AI is in a hype bubble that will crash just like every other bubble. The underlying uses are there but just like Dot Com, Tulips, subprime mortgages, and even Sir Isaac Newton's failings with the South Sea Company the financial side will fall.
This will cause bankruptcies and huge job losses. The argument for and against AI doesn't really matter in the end, because the finances don't make a lick of sense.
Ok sure the bubble/non-bubble stuff, fine, but in terms of “things I’d like to be a part of” it’s hard to imagine a more transformative technology (not to again turn off the anti-hype crowd). But ok, say it’s 1997, you don’t like the valuations you see. But as a tech person you’re not excited by browsers, the internet, the possibilities? You don’t want to be a part of that even if it means a bubble pops? I also hear a lot of people argue “finances don’t make a lick of sense” but i don’t think things are that cut and dried and I don’t see this as obvious. I don’t think really many people know how things will evolve and what size a market correction or bubble would have.
What precisely about AI is transformative, compared to the internet? E-mail replaced so much of faxing, phoning and physical mail. Online shopping replaced going to stores and hoping they have what you want, and hoping it is in stock, and hoping it is a good price. It replaced travel agents to a significant degree and reoriented many industries. It was the vehicle that killed CDs and physical media in general.
With AI I can... generate slop. Sometimes that is helpful, but it isn't yet at the point where it's replacing anything for me aside from making google searches take a bit less time on things that I don't need a definitive answer for.
It's popping up in my music streams now and then, and I generally hate it. Mushy-mouthed fake vocals over fake instruments. It pops up online and aside from the occasional meme I hate it there too. It pops up all over blogs and emails and I profoundly hate it there, given that it encourages the actual author to silence themselves and replaces their thoughts with bland drivel.
Every single software product I use begs me to use their AI integration, and instead of "no" I'm given the option of "not now", despite me not needing it, and so I'm constantly being pestered about it by something.
> With AI I can... generate slop. Sometimes that is helpful, but it isn't yet at the point where it's replacing anything for me aside from making google searches take a bit less time on things that I don't need a definitive answer for.
I think this is probably the disconnect, this seems so wildly different from my experience. Not only that, I’ll grant that there are a ton of limitations still but surely you’d concede that there has been an incredible amount of progress in a very short time? Like I can’t imagine someone who sits down with Claude like I do and gets up and says “this is crap and a fad and won’t go anywhere”.
As for generated content, I again agree with you and you’d be surprised to learn that _execs_ agree with you but look at models from 1, 2, 3 years ago and tell me you don’t see a frightening progression of quality. If you want to say “I’ll believe it when I see it” that’s fine but my god just look at the trajectory.
For AI slop text, once again agree, once again I think we all have to figure out how to use it, but it is great for e.g. helping me rewrite a wordy message quickly, making a paper or a doc more readable, combining my notes into something polished, etc, and it’s getting better and better and better.
So I disagree it has made everything worse but I definitely agree that it has made a lot of things worse and we have a lot of Pets.com ideas that are totally not viable today, but the point I think people are maybe missing (?) is that it’s not about where we are it’s about the velocity and the future. You may be terrified and nauseated by $1T in capex on AI infra, fine but what that tells you is the scale is going to grow even further _in addition_ to the methodological / algorithmic improvements to tackle things like continual learning, robustness, higher quality multimodal generation with e.g. true narrative consistency, etc etc etc. in 5 years I don’t think many people will think of “slop” so negatively
Where you see exponential growth in capability and value, I see the early stages of logarithmic growth.
A similar thing played out a bit with IoT and voice controlled systems like Alexa. They've got their places, but nobody needs or wants the Amazon Dash buttons, or for Alexa to do your shopping for you.
Setting an alarm or adding a note to a list is fine, remote monitoring is fine, but when it comes to things that really matter like spending money autonomously, it completely falls flat.
Long story short, I see a fad that will fall into the background of what people actually do, rather than becoming the medium that they do it by.
I started my daughter investing with a custodial account at 13. She put a few hundred dollars of her money in and I convinced her by matching her investment and told her if the amount ever went below the original investment I would backstop any loss.
Investing is all about that long term gain and slow growth. Having 10 years of experience after finishing college will do so much more than Robinhood for refrigerators.
I've made a similar deal with my kids: Around 7 years ago I set up a "kid retirement" plan for them, where they couldn't touch the money until they were 18, but any money they put in I would match, and I'd also give them 10% APY with monthly compounding. My daughter aged out of it a couple years ago, she got something in the $100 range. Her brother still has a 18 months left, and I just recently rolled his over into the custodial account, he's got over a grand in there currently.
My daughter I just recently set up a ROTH for her and told her I'd match anything she puts into it, and stressed she should put something into it now from her savings, and then put some of her paycheck into it, anything is better than nothing. So far she's declined the free money. I'm going to set one up for my son, once he's at the point of having an income to justify it. She's very smart, but in some ways she's very stupid.
That young you should be investing in a 527 education account not a ROTH retirement account. Education is a much better ROI when you are young than anything else. As you get older the value of education decreases. In generally the cross over is sometime in your early/mid 20s (Could be as young as 16 if you don't do well in school, or as old as 35 for things like medical doctor)
If you don't live in the US you will have different options, but the idea still applies
I'm doing a 529 as well as wanting to set up the ROTH Note that you can also just take money from your other investments, deposit it into a 529, and then immediately pay yourself back for educational expenses you've paid for off the 529.
My kids have some 529 buffer, and we are paying for my daughter's school right now (though she's paid us back for the class she got an F in). My son, it's not clear that the typical school track is going to be the right thing for him, but we also have a 529 for him that I've been contributing to.
You mean a 529 account right? 527 seems to be associated with political contributions. I looked it up to ensure I wasn't missing out on something I did not know about...
There are a lot of it depends. If you are going to be a retail worker all your life there is no reason to go to college. A music degree has questionable value on its own, but many people get them understanding that "any degree" is needed for some good jobs and those that find those do well enough (your generals and non-major electives are important). The school matters - Harvard is expensive but the networking can be worth it if you network well in school. State schools tend to be a lot cheaper than private or out of state as well, and generally pretty good. Scholarships enter in as well. Degrees like Engineering or Medical doctor tend to have a much better ROI long term, but only if you pick the right one and pass.
But you need to make your own decisions. For some your best ROI is dropping out of school at 16 - but for the vast majority more school will be worth it.
This would be fun to model. Lifetime earnings are higher for those who have more education, but there's potentially decades of servicing a potential mountain of non-dischargeable debt to consider (potentially decreasing post-college investment ability) too.
I don't know the first thing about student loans (interest rates, amortization periods). I never had one. I just search-engined 2025 federal student loan rates and I'm blown away by the interest rates. It looks like avoiding student loans at all costs is the way to go.
I wonder if spending a few years working (especially if your parents are able to continue to house you and pay for health insurance) and contributing to a 529 plan might meaningfully decrease the overall cost, albeit at the "penalty" of starting college later in life (at, say, 22 instead of 18).
I take that even a little farther. Whatever my kids make (up to the Roth limit), I give them money to put into a Roth IRA [and they can keep what they earned].
That maximizes what they (as teenagers) can put into retirement accounts, their tax rate is 0% now, and though it doesn't teach them the deferred gratification aspect, it gets their retirement savings started.
We can talk about the deferred gratification aspect in other ways and/or later, but I'd rather they get 40-60 years of tax-free growth.
Is your daughter feasibly going to make “real money” in the future? I personally look back on working a job in college as a waste of time and attempting to save money then as a waste of effort. Should have just taken more debt, the amount I did take turned out to be trivial to pay off and double or triple wouldn’t have been that bad. I feel like there are two worlds employment wise, and some advice leaks between them which ends up being maladaptive in its new environment.
I hope that @roberdam reads this and implements those into his PWA.
OP, enabling:
- deposits (and withdrawals)
- a matching logic (which we can do manually I guess, by doubling the deposit amount)
- and correct calculation of compounding (if I had $100 for 11 months and add $100 in december, I shouldn't see the value compound $200 for the whole year)
would be great.
Bonus points if there was some kind of password (even hardcoded) so that the kids can't just click the gear icon and write themselves a blank check of $1,000,000
Excellent suggestions! For now, what I do is update the amount every time there's a deposit or withdrawal, and I set the initial date to the day of the withdrawal or deposit.
Ah, she's barely out of her teens, give her a break :) Better things to spend one's life on in those years than worrying over a few hundred bucks in a bank account. She'll come back around in a few years.
Killing Arduino doesn't serve their interests based how many as-like boards there are. This is more akin to Microsoft's acquisition of Minecraft. Quick and easy way to get people in the door through recognition and a large user base.
Physical attacks are also possible, this site focuses on software so much of the time, while acts occur in the physical world. Cyberattacks are grey areas, but based on some of the undersea cable cutting and factory fires Russia has been performing, physical attacks are very much on the table if you can obscure the source.
Injury rate is 6x other space vehicle manufacturers. If you were to slow them down by 6x they would pretty close to the 20 years it’s already taken to get SLS/constellation to do a test launch.
Bluesky looks to go up then fall back to about half of it's peak. It has the look of a consistently used platform that slowly rolls off users but maintains a solid base.
Clubhouse went to the moon then died over a 6 month period. Bluesky would need to drop another 2/3 of it's active users 6 months ago if you wanted your statement to match your data. Bluesky isn't growing exponentially, and is not falling catastrophically. Not a good comparison.
There were terror attacks which caused significantly increased regulations towards them. We saw the exact same thing in the United States after the airplane strikes on the World Trade Centers but focused on air travel restrictions.
Laws follow events. This is what will eventually kill bitcoin, when someone sets up payments for the deaths of world leaders or large scale population deaths and it actually works. At that point the financial gain of participants is outweighed by everyone else calling for it's removal.
That won’t kill Bitcoin. It’s decentralized. You truly can’t kill it. That's the beauty of building decentralized applications and it's the answer whenever some tech bro wonders why "a central relational database" wouldn't be better than Bitcoin. Yes we know it would perform better but that's not the point and not what it was engineered for.
This will cause bankruptcies and huge job losses. The argument for and against AI doesn't really matter in the end, because the finances don't make a lick of sense.