A bubble burst is not necessarily ‘the end’ of a tech. The internet bubble burst back in 2000, and here we are.

A lot of the financial burden is offloaded to SPVs that may well be allowed to fail, as the AI companies don’t directly carry the liabilities. They certainly carry enough of them, but they have done a lot to manage to leave other entitites holding the bag. Government may happily let Anthropic fold if it came to it, because Trump is all pissy with them. SpaceX would depend on whether Trump is pissed or loving Elon in the moment of decision. Hell if Trump decided that ‘TrumpAI’ was a possible concept he’d probably let them all burn for the chance of his grift picking up the pieces.

I agree, though sometimes in retrospect after they see how they’re post lands they will retroactively claim they didn’t actually mean it. So have to take rationalizations with a grain of salt.

Self-checkout was a boon because reduced wages to process customers (in theory).

Now they have an even better mechanism to push: delivery and pickup. Keep the customers away from the merchandise except what they have already paid for. Wal-Mart pushing the promise of free delivery under 22 minutes when I go to check if they have something in-store.

AI, yes.

Once got flagged for theft because the camera saw me put a box down on the far side of the scanner and then used the handheld scanner because it was large. Evidently the box getting past the fixed scanner without scanning triggers theft even if you scan it.

In a convenience store, I put products on a platform and I don’t have to scan barcode and it just “scans” my whole order all at once with machine vision. It worked well for me, but seems to have the clerk on high alert to watch it like a hawk from any mistakes, which sounds exhausting. I got the sense that it screws up a lot and the clerk is on the hook for it.

Yeah, booking a flight is only difficult because I make it difficult by deciding about how I feel about cost versus layovers versus time of departure/arrival.

For grocery shopping, I’m very specific in what I want, and it’s easiest just to pick them specifically. For a lot, I’d rather just go in person to the store to look over things. In fact, whenever I spend money I’m pretty specific in what I want and I don’t want something to “improve” things by letting me be more vague.

As a point of comparison, fast food ordering. Apps and Kiosks were actually a step up for me, because it was easier and quicker for me to see what the options are and select precisely what I want. AI order taking would be a huge step backwards from there. Even when ordering from waitstaff at a restauraunt, I always like to have my finger clearly pointing to the menu for what I want to order.

Man I hope so.

I’m skeptical, but I hope so.

Also sharing the concern that people are able to vibe code some crap and too many words in their writing as a cause rather than more positive changes.

Sadly, the browser variants lack functionality. In my experience, particularly powerpoint, a colleague says the same of excel.

Thankfully, I rarely need that functionality so I only have to resort to Windows once every few months.

Between libre and office in the browser, 99% of my needs are met.

Collaborating on a powerpoint however, it’s very quickly ‘powerpoint application only’, whether I like it or not.

Of course in that scenario it may be private information, but given you are trying to file it, inherently you at least are in the realm of sharing it.

I would imagine things like asking for legal advice on a crime committed, which could hilariously backfire when that chat transcript shows up in court.

It seems to be just that consumer tech doesn’t evolve like it used to. It was insane how things went from the late nineteenth century to modern era, but lots of signs of slowing down.

While computer tech is going, it’s now only doing so by scaling behind home electrical capacity. The high end server chips are just cranking the wattage because they can’t improve within a more reasonable power envelope anymore. A 2026 laptop that replaced a 2020 laptop that was broken wasn’t really significantly faster. In 2000, a new PC would have been more than 10 fold faster than a 6 year old PC.

Tech progresses, (e.g. just got a phone with a solid state battery that’s crazy better than battery behavior before), it’s just some of the biggest consumer electronics things are hitting physics and things we are used to advancing are just flattening out.

I was so happy when I ran out of tokens, I could just keep programming without management micromanaging how I got my job done.

The author seems to think this is some horribly intolerable scenario, impossible to keep going. That without tokens you can do nothing. Lamenting that it’s impossible to understand the code the LLM put out. This is a bad sign. If you let the LLM get beyond your ability to reasonably understand and audit, then you run the risk of getting screwed at any moment. If I saw this perspective from anyone that did work for me, I told be avoiding letting them anywhere near anything potentially important.

Net this has been the worst thing to happen to the discipline of software development. Maybe after the bubble pops we can have the more reasonable takes, but right now it’s just insufferable.

Of that comes to pass, they can change it.

The codegen is a particularly big problem for famous open source projects. All of a sudden you have a flood of people trying to get their name on your project and flooding you with low quality stuff. Codegen enables folks without good ideas to generate submissions that demand a lot of review. Being about to shoot down obviously AI content without deeper review is pretty critical to keep the project viable. There may be good things tossed out with the bathwater, but it is a ton of bathwater. Besides, if there’s something real behind it, a good human is likely to emerge to take it forward more credibly.

Closed source or personal projects can enjoy a bit more judgement. You can evaluate the people independent of the submissions and may be able to have an even more nuanced take.

It’s not like it is a legally binding agreement that needs a high level of quality in adjucation. If things seem off then it can be cited and you don’t have to prove it. Conversely, if something passes human review despite being codegen, well then I guess the codegen isn’t that bad

I’ve seen a pull request that was ultimately nonsensical but plausible and short, and purported to be needed in a configuration none of the maintainers had access to. It was a pretty harmless change either way so they were inclined to accept it. But they sought a little clarification and the clearly LLM response in comment got it shut down. No human stepped up to actually explain an understanding and the LLM sounded like a TV show writer writing tech, sentences that sounded credible but to anyone with understanding was nonsensical bullshit.

LLM code can sometimes be hard to tell in a short code change, but the prose when things are anything vaguely needing explanation is just so very very obvious.

You are right, but right now we are living in a very messy reality where it’s hard to know who’s being stupid and who is using it well. One person I know that, well, I was never a huge fan of his work but at least it was somewhat serviceable is now all-in on AI and his code has been rewritten in a similar manner as the parent poster comments. He’s got no idea how it works or how it should worked, the AI decided to rewrite it in an entirely different language, and it’s a buggy mess and it never fixes the bugs without making new bugs. Then he hit his token quota 3 weeks early and basically said he was going to stop working on it because he no longer could manually work the codebase. He didn’t ask for a rewrite, but AI advised him that his language choice was a poor fit and reworked things in another language, one that none of us use to that level of seriousness. It also made it largely based on super convoluted regular expressions.

The problem is that the leadership is singing the praises of these people, they were on their ‘leaderboards’ of AI adoption and much like the craze of praising “lines of codes”, we are neck deep in the most stupid non-technical evaluation of technical work you could imagine.

A key word in that sentence is “if”, it is a rhetorical example, that’s probably pretty much correct at this point. It’s not a recommended course of action, it’s a declaration that it contrary to crazed hype, it isn’t currently as core to everything as would be befitting the current hype level.

I would argue that the CEOs aren’t on the correct track, they aren’t really in a particularly specific trajectory. I just had a debate with someone on this and their stance was “well in a hundred years do you expect things to be like they are”. My response “I cannot possibly speak to that, but we need to speak to today instead of pretending we know how things will be in a hundred years and pretending they are already at that level”. The “imagine a hundred years from now” by a relative outsider to the tech is dominating CEO mindset, and that’s problematic.

Once the bubble pops, we will almost certainly see a more durable and sane adoption for these technologies. For now, the hype is a problem as it enables some of the worst possible stewards of the technology and favors grift over progress.

I think it’s a worthy simplification that sums up the current state of things well. We have AI that broadly has different uses and then we have the ChatBot/ChatBot derived AI applications. The market is not going insane over the broader AI category. Executives are not tripping over themselves to say things like machine vision is going to replace all labor, or at least all white collar labor. The chatbot is the only thing in the conversation of consequence.

All the “everyone says AI is the reality, so everyone feels like they must say AI is the reality” refers to this specific category. It might be veering towards being oversimplified, but it’s trying to balance a perspective that is also oversimplified. Generally, we aren’t good at weighing simple straightforward takes against complex nuanced takes, so you have to “net it out” to have any hope of the point landing.

Yeah, had a car dealer try to say “the price doesn’t even matter, only the monthly payment matters, right?”

The problem for those of us who know better: this reasoning works on most of the customers and it’s more profitable to do that than cater to more savvy customers.

Given how long that would take, I’d guess that we will see OpenAI backing out of some of their purchasing commitments as a price pressure before then.

Sam Altman basically single handedly committed to buying almost half of the world’s RAM capacity, and on other fronts OpenAI has already backing out of some of its more egregiously stupid business decisions. I’m sure the purchasing commitments are only a matter of time to come up on that chopping block.

Fun fact, over half of the S&P 500 have market caps over 10x revenue.

This has not ended well for companies in the past.

My favorite one was Musk gave.

So he said that the supply of a particular natural gas turbine part was constrained through 2030. Therefore, obviously, the simplest fix is to have thousands of starship launches with ISS-sized payloads and all the attendant crap.