rozap

hindsight is the best hedge fund

Even in the first paragraph the author goes into some nuance about what they mean and it's not at all what you're saying? Years ago, I'd work on one or two things at a time. Now I do maybe 10+ things in parallel. I work more hours, "let me just finish up this one thing" I'll say, and I look at the clock and it's later than I thought. At the end of the day, my brain is cooked. Right now I'm motivated by the novelty of this new tool that gives me superhuman productivity, but a few years from now when that novelty has worn off? Well, probably a few years from now we won't have software in any recognizable sense anyway, so maybe it's not worth thinking about.

This entire demo is so incredibly techbrained I had to laugh. These people are really unable to get out of their own heads.

"What can you use it for?" "Uhh....yes, asking investors for more money"

We have done this internally at our company (link in bio). We have an internal simulation game, kind of like the OP. The game was vibecoded, but it can run using the same rules as a city in our actual system. The simulation game is really just a toy that is fun to mess around with, but the rules engine is an actual thing in our product.

My point is that there's nothing wrong with glue, but comparing the pile of shit that is the cybertruck to one of the GOATs and saying "look they both use glue" is a little disingenuous. They are completely different processes, do it in different places for different reasons. The only similarity is that there is glue involved, somewhere.

If you believe that the upside is effectively unlimited because you automate most or all jobs in existence, then it is "rational" but silly valley rationality usually ignores things that are inconvenient. But if you truly believe the upside is unlimited, then rising interest rates won't scare you.

I think the issues are:

1) that timeline has to line up with the broader macroeconomic factors (unlikely imo)

2) anthropic/openai/etc have to actually capture the value (unlikely given deepseek/glm/etc)

3) for all jobs to be automated, there needs to be a huge shift in the social contract and welfare state, which requires competent and functioning government (lol) and taxes on destruction of labor rather than labor itself (lmao) otherwise you get millions of unemployed people and a deeply unstable society, and a lot of blown up datacenters.

I think the value of AI is unlike anything that has come before, I just don't think the big players will necessarily be the ones capturing it. There will be a lot of spectacular implosions over the next couple years, and AI will continue to march along.

Lotus did this on their chassis not because it was cheap, but because it allowed them to use lighter, thinner aluminum which would have been ruined by welding. It was almost certainly not cheaper than welding, they had to add little protrusions that kept all the pieces 0.2mm apart, which is what made for the best bonding. They went to a lot of trouble to make this process work, and it resulted in one of the best sports cars of all time in terms of pure driving experience.

Tesla has very different reasons for doing what they did on the cybertruck. It's very much a form over function. Lotus has always been function over form (to a fault, in terms of their financial position).

I can imagine having kids is super rewarding, but also amplifies the pressure of being a provider probably 100x. In uncertain times, I think a lot of us aren't sure how we'll provide for ourselves in ~5 years, let alone a tiny dude, which plays into the decision to not have kids.

I'm still gainfully employed, and business is ripping, but a huge part of my value as a professional got totally vaporized over the last year. So part of me is extremely glad I don't have kids right now, and part of me is really angry that everything feeling so unstable is leading to our decision to not have them. I know that even in the best time it's a scary decision, but the general vibe is flipping people (like my wife and i) who are at the margin.

Then you can't bill insurers for it. That's where the real money is.

Facebook and its ilk sort were more or less the unravelling of western liberalism. The descent happened before generative ai.

...ok, but he really let it rip. Israel has tried to get every president since Kennedy to attack Iran and nobody was dumb enough or compromised enough to do it until now. It has been bad for a while, and it's naive to think it's not particularly bad now. Every president post 9/11 has been shit, but i can't think of any other ones in that cohort who have had such an acutely negative impact on my day to day until now.

Thurston county WA collects my property tax. Thurston county should not have attacked Iran and caused a surge in energy prices. The county should have hiked rates earlier and more aggressively. Thurston county is out of control!

Government is not a borg. We elected the dumbest motherfucker in the country, he consolidated power, and we got incredibly inflationary (among other things...) policies. Local government is just along for the ride.

Then I don't really understand the argument around restricting everything to a very specific PU formula. Like they dropped the MGU-H to make the unit as a whole cheaper "so that new manufacturers could be drawn in", but then, if there's a cost cap anyway, then what does it matter?

I think you're right, but I do wish the formula was more open ended. The super strict regs were supposed to prevent runaway costs, but now we have the cost cap. So like, why not institute a cost cap for the pu manufacturers and let them go nuts.