Hacker News

My eBay sales have been way down this year too and so far q4 is not looking good at all. People are cutting back across the board and it’s going to be very ugly once wall street stops plugging their ears and covering their eyes.

This is an indicator that is very close to the sale time. If you can share and don't mind sharing, how did whatever you saw during 2020/2021 corelate with retail sales?

tariffs could be an explanation.

sometimes volume and total $ are not the same.

car manufacturers, right at the beginning of covid, started cutting orders of components from their suppliers, thinking that demand is going to drop due to covid induced recession.

Guess what happened next?

Short the stock market then if you feel a recession is coming

That's a subset of "shares becoming more valuable"

Why? Everyone knows the stock market can be irrational and disconnected from the economy.

> What are these foundational issues?

The effective removal of regulations via winner bribes and a lack of enforcement plus the explicit removal of regulations, to reduce corruption and insider trading. AI is not required to create the systemic exploitations and they are far more efficient at extracting value than any AI system.

I don't understand the metaphor in this case.

If there's another European debt crisis (for example) does the bear eat Europe and any US issues go away?

I think a better metaphor for interconnected economies is that of chains always breaking at their weakest link.

Sure, well done, your link in the chain didn't break… but your anchor is still stuck on the bottom of the ocean and you're on your spare anchor (with a shorter chain) until you get back to harbour.

Real estate. The US economy floats on the perpetually-increasing cost of land. Thats where your mortgage money goes, to a series of finacial instruments to allow others to benifit from the eternally rising value of "your" property.

Why are you buying shit from China?

Prices going up 20-25% due to excessive money printed and hence high inflation during last administration don't help.

Federal taxes are #1 expense for most people. People forget to think about it because of direct deduction.

depends, on which side, of the tarrifs an economy happens to be and where, geopoliticaly.

AI, or whatever a mountain of processors churning all of the worlds data will be called later, still has no use case, other than total domination, for which it has brought a kind of lame service to all of the totaly dependent go along to get along types, but nothing approaching an actual guaranteed answer for anything usefull and profitable, lame, lame, infinite fucking lame tedious shit that has prompted most people to.stop.even trying, and so a huge vast amount of genuine human inspiration and effort is gone

Also EU moving away from US weapons. We're destroying all our exports.

I wonder what would be a good counter-investment if one thinks AI is in a bubble which is just about to burst.

Maybe consumer staples (Walmart, Pepsi etc.)? Dollar stores?

> which makes everyone more efficient and productive

There is something bizarre about an economic system that pursues productivity for the sake of productivity even as it lays off the actual participants in the economic system

An echo of another commenter who said that its amazing that AI is now writing comments on the internet

Which is great, but it actively makes the internet a worse place for everyone and eventually causes people to simply stop using your site

Somewhat similar to AI making companies more productive - you can produce more than ever, but because you’re more productive, you don’t hire enough and ultimately there aren’t enough people to consume what you produce

> many verticals are simply uninvestable in the US because of labor costs and the gap of cost to manufacture is so large it's not even worth considering.

I think this is covered in a number of papers from think tanks related to the current administration.

The overall plan, as I understood it, is to devalue the dollar while keeping the monetary reserve status. A weaker dollar will make it competitive for foreign countries to manufacture in the US. The problem is that if the dollar weakens, investors will fly away. But the AI boom offsets that.

For now it seems to work: the dollar lost more than 10% year to date, but the AI boom kept investors in the US stock market. The trade agreements will protect the US for a couple years as well. But ultimately it's a time bomb for the population, that will wake up in 10 years with half their present purchasing power, in non dollar terms.

I think an interesting way to measure the value is to argue "what would we do without it?"

If we removed "modern search" (Google) and had to go back to say 1995-era AltaVista search performance, we'd probably see major productivity drops across huge parts of the economy, and significant business failures.

If we removed the LLMs, developers would go back to Less Spicy Autocomplete and it might take a few hours longer to deliver some projects. Trolls might have to hand-photoshop Joe Biden's face onto an opossum's body like their forefathers did. But the world would keep spinning.

It's not just that we've had 20 years more to grow accustomed to Google than LLMs, it's that having a low-confidence answer or an excessively florid summary of a document are not really that useful.

> We should be forward looking in what we can do outside of manufacturing.

For example?

You could go back to vim with claude running in another terminal window

Another thing to note about China: while people love pointing to their public transit as an example of a country that's done so much right, their (over)investment in this domain has led to a concerning explosion of local government debt obligations which isn't usually well-represented in their overall debt to GDP ratios many people quote. I only state that to state that things are not all the propaganda suggests it might be in China. The big question everyone is asking is, what happens after Xi. Even the most educated experts on the matter do not have an answer.

I, too, don't understand the OP's point of quickly pivoting to value extraction. Every technology we've ever invented was immediately followed by capitalists asking "how can I use this to make more money". LLMs are an extremely valuable technology. I'm not going to sit here and pretend that anyone can correctly guess exactly how much we should be investing into this right now in order to properly price how much value they'll be generating in five years. Except, its so critical to point out that the "data center capex" numbers everyone keeps quoting are, in a very real (and, sure, potentially scary) sense, quadruple-counting the same hundred-billion dollars. We're not actually spending $400B on new data centers; Oracle is spending $nnB on Nvidia, who is spending $nnB to invest in OpenAI, who is spending $nnB to invest in AMD, who Coreweave will also be spending $nnB with, who Nvidia has an $nnB investment in... and so forth. There's a ton of duplicate-accounting going on when people report these numbers.

It doesn't grab the same headlines, but I'm very strongly of the opinion that there will be more market corrections in the next 24 months, overall stock market growth will be pretty flat, and by the end of 2027 people will still be opining on whether OpenAI's $400B annual revenue justifies a trillion dollars in capex on new graphics cards. There's no catastrophic bubble burst. AGI is still only a few years away. But AI eats the world none-the-less.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09275...

True true. Forgot about Waymo!

How ironic that these LLM's appear to be overfitting to the benchmark scores. Presumably these researchers deal with overfitting every day, but can't recognize it right in front of them

I don't think many businesses are at the stage where they can actually measure whatever AI is delivering.

At one business I know they fired most senior developers and mandated junior developers to use AI. Stakeholders were happy as finally they could see their slides in action. But, at a cost of code base being unreadable and remaining senior employees leaving.

So on paper, everything is better than ever - cheap workers deliver work fast. But I suspect in few months' time it will all collapse.

Most likely they'll be looking to hire for complete rewrite or they'll go under.

In the light of this scenario, AI is false economy.

Not necessarily. If $x is enough to get you 10x more Software engineering effort, people may be willing to increase their spending on software engineering, rather than decrease it

Electricity was a 10x productivity boost, just over a way longer timespan. We‘re just speedrunning this.

The plow was a 10x productivity booster. Guess what happened next?

Also, what happens to those employed when they each have 10 people trying to take their job. It’s a downward spiral for employment as we know it.

Quantum had already peaked in the hype. It doesn't scale, like at all. It can't be used for abstract problems. We don't even know the optimal foundation base on which to start developing. It is now in the fusion territory. Fusion is also objectively useful with immense depth or research potential. It's just humans are too dumb for it, for now and so we will do it at scale centuries later.

Crispr would clash with the religious fundamentalists slowly coming back to power in all western countries. Potentially it will be even banned, like abortions.

What would quantum technology actually deliver?

Other than collapsing the internet when every pre-quantum algorithm is broken (nice jobs for the engineers who need to scramble to fix everything, I guess) and even more uncrackable comms for the military. Drug and chemistry discovery could improve a lot?

And to be quite honest, the prospect of a massive biotech revolution is downright scary rather than exciting to me because AI might be able to convince a teenager to shoot up a school now and then, but, say, generally-available protein synthesis capability means nutters could print their own prions.

Better healthcare technology in particular would be nice, but rather like food, the problem is that we already can provide it at a high standard to most people and choose not to.

seriously, LLMs are cool but if this level of investment was happening around crispr, longevity and other health tech I would be 1000X more excited.

I like this, because I hate the idea that we should either be rooting for AI to implode and cause a crash, or for it to succeed and cause a crash (or take us into some neo-feudal society).

"quantum" and "biotech" have been wishful thinking based promises for several years now, much like "artificial intelligence"

we need human development, not some shining new blackbox that will deliver us from all suffering

we need to stop seeking redemption and just work on the very real shortcomings of modern society... we don't even have scarcity anymore but the premise is still being upheld for the benefit of the 300 or so billionaire families...

Solar is extremely cheap and battery costs are dropping quickly, IMO you may see US neighborhoods, especially rural disconnecting from the grid and rolling their own solutions.

This china rare earth thing may slow down the battery price drop somewhat but not for long because plenty of chemistries don't rely on rare earths, and there will soon be plenty of old EV packs that have some life left in them as part of grid storage.

cost for solar power and storage is decaying exponentially

scarcity isn't real anymore, it is enforced politically for the benefit of the owning class

Huh? Surely most of the investment in AI labs is equity investment, not debt (so it can't be defaulted on).

"Bad" is a judgment call. Trump approval ratings haven't dipped that far, so Congressional Republicans won't dare abandon him and there's not much political will for change.

It might change if we get into millions of foreclosures like the great recession and the pain really hits home. From what I can tell right now they're in wartime mode where they just need to buckle down until Trump wins and makes other countries pay for tariffs or something.

So the crash is only official once Wall Street's exuberance matches the economy as perceived by it's workforce? Is that a crash or just a latent arrival of the signal itself?

I wouldn't even call it political. It's financial, and should be criminal. The people who are elected to represent us are just taking bribes and being paid off to allow corporations to screw us over.

If you include local governments, then the education spending percentage gets higher, but still nothing close to healthcare.

Read to the point where it says subscribe to see the rest.

I think another reason for the recent global rise of anti-immigration parties is also that the relative economic value of immigrants (as unskilled labor) has gone down, and the "costs" (cultural/language friction) have become more visible.

The person you're replying to also acknowledged GDP was growing despite the tech layoffs. Is your assertion that GDP wasn't growing in 2024? If so, I'd love to see any evidence.

> The anti-AI slop that dominates HackerNews doesn't serve anything productive or interesting.

To you. I find the debate quite valuable, as there is a wide open future and we're in the midst of figuring out where "here" is.

ha I honestly don't have that strong of an opinion of the author because the few tidbits I've seen I didn't even read all the way because the info on the surface was so flawed. this was the first article I've actually read. so I can't say they're malicious or hallucinating because I haven't looked into why they have the opinions they do. but I'm definitely not inclined to trust them, which was why I had to say that I've recognized the pattern of "Noah Smith" (I don't know who they are, where they work, nothing) seems to just ship out their own copy/paste of whatever trendy (and flawed) opinion is hot at the moment

We're already past the point where there is no meaningful notion of "normal" that actually impacts what happens in government. Normalizing things doesn't matter that much if people care so little that they elect someone who's done what Trump did his first time.

I mean he's selling the hats and I've seen some talking heads on the news say they'll look at ways for him to do it. The two term limit is a kinda recent precedent all things considered, so...

[flagged]

It (was) also settled precedent that he can't stop spending money required to be spent by Congress (settled during Nixon's term), but the supremes decided it's different now. Same for firing heads of supposed independent federal departments, which was supposed to prevent presidential manipulation.

And the s.c. created presidential immunity out of nothing. For now the president has unchecked power, the conservative dream of a unitary executive.

This will all end when a Democrat is in power again. This is not a sarcastic exaggeration, one way they teed this up was shadow docket decisions like the Kavanaugh rule (ice can arrest/kidnap you based on appearance), it's not a precedent as shadow docket so they can reverse it any time.

Yet.

Trump can do whatever nobody will stop him from doing. Who's going to stop him from running again?

He can if SCOTUS says he can

Why not? Because the constitution says so?

Has that previously been much of an impediment to Trump and other fascists throughout history?

In the normative sense of "another atrocity like this cannot occur", then yes.

However your comment instead sounds like you are dismissing it as a non-concern... in which case I suggest you wake the heck up. We've had months now of seeing President and his cabinet actively and willfully breaking federal and Constitutional law, with the entire Republican legislature complicit.

It wouldn't even the first time states tried to remove him from their ballots either. [0]

[0] https://www.scotusblog.com/2024/03/supreme-court-rules-state...

Perhaps economic value can come from a more educated and skilled workforce if they're using AI for private tuition (if it can write as well as us, it can provide a bespoke syllabus, feedback etc.)

Automation over teaching sounds terrible in the long run, but I could see why learning languages and skills could improve productivity. The "issue" might be here that there's more to gain in developing nations with poor education standards, and so while capital concentrates more to the US because they own the tech, geographical differences in labour productivity reduces.

What is the economic value of a wheel? If we flood the market with wheels, we’re going to need far fewer sleds and horses. Pretty soon, no one might need horses at all — can you imagine that?

hell, it has negative economic value because of the opportunity costs of the electricity and water used to produce it.

Best I can tell, it’s resulting in less churn, which isn’t the same as work getting done faster. Maybe it’s a phenomenon unique to engineering, but what I’m observing isn’t necessarily work getting done faster — it’s that a smaller number of people are able to manage a much larger footprint because AI tools have gotten really good at relaying existing knowledge.

Little things that historically would get me stuck as I switch between database work, front-end, and infrastructure are no longer impeding me, because the AI tools are so good at conveying the existing knowledge of each discipline. So now, with a flat org, things just get done — there’s no need for sprint masters, knowledge-sharing sessions, or waiting on PR reviews. More people means more coordination, which ultimately takes time. In some situations that’s unavoidable, but in software engineering, most of the patterns, tools, and practices are well established; it’s just a matter of using them effectively without making your head explode.

I think this relay of knowledge is especially evident when I can’t tell an AI comment from a human one in a technical discussion — a kind of modern Turing Test, or Imitation Game.