FearandLoathingintheMotte
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User ID: 4101
FearandLoathingintheMotte
22hr ago
That would be be funny
I was just responding to the historical pope thing, felt like chiming in
FearandLoathingintheMotte
1d ago
Presumably all the ones in and around the Crusades? I think the above comment was silly but I imagine there were many popes who wanted to (medieval equivalent) glass the middle east.
FearandLoathingintheMotte
1d ago
Ahh
I guess I was trying to differentiate between "what was said now in this deal no one should trust" and it actually happening at scale.
"Don't count your chickens" type situation.
Especially because the language of the ceasefire seemed that the money would be split by Iran/Oman and be used for fixing shit that got blown up. So it's not clear to me if Iran will even get any money, even though all the pro-Iran/Anti-USA people are all doing this face right now 🤑
FearandLoathingintheMotte
1d ago
Iran / Russia, absolutely not. I mean I don't know if Trump has done much either way to Russia, they seem to be quite good at shooting off their own feet.
China? Unfathomably yes
Not just Trump either, China has been raking in geopolitical W's since covid.
Despite being an autocratic state more than happy to leverage its power internally/externally whenever they can get away with it, when compared to Trump China gets to pretend they're the sane rational reliable power player.
Now let's look at Russia v Ukraine and USA v Iran
Russia v Ukraine:
China's two biggest weaknesses are food and fuel. Less food these days. Russia is one of the largest producers of both of those things and they share a land border.
Russia is deeply weakened by this war. Huge disaster for them. The west is smartly* bleeding them out by arming Ukraine.
- However, a weak Russia is incredibly accretive to China. Then they're just a cucked gas station. The Sino Soviet split was good. We want Russia and China both competing to be the big dog of Eurasia. A Russia that has been burned and excommunicated from the West is a little brother to China. Huge strategic win.
Maybe having Russia incorporate into the West more post '91 was 100% impossible, and Putin is a chimpout retard for sure. But we (the West) didn't even try we just victory lapped them over and over again and now here we are, basically setting up a vassal state for China to squeeze for unblockadable raw materials.
USA v Iran
-
the USA has expended a TON of Tomahawks, JASSM-ER, and many many more offensive and defensive PGMs that are made in artisanal quantities. Big win for China for the next 5 years.
-
the USA looks like violent retards to much of the world. "Fuck the rest of the world, we don't need them" you might say. Which is somewhat true. But a terrible strategy to contain China.
-
oil shocks increase demand for EVs but this wasn't a very big one.
FearandLoathingintheMotte
1d ago
The US tried to get the Kurds to attack the regime by giving them weapons and the Kurds remembered how unreliable US support is
Genuinely one of the best parts of this whole disaster.
I love the Kurds, they seem great. I'm still so fucking mad we abandoned them.
I'm really happy for them, I hope they use the weapons well.
FearandLoathingintheMotte
1d ago
Zeno's paradox
I'm familiar with this paradox but unsure how it fits here
FearandLoathingintheMotte
1d ago
There will 100% be more pipelines as a result of this.
FearandLoathingintheMotte
1d ago
If there are actualll tolls imposed on and paid by ships, and a material amount of that money actually ends up in accounts the Iranians can control as they see fit, I would call an Iranian win. But that's a lot of "if this then that" to get that stream of cashflows into Iran.
Also we'll see what they give up on re: nuclear and missile programs.
We shall see!
FearandLoathingintheMotte
1d ago
Not saying they can't/won't
Just that there's a reason it didn't happen already
FearandLoathingintheMotte
2d ago
Not sure why that wasn’t done before.
Why build expensive infrastructure that crosses multiple borders and results in you paying huge $/%s in "transit fees" when you can just ship it
FearandLoathingintheMotte
2d ago
The best part about this ceasefire is how easy it is to spin in either direction. Everyone gets to feel like a winner!
"Iran has won, they've proven beyond a doubt that they hold the ultimate card, closing the straits. They made the USA come to the table and knock off the bombing."
"Iran has gotten cucked, we bombed them so hard they cracked and agreed to open the straits without us having to do anything but sit back and bomb them, so much for their leverage"
FearandLoathingintheMotte
2d ago
Losing a poorly thought out war with Persia is traditional for empires in this stage.
Damn this is such a banger, well done
FearandLoathingintheMotte
3d ago
Which is much more entertaining than Biden's senility.
Say what you will about Trump, he is an S-tier showman
FearandLoathingintheMotte
3d ago
I hate this uncertainty.
I've always been an anxious person, worried for the future, etc. I've basically given up with AI, the world has gotten so ridiculous it's just funny.
I have no control, everything is going to change. Everything has changed a lot already in my lifetime. I'm just gonna ride it out, I had my friends over for a BBQ last night. Trying to do more of that this year.
FearandLoathingintheMotte
3d ago
No one is going to vibe code their own SAAS to replace Salesforce et al
Salesforce and other huge boys with giant moats will enjoy higher labor efficiency. May experience serious pain due to higher competition > margin pressure but hard to predict.
Mid-cap software will knife fight each other over margins as competitors grow like weeds.
Small-cap/VC/PE idek lol, really excited to watch this space.
I'm super curious to see what happens when a given VC can invest in 5x as many startups per unit of $capital. I assume startups will scale faster. Do VCs stretch themselves thin with more companies in a portfolio? Do funds get bigger or smaller? Are there more or less actual VCs? Is it easier or harder to get a VC fund going?
FearandLoathingintheMotte
3d ago
One of my favorite parts of this forum is moments like this, when someone puts my thoughts into words better than I could. I agree with every word.
I have the exact same view on AI art. I have quite low skills in "artistic taste", it's never I skill I've been good at or sought to develop much (low reward per n time vs things I like more). But now I can get to make funny images and concept art and express ideas in mediums that were previously locked to me. What fun! Yet there's people crying and screaming on the internet because like game developers are using AI agents to help them make games faster+better. I'm just excited for the golden age of AI gameslop. Good dev studios are going to be absolutely cooking.
I myself become a wrapper for the LLM, I'm just giving the stamp of approval to outputs that are already 99% perfect, and getting paid to eat the blame if something does go a wrong 1% of the time. And competition with other humans in this role will drive my marginal profit down to pennies.
I'm hoping this window of time lasts a while. I'm adjacent to the legal world and they're going to use every institution they wield (many!) to keep themselves in this state for as long as they can.
FearandLoathingintheMotte
3d ago
Is this rapidly-improving expectations?
Yes
Honeymoon phase wearing off?
Yes + its fun building the first part of slop-software (slopware?). The last 20% of finalization/polish is much less fun. I have gone from "holy shit AI software development is so neat" to "AI software development is neat but I'm getting really sick of making X specific and complicated thing I have no business building work" (I'm so close though).
AI vendors cranking the screws to reduce costs and looking for pennies?
Yes, this is getting worse too.
I thought the models were difficult to train and largely static, so I didn't think that sort of scaling was trivially on the table.
That's why they're all spending Billions
This AI bro vs (idk what to call the opposition) schism on this site is very funny
I feel like both sides are talking passed each other in many ways, and also have no interest in bridging the epistemic gaps.
About me
I'm firmly in the "AI bro" camp I guess. I do not code, nor do I know how to do code aside from simple programming 101 type stuff, which is all I need(ed) to make VBA scripts work in excel. I will never copy/paste another line of Stack Overflow VBA to jank together a macro again, and that makes me very happy.
Adoption is slow, but it's gradually happening at my employer $MULTI_NATIONAL_FINANCE_CO. It is very clear to me that I will see (and already have seen) large productivity gains, especially as agent scaffolds are made for things other than coding.
LLMs are both extremely powerful and very jagged. I think a huge amount of their "jaggedness" is due to their nature as LLMs, and are very unlikely to get to ASI/some versions of AGI*. My best guess is they'll be as disruptive as the ~computer (i.e. the information age) was from 19XX-now, perhaps slightly smaller given "AI impact on human civilization" is kind of a subset of "computer impact on human civilization".
*Notwithstanding some kind of paradigm change in algorithm/AI approach. Which is always possible, but we're pretty clearly on the LLM-tech tree path for the next bit.
Vague Predictions
I am sure many white collar jobs will disappear entirely, many will be insulated for any number of reasons (ranging from genuine limits to retarded bureaucracy and everything in between) and will remain unchanged for a while, and some, like mine, will keep their core identity but day to day tasks will shift a lot and who knows what happens to employment (too many factors to guess per job).
Coding
It is clearly revolutionizing coding. This cannot be denied. GitHub commits are now going parabolic, so people are "building things". Much of which is slop. I am one of those people, I now have a small but growing fleet of personal tools. I'm sure they are coded awfully, I've never looked and wouldn't understand if I did. I don't care, they work for me.
There are much more accomplished coders on twitter, etc, who are also reporting massive changes to their lives. Many of them are incentivized to say such things and over exaggerate, but I doubt it's a massive coordinated lie or mass delusion. So there is truth there.
The more sensible ones will even agree that AI code is on average mediocre to bad, and AI can't do high precision high quality specialized code like a cracked human can. AI will even take your amazing high precision high quality specialized code and slop it if you're not careful. Many of them, like Karpathy, have just given up and accepted the slop as a price of doing business. Because they're accomplishing what they want with the code too. It works.
It's assumed that AI performance will improve massively from where it is today. It has so far, it's a pretty safe assumption right now. It's rumored that the new Claude model beat expectations on performance vs scaling laws. AI model hype is always a large % bullshit, but we'll find out the real capabilities soon, and no matter what they will be better than they are now.
I don't think LLMs are going to bring us the ASI digital god of Sam's wet dreams/nightmares. I think they are going to profoundly change our service economies regardless.
Your situation
I don't know your codebase or the thing you're getting it to do. I don't know anything about HTTP.
I seriously doubt you're trying to set the AI up for success at all. I can't code and I'm probably using more AI coding best practices than you are, and all my git commits are titled "lol".
It's also very possible that it's not worth the time to set up AI "properly" to fix this. There's a very real possibility it's much faster, if more tedious, to just do it yourself. But this is one task. N=1. There are things AI can do for you today, that's a guarantee.
The bubble
The usual retort of "skill issue" is "well if I have to set it up and use best practices then AI is a bubble". I think that's a strawman, because I am not stuck in a reflexive yes/no binary where if you like AI you can't also think it's a bubble. It could be a bubble, I don't know (or care). It's incredibly easy for an asset to be over-financed and you never know if you've done enough capex until you do too much (at any scale). What I care about is the AI tools I can access which are excellent and also flawed.
Maybe AI needs to be that good out of the box to justify the trillions in capex. It probably does. But does that matter here? Neither you nor I control capex spend or can predict how long the scaling laws will hold for.
I don't care if AI is a bubble - we'll all find out and predictions of this scale/magnitude are essentially worthless. If you have alpha and guess right, all power to you, but the bubble conversational branch strikes me as a fool's errand. And it's irrelevant to "can LLMs do things for you?".
Closing thoughts
We have LLMs here right now that are massively changing basically any digital task you point them at. It's not easy, and it doesn't work everywhere, but it's insane when it does.
It's cognitively exhausting. It's a new way of thinking + every time new models/tools come out you change many things you were previously doing. So many assumptions and bottlenecks change. It's genuinely not easy or obvious always how to implement it. We are learning this in real time as a culture.
It's so exciting, and I hope to soon quit my job at $MULTI_NATIONAL_FINANCE_CO to capture more of the value of my labor, which is about to increase a lot (probably lmao, could also go to 0).
If you want to refuse or deny the power of these tools you can. You can set about finding examples of them sucking to point and laugh. But you're letting your bias blind you, and leaving a lot of value on the table. You can tell your computer to do stuff and it can now, it's awesome.
Also noting that in your HN link the inventor of Claude Code is asking ppl for feedback/providing explanations live as I type this.
FearandLoathingintheMotte
3d ago
For sure. Renewables aren't something you can just put anywhere. They have pros/cons like all power generation options. The pro/con balance has just shifted massively in the last 10 years and people don't recognize or acknowledge that.
It's just another tool in the belt of an industrial civilization. And to dismiss them because of culture warring is retarded and counterproductive to the betterment of humanity.
FearandLoathingintheMotte
3d ago
Why are Americans becoming more anti-renewable?
Beacuse they are correctly updated on the reliability issues of renewables, and not at all updated on the fact battery technology is now quite good and cheap. ERCOT is standing up massive amounts of batteries right now.
God bless Texas, in some places capitalism still has a reality bias.
FearandLoathingintheMotte
3d ago
show your plan to protect solar plant or offshore wind farm from attack by drone swarms that are now common in Eastern Europe.
No infrastructure can withstand a coordinated attacker with access to a large number of cutting edge effectors...
FearandLoathingintheMotte
5d ago
Not polymarket sports betting
Draft kings sports betting
FearandLoathingintheMotte
5d ago
They may as well just put a huge disclaimer on their site "we reserve the right to void any market for any reason we deem fit"
This is literally every sports betting company. They can ban you if you win too much.
I actually think its such bullshit. If you want to provide bets and be a market maker, you should have to take the wins as well as the losses. Someone is beating your odds? Get better at providing odds or close up shop.
Did everyone see the first item, find it yawnworthy but not sufficiently objectionable to deserve a downvote, and just minimize the entire comment without even looking at the second and third items?
Yes
Your comment actually got me to go back and to read it, and that intersection is actually hilarious and an absolute monstrosity.
Your explanation/analysis is incredibly dense/written by an expert for an expert and as someone who likes civic design but who's expertise stops immediately at "likes civic design" I wanted to take something from it, but didn't really get anywhere.
In general, to be frank, I find some of your deep dives profoundly captivating and interesting, and some to be incredibly not interesting to me. I do not think you should change your posting habits at all however. You are quite smart and insightful about the things you like, and as the audience we can pick and choose what to engage with.
The fog of war is still thick, even with technology/smartphones/etc
We won't know the truth for many months, years, or decades.
Fun to speculate though
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