jj4211

A key word in that sentence is “if”, it is a rhetorical example, that’s probably pretty much correct at this point. It’s not a recommended course of action, it’s a declaration that it contrary to crazed hype, it isn’t currently as core to everything as would be befitting the current hype level.

I would argue that the CEOs aren’t on the correct track, they aren’t really in a particularly specific trajectory. I just had a debate with someone on this and their stance was “well in a hundred years do you expect things to be like they are”. My response “I cannot possibly speak to that, but we need to speak to today instead of pretending we know how things will be in a hundred years and pretending they are already at that level”. The “imagine a hundred years from now” by a relative outsider to the tech is dominating CEO mindset, and that’s problematic.

Once the bubble pops, we will almost certainly see a more durable and sane adoption for these technologies. For now, the hype is a problem as it enables some of the worst possible stewards of the technology and favors grift over progress.

I think it’s a worthy simplification that sums up the current state of things well. We have AI that broadly has different uses and then we have the ChatBot/ChatBot derived AI applications. The market is not going insane over the broader AI category. Executives are not tripping over themselves to say things like machine vision is going to replace all labor, or at least all white collar labor. The chatbot is the only thing in the conversation of consequence.

All the “everyone says AI is the reality, so everyone feels like they must say AI is the reality” refers to this specific category. It might be veering towards being oversimplified, but it’s trying to balance a perspective that is also oversimplified. Generally, we aren’t good at weighing simple straightforward takes against complex nuanced takes, so you have to “net it out” to have any hope of the point landing.

Which of course never works

If the students are such great ninjas that they are never spotted, then how would a total device ban work?

Kids are not good at hiding what they are doing. If a student is successfully getting away with something like that, it’s because the teacher doesn’t want to deal with it, not because they hid it from the teacher. I chaparoned a field trip of high schoolers. I saw for myself how they are so bad at covering up what they think they are covering up.

The ‘teacher doesn’t care’ is of course a real problem. A fair number of teachers are perfectly happy to let them quietly stare at a phone, because any non-disruptive misbehavior is no skin off their back. More work to engage and punish them and the phone user on mute is not bothering the teacher, so teacher doesn’t care. In theory they should be looking after the best interests of all the students, but in practice they got a lot of kids to look after and if the parents aren’t doing their bit, then the teacher can only do so much to make up for it.

Been starting to see more randomly picky apps. Based on vintage and rooted device.

Uninstalled the FedEx app, since every time I tapped on a tracking number, it would divert to the app which would promptly shame me for having a rooted device and refuse to run.

So I saw that my car offered up all sorts of useful diagnostic information for self diagnosing stuff. Was very excited and went to look at it for a generic fault without having to get software to tell me what the fault is. I thought "it’s stupid it has fully functional computer display yet tells me basically “contact a dealer, but it’s safe to drive” instead of what the problem is. Then I find out that because I’m in the USA, the company keeps it to themselves…

So if they see value in treating regions differently, they will absolutely go out of their way to screw over the regions that will let them.

Heh, the dryer stopped working at home and my spouse was bracing to buy a new one. So nice to break out the multimeter, find the issue, and 10 dollar part later, good as new.

Think of all the waste avoided by repairing a tiny part in a gigantic appliance.

So I have now seen it . It did not pop up, I had to go into apps and find the spider man app and click on it.

Pretty stupid waste of time, but not on startup or anything.

Indeed, someone with a deep fanaticism for Musk posted exactly that scenario as inevitable. This was to stand by his man when Musk asserted that SpaceX should be worth more than everything else on earth combined (he was pissed that spcx had fallen).

The dude claimed that by 2038 the 20 biggest companies would all be entirely space based exclusively, and that globally SpaceX would be the sole provider of space technology and the other 19 companies would be tenants of SpaceX. It all made sense to him because space is bigger than earth, right?

I can’t find it, but among the usual suspects (space mining, space datacenters, terra forming), I was especially amused that his hypothetical “space banking company”, because for some reason the financials of space companies needed to be managed by a company that could get stuff launched into space?

To an extent, they weren’t betting on the business, they were betting on the masses eating up the stock.

And they were at least initially right, and cashing out 2-4 days after the IPO certainly worked for and of them. Stock going down required some significant portion of them to take their winnings.

They were betting on the stupidity of the retail investor, not the fundamentals of the business.

Also, Elon rolled most of that ‘future AI empire’ stuff into SPCX instead. Meaning that even if investors wanted to believe it that, they know that Elon can play shell games and put the prize wherever he wants and the investors are not able to control that.

Yeah, while there are some folks that are die-hard must have gas cars, lots of other folks experience instant torque, smoothest and quietest drive imaginable, and replenishing range without having to go out of your way to a station. Wondering when the next maintenance needs to come and there’s no oil, no wearing belts, no super hot engine bay, just some things like wiper blades and a bit more rough on tires owing to generally higher weight.

There are downsides and awkward fits for some people. My apartment dwelling colleague would be screwed since his place has no available residential charging. Road trips can be more inconvient (though viable and perhaps worth it if you are taking a road trip every few months but spare yourself a weekly trip to the gas station). But certainly there’s a market for which EVs provide more value than combustion vehicles.

I want you to be right, but I’m more skeptical. I see all over the place companies explicitly targeting a profitable subset: the biggest suckers of the available suckers. Higher margin, fewer whiny customers. Bonus points if it creates a cult-like fanbase (a lot of big brands manage to cultivate this).

Saw a story where a company explicitly had a strategy of “increase prices by 10x, and it may scare off 90% of customers, but the 10% left will be a wonderful gold mine”. Particularly shortages in the tech industry swayed a lot of folks that advocated for high-volume, low-margin to low-volume, high-margin.

So if 20% are ride-or-die for Tesla and Musk, then it might be a decent enough move to double down on those 20%.

Not defending, just an explanation, and one that if anything would enrage Elon more.

He’s still an absurdly over-wealthed taint stain, but the specific numbers over that threshold were just not quite as substantial as other (also somewhat imaginary) numbers.

Point in fact, he was a trillionaire, and now he is not, but he didn’t lose anything real. He still has every bit the amount of real wealth and control over all that stuff you listed that he had before, just the number shifted by billions of dollars while preserving every last thing of import that was wrong with his wealth. He is no longer a trillionaire but that means absolutely nothing about the problems his wealth pose in real terms.

At some point, the numbers cease being a thing for meeting their needs, their comforts, and at some point even their every whim and preference they could possibly imagine. It just becomes a score and they peg their egos to the score. This is a level no one should ever be at.

Didn’t help that he pissed away the carefully cultivated “Tony Stark” image. Now people don’t shrug off his failures like they were inclined to do.

Note that while that sounds ridiculous, we demarcate value using a currency system that makes standing still look like mild growth. When you ultimately are controlling currency, you can create the appearance of growth under any real world condition you like.

So a company that looks flat in a system designed to make flat look like grown is actually experiencing some decline.

Of course whether that is a decline in product, results, or just random investor sentiment is all up in the air.

The issue is that the downsides are massive and the upsides pretty mid.

Oh look, I can whip up a pretty generic website or utility from natural language. That’s… something I guess… The more… ambitious applications of CodeGen I’ve found to be “different” rather than “better”, a different huge pain in the ass than the usual huge pain in the ass, and it’s a matter of taste which one someone prefers, and I don’t think the “All-in Agentic” flow actually is any faster when you get at this “pain in the ass” point.

On the downside, well pretty much his whole post.

Note that this specifically is the GenAI stuff, broader AI like machine vision is arguable more balanced (intrusive surveillance, but also useful for medical imaging, spotting wildfires early, stuff like that).

So I guess the concern is that by saying “if not for all the bad, it could be pretty good” may be fine, but in practice is used to provide cover for a lot of the bad, because they would argue to not risk throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

I get it, but at the same time, do we always have to let key douchebags be “too big to fail” and endlessly support their choices no matter what?

This time around, I anticipate massive inflation as they just try to print their way out of it. That’s the sort of financial disaster that seems to be a bit more on-brand for our current leadership.

Yeah, had a car dealer try to say “the price doesn’t even matter, only the monthly payment matters, right?”

The problem for those of us who know better: this reasoning works on most of the customers and it’s more profitable to do that than cater to more savvy customers.

Given how long that would take, I’d guess that we will see OpenAI backing out of some of their purchasing commitments as a price pressure before then.

Sam Altman basically single handedly committed to buying almost half of the world’s RAM capacity, and on other fronts OpenAI has already backing out of some of its more egregiously stupid business decisions. I’m sure the purchasing commitments are only a matter of time to come up on that chopping block.

Yeah, I was in a room with a customer that said point blank “even if it costs us more in opex within a year than buying it as capex, we would rather rent the stuff as opex”

Some accounting bullshit makes them hate having anything that they must count as an “asset” that goes down in value over time. Better to burn the money as “expense” than to have to manage the value burning off over years as “depreciation”.