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Is it a bubble?

oaktreecapital.com

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Re: Is it a bubble?

#571

Post by johnfn »

munksbeer wrote: post #474
samdoesnothing wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is your redesign live for chipscompo? Because if so, and absolutely no offence meant here, the UI looks like it was built by an intern. And fair enough, you sound like a backend guy so you can't expect perfection for frontend work. My experience with AI is that it's great at producing intern-level artifacts very quickly and that has its uses, but that certainly doesn't replace 95% of software development. And if it's…

>if so, and absolutely no offence meant here, the UI looks like it was built by an intern The site looks great to me. Your comment is actually offensive, despite you typing "no offence".

I appreciate you saying so.

Re: Is it a bubble?

#572

Post by rurp »

oytis wrote: post #518
f154hfds wrote: post #38

The post script was pretty sobering. It's kind of the first time in my life that I've been actively hoping for a technology to out right not deliver on its promise. This is a pretty depressing place to be, because most emerging technologies provide us with exciting new possibilities whereas this technology seems only exciting for management stressed about payroll. It's true that the technology currently works as an e…

I dunno, I might be getting old, but I think the idea that people absolutely need a job to stay sane betrays lack of imagination. Of course getting paid just enough for survival is pretty depressing, but if I can have healthy food, a spacious place to live, ability to travel and all the free time I can have, I'd be absolutely happy without a job. Maybe I'd be even writing code, just not commercially useful one.

I don't think this is the scenario most people are worried about. Having basic needs met while also having a lot of freedom and time probably sounds great to the majority of people. But there's roughly 0% chance we end up in that kind of world if current AI leads to massive job elimination.

Just look at who is building, funding, and promoting these models! I can't think of a group of people less interested in helping millions of plebs lead higher quality lives if it costs them a penny to do it.

Re: Is it a bubble?

#573

Post by roncesvalles »

nomel wrote: post #567
roncesvalles wrote: post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If these automations allow a developer to burn less time, it reduces the need for headcount. This is exactly the fallacy, and it's very hard to see why it's a fallacy if you've never professionally written code (and even then). Software development work fills to occupy the time allotted to it. That's because there is always a tradeoff between time and quality. If you have time available, you will fundamentally alter…

> This is exactly the fallacy, and it's very hard to see why it's a fallacy if you've never professionally written code (and even then). This was not necessary or appropriate, and completely discredits your reply.

Sorry, I didn't mean the "you" to be personal. It's a general "you".

But if you meant it's inappropriate even as a general statement then I disagree. Some concepts are just difficult to convey or unintuitive if one hasn't actually done the thing. It's more of a disclaimer that what's to follow is unintuitive.

Re: Is it a bubble?

#574

Post by bagacrap »

Ekaros wrote: post #314
cal_dent wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

A trillion dollar valuation doesn't imply there's actually a trillion dollars there. It's just the last price the stock sold for, times the shares in existence.

If Elon tried to sell every share of Tesla tomorrow, he would get a lot less than the face value of all his shares.

So in other words, there doesn't need to be that much currency, just that much hype.

Re: Is it a bubble?

#575

Post by bagacrap »

simianwords wrote: post #271
x0x0 wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does AI assisted shopping create more economic activity? Even assuming you can do it, and people do find it helpful, it likely just shifts who people buy from, not how much?

How did Amazon.com create more economic activity? Same way. It just has to make it more efficient.

Well Amazon makes it take way less time to buy something (almost anything). I dont have to waste time and money going to the hardware store, it only takes 90 seconds of my time and the price including shipping is less than what the hardware store wants to charge, with its rent and utilities and so on to cover. Amazon cut out a middleman between the warehouse and the household. It made things more efficient, and I can use the time and money savings to spend more money or work harder at my job. (I for one do spend more hours working if I have more time in my day. Not everyone is like this.)

AI could do the same thing. It could cut 90 seconds down to... 10 seconds? It doesn't seem like the same impact as Amazon, where an hour's investment became 90 seconds. And I can't see how AI shopping is going to save me money here. There's no middleman to cut out, except maybe some web site storefront?? There's also a huge downside: with Amazon, I suddenly had access to 100 different pairs of scissors to choose from, instead of the 2 or 3 I could find in Staples. That was a plus. With AI shopping, suddenly I'm down to one choice: whatever Chat chooses for me. If I want to have a say in which pair of scissors I buy, I'm back to shopping for myself.

Re: Is it a bubble?

#576

Post by mizzao »

rglover wrote: post #39

I've enjoyed Howard Marks writing/thinking in the past, but this is clearly a person who thinks they understand the topic but doesn't have the slightest clue. Someone trying to be relevant/engaged before really thinking on what is fact vs. fiction.

One can see he knows little about AI and relies on the judgments of others. Yet, he knows a lot more about economics, finance, and history than most AI practitioners.

As a founder of an AI company, I actually agreed with most of the article and found it to be very close to my mental model of the world. Turns out you might actually not need to understand what's causing the hype if you know that history rhymes...!

Re: Is it a bubble?

#577

Post by solumunus »

zparky wrote: post #70
stack_framer wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's kind of the first time in my life that I've been actively hoping for a technology to out right not deliver on its promise. Same here, and I think it's because I feel like a craftsman. I thoroughly enjoy the process of thinking deeply about what I will build, breaking down the work into related chunks, and of course writing the code itself. It's like magic when it all comes together. Sometimes I can't even beli…

It's been blowing my mind reading HN the past year or so and seeing so many comments from programmers that are excited to not have to write code. It's depressing.

Do you really think the creative or intellectual element of programming is the tapping of keys? I don't understand this at all. I enjoy solving problems and creating elegant solutions. I'm spending less time tapping keys and more time engineering solutions. If tapping keys is the most fun part for you, then that's fine! But let's not pretend THAT is the critical part of software engineering. Not to mention, it's not all or nothing. The options aren't writing code or not writing code. You can selectively not write any boring code and write 100% of the bits you find interesting or care about. If an LLM is failing to deliver what is in my minds eye then I simply step in and make sure the code is quality... I'm doing more and better software engineering, that's why I'm happy, that's the bit that scratches my itch.

Re: Is it a bubble?

#578

Post by classified »

f154hfds wrote: post #38

The post script was pretty sobering. It's kind of the first time in my life that I've been actively hoping for a technology to out right not deliver on its promise. This is a pretty depressing place to be, because most emerging technologies provide us with exciting new possibilities whereas this technology seems only exciting for management stressed about payroll. It's true that the technology currently works as an e…

> artificial creativity

This artificial creativity will only go so far, because it's a simulated semblance of human creativity, as much as could be gathered from training data. If not continually refueled by new training data, it will run out sooner or later. And then it will get boring really quickly.

Re: Is it a bubble?

#579

Post by throwaway2037 »

urxvtcd wrote: post #361
throwaway2037 wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Follow-up: This letter feels like a "jump the shark" moment. Ref: https://blog.codinghorror.com/has-joel-spolsky-jumped-the-sh...

First time reading this. It's actually funny how disliking exceptions seemed crazy then but it's pretty normal now. And writing a new programming language for a certain product, well, it could turn out to be pretty cool, right? It's how we get all those Elms and so on.

    > disliking exceptions seemed crazy then but it's pretty normal now
Help me to clarify. Are you saying that when Joel posted (~20 years ago), disliking exceptions was considered crazy? And, now it is normal to dislike exceptions?

Assuming that my interpretation is correct, then I assume that you are a low level systems programmer -- C, C++, Rust, etc? Maybe even Golang? If you are doing bog standard enterprise programming with Python, Java or C#, exceptions are everywhere and unavoidable. I am confused. If anything, the last 20 years have cemented the fact that people should be able to choose a first class citizen (language) that either has exceptions or not. The seven languages that I mentioned are all major and have billions of lines of legacy code in companies and open source projects. They aren't going anywhere soon. C++ is a bit special because you can use a compiler flag to disable exceptions... so C++ can be both. (Are there other languages like that? I don't know any. Although, I think that Microsoft has a C language extension that allows throw/catch!)

Re: Is it a bubble?

#580

Post by roenxi »

dmurvihill wrote: post #533
roenxi wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The stats are something like 1 in 10 people experience domestic violence. Unless someone takes a vow of silence and goes to live in the wilderness there is no way to avoid awful people. They're just people. The average standard is not high. Although I suppose an argument could be made that wife-beaters are actually just evil rather than being low-empathy but I think the point is still clear enough.

What you are saying is that 9 out of 10 never experience domestic violence despite cohabitating with 10-20 other people during their lifetime.

No, what I'm saying is that around 6-8 out of 10 people are worse at empathy than a chatbot, in my estimation. And even if that gets knocked down a little I still don't see how people would argue that humans have some unassailable edge. Chatbots are an AGI system. Especially the omni-models.
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