where it makes sense to hire another developer, in order to suppress those wages.

Moving on from there, I expect them and others in the AI space to be training models for all kinds of things, which will end up suppressing wages in other industries. Whether that is even possible remains to be seen, obviously, but it won’t stop them from trying. Success (if any), or even the perception of it, in the software development space will spurn others to try the same thing but somewhere else.

Bubbles don’t HAVE to burst anymore

You haven’t really offered much to support this assertion.

They are right, bubbles do not have to burst anymore. The housing bubble is one example. The stock market basically only going up is subject to the same forces. Economist Gary Stevenson explains. TL;DW, once rich people reach a certain wealth threshold, they have nowhere to put profits except to reinvest, which begets more profits, and so on, until they outcompete you for those assets. Once they buy up as much as is available for one asset class, they move to another. This is why housing and the stock market keep going up and up. They will even invent new asset markets to pull more money from people: see what’s happening to veterinarians for instance.

I can assure you that any bubble will burst if there’s an interruption in shareholder sentiment.

Who are shareholders? I’ve heard that 80% of the stock market is owned by the 1%. And 90% of the stock market is owned by the top 10%. Even if none of that is true, what is close to the truth? 50-60%? That’s still too much, and how long would it take them to reach those higher numbers anyway? Besides, if the majority shareholders already have more money than they could ever spend, why do they even need to change their sentiment?

It’s interesting that their CEO is sinking many millions into conservative political campaigns.

To preserve the status quo, preventing anything that stops his gravy train. The same train that is causing all of this.

Right now, everyone’s pension fund has invested in the “magnificent 7” because frankly, no one can afford not to.

Absolutely. Everyone’s pension has been swept along into this system, and held for ransom and to beat us with at the same time.

The bubble is being maintained by not taxing those who have more money they can ever spend. They reinvest it. The profits they end up with don’t come from nowhere, that money has to come from somewhere, and there’s only so much money in the system. If you follow that path, you come to know how the monetary system works, and why we inevitably have to print money to keep the system going (it’s a function of the system). Printing money causes inflation. The money funding this whole situation is essentially coming from all of us, stolen fractionally by inflation. The bubble won’t stop until people have nothing left and/or are no longer able to function (societal collapse), or we tax billionaires and begin to fix things. We have a hard road ahead either way. Good thing it’s so necessary to create Bigfoot blog videos, we couldn’t live without them.