The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.

The better strategy, IMO, is to keep your money safe and wait for the bubble to burst, then pile in for the recovery. Where to keep money safe is a good question, though. Just holding cash might be risky if inflation comes back, and the current administration seems anxious to pump up inflation.

There's a pair of seriously bad assumptions underlying your analysis:

(1) What AI does right now is all it's going to do. Given the way capabilites have grown recently, this is a ludicrous assumption. Keep in mind that ChatGPT was launched November 30, 2022... it's less than three years old! And the reasoning models are barely a year old. There is no reason whatsoever to assume that this technology has peaked.

(2) We already know how to take full advantage of AI. Every time a new technology comes along it takes decades for us to fully understand how to effectively use it, and to deploy it everywhere it is useful. I'd say we still haven't fully incorporated the Internet into our society, and we've been working on that for over 30 years now. We're barely beginning to understand how to use what AI we've already got, and it'll take years, if not decades, for the full economic benefits to be achieved -- and in the meantime AI is probably going to continue improving.

The AI thing absolutely is a bubble, but it's not "sand-castle based or vapor based". It's very real. The problem is that the massive wave of investment is going to have to start generating returns within the next 3-4 years or else the financial deals that underpin it all will collapse. That doesn't mean the technology will disappear, it just means that the current investors will lose their shirts, other people will scoop up their assets at firesale prices, and those people will figure out how to deploy it effectively, and create trillions in economic value.

Well, assuming AI doesn't just kill us all.

It's like the railroads. Enormous fortunes were made and then lost as the railroad boom played out and then the bubble burst. When people were driving hard to push rails across the continental US, the business case for doing so wasn't there. Yes, linking the east and west coasts had some value, but not much, since there really wasn't that much on the west coast. And there was a whole lot of nothing in between. But it was obvious to everyone that when the railroads connected the coasts and opened access to the interior, there would be enormous value. What exactly, no one knew, in the sense that no one knew where all of the railroad-enabled interior cities would be constructed or what kinds of things they would do. But it was clear that there was value in access to all of that land and that someone would do something with it.

On the other hand, realizing that value didn't happen right away. It took decades for all of the land granted to the railroads to become really valuable, because it wasn't valuable until people came and built farms, dug mines, established ranches and generally built lives and industry. The return on that massive investment was there... but it came far too late for most of the people that invested it. Lots of bankruptcies resulted, and others swooped in and snapped up the resources for bargain-basement prices, and they're the ones who became incredibly wealthy (well, they and the ones who supplied the steel, e.g. Carnegie).

It's been the same with pretty much every technology-driven bubble. Remember telecom/dot-com bubble in the 90s, with all of the "dark fiber" that was laid everywhere? Bankruptcies and consolidations resulted, and all of that fiber got lit up and used. That bubble built the Internet, and huge fortunes were made as a result -- the top half-dozen most valuable companies on the planet are all a direct result.

OpenAI and Anthropic are betting that this time will be different, that the payoff will come fast enough to pay back the investment. Google is betting this somewhat, too, but Google has scale, diversity and resources to weather the bust -- and might be well-positioned to snap up the depreciated investments made by others. If history is any guide, OpenAI and Anthropic are wrong. But, then again, AI is fundamentally different from every other technology we've created.

Like most racists, your critical thinking skills (assuming you have them) are shoved aside by overwhelming confirmation bias. Otherwise, you'd have noticed that the US was also a lot whiter before the Pendleton Act, and that the post-Pendleton boom continued and even accelerated after the Civil Rights acts and a large influx of non-white immigrants. We became the world's sole superpower and continued increasing our economic, political and cultural dominance as a diverse, melting-pot society. The rise of China as an economic power (oh, wait... how is that, they're not white, how can they possibly do well?) has flummoxed us somewhat, but even with Trump beginning to throw away the apolitical civil service, our international partnerships and, well, the rule of law as a whole, we're still on top. But the decline is beginning, and it's not the brown-skinned immigrants who are taking us down, it's the white nationalist administration.

If you could discard your biases and examine the situation objectively and critically, you would notice that the timeline you're referring to completely and utterly refutes the conclusion that you're trying to draw.

It may be the case that some independent operators refuse to load some random EV into a container with inadequate means of monitoring it. That doesn't mean they can't be shipped en masse with appropriate safety procedures. The likes of BYD operate their own fleets of ships and will ship them to wherever there is demand.

Well Venezuela's administration is evil but that doesn't justify the sabre rattling the US is doing right now which clearly has ulterior motives. In fact, if you were to replace the word "Venezuela" with "Ukraine", the rhetoric wouldn't be far removed from what Russia was saying prior to invading that country.

You can tell that the next giant solar flare is going to flatten this whole house of cards.

It's not just auto manufacturing but industry in general. China has stolen an insurmountable lead on renewables, EVs, battery tech, robots and other forms of manufacturing & the resources needed to make them.

Meanwhile America, instead of innovating or competing has decided to go protectionist, using tariffs to stop domestic manufacturers getting kicked to the curb because they suck so hard. That can only work for so long, but after that?

While America was imposing tariffs on everyone, other countries were re-aligning their trade to less hostile countries. China wants to do business and so it gets the business.

That's because you're taking the default, most expensive, booking option. On hilton.com, which I almost always use for business travel, click through the "more rates" link and you'll typically see rates for prepayment with no cancellation, rates with 2-3 day cancellation and rates with 24-hour cancellation. Also rates with free breakfast, rates with double points, etc.

Only consumers who are okay with possibly not being able to book a room.

I actually do this quite often on vacation. We like to fly to an interesting place with only a rough itinerary -- basically a list of things we want to see in approximate order based on a rough driving route -- then during the trip we book each night's accommodations that day, usually mid or late afternoon. By searching the whole area reachable by driving from our current location (and in the direction of what we'd like to do the next day) we can usually find a really good price on a decent place, and very often end up finding nice places that we'd never have stayed otherwise.

A few times we've really hit the jackpot, such as one night we spent at the fantastic Liss Ard Estate in southern Ireland, paying about 120 EUR for a room that usually goes for upwards of 500. That was so nice we almost decided to stay a second night. Another time, a call directly to the hotel got us the owner who offered us the night in a nice room for 50 EUR on the condition that we pay in cash :D . The flip side is that we have a couple of times had to stay places we really didn't like. It's likely that if we do this for long enough we may eventually have to badly overpay for a room (since hoteliers sometimes hold back a small number of rooms they hope to rent at very high rates when things are busy), go to a hostel, or even end up sleeping in the car. But on balance it's a risk that has paid off for us, mostly because it makes our vacations flexible and casual rather than tying us to a rigid schedule of locations, or keeping us restricted to one region.

I highly recommend this vacation strategy if you can be flexible and a little adventurous and when traveling in countries where you speak the language (or many of the locals speak yours) and which are generally safe. We've done it on a western US road trip (UT, NV, CA, OR, WA, ID), and in New Zealand, Ireland, Puerto Rico, Italy, Slovenia, Portugal and the US Virgin Islands. This is a vacation strategy that wasn't really possible before smartphones and Internet booking. I guess it could have been done pre-Internet, but it would have required a more adventurous mindset than I have at this point in my life, or than my wife has ever had.

For business travel I want my hotel reservation locked in, well in advance.

Yep, and just like happened to the Internet, after the bubble bursts everyone will realize the tech is useless and it will quickly fade into obscurity. Same thing that happened with the telecom bubble and the railroad bubble. So much fiber / track that got laid and then never used.

Completely different situation. A human is making the decisions in that case. Google Maps even warns drivers not to blindly follow it. This is entirely different from a fully autonomous vehicle which is moving without any human direction or control.

Umm, none of the suits against OpenAI for suicides have been closed out, they're all still pending. It also isn't remotely the same thing. A self-driving car operating without any human control that kills someone is clearly at fault and there is no one to shift the blame to. The case of LLM users committing suicide is very fuzzy at best.

Quite the opposite (until a couple of months ago I worked at Google, on Android, and wrote a lot of Rust): Much Rust code requires more reviews. This is because if the reviewer you'd normally go to as a subject-matter expert in the area isn't also an experienced Rust developer (common), what you do is get two reviews, one from the reviewer who knows the area, and one from an experienced Rust engineer.

The reviews still tend to go faster, though, because there are a whole lot of things reviewers don't have to check. When reviewing C++ code you have to watch carefully to make sure the author didn't write something subtly incorrect that could smash the stack or create a race condition. When reviewing Rust code you can just assume that the compiler wouldn't allow any of that, so you just focus on looking for higher-level logic bugs. Unless you're looking at an unsafe block, of course, but those are (a) rare and (b) required to be accompanied with thorough documentation that explains why the code is actually safe.

I can answer this, at least for Android (which is the topic of TFA): Android requires all new native code to be written in Rust, unless there is some specific reason to use C++. And, really, the only valid reason for using C++ is that the new code is a small addition to an existing C++ binary. So, effectively everyone on the Android team that works on native code and isn't just making small maintenance changes to existing code is "recruited" to write Rust.

One thing to keep in mind, though, is that software engineers at Google are significantly more capable than the industry average. So while I don't think your point has anything to do with the successful results in Android, it might well be a significant factor in other environments.