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Software Pump and Dump

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Re: Software Pump and Dump

#81

Post by 1dom »

xnorswap wrote: post #75
1dom wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did a lot of postgraduate research around crypto from 2011 - 2016. There are a lot of parallels, and your message adds to them. "x is different because we can actually do useful stuff with it" is what every x enthusiast deep in an x bubble or pump n dump says about x. When the next big tech bubble comes along in 10 - 15 years, there will be people saying exactly what you just said: "NextBigTech you can actually use…

The difference is, for the claims of blockchain, it was trivially easy to look at and say, "This could have been a database". Almost every single blockchain "product" (outside of the peer-to-peer trustless currency ) could have been a database. This time the cost of entry of small software products has cratered. For example, I was able to knock up a tool for a guide-maker for a niche game I play that gets about 500 p…

> The difference is, for the claims of blockchain, it was trivially easy to look at and say, "This could have been a database".

Yes, and it's trivial now to look at so many LLM startups and say "that could be a complex if/else statement" or "that could be an Alexa skill" or "I can do that already with my mobile phone".

Everything you've just described about the impact of the friction of you doing your work, and how AI has solved that, is essentially what crypto promised and delivered for a certain subsect of finance, which is why crypto still has market caps in the trillions.

AI will do the same, make a notable change on a certain sub sector of work.

My point isn't that AI is useless, it isn't that it won't add value. It's hugely valuable and will change the world in way people don't even realise, just like dotcom and crypto did and do. Right now though, the disruption and investment is disproportionate and speculative, which is why it has parallels to crypto and dotcom.

Re: Software Pump and Dump

#82

Post by bambax »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #78
bambax wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah; I did not quite understand GasTown (although I like Steve's writing style); I absolutely do not understand Moltbook or its purpose; I'm not sure I understand the point of OpenClaw -- in the sense that its benefits are not immediately obvious, while its dangers are making big red flashes and fire sirens. Often when you don't understand something you feel stupid; but sometimes the reason you don't understand is b…

> I'm not sure I understand the point of OpenClaw -- in the sense that its benefits are not immediately obvious, while its dangers are making big red flashes and fire sirens. I only skimmed the OpenClaw post, but unless I completely misunderstood the README in their GitHub repo, to me the benefits are stupidly obvious, and I was actually planning to look at it closer over the weekend. The value proposition I saw is:…

Thanks for the comment. Maybe I'm just not in the target group. I only use WhatsApp so I have zero interoperable needs; and I would never in a million years let an LLM access my private messages -- not willingly, anyway.

Re: Software Pump and Dump

#83

Post by 1dom »

nthj wrote: post #66
1dom wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did a lot of postgraduate research around crypto from 2011 - 2016. There are a lot of parallels, and your message adds to them. "x is different because we can actually do useful stuff with it" is what every x enthusiast deep in an x bubble or pump n dump says about x. When the next big tech bubble comes along in 10 - 15 years, there will be people saying exactly what you just said: "NextBigTech you can actually use…

A big difference between crypto and AI is around how crypto could paint a better future once we rebuilt most of our transactional infrastructure and persuaded a quorum to move onto it, and how I personally am benefiting from AI day by day to build myself tools and infrastructure for my life, work, businesses and finances only requires me to accept this change. Everyone else in the world could reject AI-augmented engi…

You're right.

AI will offer us a utopia when we've finished rebuilding all of our electricity infrastructure and finally got enough AI datacenters, and stopped muggle humans buying memory and GPUs because AI needs them more.

I'm pretty certain I read the sentence above about crypto sometimes around 2015.

Re: Software Pump and Dump

#84

Post by 1dom »

pixl97 wrote: post #73
1dom wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did a lot of postgraduate research around crypto from 2011 - 2016. There are a lot of parallels, and your message adds to them. "x is different because we can actually do useful stuff with it" is what every x enthusiast deep in an x bubble or pump n dump says about x. When the next big tech bubble comes along in 10 - 15 years, there will be people saying exactly what you just said: "NextBigTech you can actually use…

This said I remember when the internet was a fad that wasn't going to stick around according to some people, so there is that.

I agree! AI, crypto and dotcom were all hugely valuable and world changing. It's a shame they were all afflicted with hypes and bubbles along the way.

Re: Software Pump and Dump

#85

Post by Uehreka »

afishhh wrote: post #55
Uehreka wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I'm going to fucking crash out if another person says they're making a browser and their inline layout does this shit[1] I swear to god. I held off on commenting on the last AI browser post because the author said "it's not even good" so they recognized it's trash (it was). Please educate yourself on how inline layout is supposed to work[2] first. (no, you cannot lay out text span-by-span[3] either...) [1] https://gi…

You found it! Yeah the 4th version of the browser is in Haskell and is only a couple hours in, so it’s nowhere near done. The Go version achieved Acid3 compliance in 7 hours, but I expect this one to take a lot longer since Haskell is a bit more difficult to work with and there’s probably less Haskell in the training dataset.

Re: Software Pump and Dump

#86

Post by 1dom »

mr-ron wrote: post #64
1dom wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did a lot of postgraduate research around crypto from 2011 - 2016. There are a lot of parallels, and your message adds to them. "x is different because we can actually do useful stuff with it" is what every x enthusiast deep in an x bubble or pump n dump says about x. When the next big tech bubble comes along in 10 - 15 years, there will be people saying exactly what you just said: "NextBigTech you can actually use…

In those years of crypto, did you actually build anything relevant to the world? It sounds like you were in the wrong bubble and now have sour grapes. Meanwhile im using AI coding agents to build a B2B Saas.

I was a crypto researcher - I watched all the people like you run to the bubble telling themselves they're building the next b2b crypto SaaS:)

Re: Software Pump and Dump

#87

Post by 1dom »

mr-ron wrote: post #74
ipaddr wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know how relevant to the world another b2b sass platform is. You could easily grab one from github which is where AI is got the data to build one in the first place. Meanwhile cryto offers an alt banking platform used by many who have been debanked.

I could be building a game, a home blog, any sort of OSS. The point im making is that crypto exists purely as this alt investment, trading tokens to get rich. Im skeptical its actually being used as a currency in any real currency-fashion. But now seems to be stuck in pump and dump schemes. Meanwhile, AI is enabling people right now, today, to help build and learn things they normally wouldnt do.

> I could be building a game, a home blog, any sort of OSS.

Classic speculative AI developer;)

> Meanwhile, AI is enabling people right now, today, to help build and learn things they normally wouldnt do.

Are you sincerely suggesting nobody ever built or learnt anything from crypto?

Re: Software Pump and Dump

#88

Post by pcthrowaway »

mr-ron wrote: post #40
macmac_mac wrote: post #9

FWIW I’ve been in enough of these cycles to see the same pattern play out now with software + AI hype that I saw back in crypto land. You get: some half-baked project that looks cool until you actually try it, a flood of “look at me I’m first” blog posts and influencers hyping the hell out of it, people and companies saying they’re building on it because they don’t want to be left behind, a weird intersection with to…

I mean besides crypto and ai being big investments, i barely see any parallels. AI you can actually use to build useful things in the world , and tokens are used not as trading , but transactional currency to do that building.

> and tokens are used not as trading , but transactional currency to do that building.

I think it's funny that you highlight this, because for many blockchains, their native token is the transactional currency also.

Which opens up the possibility for a marketplace around it, as well as an incentive to grift to recoup one's investment.

AFAIK there's no similar market for LLM tokens (the price may fluctuate, but the AI companies set it, and they can't be resold), but the grift works by instead selling the outputs from using the tokens.

Re: Software Pump and Dump

#89

Post by xnorswap »

1dom wrote: post #81
xnorswap wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is, for the claims of blockchain, it was trivially easy to look at and say, "This could have been a database". Almost every single blockchain "product" (outside of the peer-to-peer trustless currency ) could have been a database. This time the cost of entry of small software products has cratered. For example, I was able to knock up a tool for a guide-maker for a niche game I play that gets about 500 p…

> The difference is, for the claims of blockchain, it was trivially easy to look at and say, "This could have been a database". Yes, and it's trivial now to look at so many LLM startups and say "that could be a complex if/else statement" or "that could be an Alexa skill" or "I can do that already with my mobile phone". Everything you've just described about the impact of the friction of you doing your work, and how A…

Crypto only looked like it solved friction in places with messed up banking.

To people in the EU/UK who had free faster payments before Bitcoin was a thing, it never looked like an improvement at all.

The solution expensive and slow banking was always political, not technical.

Crypto was purely speculative, because it was never solving real problems.

I'm not speculating about problems being solved, I'm out there solving real problems. No-one in "blockchain" ever got to say the same. It was always a promise of things being better. And for many people, things already were better than what was being promised.

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