Tech CEOs are apparently suffering from AI psychosis

Shorting stocks has a very high "you must be at least this right" bar in order to make money. And given the uncapped nature of losses - the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent - you need to also be really correct about how high it'll go before you're right, and also, you're borrowing these shares you've sold, so you're on the hook for the borrow fee and also on the hook for paying dividends paid out to those shares you're borrowing but not holding. Plus you have to pay for the margin loans you're using.

That's a very high set of both static and scaling costs that eat away any profit you made by being nominally correct. Combined with the risk profile... you can't "just" go short a stock.

And yes, you can hedge losses with options or construct complicated options positions to try to hone in on a specific price movement you're anticpating. Now you have to deal with entering and exiting a complicated multi-instrument position without price slippage, AND you have theta decay and volatility-related price movements also eating away at the core money you're making by being nominally right.

Have people made money? Yes, for sure. There's also a lot of dead bodies and people who barely broke even despite theoretically having been right.

No. Body. Knows.

This feels more like AI delusion, but I do worry about AI psychosis (which we're seeing in smaller numbers). People literally losing their ability to make sense of reality due to talking to AI all day.

We all know that celebrities/athletes frequently end up demonstrating psychotic behavior in public. Us normal people commonly attribute that to the distorting power of wealth and fame. When you're surrounded by "yes men" who give you only positive feedback and fans who adore you, it's easy to spin out of control.

AI means normal people can have the same experience. A constant companion that tells us we're smart and insightful, that we're making all the right decisions, that generally affirms our every belief and bias. If you spend all day talking to an AI who is _literally_ programmed to please you, I believe you'll eventually experience psychosis.

There's lots of very healthy addictions. There are also lots of very unhealthy addictions. Dental hygiene addiction? Good -- if kept in check (it can go too far). Heroin addiction? Bad -- always bad!

These things are all included under the addiction umbrella.

I was addicted to using that air nailer. The boss might tell me to use my hammer instead when it was out of service and to just get the work done, but when that happened I'd start fixing it anyway as soon as he wasn't looking... like a drug addict who is working towards getting his next hit at every opportunity.

I'm not compelled to feel bad about having been addicted to using that tool. I did a lot of good work with it. It was a good addiction to have. I fed this addiction 5 days a week for years.

Anyway, yes: LLMs. I use the shit out of LLM tools. I understand what they are, and what they are not -- I'm not psychotic in this way at all. I spend a lot of time correcting their errors so whatever I'm working on can move forward.

And after several decades of trying, LLMs allow me to finally accept that I'm just terrible at writing code. I used to feel inferior about this. Every little project would get completely hung up on something that many, many other folks would have no trouble overcoming.

Like: Somewhere in a box in my basement I even have the original TI MSP430 LaunchPad kit that I bought at launch 16 years ago with focused intention to get a very specific thing done with it. I never got it done. As time moved on, I bought ESP dev boards and Pi Picos hoping that things would finally let me finish my one simple little project, but I always got hung up whether in C or C++ or uPython or whatever. Different IDEs, no IDEs, different build processes, whatever. The process always stalled and died. Every. Single. Time.

Again, I suck at code. Being able to finally accept this has been richly rewarding.

With an ESP32 board, Codex, a clear vision of what I wanted, and a fragile dysfunctional draft written in uPython that didn't come close to actually working (despite years of effort), I got that thing working properly and cleanly in one single evening -- in C++.

16 years of effort resolved all at once, just like that. With guidance, the bot even wrote its own tests that worked with real-world feedback from the hardware the ESP32 was driving.

That all felt great. It was a tremendous relief.

I spent part of another evening making it fancy with a web interface for tuning and monitoring. I transferred the circuit over to perfboard and installed it in the place I've wanted it for 16 years. It's now a completely functional prototype. I want to rejigger it a bit with a custom PCB and a different MCU, but with LLMs I find that all very practical and approachable without fear.

This tool lets me work with things that I am otherwise incapable of working with. It lets me do things I was always ultimately incapable of doing.

Am I addicted to it? Yes. I'm completely finished with trying to write code the old-fashioned way, and LLMs make me feel good about finally accomplishing some good stuff. Like the air nailer in construction, I use LLMs compulsively in these tasks.

For programming, the bot is the first thing I reach for; in fact, it's the only thing I reach for.

If the bot is unreachable today and I have programming to do, then I seek to restore my use of the the bot just like I sought to fix the air nailer back when I had nailing to do.

And like any other addict of any other thing: I don't care if this causes harm to me, or to others, or the world itself. Maybe it's turning a part of my brain into mush; I don't care (the coding part was apparently mush to begin with). I enjoy using it enough that I'm just going to keep doing it no matter what. I've got more programming to do now than I ever have before, and so my use is accelerating: This is the feedback cycle typical of addiction.

I'm not sorry about any of that at all.

Surely you just copy the prompt over and it immediately knows all the same on the job stuff that the previous model did.