But what about the damage along the way? Misallocation of capital? Too many data centers and not enough jobs? CO2? Expensive RAM? Endless articles on HN about AI saying there are too many articles on HN about AI?

https://theonion.com/fbi-uncovers-al-qaeda-plot-to-just-sit-...

With everybody investing on index funds, directly or indirectly through their 401k, does economics ever have a time to catch up? Being out of the market during the crazy hype means losing out on "easy" gains, so basically it keeps going up and up, these companies get even more hyped, and I wonder what's the end game.

I keep hearing that retail investors are just small fry and have no power to affect any stock's valuation, but certainly the hype spreads to big money as well.

Even if I'm way off the mark, I would love to read about what happens to the economy in the mathematically plausible case that people keep buying and no one ever sells enough to mitigate the hype.

Though, the larger the bubble becomes the more damaging the pop will be

I find the industrial revolution parallels interesting too. I figure we're in the steam age and this is a bit like the railway bubble. Or maybe a bit before that - I'm not sure current AI is as useful as railways.

If that is true, they are incredibly stupid. Empowered workers create better, more effective companies.

As a business owner I assure you I am not overly obsessed with labor costs. I obsess on all costs, and all revenues. VC funded and public companies may or may not take a similarly holistic view.

It's allowed me to learn things more quickly. For example, I haven't written any C++ professionally for 20 years, and found myself in the position of needing to know it again. The existing material online for learning it is thick; sometimes I have a question that isn't answered directly or clearly in any way I can find with a standard search. I can grill the LLM much more quickly and pointedly.

However, this does not answer the usefulness-at-work question. Does anyone care if I know how the initializer list braces in constructor `Foo{1,2}` work? Today for hiring managers smitten with AI, seems like they don't.

Personally, I'm just trying to stay sharp on the off-chance that things crash out and people who know how to engineer *and* code become highly valuable. If not, I'll be doing something else, anyway.

Interesting challenge.

1 - I worked abroad and wasn't really familiar with the systems there. Gemini made me aware of a kind of pension account that I could withdraw from when I left the country netting me a few thousand dollars.

2 - Working as a tech contractor, charging by deliverable, Codex/Claude Code speed me up and it doesn't seem to have significantly dropped rates in the market.

3 - Also contractor related: I had Claude do a quick legal sanity check of my contracts, and it warned me of some clauses that I'd be better off removing/changing/refining. I was not aware of these nuances and would not have paid a lawyer for this as the contract was too small, but the changes were accepted by the client and reduced my risk exposure meaningfully.

4 - Learning a foreign language, I use it to check my draft emails and messages. It corrects them but also serves a tutoring role providing feedback, improving both the accuracy of my communication and my rate of language acquisition.

5 - Gemini Deep Research helped me narrow down tent models that met my fairly specific set of requirements. Very happy with the tent I ended up buying, from a brand that was not on my radar before.

I can name three:

- better speech to text, - better auto translation, - better image to text.

Other then that, I hate how AI is inserted into everything, how I cant tell anyone I did something without them telling me I could have use AI for it, the doom trolling , the AIG singularity bullshit as if it was new incoming god rather then a set of technologies.

It's not, though. The banking system holds onto everyone's money in a fractional reserve system, if you let a run on the banks happen everyone's money is gone. That's "too big to fail".

If anthropic and openAI fail, the top 10% lose half their money in a stock sell-off. That's perfectly tolerable. Maybe congress bails them out anyways but they don't have to.

So you’re going to be shorting AI stocks?

Sounds more like a simpleton than a simple man.

And yet you choose to enshitify the comments of this thread

While that's a bit cruel, I do have to wonder how exactly Doctorow got in the position he has -- he isn't somebody who has done great things and is now a tech critic like someone like Geoffrey Hinton. He seems a pleasant enough fellow, but basically he got fame from writing SF books that he gave away for free. How does this translate into being an expert that journalists fawn over?

> The bubble is weirdly being kept alive by the promise it can replace software developers

And lawyers, and doctors, and tax preparers, and financial managers...

> refuse to use the s word

strike?

I agree the mixed metaphor and grammar are a bit awkward, but "its" refers to AI, innit?