Also, Elon rolled most of that ‘future AI empire’ stuff into SPCX instead. Meaning that even if investors wanted to believe it that, they know that Elon can play shell games and put the prize wherever he wants and the investors are not able to control that.

Yeah, while there are some folks that are die-hard must have gas cars, lots of other folks experience instant torque, smoothest and quietest drive imaginable, and replenishing range without having to go out of your way to a station. Wondering when the next maintenance needs to come and there’s no oil, no wearing belts, no super hot engine bay, just some things like wiper blades and a bit more rough on tires owing to generally higher weight.

There are downsides and awkward fits for some people. My apartment dwelling colleague would be screwed since his place has no available residential charging. Road trips can be more inconvient (though viable and perhaps worth it if you are taking a road trip every few months but spare yourself a weekly trip to the gas station). But certainly there’s a market for which EVs provide more value than combustion vehicles.

I want you to be right, but I’m more skeptical. I see all over the place companies explicitly targeting a profitable subset: the biggest suckers of the available suckers. Higher margin, fewer whiny customers. Bonus points if it creates a cult-like fanbase (a lot of big brands manage to cultivate this).

Saw a story where a company explicitly had a strategy of “increase prices by 10x, and it may scare off 90% of customers, but the 10% left will be a wonderful gold mine”. Particularly shortages in the tech industry swayed a lot of folks that advocated for high-volume, low-margin to low-volume, high-margin.

So if 20% are ride-or-die for Tesla and Musk, then it might be a decent enough move to double down on those 20%.

Not defending, just an explanation, and one that if anything would enrage Elon more.

He’s still an absurdly over-wealthed taint stain, but the specific numbers over that threshold were just not quite as substantial as other (also somewhat imaginary) numbers.

Point in fact, he was a trillionaire, and now he is not, but he didn’t lose anything real. He still has every bit the amount of real wealth and control over all that stuff you listed that he had before, just the number shifted by billions of dollars while preserving every last thing of import that was wrong with his wealth. He is no longer a trillionaire but that means absolutely nothing about the problems his wealth pose in real terms.

At some point, the numbers cease being a thing for meeting their needs, their comforts, and at some point even their every whim and preference they could possibly imagine. It just becomes a score and they peg their egos to the score. This is a level no one should ever be at.

Didn’t help that he pissed away the carefully cultivated “Tony Stark” image. Now people don’t shrug off his failures like they were inclined to do.

Note that while that sounds ridiculous, we demarcate value using a currency system that makes standing still look like mild growth. When you ultimately are controlling currency, you can create the appearance of growth under any real world condition you like.

So a company that looks flat in a system designed to make flat look like grown is actually experiencing some decline.

Of course whether that is a decline in product, results, or just random investor sentiment is all up in the air.

The issue is that the downsides are massive and the upsides pretty mid.

Oh look, I can whip up a pretty generic website or utility from natural language. That’s… something I guess… The more… ambitious applications of CodeGen I’ve found to be “different” rather than “better”, a different huge pain in the ass than the usual huge pain in the ass, and it’s a matter of taste which one someone prefers, and I don’t think the “All-in Agentic” flow actually is any faster when you get at this “pain in the ass” point.

On the downside, well pretty much his whole post.

Note that this specifically is the GenAI stuff, broader AI like machine vision is arguable more balanced (intrusive surveillance, but also useful for medical imaging, spotting wildfires early, stuff like that).

So I guess the concern is that by saying “if not for all the bad, it could be pretty good” may be fine, but in practice is used to provide cover for a lot of the bad, because they would argue to not risk throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

I get it, but at the same time, do we always have to let key douchebags be “too big to fail” and endlessly support their choices no matter what?

This time around, I anticipate massive inflation as they just try to print their way out of it. That’s the sort of financial disaster that seems to be a bit more on-brand for our current leadership.

Ask a stupid question on no stupid questions.

Hey, it’s no stupid questions. Only smart questions allowed.

If you ever want to grow capability of technical contributions, you are welcome but not necessary.

I would much prefer someone that accepts their level of contribution than one who thinks “Claude can make me a valuable contributor even if I have no idea how to”.

I want to agree, but have to acknowledge that, realistically, they won’t even know all the things that need to be addressed before the huge userbase starts poking it.

Back in the day games were limited and the gameplay was generally fairly constrained, making fairly comprehensive QA at least plausible. Now things are so open ended there’s no way a company hits all of that.

Though I’m not sure every game needs to be that open ended…

I went to look it up, evidently it was the Commodore 64.

But judging from the context, they wouldn’t have even bothered. They knew and made a change to just force an unsatisfying game over. They had ample opportunity to fix it even after release (logistics easier than NES roms), but didn’t bother.

No, saying that folks who get going with AI can get into a feedback loop. Wow, this seems like a person except it likes every idea I have and never ever challenges me. Then they recalibrate to a more lower friction world.

Already happens in online communities where folks tend to get ban-happy over anything that doesn’t perfectly fit a community’s vibe. People got a bit more insufferable when they could find the most like-minded communities to endlessly reinforce their own views. AI takes it a step further by always being able to be that like-minded peer, no matter what your views are.

It’s even worse if people get hit with this a lot during their formative years, but people stay a bit malleable after growing up. Certainly some upbringings bring you closer to going all in on AI flattery than others and having a further “starting point” makes things more likely and faster, but even fairly reasonable people can go a bit nuts.

You also see it with power and wealth. I’ve known folks that at least seemed fairly grounded with a healthy relationship with being wrong or losing turn into quite unlikeable, self-centered folks after having a bit of success and excessive external validation from sycophants.

Well I try to be easy to talk to, but I’m not going to be “What a clever idea” to everything brought up to me no matter what, so I won’t be as “nice” as a GenAI chatbot ever.

Of course that’s true, the issue is that when folks are surrounded by “yes men” (or AI equivalents), they lose perspective and suddenly a lack of flattery is enough to be in the “douchebag” category. Some reasonable social friction is important to keep people from going way off the rails.

One problem is AI interactions moving the goalposts of what folks may perceive as ‘douchebag’.

An AI providing sycophantic reinforcement at max makes someone being vaguely skeptical of you feel, by comparison, like they are being a ‘douchebag’.

Sometimes, it’s best if people in your life aren’t always acting in a way that seems supportive and positive in the moment. For example if you are having a paranoid delusion, you need a reality check rather than what feels like external validation.

Talking to yourself keeps the perspective hopefully grounded, you know who you are talking to and how full of shit they can be. The magic of AI seems to peel that grounded perspective away for some folks.

The pronouns are vague, but I think they are claiming that an AI user sincerely believes that some manifested thing on an AI platform loves the user. That the LLM+Context Window = An entity capable of love.

I’m more worried about such a person than holding stuff against them.

Treating a chat bot like an acquaintance leads to some poor mental health outcomes.

Yeah, had a car dealer try to say “the price doesn’t even matter, only the monthly payment matters, right?”

The problem for those of us who know better: this reasoning works on most of the customers and it’s more profitable to do that than cater to more savvy customers.

Given how long that would take, I’d guess that we will see OpenAI backing out of some of their purchasing commitments as a price pressure before then.

Sam Altman basically single handedly committed to buying almost half of the world’s RAM capacity, and on other fronts OpenAI has already backing out of some of its more egregiously stupid business decisions. I’m sure the purchasing commitments are only a matter of time to come up on that chopping block.