Live data from Hacker News

Is it a bubble?

oaktreecapital.com

311–320 of 605 posts

Re: Is it a bubble?

#311

One thing I don't hear people talking about very is about how AI is going to make money in any other way other than cutting employment. With the internet, and especially with the internet being accessible by anyone anywhere in the world in the late 2000s and early 2010s globally, that growth was more obvious to me. I don't see where this occurs with AI. I don't see room for "growth", I see room for cutting. We were a…

That's a pretty significant way to make money though.

I do think at this stage the best analogy is the offshore call centres. Yes, the excess in the market is likely because of misunderstanding about what LLMs can actually do and how close AGI is, the short term attraction is the labour cost savings. People may not think wages are high enough etc but the total cost for one hire to companies, particularly outside the US, is nothing to sniff at. And at current pricing of ai services, the maths would make complete sense for the bottom line.

I don't like it, because I ultimately err on the side of even limited but significant changes to people's livelihood will make the world a more hostile place (particularly in the current climate), but that's the society we live in

Re: Is it a bubble?

#312

The memo itself is an excellent walk through historical bubbles, debt, financing, technological innovation, and much more, all written in a way that folks with a cursory knowledge of economics can reasonably follow along with. A+, excellent writing. The real meat is in the postscript though, because that's where the author puts to paper the very real (and very unaddressed) concerns around dwindling employment in a so…

All you'll get is Jevon's paradox this and horses that, while continue to fundamentally undersell the potential upending of a not insignificant part of labour market.

FWIW, the only optimism I have is that humanity seemingly always finds a way to adapt and its, to me, our greatest superpower. But yeah, this feels like a big challenge this time

Re: Is it a bubble?

#314

If you look at the chart at the bottom comparing Dec 99 to today.... > during the internet bubble of 1998-2000, the p/e ratios were much higher That is true, the current players are more profitable, but the weight in SPX percentages looks to be much higher today.

i also wonder about p/e ratio comparisons over time because our world view of what long term economic growth is going forward is less now that it was then. That is always subtly implicit when we think about p/e ratio. So what's to say a 30x p/3 isnt equivalent to a 40x then

Also it depends on where you start. Going from million to billion in price is currently pretty possible. Billion to trillion would be rare, but still could happen. Now from trillion to quadrillion. How much currency there is again...

Re: Is it a bubble?

#315
post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of the best programmers I know are very good at writing and/or speaking and teaching. I struggle to believe that “advanced programmers” are poor communicators.

Genuine reflection question, are these excellent communicators good at using llms to write code? My supposition was: Many programmers that say their programming domain was too advanced and llms didn't work for their kind of code are simply bad at describing concisely what is required.

Most good programmers that I know personally work, as do I, in aerospace, where LLMs have not been adopted as quickly as some other fields, so I honestly couldn’t say.

Re: Is it a bubble?

#316

> In many advanced software teams, developers no longer write the code; they type in what they want, and AI systems generate the code for them. What a wild and speculative claim. Is there any source for this information?

Wow, reading these comments and I feel like I've entered a parallel reality. My job involves implementing research ML and I use it literally all the time, very fascinating to see how many have such strong negative reactions. As long as you are good at reviewing code, spec-ing carefully, and make atomic changes - why would you not be using this basically all the time?

Re: Is it a bubble?

#318

Man some you guys are lame. Seriously. Remember 2019-2021 when y’all were sure the fed would be dissolved and the dollar would crash and everyone would be poor if they didn’t have a bored ape and 80% bitcoin portfolio? Relax. AI is a tool. Just ride the wave. It’s gonna crash some people out. It’s entertaining watching them. You’re not being crashed out, right? Ride the wave dawg.

> Remember 2019-2021 when y’all were sure the fed would be dissolved and the dollar would crash and everyone would be poor if they didn’t have a bored ape and 80% bitcoin portfolio? I don't know which "y'all" you're talking about because it's certainly not the HN crowd, who is famously anti-cryptocurrency in general. Perhaps you're thinking of the bros on Twitter back then.

Nope. Here. About half the posts would be about crypto, and the comments were the same split arguing about it.

It was doomer AF on one end, and optimistic AF on the other end.

So, it reminds me of the same FOMO many spread here.

Re: Is it a bubble?

#319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At $WORK, we have a bot that integrates with Slack that sets up minor PRs. Adjusting tf, updating endpoints, adding simple handlers. It does pretty well. Also in a case of just prose to code, Claude wrote up a concurrent data migration utility in Go. When I reviewed it, it wasn't managing goroutines or waitgroups well, and the whole thing was a buggy mess and could not be gracefully killed. I would have written it fa…

It took me a while to realize you were using "$WORK" as a shell variable, not as a reference to Slack's stock ticker prior to its acquisition by $CRM.

You never know. Could be both.

Re: Is it a bubble?

#320

> In many advanced software teams, developers no longer write the code; they type in what they want, and AI systems generate the code for them. What a wild and speculative claim. Is there any source for this information?

At $WORK, we have a bot that integrates with Slack that sets up minor PRs. Adjusting tf, updating endpoints, adding simple handlers. It does pretty well. Also in a case of just prose to code, Claude wrote up a concurrent data migration utility in Go. When I reviewed it, it wasn't managing goroutines or waitgroups well, and the whole thing was a buggy mess and could not be gracefully killed. I would have written it fa…

> FWIW, our CEO has declared us to be AI-first, so we are to leverage AI in everything we do which I think is misguided. But you can bet they will be reviewing AI usage metrics and lower wont be better at $WORK.

I've taken some pleasure in having GitHub copilot review whitespace normalization PRs. It says it can't do it, but I hope I get my points anyway.

Post reply on HN