Mistletoe

Is there any way out of the private equity death spiral we are in? What’s the natural check and balance to it before everything is gray goo?

If anything the Chinese and Russians made us run up our economy on nonsense AI dreams and the crash will take a decade or more to recover from.

You don’t think Satoshi Nakamoto had credibility or professionalism? It’s not fair to lump the bad seeds in with the good. Imagine if I said the US Dollar was a scam because drug cartels or AI companies use it.

I miss him.

"Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them." -Dune

I wish we would stop speedrunning this Dune/Blade Runner future we keep trying to attain.

Can you give examples of other things they can do that would be worth paying for?

Graphs like this are all I can think of when I see unsustainable euphoria like above.

https://www.bigtrends.com/education/lessons-from-the-past-10...

> If the hardware price tag (over $17,000) is out of reach, Cherry Audio offers an exacting virtual analog emulation for just $49.

:)

Stock price has almost doubled in the past year and you still aren’t satisfied? This delusional market needs a reckoning.

1Y 86%

Form follows function but really it’s just probably modeled on the founders.

Kudos to DeepSeek and Midjourney for doing something different.

Open models are 4k TV (or maybe 1080p tv now and 4k TV soon) and SOTA frontier models are 8k TV. Can I or the average user tell the difference? Not really. Would they pay for that difference? Not a chance. Our entire economy is teetering on some future hope that this fragile and immaterial difference will pay off, when the reality is that LLMs are a race to the bottom and eventual razor thin margins. Maybe a tiny vocal subset of programmers can use it for work and make paying for it worth it to them, but that can't prop up an entire economy, especially when said programmers are phased out, jobless, and replaced by AI with each better iteration...

I'm also judging by my own eyes because I can see that the WPA concrete uses coarser substrate like the Gemini answer says and is harder than normal concrete when I press it. And also has no cracks in it almost 100 years later.

I’ve often wondered why every good sidewalk I see has a WPA stamp on it from the 1930s and the modern ones are all crumbled and uneven.

https://share.gemini.google/5g0gxGyOmAPD

Welcome to the Age of the Plateau. Enjoy your stay, everything is very mid, but it’s oh so cheap to make.

The reality will be something more like this-

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minsky_moment

It’s so lame they changed the LEDs to meaning nothing.

I was thinking the other day that the AI bot infested internet we have now is some sort of Eternal December that is even worse than Eternal September. But we never get Christmas.

When I hear recursive self improvement all I remember are the ridiculous articles a few years ago about how 3d printers were going to make themselves and take over the world.

I can’t imagine working at a company called Oven and expecting it to be a good time.

Has the internet made the average human’s life better? As someone that lived in both eras I have to say no. If you want to improve humanity greatly and prevent currently 8.3 billion people’s misery and counting, you build a time machine and prevent Tim Berners-Lee from inventing it in the first place. But it wouldn’t help, because someone else would still invent this torture nexus of hyperconnected human minds.

That’s all great but that isn’t a bull case for getting actual money out of it at the levels needed to justify the spending. Our entire stock market (everyone’s retirement) is based on this right now. Not all amazing inventions enrich everyone involved. Sometimes it’s just pgp or the dishwasher. It’s interesting you mention electricity, because that’s what AI feels like to me. It will be important and vital, but you don’t care where it comes from, you just care if it works and nobody really makes a killing from a commodity like electricity. The valuation of these companies is based on AI being something completely different from what it will be because of hysteria. There is no difference between this and the GME meme stocks, it simply got bigger and has now swallowed the whole economy.

Can someone even outline the AI bull case? I can’t fathom one at all.

https://isaiprofitable.com/

The only profitable company is the one running the scam.

Isn’t that just what people tell themselves at the top?

https://www.currentmarketvaluation.com/models/s&p500-mean-re...

Did the little hats do anything? Or were they just for show? I also wonder if they were only worn when the cameras came out.

Do you use it for work? I can’t imagine paying this myself for personal use. I just don’t see the benefits vs. the free models available to me.

Apathy is a valid feeling to these incremental improvements touted as vital and amazing and worth paying for.

I don’t think The Economist has that kind of power. More likely that when they make covers like these every normie feels that way and it’s going the other way soon, as it has exhausted every buyer or seller and it has reached the ends of your earth and your Mom and Dad even feel that way.

https://www.readtrung.com/p/the-economist-cover-curse-explai...

A picture of the adapter would have been nice.

The really uncomfortable part is that 1000 ppm isn’t that far off from how EARTH will be. A terrifying scenario that will be like Total Recall with people clamoring for and paying for fresh air. Those that can’t will be permanently in a stupor.

https://science.nasa.gov/earth/explore/earth-indicators/carb...

Yes because Poe’s Law has never been more true than the current era.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law