My point wasn't that I am a hunter gatherer, it's that I didn't have a vested financial motivation to cheer for or be against AI

You can just not have investments, which is more common than you think. Being young, lots of people I know don't even have enough of a cushion to invest, and others want to avoid all risk (especially in the current market) and park their money in a high-interest savings account.

Of course, this doesn't insulate you from second- or third-order effects, but it does remove the possibility of your money being immediately wiped out. It's really not as bold or crazy as you say it is.

In fact, the subprime mortgage crisis impacted the average Joe much more than the fuckers responsible for it, who ran away scot-free with fat money bags.

The financial crash that will happen as the result of the AI speculation bubble popping will be the exact same. You won't see Altman or Dario on the streets, that's for sure.

so 35% of americans are affected :)

be poor (minus electricity, I guess)

Homeless people who live in the sewers. But first, you have to learn karate.

Just don't be invested in AI stocks, heavily leveraged in the stock market and about to retire, or work at a place built on such?

I guess if you're older, retired, sufficiently wealthy and have few needs (house paid off, lots of savings, don't care too much about acquiring new tech) then you can easily not be affected.

life is too short to watch ashton kutcher movies

People enjoy the narrative that AI is doomed. I am in the same mindset as you. I cannot see compute demand changing anytime soon.

> I literally do not write code anymore.

but you are taking advantage of a subsidised service. What happens when developers are forced to pay the full price (i.e. $2000 a month instead of $200 a month)

But were the internet companies of 2000 the ones who became the most valuable? GOOG, yes. Netscape and Yahoo, not so much. Amazon yes, pets.com, not so much. Sun is no more, Cisco to two decades to return to its dotcom bubble levels. Netflix was shipping physical DVDs. Microsoft could qualify as an internet company now with Azure, but not in 2000.

So AI can become as big as the internet, but that does not mean that the existing "AI" stocks will become big.

it is a little ironic how software devs loved creative destruction and "paradigm shifts" until it happened to them. I think what happened to Journalism is unfolding again but this time to the software development industry. Some will survive and adjust but many won't, the change is just too fast and sudden for an industry use to being immune.

I think other industries are use to being continually disrupted by advances in technology and so will adapt easier and faster. Which again, is kind of ironic..

(i am a dev myself but it still makes me laugh)

> Models just got good at writing code this year

That's not correct, is it? Opus 4.5 came out in Nov 2025. Some might say models were good at coding even before that.

The robotics story is a good example of where overexuberance may be entering the market. What is the connection between LLMs or image generation and robotics, beyond the vague intuition that they're both futuristic AI tech? (Perhaps AI maximalism is true and the entire economy will be eaten soon, but then none of this sector-specific analysis matters.)

You've talked past the point. Both can be true.

It took 10-15 years before the stock market got back to the level it did pre dot-com crash [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble

[dead]

https://capitaloneshopping.com/research/online-vs-in-store-s...

Basically, 80% of sales are still brick-and-mortar. That doesn't seem very depressing?

What are the horribly depressing stats that show otherwise? Maybe it's different where you live.

> 1929, Dotcom, Great Recession, 2010's Flash Crash - none of these were in the public discussion before they happened.

The "public discussion" is a whole different thing. They weren't in the public discussion because macroeconomic theory isn't something mom and pop like to chat about on the weekend. They only become dinner-table discussion topics when the impacts hit main street, after they happen. But bubbles in recent history have been pretty reliably identified beforehand:

https://web.archive.org/web/20180330001927/https://www.barro...

https://www.economist.com/special-report/2005/06/16/in-come-...

It isn't hard for economists to find bubbles, where the market is taking on high levels of risk. What is downright near impossible to do is predict what specific event will cause the dominos to begin dropping, or when it will happen.

Michael Burry almost got wipe out if the bubble last just a bit longer. He started shorting way before the crash. He was lucky that he held long enough. There are many others see the same thing but just lost right before the end of the race.

That's why timing the crash is hard. The market has to agree with you but also at the right time

2008 financial crisis, after years of "mortgage bros" inflating that bubble.

I was there for the Great Recession, and they were indeed in the public discussion. I remember the year 2007, as a 20 year old anti-capitalist, I was counting days until the economic crash. As predicted by plenty of left-wing economists at the time.

The only people who didn’t see it coming were the capitalists who were invested in the inflated market, and had bought into pseudo-scientific economic theories that served the single purpose of affirming what the capitalists already believed.