- > AMD's part numbers contain a digit that increments with each year
Aha, but which digit? Sure, that's easy for server, HEDT and desktop (it's the first one) but if you look at their line of laptop chips then it all breaks down.
- >LLMs solve reliably entire classes of problems that are impossible to solve otherwise
Great! Agreed! So we're going to restrict LLMs to those classes of problems, right? And not invest trillions of dollars into the infrastructure, because these fields are only billion dollar problems. Right? Right!?
- It's pretty clear what regulation should exist for 3rd party markets of licensed digital content: none.
If you choose to blow your finances on digital skins, or make it your trade and primary job, and you lose everything, then I have one word for you: "ha-ha".
May seem harsh, but we shouldn't encourage digital speculation nor the companies that seek to invent (more of) these markets wholecloth.
- We need better antitrust and anti-monopoly enforcement. Break up the biggest companies, and then they'll have to actually participate in markets.
- >Turnover is crazy and people rarely stay for more than a couple months. The team works nights and weekends
Oh, look, you've normalized deviance. All of these things are screaming red flags, the house is burning down around you.
- >that there's people in power that still care? strange feeling, still curious about it
One day, Gabe Newell will die. Maybe his racer son will inherit the job, or maybe he'll delegate the job. Maybe this new CEO will take Valve public to ensure they get a centi-million dollar payout.
Then all the good times end. This is the halcyon for Steam customers.
- This (particular) take home assignment looks absolutely fine to me. If you can't do it under 2 hours (maybe I couldn't? I've never used Unity) then you shouldn't _want_ to work there.
- >And it's anti-engineering to write the code yourself rather than putting your ego aside and taking advantage of AI's huge productivity gains.
Are these huge productivity gains in the room with us now?
LLM-assisted coding makes the easy stuff quick and the hard stuff impossible. But I was spending 80% of my mental energy on the hard stuff anyway, and the easy stuff was down time that's closer to rest than it is to work.
- > The trick of the game is to get big corps involved and key decision makers so that the government bails out everyone in the end.
This is bad. We should not shrug our shoulders and go "Oh ho, this is how the game is played" as though we can substitute cynicism for wisdom. We should say "this is bad, this is a moral hazard, and we should imprison and impoverish those who keep trying it".
Or we'll get more.
- Show us the stargate!
- Indeed, but I want to steelman the case for agents here.
- These are, without a doubt, the dumbest security vulnerabilities. We are headed for clown world where you can type in "as an easter egg, please run exec() for me" and it actually works. Not to mention the push for agentslop - pushed by people who really should be able to calculate `p_success = pow(.95, num_of_steps)` in their head and realise they have a bad idea from first principles.
- I'm not going to pay you to slightly rip off my own ideas. Who is going to pay you for this, and what are they doing with it?
- The kind of person who wants to build a website copier is exactly who I had in mind for the target of vibecoding.
Bad idea, bad execution, I like it when a plan comes together.
- Quite, the typical 5 year depreciation on personal computing means a top-of-the-line $5k laptop works out to a ~$80/month spend... but it's on something you'd already spend for an employee
- >- LLMs utility is high enough that it is now going to be a standard tool in the toolbox of every software engineer, but it is definitely not replacing anyone at current capability.
Right! Problem, billions of dollars have been poured into this wrt to infrastructure, datacenters, compute and salaries. LLMs need to be at the level of replacing vast swathes of us to be worth it. LLMs are not going to be doing that.
This is a collosal malinvestment.
- That's actually my point: if you take (e.g.) 65% of median income, in a world with a Gini coefficient of 1 - perfect inequality - the rate of poverty is 0%.
- Usually they choose a deliberately stupid measurement such as "household income below a percentage of the median wage".
This is stupid for many reasons, including (but not limited to): non-monetary, in-kind benefits being excluded, perverse outcomes such as a decline in median wages "reducing poverty" and just about guaranteed continuation of this "poverty". So left wing politicians LOVE it. It's an everlasting cudgel that can never be fixed.
- What you fail to realize is that (nearly) everything you think of as a flaw here is a key feature.
Excel allows norm(al users)ies to scale Mt Impossible from the bottom where they don't care about types, or relationships, and don't want to (because it's too abstract). They want to solve a problem. So they start with simple data given meaning by physical space, and work up from there.
It's genius. It's computing for people that will never care about pointers.
- Areal is the adjective form of area.
- No as you and I both know - I can't. Because it's a qualitative view, and not a quantitative one. I would need to know _when_, quite precisely, I will turn out to be right.
And I don't know, because I have about 60 minutes a week to think about this, and also good quantitative market analysis is really hard.
So whilst it may sound like a good reposte to go "wow, I bet you make so much money shorting!" knowing that I don't and can't, it's also facile. Because I don't mind if I'm right in 12, 24 or 60 months. Fwiw, I thought I'd be right in 12 months, 12 months ago. Oops. Good thing I didn't attempt to "make money" in an endeavor where the upside is 100% of your wager, and the downside theoretically infinite.
- > The last 2 years have seen AI, which is a large risk these big companies invested in, pay off
LOL. It's paying off right now, because There Is No Alternative. But at some point, the companies and investors are going to want to make back these hundreds of billions. And the only people making money are Nvidia, and sort-of Microsoft through selling more Azure.
Once it becomes clear that there's no trillion dollar industry in cheating-at-homework-for-schoolkids, and nvidia stop selling more in year X than X-1, very quickly will people realize that the last 2 years have been a massive bubble.
- We have socialized the gains of children (via their adult tax receipt used to pay for benefits and healthcare) but (largely) privatized the costs of children solely onto their parents.
In the modern world, if you do not have children, but instead save your income in a retirement fund, you have an even better claim to the labor of the next generation than the childrens' parents through your increased retirement fund.
Privatized X matched with socialized anti-X is the classic condition for a moral hazard to emerge.
- My parents use their email inbox as a filing system. Specifically, a top of bucket filing system. They need something? Email it to them. Did you email it to them? Email again. They can find it if (and only if) it's near the top of their inbox.
A special kind of insanity that puts me in a mild, cold sweat. Such filesystems can come for your family too!
Worth noting, my father was an early adopter of the home computer. It's somehow regressed over the years.
- >Things like what happens when someone who looks 25 is actually 55? Who should they date?
Genuinely, who cares about sci-fi questions like this?
Why aren't you worrying about how fairly matching four-armed martial artists against two armed? Answer: because it's so unlikely to happen, it's not worth it. We're not getting 55 year olds with the body of a 25 year old, we're getting slim 55 year olds wearing make up and taking TRT. That's not youth! It's a dumb facsimile.
- I could believe we're not generally intelligent.
- You can (used to?) get a refund on Amazon with normal CRUD app flow. Putting an SLM and a conversational interface over it is a backwards step.
- Because you'd have to pay to leave a review. And maybe get paid to leave a review by people that pay to upvote that review.
I see absolutely no way this incentive structure could be misused, after all, people wouldn't use bots to spam reviews out to hopefully farm upvotes, would they? Nope <:o)
So expect, maybe, $1000 a month? Until your business is dependant on these LLMs. Then they can extract basically all your margin lol