However with AI, it feels different. I have seen both technical and non-technical managers tell engineers something to the effect of "you aren't prompting correctly" if they aren't able to get the task done within some preferred time frame.

We are seeing the industry revive metrics like lines of code, number of tickets closed, bug's found (looking at you Mythos), and now even "tokenmaxxing". It's exhausting to push back on. These are all things that we know will be gamed. But the individual that brings this up might be viewed as "anti-ai" or something.

If you're an IC, I do think the best thing to do is just go along with it. Sooner or later we will see more shocked-pikachu-faced executives when they realize that engineers are spending tokens just for the sake of it.

I am just not completely sure that we won't gain something new on the other side of this, in the same way the calculator outsourced the need for doing arithmetic in our heads.

My argument is more that, the speed and scale is so unlike anything that we've seen before, that this time _feels_ like more of an attack on something to core to what humanity is. But maybe it's just that: a feeling.

LLMs/AI could very well be the worst case scenario we are imagining/discussing here. I just don't think we know enough to say that's how it will definitely play out.

I think the jury is still out on whether LLMs actually lead to complete atrophy of skills that don't eventually get replaced with brand new skills.

I think it's true that we collectively lose something akin to beauty every time technology advances. But usually some new set of skills that have beauty emerge.

If LLMs end up being the pneumatic nail gun for the human mind, I personally think that's a fine thing for us to accept.

If they end up being more like some dark factory that autonomously does everything - then I think ultimately the thing that makes us human (our minds) will slowly decay and be lost, and that seems very sad. That's a version of the future we should try to prevent, I think.

Extremely simplified example. Ignore inflation, raises, etc.

Which choice is better?

- $400k/yr for 5 years followed by a layoff, with the possibility that the thing you've helped Meta build rolls out everywhere, and there are next to no job opportunities

- $200k/yr for the rest of your career, and employment opportunities don't dry up because you didn't help build the thing meant to replace you

IPO's fairly reliably pop on day one. The performance in the first 6 months is mixed but skews slightly negative.

But the size of these 3, combined with the rule changes that are allowing them to be included in the indices much quicker than normal, means this time is very different than what we've seen before.

Spacex/Anthropic/OpenAI almost certainly won't crash the market. The most probable thing to happen is that all 3 of these rally a surprising amount on their opening day, because there will be so much forced buying of the shares.

In my opinion, the most likely bagholders will be any retail traders that buy these stocks before the lockups expire.

I think it's very likely that we see the following:

IPO day -> all 3 close higher than opening price.

1 month -> price settles into a range 20-30% higher than IPO price.

6-12 months -> price is back near IPO price +-5%. Anyone who bought and held in the first 3 months has unrealized losses.

What Spacex/Elon are doing is sketchy as hell. But the numbers involved here are not terribly meaningful for your portfolio.

At IPO, $75B of Spacex shares will be bought/sold. The S&P 500 uses float-adjusted weightings, and the current float-adjusted total is $54T. If you are 100% invested in SPY, then about 0.14% of your holdings will be spacex on IPO day (75B/54T~=0.14%).

Obviously Musk and friends will start dumping some of the locked up float (~1.65T) when they can. But they definitely will not be doing so in a way that crashes the price or the market. That's in nobody's interest.

If you assume that half of the shares end up as float eventually (post-lockup), you'd end up owning around 1.6% of spacex in your S&P 500 etf (875B/~55T~=1.6%). That's not nothing but it's not significant enough that you should consider liquidating your 401k.

I'm picking on Spacex specifically because they are the biggest and imo, have the sketchiest/worst finances of the 3.

No, we really haven't. Every previous wave of automation has targeted human labor.

The thing that makes human's unique in the animal kingdom is our intelligence. From an economic stand point, that's the thing that makes people valuable.

When that's automated, what is there left? Onlyfans?

To anyone with a brain, that is obviously not true.

If AI continues to improve at the pace that it has been, why would anyone hire a human to do the thinking? Human intelligence will be orders of magnitude more expensive, and much slower...

The tech executives know this and they actually just do not care. The reason they are saying it will drive job creation is just to temporarily keep worker anxiety levels to a minimum.

To be clear, I am not claiming that all human work will be automated away soon. Just that a huge portion of it will be.

But the hemispheres absolutely DO specialize in very predictable ways. Core language faculties are almost always handled by the left hemisphere, for instance.

Face processing is almost universally handled by the right hemisphere.

We know these things from people who have suffered an injury to one of their hemispheres. A person with damage to the right hemisphere has a chance of not being able to recognize faces, but that's almost never seen in an injury that exclusively effects the left-hemisphere.

But why would situs inversus somehow be tied to this at all? If there's a gene that favors right-handedness, it's not like it would somehow "choose" left-handedness because the individual has their internal organs flipped.

Zero is a good alternative in that case.

> data centers of this magnitude offer a ton of economic benefits to the area and the state

Electricity cost increases are subsidized by residents: https://hls.harvard.edu/today/how-data-centers-may-lead-to-h...

Job creation is extremely minimal - data center build outs have some of the lowest job creation numbers per $ spent: https://goodjobsfirst.org/study-state-and-local-governments-...

Question: why are these huge data centers being built in remote regions and small towns?

Answer: because the companies building the data centers are essentially getting free power and water at the expense of the area's citizens. The only locals who benefit from these projects are the politicians giving the land away.

This was well known before the AI boom - see this study from back in 2016:

https://goodjobsfirst.org/study-state-and-local-governments-...

The numbers are even less favorable today.

Right now, layoffs are cool. It boosts earnings. And the current sentiment is that new ideas and projects are risky unless they involve shoving the square-shaped-AI into the circle-shaped-hole.

The thing that bothers me the most is that the people making these decisions are "winning" regardless of the outcomes. I can't remember a time where the industry was so overtly like this (i.e., the outcomes don't really matter). Perhaps the dotcom-era but I wasn't working in tech yet.

The majority of active traders won't beat the market (e.g. the S&P 500). That doesn't mean they aren't profitable.