johnnienaked

Our very strong and very domestic stupidiy, naivete, and ignorance is way more important of a factor than foreign influence.

LLMs are going to do none of this, so there's really no worry

LLMs will be great politicians one day

The cope about this "not being new" is pretty typical denial I'm glad to have left up there.

Metaverse?

There hasn't been one dollar of profit from any company, it's more a battle of how low you can keep your losses

This seems to be a slow discovering of the inherent limitations.

Good article and it's on the mark

I thought bitcoin was cool for about 6 months back in 2014, and read everything I could about it. For the life of me I simply can't understand how people are still so interested in it or who created it.

Couldn't agree more. If you don't want to be famous in today's day and age, don't do infamous shit.

Amazing to see a lot of the comments stating the exact qualifiers he laid out as potential counterarguments to his writeup. Did they even read it?

"they should not have had 12,000 to begin with"

Nailed it

And every other civilized society except America builds internal power structures that inhibit violent self-centeredism. Maybe it's time we do the same?

Some of the money is spent. What happens when better models, more efficient cooling techniques, and other technologies hit? Seems like the best strategy at this point isn't dumping your entire FCF into datacenters, but wait and see if there's even a viable business efficiency improvement first.

I mean you're half right. Companies seek to automate some of their transactional labor and reduce their overall head count, but they also want a pool of low paid labor to rotate when they do layoffs, which are usually focused on the highest paid slices of the labor chain.

There's a couple issue with LLMs. The first is that by structure they make a lot of mistakes and any work they do must be verified, which sometimes takes longer than the actual work itself, and this is especially true in compliance or legal contexts. The second is the cost. If a company has a choice to outsource transactional labor to Asia for $3 an hour or spend millions on AI tokens, they will pick Asia every single time. The first constraint will never be overcome. The second has to be overcome before AI even becomes a relevant choice, and the opposite is actually happening. $ per kwh is not scaling like expected.

My prediction is that LLMs will replace some entry level positions where it makes sense, but the vast majority of the labor pool will not be affected. Rather, AI might become a tool for humans to use in certain specific contexts.

The issue with framing this as a resurrection of the productivity paradox is that AI had never even theoretically increased productivity.

I think in retrospect it's going to look very silly.

Who would have thought the median American life, something havily satirized and made fun of in The Simpsons, would become what people most long for. That, more than anything else I think, is strong evidence of how far we've fallen.

Well said. In music, it's very similar. The jarring, often out of key tones are the ones that are the most memorable, the signatures that give a musical piece its uniqueness and sometimes even its emotional points. I don't think it's possible for AI to ever figure this out, because there's something about being human that is necessary to experiencing or even describing it. You cannot "algorithmize" the unspoken.

I think you're really overstating things here. Entry level positions are the tier at which replacement of senior positions happen. They don't do a lot, sure, but they are cheap and easily churnable. This is precisely NOT the place companies focus on for cutbacks or downsizing. AI being acceptable at replacing unskilled labor doesn't mean it WILL replace it. It has to make business sense to implement it.

We're talking about it because quantifiable variables aren't the only aspects of reality that matter. If a company does something profitable but it makes everyone but them worse off, there's an argument they shouldn't be allowed to do it.

All these hyperscalers do is control the internet and suck money from companies that actually add value via that control. I can name on one hand the amount of successful products GOOGLE has natively launched (without acquisition). This predatory behavior has the opposite effect on the economy you're claiming here.

Right, but the unprecedented control of the public discourse on the internet by just a couple megacorps PREVENTS businesses from promoting themselves, unless they pay through the nose for the privilege. This destroys small competitors by design and leads to more and more monopolization of every industry, which is an absolute nightmare scenario for everyone involved in the economy but a tiny handful of people.

I didn't mean to imply it was a recent invention. However, the almost total centralization of advertising in a few companies on the internet IS new. Their parasitism and malevolent monopolistic omnipotence is pretty obvious to anyone who runs any kind of business with an internet presence. This severely inflates advertising costs and transfers profit that should be going to businesses who actually add value to companies that simply exploit their control of the platforms. Competition being introduced into this space, which at this point is only possible via government force, would make advertising cheaper and bring more exposure to companies and their products, which I fail to see as anything but a good thing for the economy.

There is no competition in the ad space, so those companies can continue to just parasite their way to record earnings by stealing every other businesses profits. They create almost nothing of actual value, they are just heads of an ecosystem they totally control. Parasitism as a business model.

They have all the control and no competition. The time for breaking these companies up or hamstringing them at least a little bit is many years past due.

The problem is that monopolies are extremely profitable and are as "American as apple pie," despite the prevailing healthy competition myth that goes alongside it.

Do you genuinely believe the economy didn't function prior to the invention of the advertisement?

I don't think that's how it works. These companies have all the visibility control and make you invisible by default unless you pay them. It has very little to do with quality, demand, or any of the rest.

The solution is to prevent the privatization and wealth accumulation that flows from control of infrastructural technology platforms. Netscape, google, computer os, machine learning were all public or university research projects until the first movers (andreeson, brin/page, Ellison, gates) stole them, gatekept and IPed them, and then exploited wide user base to accumulate absurd amounts of wealth for just themselves. These people either didn't create anything at all or made very slight variations before deploying them. They were smart in seeing the trends before they happened, but should they really be entitled to 50% of a countries wealth just because they were lucky enough to be first? Especially now that we see how they behave once they get that control?

There is no reason at all why the US govt. can't control this better, they just refuse to do so.

It was useful for doing illegal shit

See the same thing in the bitcoin space. If you ask them to explain the value to you, you're a moronic, behind-the-times, luddite boomer who just doesn't understand. Not to mention poor!

I'll remain skeptical and let the technology speak for itself, if it ever does.