this post was submitted on 06 Jan 2025
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TechTakes

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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.

For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community

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[–] [email protected] 76 points 2 months ago (5 children)

We will have a manned mission to mars within two years! Full self driving this year! This will bank the unbanked! Wait, sorry different guys. ;)

[–] [email protected] 32 points 2 months ago (3 children)

It's like everyone learned the wrong lessons about the dotcom bubble

[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 months ago

Amazon lost money so if OpenAI loses money it must be Amazon

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago

Did they, though? I mean, it beats workin’.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (3 children)

And people who keep repeating this dumb shit probably visit 50 .com's a day.....

The dotcom bubble didn't rid us of dotcoms. Neither will the AI "bubble".

[–] [email protected] 30 points 2 months ago (2 children)

The dotcom bubble didn’t rid us of dotcoms.

wait… is your definition of dotcom any corporation that owns a .com TLD domain? that’s so fucking precious, I love it

[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Didnt you know? The subprime crisis of 2008 got rid of subprime numbers.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago

and it deleted my Optimus Subprime fan fiction!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble

Literally...the...definition. Did you think it meant something other than that? Because it's quite literally in the word.

Most of the sites today were survivors of the era of easy venture capital, and they weren't any different than the other dotcoms. The whole point was the widespread adoption of the internet, thus...dotcom; because they all started up .com web addresses.

Google, Amazon, Ndivia, Ebay still dotcoms. Just survivors.

We still have remnants of their behavior too - with things like Uber and Lyft.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 months ago (1 children)

xD

My favourite dotcom is Ford

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 months ago (1 children)

if only I splurged on awfulsystems dotcom, I could’ve been one of the big boys

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago

At least wereallyreallysuck dot com should still be up for grabs

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

At the same time, a decline in interest rates increased the availability of capital.[14] The Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997, which lowered the top marginal capital gains tax in the United States, also made people more willing to make more speculative investments.[15] Alan Greenspan, then-Chair of the Federal Reserve, allegedly fueled investments in the stock market by putting a positive spin on stock valuations.[16] The Telecommunications Act of 1996 was expected to result in many new technologies from which many people wanted to profit.[17] The bubble edit

As a result of these factors, many investors were eager to invest, at any valuation, in any dot-com company, especially if it had one of the Internet-related prefixes or a ".com" suffix in its name. Venture capital was easy to raise. Investment banks, which profited significantly from initial public offerings (IPO), fueled speculation and encouraged investment in technology.[18] A combination of rapidly increasing stock prices in the quaternary sector of the economy and confidence that the companies would turn future profits created an environment in which many investors were willing to overlook traditional metrics, such as the price–earnings ratio, and base confidence on technological advancements, leading to a stock market bubble.[16]

[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 months ago

I'd suggest learning more things before sharing your thoughts.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I'm not expecting AI or dotcoms to go away. It's a way for the right people to get rich before they move on to pumping something else.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago

a ferengi wouldn’t - props for keeping in character at least

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago (1 children)

More or less the same guys in the background.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago

just give them a few thousand days, any thousand days now

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago

Well it worked, and in fact still does for Phony Stark.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago
[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

https://motherfrunker.ca/fsd/ Someone posted this on a different post. Hilarious

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago

Wonder if his pivot to politics is because that is a better fit for his seemingly low attention span and high need for novelty/excitement or if it is because he is starting to realize that he can't keep promising this forever. (both of course).

[–] [email protected] 66 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Ironically so far it looks like it is capable to replace execs.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 2 months ago (2 children)

This isn’t stopping execs from laying workers off in droves and mandating AI replacements.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 months ago

They have been wanting to fire those workers for the past 4 years, but now they can do it in a way that won't spoke shareholders.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago

Geniuses i tells ya. We’ll save millyuns! Minus the bonuses tho right: ha haaaaa!

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago

Replacing execs is the easiest thing to do, since all it takes is someone who is more than willing to fuck up the workers in the name of profit, no actual skills required.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago

It's easier and cheaper to just use parrots to replace execs.

[–] [email protected] 39 points 2 months ago (2 children)

We'll destroy the environment and ruin the economy, but for 1 month you'll have amazing profits while you don't have to pay wages!

[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 months ago (1 children)

What if we just fire all the employees except the CEO? Just hear me out.

No expenses. In fact sell the office buildings too.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Why stop before the ceo, fully automated cishet planetary chatgpt capitalism!

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Zuckerfucker is on it already, soon instagram and facebook will be nothing but AIs posting

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago

I for one welcome our slop replacements.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago

Nah j/k the profits aren’t great.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Or they’ll be “AGI” — A Guy Instead.

Lol. This is perfect. Can we please adopt this everywhere.

As for the OpenAI statement... it's interesting how it starts with "We are now confident [...]" to make people think "ooh now comes the real stuff"... but then it quickly makes a sharp turn towards weasel words: "We believe that [...] we may see [...]" . I guess the idea is that the confidence from the first part is supposed to carry over to the second, while retaining a way to later say "look, we didn't promise anything for 2025". But then again, maybe I'm ascribing too much thoughtfulness here, when actually they just throw out random bullshit, just like their "AI".

[–] [email protected] 21 points 2 months ago (1 children)

the important point is for Sam not to make any statement that wouldn't qualify as forward-looking statements. This helps dodge the SEC busting them for lying to investors, like Theranos and FTX.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago

Sam better have a savings account exclusively to pay for lawyers once Microsoft realizes buying 49% of OpenAI was a mistake.

Or not, it'd be hella fun seeing him get fucked in court

[–] [email protected] 28 points 2 months ago (1 children)

How’s it going? The Wall Street Journal looked at five “agents” that are totally in real production use, guys. Three of the “agents” generate plans under close human supervision. Two of the “agents” are chatbots — showing how the real future of agents is simply to rebrand existing systems as “agents.” Or they’ll be “AGI” — A Guy Instead. [WSJ]

Seriously. Everyone putting money on this is a total schmuck.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I'm afraid they're putting so much money into it, that it becomes too big to fail. The behemoths will push onwards, but the smallest investors will lose.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago

The end-game for AI (and Crypto, increasingly) is to incorporate into federal systems and financial systems in such a way that they can't be removed without gutting departments or upsetting major donors.

These are entirely parasitic organizations. They only exist to deplete the assets of the organizations they latch onto.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 2 months ago

OpenAI and Microsoft recently redefined “artificial general intelligence” as OpenAI making $100 billion profit.

Defining intelligence this way means that virtually no human who has ever lived qualifies as intelligent, either. That's one way for machine intelligence to reach parity with human intelligence, I suppose.

Then again, Sam Altman has lit enough of Microsoft's money on fire that he especially doesn't count as intelligent according to this definition. So maybe it has some merit after all.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Sam Altman == Elizabeth Holmes

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 months ago (1 children)

He's at least an order of magnitude bigger than Holmes. She only squandered billions and injured thousands. Altman's looking to squander trillions and (if his endless thirst for water and electricity is continuously sated) kill millions.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago

that's just inflation, the schema is the same, before them there were Adam Neumann, Travis Kalanick, they exploit people and environment for their own ego.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 months ago

AI is only losing money because its too good at its job. If you invest another $1T, you can get in on the ground floor of the most transformative grift of the national security state since the dosing rod.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 months ago

Wait you're saying I can't replace multiple waged employees for $200 per month? No one could have predicted this

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

In other news, artificial general intelligence announces joint venture with fusion power called Ten Years Away.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 months ago