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The AI wildfire is coming. it's going to be painful and healthy

ceodinner.substack.com

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Re: The AI wildfire is coming. it's going to be painful and healthy

#181

Post by uplifter »

> She argued for thinking of this moment as a wildfire rather than a bubble. The metaphor landed immediately. Wildfires don’t just destroy; they’re essential to ecosystem health.

This is some of the most nihilistic thinking I've read linked from this site. Also it lacks the nuance that when brush is left to accumulate over due years of forest mismanagement, the resulting wild-fires are much worse and unnecessarily destructive in ways that are hardly describable as "ecosystem health."

Re: The AI wildfire is coming. it's going to be painful and healthy

#182

Post by tjr »

Bluestrike2 wrote: post #162
striking wrote: post #74

I'm excited for the AI wildfire to come and engulf these AI-written thinkpieces. At this point I'd prefer a set of bullet points over having to sift through more "it's not X (emdash) it's Y" pestilence.

> it's not X (emdash) it's Y No, no, no! Stop that! The em dash is an wonderful little punctuation mark that's damned useful when used with purpose. You can't turn it into some scarlet glyph just because normal people finally noticed they exist. LLMs use them because we used them, damn it. For god's sake, are we supposed to go back to the dark ages of the double hyphen like typographic barbarians in the hopes that a…

I first learned about em dash reading the GNU Texinfo manual in the 1990s. Now I have to wear a red, slightly long horizontal line on my shirt, and passersby shun me.

Re: The AI wildfire is coming. it's going to be painful and healthy

#183

Post by redrix »

striking wrote: post #74

I'm excited for the AI wildfire to come and engulf these AI-written thinkpieces. At this point I'd prefer a set of bullet points over having to sift through more "it's not X (emdash) it's Y" pestilence.

You’re absolutely right! It’s not just pestilence—It’s the death of the internet as we know it. …I’m sorry, I couldn’t help myself.

Edit: I forgot HN strips emojis.

Re: The AI wildfire is coming. it's going to be painful and healthy

#184

Post by AbrahamParangi »

jpkw wrote: post #144
AbrahamParangi wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the plateau is reached at some higher level of capability, I will remain correct, yes. If use cases are discovered that do not exist today, I will also be correct. You said it in a silly way but you're directionally correct.

No. You state that this is all that it would take to be considered as tremendous business value. You are moving your goal posts on your point. My point is that you are taking an absolute position that there is tremendous business value in its current form(as a miniscule improvement and one insignificant new use case does does not equate to tremendous business value in itself) and so that remains to be seen.

You either misread or are misrepresenting my statement and either way I am not interested in continuing this.

Re: The AI wildfire is coming. it's going to be painful and healthy

#185

Post by ehdjfnrn »

Bluestrike2 wrote: post #162
striking wrote: post #74

I'm excited for the AI wildfire to come and engulf these AI-written thinkpieces. At this point I'd prefer a set of bullet points over having to sift through more "it's not X (emdash) it's Y" pestilence.

> it's not X (emdash) it's Y No, no, no! Stop that! The em dash is an wonderful little punctuation mark that's damned useful when used with purpose. You can't turn it into some scarlet glyph just because normal people finally noticed they exist. LLMs use them because we used them, damn it. For god's sake, are we supposed to go back to the dark ages of the double hyphen like typographic barbarians in the hopes that a…

I’ve never seen an LLM use an em-dash the way a thoughtful human is most likely to use them, in a parentheses-like pair. It’s just too bad there’s way too many idiots who cannot notice such subtleties.

Re: The AI wildfire is coming. it's going to be painful and healthy

#186

Post by assemblyman »

karlgkk wrote: post #113
noncoml wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$250k+ a year means ~$12k monthly salary. A semi decent apartment in SV will cost you ~$3k Bills(phone, internet, electricity, etc) another $1k. If you are married, groceries at least $1k. Even if we assume you don’t do anything else in life, and you are in perfect health best case scenario would be $6k savings a month or $72k a year. It would take you 10 years to save $720k plus whatever you make from investments. T…

Rent? Ever heard of equity? If you make 250k you can afford a nice condo. Right away that blows a huge hole in your math. Also $1k month on bills? Groceries too? Judging by your inflated costs for everything, and ann idea that a house (versus more modest accommodations) is what the goal is, you’ve got Lifestyle creep. And, things certainly get a lot easier when your spouse also works.

Renting can be much better financially than buying.

Edit: all % numbers are per year

Consider the case of condos in cities. If you were to buy outright, you effectively get a return by not paying rent (i.e. paying yourself rent). Rent is usually ~5% of the condo cost. HOA + property taxes is 2-3% so subtract that from the rent return i.e. net return 2-3% (5-2/3%). The rest of the return is appreciation from the underlying real estate prices. I am excluding maintenance costs because they are negligible in condos.

On the other hand, if you rent and put the entire amount (that you would have paid to buy the condo), you get ~10% per year. To break even between the two scenarios, you would need real estate prices to grow 7-8% (2-3% + 8-7% = 10%).

Beyond this, there are psychological reasons to buy vs rent. Buying - ability to customize the space, peace of mind because of perceived stability etc. Renting - flexibility, peace of mind because of no long-term obligations etc.

A mortgage is an interpolation of the two cases at the cost of the interest one pays. It is noteworthy, at least in the US, that for most people, this is the only time they can borrow several hundreds of thousands at relatively low costs.

Re: The AI wildfire is coming. it's going to be painful and healthy

#187

Post by cindyllm »

ehdjfnrn wrote: post #185
Bluestrike2 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's not X (emdash) it's Y No, no, no! Stop that! The em dash is an wonderful little punctuation mark that's damned useful when used with purpose. You can't turn it into some scarlet glyph just because normal people finally noticed they exist. LLMs use them because we used them, damn it. For god's sake, are we supposed to go back to the dark ages of the double hyphen like typographic barbarians in the hopes that a…

I’ve never seen an LLM use an em-dash the way a thoughtful human is most likely to use them, in a parentheses-like pair. It’s just too bad there’s way too many idiots who cannot notice such subtleties.

[dead]

Re: The AI wildfire is coming. it's going to be painful and healthy

#188

Post by akomtu »

tim333 wrote: post #165
akomtu wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Costs $20" really means "one of those poor call center reps got paid $20, barely enough to pay rent." Once you solve the supposed problem, all those people will be on the streets.

That's not how it's mostly gone historically. People tend to find different jobs.

Those who work at call centers are already desperate for any job and have zero savings. I'm not sure where they will down even further. I guess the governments will have to pick them up at the end: give them some fictious jobs and pay the minimum out of taxes from the remaining populace who still have jobs.

Re: The AI wildfire is coming. it's going to be painful and healthy

#189

Post by GMoromisato »

m4rtink wrote: post #175
GMoromisato wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Starlink (collectively) already has 10 times the solar power of ISS, with present-day launch capabilities. If Starship works out (not guaranteed) launch cost should drop to ~$100/kg, which would enable very large constellations. Musk is planning for 1 megaton/year of satellites, each with 100kW, yielding about 100GW per year.[1] He thinks they can do that in 4 years, but adjusting for Elon-time, it's probably no less…

Sure, it is impressive how much solar power Starlink currently captures, but ISS actually does not get that much - as far as I can tell its about 250 kW maximum even with the new roll-out solar arrays that have been installed quite recently. So about 2.5 MW of solar potential ? That's indeed quite impressive, but for serious compute a lot of energy needs cooling will eat into that.

Cooling won’t use much energy because it’s mostly radiators and probably some recirculating pumps.

Re: The AI wildfire is coming. it's going to be painful and healthy

#190

Post by rkomorn »

karlgkk wrote: post #154
rkomorn wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I left Silicon Valley 5 years ago. Are people getting $1M+ loans with zero down these days?

No? What? I mentioned Lifestyle creep before but what is with everyone’s fried brains? A small condo in a nice neighborhood in Santa Clara is below $500k. Yes, that’s a lot, and you certainly can get more bang for your buck if you’re willing to do a little commuting. Btw a $1m house is accessible if you make $250k yr, although to be honest, I would highly recommend against it

The question I originally responded to was "why would you rent and save for a house at the same time?"

I said "because you need to have a downpayment".

You reply "downpayments aren't that high".

Unless you're getting loans zero down, you literally still need to save to have your downpayment. While you're renting.

So where is my brain fried?

Even on a $500k condo, you're putting 10% down, you still need to have that saved up. Noticeably more, in fact, because I'm sure you'd agree "lemme sink every saved cent I have into my house downpayment" wouldn't be wise.

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