Like you, I'm sick to the back teeth of talking about AI. Like you, I keep getting dragged into discussions of AI. Unlike you, I spent the summer writing a book about why I'm sick of writing about AI, which Farrar, Straus and Giroux will publish in 2026.
A week ago, I turned that book into a speech, which I delivered as the annual Nordlander Memorial Lecture at Cornell, where I'm an AD White Professor-at-Large. This was my first-ever speech about AI and I wasn't sure how it would go over, but thankfully, it went great and sparked a lively Q&A. One of those questions came from a young man who said something like "So, you're saying a third of the stock market is tied up in seven AI companies that have no way to become profitable and that this is a bubble that's going to burst and take the whole economy with it?"
I said, "Yes, that's right."
He said, "OK, but what can we do about that?"
So I re-iterated the book's thesis: that the AI bubble is driven by monopolists who've conquered their markets and have no more growth potential, who are desperate to convince investors that they can continue to grow by moving into some other sector, e.g. "pivot to video," crypto, blockchain, NFTs, AI, and now "super-intelligence." Further: the topline growth that AI companies are selling comes from replacing most workers with AI, and re-tasking the surviving workers as AI babysitters ("humans in the loop"), which won't work. Finally: AI cannot do your job, but an AI salesman can 100% convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can't do your job, and when the bubble bursts, the money-hemorrhaging "foundation models" will be shut off and we'll lose the AI that can't do your job, and you will be long gone, retrained or retired or "discouraged" and out of the labor market, and no one will do your job. AI is the asbestos we are shoveling into the walls of our society and our descendants will be digging it out for generations:
The only thing (I said) that we can do about this is to puncture the AI bubble as soon as possible, to halt this before it progresses any further and to head off the accumulation of social and economic debt. To do that, we have to take aim at the material basis for the AI bubble (creating a growth story by claiming that defective AI can do your job).
"OK," the young man said, "but what can we do about the crash?" He was clearly very worried.
"I don't think there's anything we can do about that. I think it's already locked in. I mean, maybe if we had a different government, they'd fund a jobs guarantee to pull us out of it, but I don't think Trump'll do that, so –"
[...] I firmly believe the (economic) AI apocalypse is coming. These companies are not profitable. They can't be profitable. They keep the lights on by soaking up hundreds of billions of dollars in other people's money and then lighting it on fire. Eventually those other people are going to want to see a return on their investment, and when they don't get it, they will halt the flow of billions of dollars. Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops.
[...] The data-center buildout has genuinely absurd finances – there are data-center companies that are collateralizing their loans by staking their giant Nvidia GPUs as collateral. This is wild: there's pretty much nothing (apart from fresh-caught fish) that loses its value faster than silicon chips. That goes triple for GPUs used in AI data-centers, where it's normal for tens of thousands of chips to burn out over a single, 54-day training run.
That barely scratches the surface of the funny accounting in the AI bubble. Microsoft "invests" in Openai by giving the company free access to its servers. Openai reports this as a ten billion dollar investment, then redeems these "tokens" at Microsoft's data-centers. Microsoft then books this as ten billion in revenue.
That's par for the course in AI, where it's normal for Nvidia to "invest" tens of billions in a data-center company, which then spends that investment buying Nvidia chips. It's the same chunk of money is being energetically passed back and forth between these closely related companies, all of which claim it as investment, as an asset, or as revenue (or all three).
[...] Industry darlings like Coreweave (a middleman that rents out data-centers) are sitting on massive piles of debt, secured by short-term deals with tech companies that run out long before the debts can be repaid. If they can't find a bunch of new clients in a couple short years, they will default and collapse.
[...] Plan for a future where you can buy GPUs for ten cents on the dollar, where there's a buyer's market for hiring skilled applied statisticians, and where there's a ton of extremely promising open source models that have barely been optimized and have vast potential for improvement.
[...] The most important thing about AI isn't its technical capabilities or limitations. The most important thing is the investor story and the ensuing mania that has teed up an economical catastrophe that will harm hundreds of millions or even billions of people. AI isn't going to wake up, become superintelligent and turn you into paperclips – but rich people with AI investor psychosis are almost certainly going to make you much, much poorer.
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The meteoric rise of artificial intelligence but it's facing a shortage of training data:
"We've already run out of data," Neema Raphael, Goldman Sachs' chief data officer and head of data engineering, said on the bank's "Exchanges" podcast published on Tuesday.
Raphael said that this shortage may already be influencing how new AI systems are built.
He pointed to China's DeepSeek as an example, saying one hypothesis for its purported development costs came from training on the outputs of existing models rather than entirely new data.
[...] With the web tapped out, developers are turning to synthetic data — machine-generated text, images, and code. That approach offers limitless supply, but also risks overwhelming models with low-quality output or AI slop.
However, Raphael said he doesn't think the lack of fresh data will be a massive constraint, in part because companies are sitting on untapped reserves of information.
Rick Beato talked about [15:29 --JE] how he broke ChatGPT with a simple question and exposed the gaps in AI's "knowledge" that are filled with synthetic data.
Related: The Real (Economic) AI Apocalypse is Nigh
A blog post covers why datacenters in space are a terrible, horrible, no good idea. Thermal management is just the beginning of the long list of challenges which make space an inferior environment for data centers.
In the interests of clarity, I am a former NASA engineer/scientist with a PhD in space electronics. I also worked at Google for 10 years, in various parts of the company including YouTube and the bit of Cloud responsible for deploying AI capacity, so I'm quite well placed to have an opinion here.
The short version: this is an absolutely terrible idea, and really makes zero sense whatsoever. There are multiple reasons for this, but they all amount to saying that the kind of electronics needed to make a datacenter work, particularly a datacenter deploying AI capacity in the form of GPUs and TPUs, is exactly the opposite of what works in space. If you've not worked specifically in this area before, I'll caution against making gut assumptions, because the reality of making space hardware actually function in space is not necessarily intuitively obvious.
Previously:
(2025) The Data Center Resistance Has Arrived
(2025) Microsoft: the Company Doesn't Have Enough Electricity to Install All the AI GPUs in its Inventory
(2025) China Submerges a Data Center in the Ocean to Conserve Water, is That Even a Good Idea?
(2025) Data Centers Turn to Commercial Aircraft Jet Engines Bolted Onto Trailers as AI Power Crunch Bites
(2025) The Real (Economic) AI Apocalypse is Nigh
(2025) Real Datacenter Emissions Are A Dirty Secret
... and more.
(Score: 4, Funny) by turgid on Saturday October 11, @09:07PM (33 children)
I bought gold, silver, palladium and platinum. I have not been disappointed. I have nearly enough for a curry and a couple of beers.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 0, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 11, @09:36PM (23 children)
> I bought gold, silver, palladium and platinum.
Out of curiosity, did you buy some of these metals directly (like Krugerrands?) Or in related stocks like mining or refining companies? Or some other type of investment?
I inherited my parent's sterling silver 8 place dinner set (which I'll never use), the current scrap silver price is at record levels, so it's tempting to sell now. Any comments on market timing a sale like this? I don't need the money, but we could use that drawer for something else...and it would be one less thing to worry about as I get older and less capable.
(Score: 3, Informative) by turgid on Saturday October 11, @09:40PM
I have a Revolut account. I bought them via that. You can also invest in funds via an investment ISA. I have made about £30 that way, investing in some metal companies fund.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 4, Touché) by turgid on Saturday October 11, @09:53PM (21 children)
What we can learn from this is that Capitalism is fun. It's more fun the more money you have. Remember to have lots of money!
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 11, @10:02PM (9 children)
> ... It's more fun the more money you have. Remember to have lots of money!
And if you don't have lots money, work out an accounting scam to make it look like you do! The creative accounting described in tfs reeks of Enron, where they logged debits in the asset column (or something like that, I've since forgotten details).
(Score: 5, Interesting) by crm114 on Saturday October 11, @10:22PM (2 children)
And don't forget the daughter of one of Enron's VP is Elizabeth Holmes, of Theranos fame.
Make believe money "stays in the family."
(Score: 3, Interesting) by RS3 on Sunday October 12, @01:42AM (1 child)
I didn't know that, very interesting. The apple doesn't fall far from the tree.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 12, @09:46AM
The apple doesn't fall far from the horse.
FTFY
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Sunday October 12, @01:23AM (5 children)
As I recall, they had somewhere over $10 billion in debt from stupid investments. They then transferred the debt to shell companies so that it was no longer on the books, and assigned a positive value to ownership of these shell companies. Debts shifted to the asset column as advertised. Someone eventually saw through the fraud and it all came down.
(Score: 5, Informative) by VLM on Sunday October 12, @03:17PM (2 children)
Enron gets all the credit but a large part of the scandal was Arthur Anderson, ML, the audit board, and the SEC, who's idea of oversight was to encourage them to do more and more until they all got caught.
The "big picture" crash problem was AA was one of the largest "most reputable" accounting firms in the whole world although turns out they were organized crime folks specializing in fraud, which as you can imagine shakes the entire market up quite a bit, and the SEC essentially entrapped Enron telling them in writing to commit fraud and then busting them for it IIRC.
Enron started out as a gas pipeline company (my area of investing, energy) and they pretty much ended up owning the natgas trading market in the 90s. Left to that, they'd be OK, they'd be like "the BP gas station of natgas" kind of.
But they got into aggressive wild diversification like they're some kind of miniature GE Capital. Lots of foreign investment. If dividend taxes are too high, that'll encourage companies to invest in capital, even if they have too much money to intelligently know what to do with. They ran out of good investments and got into bad ones.
SOME of the stuff they did was fundamentally legit. You buy a steam engine for $2M, sell it for $1M after wearing it out, buy a hotel for $1M, sell it for $2M after land values go up, it balances out. They got a little ambitious and some gains and some losses got counted multiple times because their financial sheets were infinitely large and uncategorized. It was a too big to account for company.
There was also problems with mark to market vs book value. If there's a massive entire market bull run the "retail price" of stuff you own means you're rich although the fundamental value isn't there when the bull run ends. Whats the net present value of a long term contract if interest rates are not constant and you don't even know if the counterparty will pay up? Well who knows, but Enron logged it as the market will never crash and no contracts will ever fail. The SEC explicitly approved this BTW which feeds into the market wide trust issue when it all collapsed. Isn't the SEC's job to prevent fraud, not to encourage fraud in writing?
Enron wasn't even really an energy company after 1990 or so anyway, they were more like a miniature GE Capital or a mutual fund. Like 10% of their company was the legacy natgas business but not really the main focus of the company. This was a cultural issue, energy is almost as boring as traditional banking so they need supervision like a natgas pipeline company (aka not very much) but they were actually a gambling international mutual fund, more or less and were not as closely supervised as you'd think.
They got busted doing some SPE stuff which in their case boils down to make a child company, give it the losers and non-performing accounts, then let it collapse. I guess a sysadmin analogy would be create a child process or thread to hold the memory leak then let it crash out leaving the main program with no memory leaks. Usually almost all SPEs are legit. Sometimes they fail. Thats fine. If you intentionally set it up to fail to arguably do something that in the very big picture is fraudulent, that is illegal, and both AA and the SEC were encouraging them to do more and more, so they did, until they collapsed, at which point Enron took all the blame and the regulators mostly got away with it (well some heads rolled but the overall system of pretending to regulate and pretending to audit remains today)
The audit committee got away with a lot, Merrill Lynch got away with a lot...
They did get busted doing some very small dollar value stuff IIRC they filed a few bridge loan as a sale (Oh you're buying this car but can't drop off a check this quarter, OK we will loan you the cost of the car until the first week of next quarter essentially you will rent it from us until next Q, no problem I'll mark that car as sold so I don't accidentally sell it a second time to some other dude, which accidentally marks it as sold this quarter although legally speaking it is sold next quarter, which sounds BAU and very sensible but is also big time illegal mostly because its easy to catch not because it really matters IRL) that affected their bottom line by maybe an entire 0.001% which is technically illegal but its MARKETED to noobs and non-financial people as the primary problem, whereas the real problem that sank the other 99.9999% of the company was stuff I mention above. Its very easy to look at the paper trail and document an illegal filing of a bridge loan as a sale, so they talk it up a lot, although it literally doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things. Like sending Al Capone to prison for tax fraud type of scenario.
I've read a lot about the whole topic over the years. In summary: "What if we used the concept of the confuseopoly to design our financial structure" well that'll work really well until it collapses LOL. Meanwhile WRT legality they worked closely with the SEC and their auditors who did an entrapment deal against Enron. "If a cop informs you in writing that its OK to commit a crime and you later end up in court, you will still get found guilty" although entrapment as a job strategy is illegal WRT the cops, but the union will keep him away from any punishment, which is pretty much how it turned out for the SEC. Meanwhile auditing doesn't work if the auditor depends on a crooked revenue stream to pay for their audit and they really like making money doing audits until they lose all their credibility and close, which happened to AA. Every other audit company does the same thing and now has all the AA employees also doing all the same things at their new jobs, but we'll pretend that Enron management was the entire problem.
If a financial structure is intentionally too complicated to understand, its probably a bad investment, long term.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 12, @04:12PM (1 child)
Wow, that was a wall of text on Enron. More than I ever managed to distill from news reports at the time, thanks.
Didn't Enron also game the California electric power authority by taking in-state generation off-line, then making up the difference with very expensive power shipped in from another state? Or am I confusing Enron with some other scamming company/companies that made electricity extremely expensive in CA?
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Sunday October 12, @04:56PM
You got it right. They were more the coordinators for the market manipulation though. Generators would find excuses to take off enough power production to generate high prices in the electricity spot market that the big electricity providers were required to use. It also involved the California government. Two of the providers, Consolidated Edison and Pacific Gas & Electric were trapped because they were forced to buy from this spot market at price and then sell to their customers at a fixed, much lower rate. Only Sierra Energy could pass the costs on to their customers. This distinction was supposed to be a matter of choice with the expectation that the electricity providers would switch over in time to passing costs through to customers. But California regulators blocked both Edison and PG&E from doing so, leading to the eventual bankruptcy of both firms. That was the second coordination angle for Enron, getting the California government on their side and draining these two companies.
Anyway, the ending of the crisis (dropping the spot market requirement and allowing the providers to buy huge fixed price contracts) resulted in a pickle for Enron who had come to depend on that profit to keep themselves afloat.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Monday October 13, @10:54AM (1 child)
Man, what was a big thing then seems like amateur-hour compared to current stupid investments.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday October 14, @03:57AM
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 11, @10:09PM (7 children)
(Score: 2, Offtopic) by turgid on Saturday October 11, @10:13PM (6 children)
Leverage your value stream!
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 3, Insightful) by sgleysti on Sunday October 12, @04:56AM (5 children)
I've looked into using leverage in various ways (futures, LEAPS, margin), and I can never bring myself to do it. They say that the average human judges a loss to be approximately twice as painful as an equivalent gain... I can't get over the possibility of losing more than I put in.
That said, if the market tanks and the fed reduces interest rates, I will be sorely tempted to leverage my equities position.
(Score: 3, Informative) by khallow on Sunday October 12, @05:01PM (4 children)
Consider the problem of cash flow. A gain has almost no chance of negative impact on cash flow and may even generate cash flow on its own. A loss has to be covered by your cash flow. Suddenly you might be forced to sell things at a loss that you wouldn't normally touch because you need that cash to pay the bills. It's not just the loss, but the forced moves you then need to make to cover the loss.
That's why losses can be much worse than equivalent gains can be better.
(Score: 2) by sgleysti on Sunday October 12, @09:23PM (3 children)
Oh, for sure, in that sense margin is playing with fire.
The loss being perceived to be twice as bad as an equivalent gain is a more general result from psychological research.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday October 12, @09:57PM
With a basis in reality. As primitive people, we would be very limited in how much we could gain. There's only so much food you can eat before it spoils and only so much food and gear you can carry before you can't move. And if you lose those resources, you might die from a variety of causes.
This era of cash flow concerns is actually the mildest that loss has ever been for us. Loss is still significantly worse than gain. The key to dealing with it is that with adequate preparation and strategy, you can weather quite a bit of loss, even routine large losses as long as you can offset it with larger gains.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 13, @01:20PM (1 child)
> The loss being perceived to be twice as bad as an equivalent gain is a more general result from psychological research.
No need for fancy research, just look at how the arithmetic works (I'm making the assumption that everyone here knows their arithmetic). To recover from a 50% loss takes a 100% gain. If we're talking money and the dip/recovery takes any significant time, you need more than 100% to recover the original "buying power" because inflation has been moving along.
My investment vehicles of choice are CD's (guaranteed by US Gov't) and investment grade bonds. Not getting rich this way, but the bottom line is always headed up...at a low slope.
(Score: 2) by sgleysti on Monday October 13, @08:48PM
You might like inflation indexed bonds, both TIPS and Series I savings bonds. They pay out at inflation (CPI-U) plus some percentage. Guaranteed by the US government, state tax free.
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by Mojibake Tengu on Saturday October 11, @10:10PM (2 children)
We were already instructed about that in early 80's https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETxmCCsMoD0 [youtube.com]
Nothing has changed ever since.
Rust programming language offends both my Intelligence and my Spirit.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday October 12, @12:17PM (1 child)
So require banks to back their loans with assets more durable than the GPU flavor of the month and tighten the rules on the accounting slosh. Those rule changes would be sane in the long run and probably end most of the AI bubble in a three month quarter reporting cycle.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 13, @01:25PM
> So require banks to back their loans with assets
Yes, _require_ banks. Imo, bankers are (1) not very bright and (2) greedy. Not a stable combination, they are easily distracted by the new shiny thing that promises a high rate of return, with ensuing consequences.
(Score: 4, Informative) by turgid on Saturday October 11, @10:17PM (8 children)
Off topic? I figured that these stocks were over-priced and that the market was getting high on over-optimism, so I bought some commodities. That's not off-topic. That was the point I was trying to make. Warren Buffet isn't buying stocks either. Is he also off-topic?
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 12, @01:52AM (1 child)
You're not off-topic. Mod system is (philosophically) very broken.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by c0lo on Sunday October 12, @03:28AM
It's not broken, it works as intended - modders' democracy.
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Interesting) by sgleysti on Sunday October 12, @04:48AM (5 children)
How is buying non-productive speculative assets balancing your equities position? When Buffett isn't buying stocks, he's parking his pile of money in T Bills. For me, it's Series I Savings Bonds.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Sunday October 12, @09:05AM (1 child)
All of this investing stuff is a bit beyond me. I have some proper pensions managed by proper companies that I have been building up over the decades. They're quite diversified and they're doing fine, keeping up with inflation.
I've had an investment ISA. In the UK there's this thing called an Independent Savings Account. They can be cash or shares (investments) and the government lets you put a maximum of £20k in total in each year (if you're lucky enough to have that sort of money). I have about £0.50 rattling around in my Investment ISA from before. We got some money when someone died some years back and after we paid off all our debts, I but some in and bought into some funds. We made a little bit of money on that (a few hundred here and there) which came in very handy for things like getting the cars fixed and so on. I read some of the business news and then looked for some funds to buy (Asia, Pacific, China...) and bought some and sat back and watched for a bit.
Recently, I have been reading that the stock markets are way over-inflated on hype, a lot of it to do with AI. I had a feeling this was coming, and it seems to be. Commodities started to go up a while back and I had some spare change so I thought I'd buy some. Lo and behold, they went up tens of percent.
I have a friend who does this sort of thing but with £thousands. Sometimes he makes enough for a nice foreign holiday. Other times he loses a lot. He also wrote his own algorithmic trading stuff in C++ that interfaces with on-line trading platforms. When he wants to go on holiday, he wheels it out, sets it going for a few days, and cashes in. You won't catch me doing that. It's too risky. The worst I will do is buy into some funds and leave them for months or a year or two.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 4, Informative) by sgleysti on Sunday October 12, @09:30PM
Ah, right, ok. My strategy is to buy low expense ratio broad index funds and hold them as long as I can, in tax advantaged accounts (Roth IRA, 401k, similar to your ISA) if possible. From what I've read, this is generally recommended, and there's not much too it.
So I have some broad US market funds based on what's available (401k: VINIX, Roth IRA: VTI) and an international fund (Roth IRA: DBEF). I keep some savings on the side in inflation indexed savings bonds in case I lose my job for a while or need a major home repair. That's it.
I wouldn't buy precious metals or cryptocurrency because they're speculative assets. I wouldn't buy individual stocks because it's too risky—single companies can fail. I don't try to time the market, just invest what I can every pay period. The strategy is to just keep doing this as long as I can.
You're lucky to have pensions. That's uncommon these days in the U.S.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Sunday October 12, @10:57AM (2 children)
Sorry, I meant to say, the point of an ISA is that it's tax-free. Any interest/profit you make is entirely yours to keep. In an ordinary savings account, or share trading account, you are liable for tax on the interest and profits above a certain threshold.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by number11 on Sunday October 12, @03:53PM (1 child)
So, ISA is sort of the UK equivalent of a US Roth IRA, except that there aren't restrictions on removing money.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Sunday October 12, @06:25PM
Yes, the government says you can save or invest up to £20k a year without paying any tax if you use one of these special accounts. You're apparently allowed as many ISA accounts as you like but you must not deposit more than £20k in total in one tax year. The interest and profits don't count, so if you were lucky and invested £20k and doubled your money, you'd get to keep all of it. They have talked about bringing the annual allowance down as low as £4k.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 5, Insightful) by gnuman on Saturday October 11, @10:20PM (10 children)
Have some faith here people. Every time we have "economic" whatevers, we muddle through. The risk is never economy or currency or jobs. It's always comes down to when people start loosing faith in each other. That is the only time when we are cooked. In history, that happens over and over again. We do well, when we have faith in ourselves, our communities and each other, as a human race. Then we can achieve anything. But if we are led down some perverted faithless road that divides us, creates artificial barriers and impedes our faith with some perverted aim (power, money, etc.), it always ends badly.
It's not the AI we need to worry about here. It's us losing touch with ourselves and our friends and communities is where danger lies. Fear is first sign of losing faith here. Hate is on its heels. Faith is our only salvation and it comes either though realization today, or after a self-created catastrophe.
No, they are not. There's only ONE thing that we have in our lives. It's not money. It's *time*. Rich-as-fuck or not, we have same currency when it comes to life. It's time you spend with your family, heck, even your co-workers, that matters each and everyday. Vacillating about the future is how we waste lives. Reminiscing about rose-colored past is how we grow bitter. Live, today, because that is the only time you are alive, is how you stop worrying about his BS. We live in best of times. It's been like this for many generations (facts!) -- don't let some charlatans tell you otherwise. And there's no savior that's coming to save you either -- it's only through hard work and having *faith* in each other that we move forward in our lives as individuals, as societies and as a human race.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 11, @11:09PM
If you think losing faith is bad, wait to see when losing trust becomes the norm.
Oh, sorry, did you really meant setting the faith loose?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 11, @11:39PM (6 children)
"it's only through hard work and having *faith* in each other that we move forward in our lives"
spoken like a true WASP
your black and brown breathen have been warning you about The Man for a VERY
long time, and now it's your turn to get fucked by them
(Score: 2, Informative) by khallow on Sunday October 12, @01:54AM (4 children)
gnuman has this right. Making excuses never helped said brethren.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by aafcac on Sunday October 12, @02:05AM (3 children)
Yes, but refusing to acknowledge reality also has never helped said brethren.
(Score: 2, Informative) by khallow on Sunday October 12, @12:07PM (2 children)
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Sunday October 12, @08:04PM (1 child)
Because a bunch of it was actually true and pretending like it wasn't isn't any more helpful than the opposite position.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday October 14, @04:02AM
(Score: 2) by gnuman on Thursday October 16, @09:42AM
So, I actually had to look up these slang terms...
I understand this is also what Russians like to use to divide people. But then Jesus would also be such a WASP? Buddha? Anyone that has the privilege to reflect what the world actually is, is a WASP? Or you have another point of some kind?
Truth is very important for reconciliation. The acknowledgement of wrong is important as well. But using such things as means of *blaming* another, is the opposite of reconciliation and moving forward. It's a trap. It's your own whale that will destroy you (story of Ahab). You see, Jesus spoke about forgiveness -- and before you roll over and try to spit in my face, listen. Forgiveness is a core principle and goes hand-in-hand with faith. The church tells us that it's "difficult" to forgive. On the contrary, *if* you have faith, forgiveness is automatic. Why? Because you have faith and you defer punishment and consequences to another. We do this all the time -- we defer punishment to the justice system. We try to avoid blood feuds. Forgiveness is not about you giving a break for the perpetrator -- it's about you giving yourself a break. To have reconciliation for any wrong whatsoever, the importance is ability to understand and forgive -- to have faith in your society around you.
One time I was telling my cousin a story why my personality is a little strange. Why I used to almost hide-away from the world. You see, I was afraid to fail. I grew up in a household of people with their own mental issues and it rubbed off on me. I grew up trying to please people that could never return my affection and I blamed myself for it. I thought I didn't do good enough. So, better try not to do anything just in case you do something wrong. It took me a decade to finally understand *why* I was the way I am. It's because of my parents. But I do *not* blame my parents. They did the best they knew how. What I gained is *understanding* and a way forward so that my kids are hopefully not going to have same ... internal limitations.
You may blame WASP of the past or current generation even, for why black or brown people are the way they are. But that will not give you a way forward. The only way forward is to gain an *understanding* of why brown/black people are the way they are -- because of discrimination, racism, etc. And if you gain understanding, you can gain power to move forward. The state of mind is more important here than even facts --- are you *empowered* to do something and *will you* do something? Or will you just sit there, blaming the WASPs why you cannot do something?
I urge you to do something to better yourself and your community. If you do this without trying to trample on another, you may just lose that hate. Hate comes from fear, and if you no longer fear acting positively, hate has no where to get its power. That's true *reconciliation*.
There's another story here.. story of Chernobyl. Did you know that less than about 60 people died as a consequence of radiation from that accident? Soviets knew that excess exposure means danger, so they had an idea. They recruited 800,000 "liquidators" that were to help contain the mess. Why so many? So that each of them could do some work before they got significant radiation dose and then they were rotated out. Scientifically, it makes perfect sense. Those liquidators would spend minutes to few hours doing things and then they were rotated out. They even got a medal for their effort and even special pension. Win-win? Sadly, the suicide rate and self-harm through drug addition, alcoholism was much higher in that group. Many many many times more people in the "hero liquidators" died due to disrepair that they were "harmed" and their "lives were over" due to their small exposure than anything to do with radiation. Actually, you get 2 or 3 CT scans in your life, and your dosage makes you a liquidator -- but who's counting, right...
So, back to your "my turn to get fucked by brown and black"... there's two ways this goes down. We elevate each other through understanding, or we give in to fear and hate and try to trample each other because the alternative is the future of liquidators -- disaster. And careful... there are plenty of WASPs that believe that the only way they can thrive is to keep walking over brown or black people. That's why they voted for Trump -- fear. That's why people voted for Hitler -- fear. That's why people vote for anyone like that -- fear. After fear, you get hate. And after hate, you self-destruct. And this all happens because people have no faith in each other. No faith in themselves.
Go out of the basement and do something. Do something positive. Gets others to do something positive. And the world will be yours. Do something negative, like you are writing, and you will destroy yourself and your family, community, country, etc. But the choice here *is* yours.
I know. The first step is the hardest.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Thexalon on Sunday October 12, @06:20PM
Yes, but: That muddling through comes at a steep human cost. Millions of real people lost their homes and often decades of hard work trying to build wealth and basic financial security in the mortgage crash, for example. People sometimes choose to end their own lives over stuff like this, or even worse sometimes choose to end a bunch of other people's lives (often their spouse and children) and then their own life.
As for your admonition that there's a lot of stuff that matters more than money: No disagreement there, and anybody who experiences anything resembling a real community of friends and family knows there's no substitute for that. But also, in my experience, it is easier to muster that when you've all had 2-3 square meals a day and a good night's sleep. There have been studies with UBI, and also the lived experience of Covid-lockdown life, that strongly suggest that most people people freed from the economic misery most of humanity is stuck in right now would be doing some very cool things: Making music, art, food, community, etc. Instead, we've spent roughly 50 years prioritizing the profits of rich people above all else and just letting those same rich people buy the people making the decisions to keep things that way, all so a few hundred people out of 8 billion can buy a bigger yacht to park their smaller yacht in.
Where AI fits into all of that: The promise the AI bros are making is that we can have the machines do all the work, and then they can get rid of all those allegedly-unnecessary worker bees. And by "get rid of", I mean "you and your family are no longer necessary to us rich people getting what we want, so it is no longer necessary for you to have housing, food, health care, or anything else, and you can drop dead whenever". The world of business would happily sacrifice us all to Mammon, and gladly crucify humankind upon a cross of gold.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 4, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Sunday October 12, @07:57PM
>Rich-as-fuck or not, we have same currency when it comes to life.
There's poverty level income of ~$9K per year in places like India which equates to a life expectancy of 65 years.
There's US median household income rich of ~$75K per year, that equates to a life expectancy of 78 years.
There's reasonably common US rich AF: "The life expectancy for the wealthiest 1% of Americans is significantly longer than the poorest, with some studies showing a gap of over 15 years for men and 10 years for women. For men in the top 1% of income, the expected age of death is around 87.3 years, compared to those in the bottom 1%. The life expectancy for the richest 1% of women is about 10 years more than the poorest 1%."
Then there's the global billionaire's club rich AF, who can do things like "procure compatible organ donors" when they need them. I would assume that can extend life significantly as well.
Median age of the US senate is 65 years, with many still serving in their late 70s: https://www.axios.com/2023/09/29/feinstein-dies-oldest-senators-mcconnell [axios.com]
So, I agree that there's diminishing returns on money for lifespan and I agree that time well spent is more valuable than additional time gained with wealth, but the return of additional time living for money is far from zero.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by whatnow on Saturday October 11, @10:34PM
I'm sick to the back teeth of talking
I keep
I spent
I'm sick of writing
I turned
I delivered
I'm an AD White Professor
I wasn't sure
I said
He said
I re-iterated
(I said)
(Score: 2) by corey on Sunday October 12, @09:52AM (3 children)
I like this article, it makes me feel less stressed about the future. I’m happy with an economic collapse of an industry (my superannuation is already in low risk areas). It’s not as bad as the other story I’m led to believe, that AI is taking over the world. I mean, if AGI isn’t going to happen, it’s still bad: the current state of “AI” is being weaponised against young people to make money already. Agents, friend bots, ChatGPT as it is. The young folk at work use it to do all sorts of time wasting stuff. These things aren’t exactly my ideal future.
It does seem to hold water that the economics of AI is a pyramid scheme (or similar, house of cards?). The crash of it all would hopefully remove most AI shite that exists and leave the useful stuff behind (medical or physics research, search engine augmentation etc). I say bring it on.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Sunday October 12, @08:57PM (2 children)
Remember the movie "White Men Can't Jump"?
A year ago, I was of the opinion: "AI can't write (useful) code."
That has changed, drastically. 5 years ago I spent a significant number of hours coding a music playing program with automatic selection of the next song to play based on the AcousticBrainz profile of all the (thousands of) songs in the library. It worked pretty well, but isn't exactly polished enough to release to the wild.
In the last week, I have worked up a spec with the $20/month Claude Code subscription which seems like Claude Code will be able to use to re-create that music player app as I wish it was instead of how it turned out after months of hobby-time implementation. And working from those refined specifications, Claude Code is implementing it, it's already further along after a week than I was by myself after a month, and I suspect within 2 more weeks it will be about where I was at after 6 months. 3 weeks vs 6 months is significant improvement. And, consider that 5 years ago, I was using Google search to help me code, if I was reading books from the bookstore and paper manuals, I would estimate that 6 month project A) never would have happened, but B) probably would have taken 2+ years to happen if it did. Now, this "rapid prototype development" that I did 5 years back, I liken to Jeff Foxworthy's "Rednecks' last words:" "Buckle up, I'mma try somethin." I made a living from 2006 to 2013 fixing various startup companies' "Buckle up, I'mma try somethin" projects into maintainable, saleable, extensible commercial products. From 1991 to 1998 I made more careful, paper reference based software, and due to the extra effort of finding the resource material in the first place, more care was put into the architecture and crafting. With discipline that has always been possible, but as the tools have evolved what you can produce without discipline is getting more and more impressive.
With the recent AI shift, I see the possibility for a return to quality, taking the time to craft complete specifications and getting what you really want built instead of just whatever you can make that sort of meets spec and schedule. Sure, there will always be people doing it fast and sloppy, but the cost of doing it well seems like it's dropping rapidly.
Now, as to limitations... software development management has always been likened to herding cats, and I see a real simiarity with AI. It has limited context windows, it doesn't read all the specs before it goes off and makes something, it can't - it doesn't have the attention span, but... where you turn a software developer loose for 40 hours and they come back with a chunk of code to critique, you can do the same with AI in 40 minutes and if it's crap you can refine the specs and do it again, 3 or 4 times in a day. For the people who care, this should become a great enabler of quality.
On the financials side, sure... it's a bubble that will pop, just like .com did, but 25 years after its bubble burst the .com internet is still with us, and has become a rather significant part of most of our lives.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by corey on Monday October 13, @10:33AM (1 child)
Yeah what you say is a good point, I didn’t really go into that but I didn’t intend to. I have a problem with “AI” because of how its being used against people, and how tech companies are trying to get richer because of it. And it’s intended to replace costly people, and put them out of work. I’ll always be against that.
I also am a traditionalist with software and think people should write it. I dunno why honestly, I’m getting tired of trying to justify it. But it seems software quality is shite at the best of times and this will make it worse. And people will lose software writing skills, nobody will understand the software (who has the time or resources to do code reviews if it just works) nor identify bugs. So we’ll get shittier software products, more bugs, more security holes and it’ll take longer to fix them. I also think lots of people write code because they enjoy it.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday October 13, @12:40PM
> it’s intended to replace costly people, and put them out of work. I’ll always be against that.
Automation has been putting people (all people are costly, really) out of work since the cotton gin and before... As I pointed out, progress in search engines over the last 30 years has made me progressively more productive (putting costly people out of work) all this time...
>software quality is shite at the best of times
Pretty much, but eventually some of it gets better. I remember hand writing assembly code because the compilers/optimizers were shite in the early 1990s, by the mid 1990s I gave that up - they were consistently better than me by then.
Honestly, if I can "code" as specifications instead of rigid machine instructions (like Rust, C, assembly, whatever) I'm O.K. with that - the process is still the same, and people who think they can code just because it's written in english instead of code will soon be learning that it's not just the language, it's the process and logic and specificity.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Sunday October 12, @02:29PM (2 children)
HR is very strict about career paths (may vary by area and industry) and the one upside is this might remove their strangehold.
"He's been unemployed 18 months we have a policy to never hire someone with a gap that long" "So we can close or we can get rid of that old policy." "Oh OK then".
(Score: 4, Informative) by Thexalon on Sunday October 12, @06:24PM (1 child)
No, what they'll do is either (a) hire someone right out of school, (b) nepotism-hire, or (c) bring in someone from a country whose businesses didn't make the same mistake. You're still screwed as the former senior-level expert.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday October 12, @09:05PM
> You're still screwed as the former senior-level expert.
I've been a former senior-level expert since 2007, never had much problem finding work since then - though the startup scene is pretty frustrating with its flameout rate.
In 2014 a megacorp bought out the startup I was working for, in their opinion, so far, I'm worth holding on to. Past performance is no guarantee of future behavior, but they've been holding on to a guy they hired in 2005 at the age of 52 and as long as he still calls in from his cabin in the mountains, they keep paying him.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2, Disagree) by khallow on Sunday October 12, @09:15PM
[...]
The problem with the above narrative is there's a weak case for worry here. First, anyone who is just replacing their workers willy nilly without regard to the value of the worker, is already a failing business. The leadership is already incompetent. AI just happens to be part of the environment that the drowning business grasps on its way down. The narrative of failing businesses that somehow manage to beat competent businesses is ignoring reality. My take? If you see your business replacing people with inadequate AI solutions, then the business is dying and it's time to move on. Maybe if you stuck around, you wouldn't face the ignominy of being replaced by AI, but you would lose your job anyway.
For all the apocalyptic talk, who really are at danger here? In the case of the real estate crisis or the lesser dotcom bubble, there were much larger portion of the economy involved. In particular, the real estate crisis of 2008-2009 involved a large number of countries with huge economies which had evolved around the building of real estate and the various financial gimmicks of that time. In our case, it's a narrow niche mostly between the US and Southeast Asia. Sure, for whoever is in that industry, it will be a mess. But most of the world has nothing to do with it.
Moving on, there's a simple solution here at the personal. Don't be a part of the mess, if you can help it. If you can't like the undergrad of the story above, you can still build up your skills, experience, and assets. Work for money and don't buy into this generation of dreams. You'll get paid a bunch while the wine and roses last, then you'll get a kick in the ass. If you didn't invest full bore, then you're in an ok position. You have work experience, money, and maybe even some useful ideas. There will be plenty of cheap computational assets around, if you want to go that route. And plenty of competition for the sort of jobs you did. So probably a good time to move on to another sector with what you have.
Ultimately, I think this is will be a combination of a very expensive learning experience for those in related fields along with a massive transfer of wealth from the stupid to the less so.