Ideally a new business creates more value than it simply takes out of an existing marketplace.

I think one can argue a lot of 2010s app-ification, Uber-of-X, or what I called "re-intermediation" was more than 50% rent seeking.

The business model of being willing to lose billions selling $1 of goods for 80cents (before even talking CapEx) until your competitors fold (and then raise prices) is the kind of thing we used to regulate against.

At some point our regulation shifted towards a more short term "if it makes consumer prices lower right now its OK".

Yes this also stuck out the most to me haha. That's like the tax&tip for a single beer if you are sitting down to dine in NYC now

"it didnt work" - providing neither the code nor the error

"I ran this" - dropping 500 lines of code into slack, not specifying where he ran it, what line it broke or what the error was

Either mode required 15 iterative questions to get to a useful state of information.

It's crazy watching some of the producer YT videos now and they open up these projects with 105 tracks, multi-layered/multi-voice drums, etc.

We've already made most consumer goods cheap.

The goods/services that are more inflation tied - food, transport, medicine, housing, and education.. are those tethered tied to physical world where costs are driven by energy, regulatory issues, and skilled domestic labor.

Good chance we run the COVID inflation all over again

Pi 5 8GB is $200

MacBook Neo 8GB is $600 (probably some edu discount available) Sure 3x the price, but it comes with - 256GB SSD, battery, display, keyboard, trackpad..

So the Pi has slowly become too expensive for weird one-off projects and also price competitive with a cheap Mac by the time you add all the stuff you need to use it as a cheap computer.

If Apple ever got around to a headless "Mac Micro", below the Mini, which had the same specs as the Neo in desktop form it would be even more stark. They could easily ship that for $400 (mini is $300 cheaper than cheapest M-series MacBook with same ram/ssd). They might never do this as it's enough computer for most people they'd lose revenue from those otherwise spending far more at the Apple Store.

Also big picture its hard to see it as some sort of self-improving intelligence if humans are hand crafting these paths and tools for it.

So the question remains if non-programmers will adapt, the LLMs will accept wider range of input styles, or .. its just another abstraction layer for devs to use.

I've observed this in the wild where someone is iterating with an LLM and giving it only negative feedback. For example responding to edits with "don't make it blue" rather than "keep the existing button shape, and change the color back to green".

The LLM doesn't really come back the way a human would and say "so what color do you want?".. it just, guesses. Now abstract that to more complex tasks.

In X years is it just going to be a thin OS-like layer where a majority of work is being handled by other "programs".

There are a lot of non-tech people using these products in this manner.

Along these lines my friend is CTO at a non-tech firm and theres vibe coding happening in one department on a project that is going to churn $1M of tokens. Head of that department told him it's OK because instead of paying a SWE annual salary, they'll just pay $1M of tokens once forever.

People don't know what they don't know about software, SDLC, support, maintenance, etc. If code was something you write once and never think about again, most tech orgs could be 75% smaller.

Particularly as tokenmaxxing has ended and people are being charged more economic prices. If the pricing 5-10x the way Uber,etc did on the path to profitability.. even more so.

It's still funny that 4 years into this mania the models can hallucinate basic ground truths, humans are increasingly not reviewing the output, and misusing LLMs where simple automation would suffice.

My wife does project management and works with a lot of tech leads. They came to her with a project plan deck, and she started questioning some weird dates.

The LLM was able to pull artifacts out of their issuer tracker, but it just.. hallucinated some of the dates in the process of creating a project plan deck out of the underlying data. These guys didn't care to review and notice, and who knows what else it hallucinated content wise. They were happy to send this project plan multiple levels up the food chain with hallucinated unreviewed dates.

5 years ago they would have just written a script and had none of this mess.

The S&P recovered from Dotcom bottom in ~7 years while the Nasdaq-100 took 15 years. Likewise Nasdaq took 3.5 years and the AI hype to recover back to its COVID highs in 2024 while S&P had the same recovery in about 2 years.

This is the downside to Nasdaq having higher returns in tech bull markets.

So the indices have a very different volatility profile by design, we should be happy to have the choice rather than have them all converge to the same product.

It dropped because tech dropped and it still has a lot of tech.

This is why QQQ was down far more than SPY, as QQQ is more tech heavy and will be adding these companies.