When in the history of humanity has there not been a big problem coming? Or occurring, for that matter.

Correct. This is why I don't like the term "hallucinate". AIs don't experience hallucinations, because they don't experience anything. The problem they have would more correctly be called, in psychology terms "confabulation" -- they patch up holes in their knowledge by making up plausible sounding facts.

I have experimented with AI assistance for certain tasks, and find that generative AI absolutely passes the Turing test for short sessions -- if anything it's too good; too fast; too well-informed. But the longer the session goes, the more the illusion of intelligence evaporates.

This is because under the hood, what AI is doing is a bunch of linear algebra. The "model" is a set of matrices, and the "context" is a set of vectors representing your session up to the current point, augmented during each prompt response by results from Internet searches. The problem is, the "context" takes up lots of expensive high performance video RAM, and every user only gets so much of that. When you run out of space for your context, the older stuff drops out of the context. This is why credibility drops the longer a session runs. You start with a nice empty context, and you bring in some internet search results and run them through the model and it all makes sense. When you start throwing out parts of the context, the context turns into inconsistent mush.

The problem in this story is not the wealth, but its form. Cryptocurrency transactions are generally irreversible and not subject to the layers of process and protection that have been built up around large banking transactions. Keep your money in banks and brokerages like a sensible person and you don't have much risk.

I tried to use a chat tool to write a bash script that would prompt for username and file system, for a quota change.

Was total garbage.

I'm not a coder; just a stupid admin but how are folks using these tools for programming?

Uh, yes, the 24-hour cancellation option is always the most expensive one for a given room (ignoring paying extra for add-ons like free breakfast or extra points). What other option would be more expensive? The one that gives the consumer the most flexibility is the one with the highest risk to the property, and that's priced in.

Yeah, TFA overstated it. Though if you're not booking through the chain directly, in many cases it is hard to get a 24-hour cancellation policy. Many of the travel aggregator services hide them.

Yep. That's all true even if AI is the most transformative technology ever invented, even if it generates trillions per year in economic output -- it might not do it soon enough to prevent another crash. You don't have to believe that AI is "sand-castle based or vapor based" (which it's really not) to see a big problem coming.

It is like saying: someone will do some work for free, because they like it, lets then make sure that we take away the product of their work, they don't need it anyway. How is that a moral stance, how is it good economically? People feel a certain way if someone tries to steal from them. One thing is to work, even if you don't have to, but to understand that the result of your work is yours. It is a completely different proposition to enslave someone just because they can survive without keeping the results of their work. Practically speaking, if someone sees this type of attitude, they choose a different jurisdiction to do their work, where there won't be such blatant abuse.

I disagree with this approach because I am against theft. Whatever an individual can create for himself is his to do with as he desires, not anyone else. I don't understand this sentiment, is there anything in it except for envy?

The goal is to be the last man alive, sitting on a pile of 8 billion plus skulls.

There is no other definition of 'a winner'.

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.

Here is the thing, you are posting on Slashdot. Don't tell me you are not sharp enough to find a broker, and buy some long dated at the money PUTS either on the AI and AI adjacent firms or just the market over all with funds like SPY / QQQ.

You If you really had conviction about truly big enough crash for Main Street to feel it to commit 18 or 20K; you'd make enough to keep the mortgage current and food on the table for a year right there after there return of the principle.

The thing is you don't really believe in such a crash. The bigger part of you thinks this will all just blow over in couple quarters, you might not get a great Christmas bonus either for 2025 or 2026 but mostly you don't think your financial life will be all that greatly impacted. I think that bigger part of you is right. OpenAI's investors are going to lose a lot of money, probably Anthropic and anyone else not actually in the business of making the compute hardware, or using the compute hardware to make physical things like drugs, better plastic, etc. I don't think there is going to be any 2008 like crisis..

And we're also smart enough to realize the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.

Newt Gingrich predicted the dot-com boom will crash... in 1996. It took another 5 years for it to happen.

The 2008 crash was also predicted - you might remember The Big Short. But you'll also remember there were serious issues with cashflow a couple of years before it happened.

If this stuff was easy to predict, I wouldn't be making puts. I'd be investing heavily in it knowing when it wouild peak and then sell just shortly before. Then once sold I would make put calls.

There are many manufacturers that sell all kinds of vehicles in the USA. Some made completely abroad from various different countries. Some domestically. And a lot are a complex mixture of the two. But you think there is a grand conspiracy/collusion among them all of them to deprive consumers of lower-priced/lower-end models?

The big 3, which have American brand loyalty up the wazoo, realized in the 90s they made more money on bigger vehicles. They they've been marketing bigger and bigger vehicles to Americans. It's why the F-150 is the best-selling pickup truck (and how much larger it is now than in the past). Heck, for a few years in the mid 2000's, F-150's were sold with so much luxury they had no cargo carrying capacity once you loaded it up with a couple of adults - you had maybe 150 lbs of axle weight left.

It's also why SUVs are insanely popular, and not cheap small SUVs like the foreign makes, but the big ones.

It's why the Big 3 have been getting rid of less profitable sedans - they're marketing people to buy big cars. And the cars they do make in the lower end of the spectrum just can't compete - with major recalls going on.

The only reason America still makes cars are EVs like Tesla. The ICE cars are almost all foreign makes.

The Big 3 aren't worried about Toyota Camrys or Corollas because Americans are loyal to the Ford, GM and Chrysler marks. It would take a seismic shift to get them to consider a Honda or Toyota. And even more to go with a Hyundai or Kia. All of whom make low end vehicles that are cheap but relatively full featured.

Ford isn't going to sell F-150s to Japan - too big, too expensive, not very useful. But Ford doesn't care about the Japanese market. Toyota and Honda, meanwhile, sell very nice efficient cars to Americans to fill the lower end gap. Of course, Trump also goes around and does tariffs, but a lot of those are made in the US to be sold in the US.

But brand loyalty is a fierce thing, especially in red country.

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.