[HN Gopher] The hype is the product
___________________________________________________________________
The hype is the product
Author : lr0
Score : 125 points
Date : 2025-07-30 17:50 UTC (5 hours ago)
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| murdockq wrote:
| This is kind of obvious because the internal incentives for
| employees (who make lots of product decisions) are based on stock
| being more than half of staff compensation comes via RSUs.
| johndhi wrote:
| I liked this analysis quite a bit. A few reactions:
|
| (1) I don't think a tech company having a monopoly is necessary
| for a tech company to stop caring about their customers and focus
| on hype instead. Plenty of public tech companies do this, just to
| chase stock price and investors.
|
| (2) It's weirdly the opposite mindset that Bezos talked about in
| that famous old video where he talks about "creating the best
| experience for the customer" is his business strategy.
| Interesting. I think ultimately companies may be misguided --
| because, in fact, ChatGPT is succeeding because they created a
| better search experience. And hype bandwagoners may fail because,
| long-term, customers don't like their products. In other words,
| this is a bad strategy.
|
| (3) what's weird about AI -- and I guess all hype trains -- is
| how part of me feels like it's hype, but part of me also sees the
| value in investing in it and its potential. The hype train itself
| and the crazy amount of money being spent on it almost defacto
| means it IS important and WILL be important. It's like a market
| and consumer interest has been created by the hype machine
| itself.
| nottorp wrote:
| > ChatGPT is succeeding because they created a better search
| experience
|
| Funny enough, no "AI" prophet is mentioning that, in spite of
| it being the most useful thing about LLMs.
|
| What I wonder is how long it will last. LLMs are being fed
| their own content by now, and someone will surely want to
| "monetize" it after the VC money starts to dry up a bit. At
| least two paths to entshittification.
| api wrote:
| "A junior intern who has memorized the Internet" is how one
| member of our team described it and it's still one of the
| best descriptions of these things I've heard.
|
| Sometimes I think these things are more like JPEGs for
| knowledge expressed as language. They're more AM (artificial
| memory) than AI (artificial intelligence). It's a blurry line
| though. They can clearly do things that involve reasoning,
| but it's arguably because that's latent in the training data.
| So a JPEG is an imperfect analogy since lossy image
| compressors can't do any reasoning about images.
| nottorp wrote:
| > They can clearly do things that involve reasoning
|
| No.
|
| > but it's arguably because that's latent in the training
| data.
|
| The internet is just bigger than what a single human can
| encounter.
|
| Plus a single human isn't likely to be able to afford to
| pay for all that training data the "AI" peddlers have
| pirated :)
| peterlk wrote:
| A dismissive "no" is not a helpful addition to this
| discussion. The truth is much more interesting and subtle
| than "no". Directed stochastic processes that reach a
| correct conclusion of novel logic problems more often
| than chance means that something interesting is
| happening, and it's sensible to call that process
| "reasoning". Does it mean that we've reached AGI? No.
| Does it mean the process reflects exactly what humans do?
| No. But dismissing "reasoning" out of hand also dismisses
| genuinely interesting phenomena.
| LamaOfRuin wrote:
| Only if you redefine "reasoning". This is something that
| the generative AI industry has succeeded in convincing
| many people of, but that doesn't mean everyone has to
| accede to that change.
|
| It's true that something interesting is happening. GP did
| not dispute that. That doesn't make it reasoning, and
| many people still believe that words should have meaning
| in order to discuss things intelligently. Language is
| ultimately a living thing and will inevitably change.
| This usually involves people fighting the change and no
| one know ahead of time which side will win.
| ToValueFunfetti wrote:
| It would be useful to supply a definition if your point
| is that others' definition is wrong. Are you saying they
| don't deduct inferences from premises? Is it "deduct"
| that you take issue with?
| zahlman wrote:
| They do not perform voluntary exploration of the
| consequences of applying logical rules for deduction; at
| best they pattern-match. Their model of conceptual
| meaning (which last I checked still struggles with
| negation, meta-reference and even simply identifying
| irrelevant noise) is not grounded in actual observational
| experience, but only in correlations between text tokens.
|
| I think it should be abundantly clear that what ChatGPT
| does when you ask it to play chess is fundamentally
| different from what Stockfish does. It isn't just weak
| and doesn't just make embarrassing errors in generating
| legal moves (like a blindfolded human might); it doesn't
| actually "read" and it generates post-hoc rationalization
| for its moves (which may not be at all logically sound)
| rather than choosing them with purpose.
|
| There are "reasoning models" that improve on this
| somewhat, but cf.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44455124 from a few
| weeks ago, and my commentary there
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44473615 .
| zahlman wrote:
| > Only if you redefine "reasoning". This is something
| that the generative AI industry has succeeded in
| convincing many people of, but that doesn't mean everyone
| has to accede to that change.
|
| I agree. However, they _can_ clearly do a reasonable
| facsimile of many things that we previously believed
| required reasoning to do acceptably.
| peterlk wrote:
| I don't think we need to redefine reasoning. Here's the
| definition of "reason" (the verb): "think, understand,
| and form judgments by a process of logic"
|
| If Claude 4 provides a detailed, logical breakdown in its
| "reasoning" (yeah, that usage is overloaded), then we
| could say that there was logical inference involved. "But
| wait!", I already hear someone saying, "That token output
| is just the result of yet another stochastic process, and
| isn't directing the AI in a deterministic, logical way,
| and thus it is not actually using logic; it's just making
| something that looks convincingly like logic, but is
| actually a hallucination of some stochastic process". And
| I think this is a good point, but I find it difficult to
| convince myself that what humans are doing is so
| different that we cannot use the word "reasoning".
|
| As a sidenote, I am _very_ tired of the semantic quagmire
| that is the current AI industry, and I would really
| appreciate a rigorous guide to all these definitions.
| exasperaited wrote:
| > A dismissive "no" is not a helpful addition to this
| discussion.
|
| Yes, your "no" must be more upbeat! Even if it's correct.
| You must be willing to temper the truth of it with
| something that doesn't hurt the feelings of the massive.
|
| > Does it mean that we've reached AGI? No. Does it mean
| the process reflects exactly what humans do? No.
|
| But here it's fine to use a "No." because these are your
| straw men, right?
|
| Is it just wrong to use a "No." when it's not in safety
| padding for the overinvested?
| GoblinSlayer wrote:
| I have a hunch it can reflect what humans do "A junior
| intern who has memorized the Internet and talks without
| thinking on permanent autopilot". We're just surprised
| how much humans can do without thinking.
| zahlman wrote:
| > "A junior intern who has memorized the Internet"
|
| ... who can also type at superhuman speeds, but has no
| self-awareness, creativity or initiative.
| Snarwin wrote:
| > ChatGPT is succeeding because they created a better search
| experience
|
| Or perhaps because Google created a worse search experience.
| leptons wrote:
| The only thing I find bad about Google search now is their
| "AI" summary, which is often just wrong. I can deal with ads
| in the search results, I expect them, and I have no doubt ads
| will be shown in ChatGPT search results too, because they are
| bleeding money. And ChatGPT is under no obligation to show
| you anything with any accuracy, which is what the underlying
| tech is based on - guessing. Thanks, I'll take my chances
| with actual search results.
| sheiyei wrote:
| I think AI evangelists avoid talking about search because
| AI is why every internet search engine sucks. I use
| DuckDuckGo and Startpage, and when trying to find answers
| to nontrivial questions I get ONLY AI spam sites as
| results. (Come up with 1500 semi-specific SEO-friendly
| articles vaguely relating to subject the theme of website
| N. Then repeat until N=100
|
| And shortly enough, AI is not even going to help with
| searching - it will eat its own s*t and offer that as
| answers. Unless the AI giants find some >99.99% way to
| filter out their own toxic waste from the training data.
| strange_quark wrote:
| What you're saying is totally correct about AI slop
| polluting the web, but the reason they don't want to talk
| about it is because the second they frame "AI" as
| slightly better search, it invites all sorts of
| unfavorable financial comparisons. It also deflates the
| hype because now you're talking about a better version of
| a thing everyone is familiar with instead of some magical
| new buzzword like "agent" or "RAG" or whatever we're
| going to be talking about next year when agents don't
| work.
| zahlman wrote:
| There was a period I remember fondly when the SEO slop
| was still mostly human generated because AI couldn't
| quite do it yet, and I was getting _much_ better results
| from DDG than from Google. Now it 's _all_ despair-
| inducing.
| jerf wrote:
| "what's weird about AI -- and I guess all hype trains -- is how
| part of me feels like it's hype, but part of me also sees the
| value in investing in it and its potential."
|
| The DotCom bubble is an instructive historical example. Pretty
| much every wild promise made during the bubble has manifested,
| right down to delivering pet food. It's just that for the
| bubble to have been worthwhile, we would essentially have had
| the internet of 2015 or 2020 delivered in 2001.
|
| (And because people forget, it is not too far off to say that
| would be like trying to deliver the internet of 2020 on
| machines with specs comparable to a Nintendo Wii. I'm trying to
| pick a game console as a sort of touchpoint, and there probably
| isn't a perfect comparison, but based on the machines I had in
| 2000 the specs are roughly inline with a Wii, at least by the
| numbers. Though the Wii would have murdered my 2000-era laptop
| on graphics.)
|
| I don't know that the AI bubble will have a similar 20-year
| lag, but I also think it's out over its skis. What we have now
| is both extremely impressive, but also not justifying the
| valuations being poured into it in the here & now. There's no
| contradiction there. In fact if you look at history there's
| been all sorts of similar cases of promising technologies being
| grotesquely over-invested in, even though they were
| transformative and amazing. If you want to go back further in
| history, the railroad bubble also has some similarities to the
| Dot Com bubble. It's not that railroad wasn't in fact a
| completely transformative technology, it's just that the random
| hodgepodge of a hundred companies slapping random sizes and
| shapes of track in half-random places wasn't worth the
| valuations they were given. The promise took decades longer to
| manifest.
| zahlman wrote:
| > (And because people forget, it is not too far off to say
| that would be like trying to deliver the internet of 2020 on
| machines with specs comparable to a Nintendo Wii. I'm trying
| to pick a game console as a sort of touchpoint, and there
| probably isn't a perfect comparison, but based on the
| machines I had in 2000 the specs are roughly inline with a
| Wii, at least by the numbers. Though the Wii would have
| murdered my 2000-era laptop on graphics.)
|
| It depresses me to think how much of the 2020 Internet (or
| 2025 Internet) _that is actually of value_ really _ought to_
| be able to run on hardware that old.
|
| Or so I imagine, anyway. I wonder if anyone's tried to
| benchmark simple CSS transitions and SVG rendering on ancient
| CPUs.
| BobbyTables2 wrote:
| Also in the amount of data.
|
| Ever remember waiting something like hour to watch a
| 60-second movie preview over dialup?
|
| I get a reminder every time I load a modern website in an
| area with very poor reception. Appears to not load at all
| --- not due to lack of connectivity but rather due the
| speeds and latencies being too slow for the amount of crap
| being fetched.
|
| GPRS and EDGE were many times faster than dialup -- must
| have been a dream -- but now utterly unusable.
| zahlman wrote:
| That is indeed one of the differences I had in mind.
| lubujackson wrote:
| It is a valuable and relevant lesson - when something wide
| and structural manifests (personal computing, the internet,
| smartphones, AI), lots of people will be able to see the
| coming future with high fidelity, but will tend to
| underestimate the speed of change. Because we gloss over all
| the many, many small challenges to get from point A to B.
|
| Yes, now it feels like something like smartphones came of age
| overnight and was always inevitable. But it really took more
| than a decade to reach the level of integration and polish
| that we now take for granted. UI on phone apps was terrible,
| speeds were terrible, screens resolutions were terrible,
| processing was minimal, battery didn't last, roaming
| charges/3g coverage, etc. For years, you couldn't pinch to
| zoom on an iPhone, stuff like that.
|
| All these structural problems were rubbed away over time and
| eventually forgotten. But so many of these small tweaks
| needed to take place before we could "fill in the blanks" and
| reach the level of ubiquity for something like an Uber driver
| using their phone for directions.
| mrob wrote:
| UI on phone apps still is terrible. Have you ever used a
| desktop with high-end gaming peripherals (fast
| monitor/keyboard/mouse), running a light desktop
| environment such as LXQt on Xorg, with animations disabled?
| The feeling of responsiveness leaves all mobile devices in
| the dust. Any modern CPU+SSD is fast enough, but good
| peripherals are still rare and make a huge difference. Most
| phones are still running 60Hz displays. A touchscreen is
| inherently clumsy compared to mouse+keyboard. Mobile UI
| feel is worse than desktop computers from the 90s.
| zahlman wrote:
| > It's weirdly the opposite mindset that Bezos talked about in
| that famous old video where he talks about "creating the best
| experience for the customer" is his business strategy.
|
| A big part of hype as a business strategy is to convince
| potential customers that you intend to create the best
| experience for them. And the simplest approach to that task is
| to say it outright.
|
| > in fact, ChatGPT is succeeding because they created a better
| search experience.
|
| Sure. But they don't market it like that, and a large fraction
| of people reporting success with ChatGPT don't seem to be
| characterizing their experiences that way. Even if you discount
| the people explicitly attempting to, well, chat with it.
| mattigames wrote:
| "Created a better search experience" sure, just like eating
| human meat would create a better dinning experience because
| there is a lot of humans near you, at the end of the day what
| "AI" is doing is butchering a bunch of websites and giving you
| a blend, in the progress making you no longer required to enter
| those websites that needed you to do so to survive, because
| they are monetized by third party ads or some paid offering.
| GuinansEyebrows wrote:
| "The spectacle is the inverted image of society in which
| relations between commodities have supplanted relations between
| people, in which 'passive identification with the spectacle
| supplants genuine activity'." [0]
|
| I read _The Society of the Spectacle_ too young and it broke me
| forever :(
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Society_of_the_Spectacle
| h2zizzle wrote:
| Hype is the product, and what it's the product of is a wealth
| imbalance that forces capital into (and I apologize in advance
| for the ire this characterization is likely to cause) Stupid
| Boomer Things. That is, the way the oldest and wealthiest
| Americans want to live and/or what they think will make them the
| most money.
|
| Poor old people don't like this kind of change because it has
| historically come at their expense. Young people don't like this
| new tech because they recognize it (to varying degrees of
| correctness) as pulling up the ladder on entry-level positions,
| decimating the social and knowledge landscape (particularly the
| treacherous, abyssal seas that used to be the World Wide Web),
| amd drawing capital away from green tech and social investment
| and into climate change-exacerbating energy usage and
| construction. But they don't have the capital to dictate
| investment decisions, so no one cares.
|
| I don't think this changes without some sort of economic
| "catastrophe" that redistributes wealth fast enough that the
| current arbiters can't get their legs back under themselves in
| time to prevent it. That's why you keep seeing all of these weird
| and novel tactics to forestall even the hint of a recession, and
| why so many young people are practically begging for, say, a
| repeat of 2008.
|
| Edit: Also, I really like this site's layout on my phone. It
| feels fresh and performant.
| leptons wrote:
| >Stupid Boomer Things
|
| Ageism is never a good look. There are smart and stupid people
| in every age group.
| h2zizzle wrote:
| Doesn't matter. If a system's purpose is what it does, a
| people's priorities are what they invest in, in aggregate.
| Boomers hold outsize wealth and have steered America's
| economic and political ship for most of the lives of the
| younger generations. So the current crop of Stupid Things are
| mostly Stupid Boomer Things (or else they wouldn't exist, as
| there would be no money or political will to sustain them).
|
| Refusing to take responsibility isn't a good look, either. So
| is derailing with respectability gripes. Let's solve the
| problem at hand.
| leptons wrote:
| >Refusing to take responsibility isn't a good look, either
|
| You want me to take responsibility for how other people in
| my age group vote (not that I am a boomer, I'm not)? That's
| your argument?
|
| Thanks but no thanks for this ridiculous comment thread.
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| Your political and moral imagination in hampered by the uber-
| adversarial and totally transactional understanding of human
| nature that the liberal worldview presupposes (by "liberal", I
| mean the hyperindividualistic ethos in the tradition of Hobbes,
| Locke, and Mill). That's why you flirt with what sounds like
| socialist-style redistribution as the only option and view
| capital as an enemy of labor.
|
| In the liberal worldview, private property has prior existence.
| The common good is understood as a concession, a derivative
| good composed of that which is ceded from private property.
| Human beings are viewed as atomized units, and society is
| consequently viewed as a fluctuating miasma of transactional
| relationships.
|
| In the classical view, the common good has prior existence, and
| private property exists _for the sake of the common good_ (we
| avoid a whole lot of grief and social strife by having private
| property; properly disposed, it is a successful means of
| distribution). Capital and labor are not construed as
| necessarily opposed. Rather, in a society in which cooperative
| relationships for mutual benefit are the rule (in place of a
| market driven by exploitation), capital and labor are friends.
| Both have skin in the game by assuming risk. In the classical
| view, workers are owed at least a family wage as a matter of
| justice. If we have a billionaire who fails to pay his
| employees adequately, then we have someone who quite literally
| has robbed his employees. Human relationships are not confined
| to merely the transactional, and we have duties toward society
| that precede our consent.
|
| According to a liberal view, if a famine strikes a region and
| some guy has a warehouse full of food, it would be theft for to
| take the food in that warehouse to survive, and theft, of
| course, is not morally permissible (it is absurd to claim
| otherwise; it's theft!). Meanwhile, according to a classical
| view, private property is not fixed absolutely. As you recall,
| it exists for the sake of the common good. So, in such a case,
| the food in that warehouse is not absolutely determined as
| private property. Private property is derived and ordered
| toward the common good. It would not be theft for the starving
| to take food from that warehouse, as the food quite literally
| belongs to them! (This is an extreme example, but I include it
| to demonstrate how the consequences of each stance play out.)
| zahlman wrote:
| It took me hardly any effort to find an essay that appears to
| be arguing that Hobbes' thought is in many ways compatible
| with that sort of redistribution:
| https://brill.com/view/journals/hobs/34/1/article-p9_9.xml
| Some quotes:
|
| > Also notable is Gregory Kavka, who argues, "Though it is
| rarely noticed, Hobbes is a bit of an economic liberal, that
| is, he believes in some form of the welfare state and in the
| redistributive taxation needed to support it."7 .... But
| Kavka's analysis has two significant flaws. First, ... Hobbes
| dedicates arguably greater attention to the problems
| associated with excessive wealth. ... The second problem with
| Kavka's analysis is that it ignores Hobbes's rich moral
| psychology that is integral to Hobbes's understanding of the
| problems associated with wealth, poverty, and inequality.
|
| > Hobbes's political program prioritizes peace above all.
| Along these lines, it is essential when considering Hobbes on
| economics that one understands how poverty, concentrated
| wealth, and inequality can obstruct peace. This is one of the
| fundamental lessons Hobbes likely learned in the decades
| leading up to the English Civil War - a war at least partly
| facilitated by the economic upheaval, the impoverishment of
| many along with the enriching of others, the concentration of
| wealth, and the systemic inequality. Hobbes acknowledges some
| of this in his own history of the Civil War, Behemoth.
|
| > While Hobbes is surely concerned about the problems poverty
| pose for his commonwealth, he expresses even greater concern
| about concentrated wealth. His earliest discussion of wealth
| can be found in his Briefe of the Art of Rhetoric, written in
| 1637, his summary of Aristotle's Rhetoric.84
|
| Classical liberals are not the same people as modern
| libertarians or minarchists.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| I don't know if anyone's done research on this extensively, but
| we seem to be very much living in a "vibe" society all around?
| the market is more irrational than ever, outright lies can be
| enough to hype up millions in value, and conversely the specter
| of bad vibes can tank anything.
|
| Has it always been this way? or am I just slow on the uptake
| mlsu wrote:
| I have noticed this as well, and yes it hasn't always been this
| way.
|
| My theory is that we are simply too wealthy. For the average
| rich person (the top 20-30%), the first $70,000 goes to real
| companies who sell real things for money. Past that and it all
| is just kinda funny money. In our society there are actually a
| ton of people making this kind of money, so there's just this
| huge chunk of money that isn't really tied to anything real. If
| you lose $100k on cryptocurrency, or you spend $800 on some
| metaverse thing, it's fine, you can still buy food.
|
| Of course this is also why people who don't make this kind of
| money are so baffled (and angry). Hearing that some no product
| company [1] was sold for billions of dollars feels insane when
| you're seriously considering the difference between a $5000 and
| a $6000 car.
|
| [1] (https://openai.com/sam-and-jony/)
| gowld wrote:
| > My theory is that we are simply too wealthy.
|
| Maybe 0.1% to 1% of us are, but the rest of us aren't.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| I think it's more insidious than the top 1%, what % of
| americans buy some frivolous overpriced coffee or cookie
| regularly? viral beverages like prime? the absurdity of
| ordering mcdonalds via uber eats?
|
| income inequality is wild right now, but even lower classes
| are participating in some absurd sort of money grabs
| regularly...
|
| the top of the market, these billion dollar companies that
| have perfected this sort of private equity capitalism have
| optimized every day luxury that can bleed anyone dry... not
| just the rich... wework or wish go down the tubes and it's
| on to the next one, founders rocket off and some unlucky
| investors are stuck holding the bag
|
| every category of daily life now has some optimized
| extraction mechanism
| mlsu wrote:
| Nah. The top 10 percent of US households make $190,000 per
| year. That is simply a lot more money than a household
| strictly needs. At that point, your Roth IRA is maxed out,
| you own a home, and you still have thousands every single
| paycheck to play with.
|
| Funny money.
| schiem wrote:
| This tracks with a report[1] that nearly half of consumer
| spending now comes from the top 10%.
|
| [1]: https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/stock-market-today-
| dow-sp50...
| mandevil wrote:
| Wealth inequality is intensely fractal, at every level it
| is enormous: someone at the 90th %ile household (there
| are 15 million of these), making 178k (1), can mostly
| imagine what someone at the 97th %ile, making 350k, would
| live like (there are 4.6 million of these), but someone
| at the 99th %, making 663k would be harder to imagine,
| and someone at the 99.9th %ile, making 3.2 million a year
| is basically impossible, and the 1500 taxpaying units at
| the 99.99th %ile, making 85 million a year is simply out
| of the frame of reality.
|
| 1: All stats are 2022 tax year, and are AGI per tax
| return, so excluding things like 401(k), based on
| https://www.irs.gov/statistics/soi-tax-stats-individual-
| stat... and defining household as "taxpaying unit"- e.g.
| married filing separately would count as two, at two
| separate levels of income
| sheiyei wrote:
| Wealth inequality; too much of the wealth that exists is
| concentrated where it is worth the least.
| ozten wrote:
| > If you lose $100k on cryptocurrency, or you spend $800 on
| some metaverse thing, it's fine, you can still buy food.
|
| 20 - 30% cannot spend $100k per year as funny money, that is
| more like the top 5% but probably more like the top 2%.
|
| High earners in the 20 - 30% often also live in expensive
| areas, so their dollar doesn't go as far as some of the more
| affordable places to live (housing, food, etc).
| arximboldi wrote:
| The parent comment just shows how most people do not
| understand how inequal the US actually is. I'd recommend to
| try this: https://wid.world/income-comparator/US/
|
| If you make a yearly gross salary of 100K you're already in
| the top 11%. With 200K you're in the top 3%. Inequality
| also leads to social segregation, which means that we live
| in bubbles where most people are "like us" and it's very
| difficult to see how privileged we actually are.
|
| Read Piketty's "Capital in the XXI century" to learn more
| about how crazy inequal the world, but specially the US, is
| becoming. Phenomena like Trump are easier to understand
| when taking this into account.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| There _is_ some nuance to it though, the average monthly
| car payment is $700! Only 10% are under $400.
|
| With the median income ~$50k and many households owning
| two cars... much of the country is actively living beyond
| their means just to get to work.
|
| We have built some sort of pseudo-luxury economy that
| seemingly has to be upkept by mandatory good vibes.
| gowld wrote:
| Did the author never watch Silicon Valley?
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZFTaEenaHM
|
| Richard, listen--
|
| No, you listen to me Jack. You promised me that you would never
| compromise the product, so do you feel like taking some action
| and backing me up on this because me and my product feel pretty
| compromised right now
|
| Richard, I don't think you understand what the product is. The
| product isn't the platform, and the product isn't your algorithm
| either, and it's not even the software. Do you know what Pied
| Piper's product is, Richard?
|
| Is--is it me?
|
| Oh God no no how could it possibly be you? You got fired! Pied
| Piper's product is its stock.
| mrweasel wrote:
| We do need to start talking about the failure of capitalism. I'm
| not naive enough to think that we should turn to communism, but
| it's clear how we're taught capitalism is suppose to work and how
| it plays out in reality are two different things.
|
| Ideally capitalism would yield better product or services, for a
| lower price. That's no longer happening. We're getting shittier
| products and we're paying more. But somehow we convince ourselves
| that it's still good, because the stock market is going up,
| corporate profits are going up.
|
| If there was ever any doubt that the hype is the product, then
| please explain the Tesla stock, 100% hype driven, there is zero
| correlation between the stock price and how the company is
| actually doing.
| mlazos wrote:
| It's because capitalism assumes a free market with competition.
| If you allow monopolies to thrive, you will not get those
| benefits. It's just that some of these types of markets have
| different dynamics due to their structure. E.g. natural
| monopolies where the barrier to entry is huge up front costs.
| Interestingly the AI startup ecosystem is raising enough money
| to surpass the barrier of needing a ton of data to train AI.
| mrweasel wrote:
| > It's because capitalism assumes a free market with
| competition
|
| But even in the cases where we do have a free market, we're
| often seeing one company fiddle with quality, maybe drop the
| price a little, then the rest quickly follow and price goes
| right back up across the board.
| zahlman wrote:
| For centuries as capitalism developed from more primitive
| systems (like feudalism and mercantilism), goods and services
| that gain value from social network effects were well beyond
| anyone's imagination. The printing press survived the
| church's attempts at suppression, but nobody back then could
| have conceived of a service that automatically distributed
| copies of your books to your friends -- much less one that
| could profit from _knowing who your friends are_ , rather
| than from explicitly charging you for the service.
| fsckboy wrote:
| not attacking your thinking, but the terms "capitalism" and
| "free market" aren't consistently well enough defined to
| capture the nuances of what this type discussion requires. At
| a minimum, capitalism is the right/ability to own something
| without others taking it from you, and free markets are
| markets you can participate in if you would like without
| asking permission from the govt or belonging to a guild.
|
| capitalism works best for everybody _on average_ when free
| markets are competitive, but when they are not, markets still
| work, they just work better for some, worse for others but
| better than nothing, and also overall worse for everybody
| because markets are not zero sum. The problem with a lot of
| what-turns-out-to-be left-wing and or populist thinking on
| markets is the assumption that markets are zero sum, "if
| there is a winner, there must be a loser", which while an
| attractive idea turns out to be false.
|
| same is true of the completely overblown idea that people are
| not rational. people are not _perfectly_ rational, but when
| it comes to parting with their money they are much more
| rational than they are not. If it were not true, people
| wouldn 't be living rationally measurably better lives today
| than 100, 200, etc. years ago. there are many other sources
| of noise in measuring that swallow irrationality up with the
| noise. (yes, selling gambling to gambling addicts is an
| irrational money printing machine, but civilization has not
| collapsed)
| indoordin0saur wrote:
| Capitalism isn't a single thing with an approved international
| standard of implementation. It can be implemented in a million
| different ways and its possible we just need some big redesign
| of it.
|
| > please explain the Tesla stock, 100% hype driven, there is
| zero correlation between the stock price and how the company is
| actually doing.
|
| They do still have the best electric cars on the market.
| sznio wrote:
| the theory assumes that in a free market, everyone is a
| rational actor, and that everyone is truthful
|
| we live in the age of lies. you can either keep debunking them
| to deaf ears, or join the bandwagon and maybe make some money
| by fooling someone else. the whole stock market feels like a
| ponzi scheme now.
| mathiaspoint wrote:
| The advantage to capitalism is the escape hatch not the
| cybernetics.
| echo7394 wrote:
| I just came to mention that I really enjoy the UI of this
| website. That is all.
| lr0 wrote:
| Me too. I miss a lot when the web used to look more like this.
| marcellus23 wrote:
| > There is more and more proof these tools are not as useful as
| they are hyped out to be. LLM-based coding tools seem to actually
| hurt programmers' productivity. "Hallucinations" are not going
| away because the only thing these LLMs can do is "hallucinate";
| they just sometimes (about 30% of the time, in fact) happen to
| generate some text that has some connection to reality.
|
| This hurts the article, I think. I don't disagree with his point
| about companies caring too much about stockholders. But this
| anti-LLM envangelism just comes across as ludditism.
| indoordin0saur wrote:
| Yeah, author is definitely false here. I have 10+ years of
| professional experience backend programming and I've found VS
| Code copilot to be pretty helpful overall. It saves me a lot of
| time digging through documentation and writing out tedious
| little functions (e.g. converting dates from one format to
| another). I wouldn't use it to write anything lengthy but
| overall it has improved my productivity, though I could see how
| it might hurt junior engineers.
| fmbb wrote:
| > This hurts the article, I think. I don't disagree with his
| point about companies caring too much about stockholders. But
| this anti-LLM envangelism just comes across as ludditism.
|
| Is there any research out there suggesting LLMs help
| programmers get stuff done? I can't say I follow the research
| closely but I have not seen any.
|
| Googling for [ai llm productivity research] and looking at the
| first page of results I can't find much interesting evidence.
| One report says users asked to create a basic web server in JS
| complete the task 55% faster using an LLM. One report measures
| "perceived productivity". Students given text writing tasks are
| faster. One report measures productivity as lines of code
| written. The rest seem to just be projecting theoretical
| productivity gains.
|
| Has anyone measured any improved productivity?
|
| I can see this report from METR that is actually measuring
| something: https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-
| experienced-o...
|
| > Core Result > > When developers are allowed to use AI tools,
| they take 19% longer to complete issues--a significant slowdown
| that goes against developer beliefs and expert forecasts. This
| gap between perception and reality is striking: developers
| expected AI to speed them up by 24%, and even after
| experiencing the slowdown, they still believed AI had sped them
| up by 20%.
|
| But surely someone must have also found results showing
| productivity gains. I assume I was just not looking hard
| enough.
|
| I am a happy Copilot Pro user since 2021, still.
| ignoramous wrote:
| > _Is there any research out there suggesting LLMs help
| programmers get stuff done?_
|
| Any research will be limited by what the researchers control
| for?
|
| In my personal experience, when I get a well written bug
| report or detailed logs, my instinct that I feed it to an
| Agent and let it figure it all out has never disappointed me.
| It runs in the background while I work on things I
| instinctively know the Agent wouldn't do a good job of. How
| did I develop those instincts? By using Agents for like 3
| days. These things (including for code completion) are
| ridiculously effective for the programming languages & code
| bases I work in, if nowhere else.
|
| > _Has anyone measured any improved productivity? ... I am a
| happy Copilot Pro user since 2021, still._
|
| Whether productivity is tanking or not, I will find it
| incredibly hard to stop using LLMs/Agents just because a
| metric or three indicates I'd be better off without them. I
| must note though, it might be too soon to put a mark on
| productivity as it is a function of how well new technologies
| are integrated into processes and workflows, which typically
| happens over decades and not months/years.
| alsefj wrote:
| LinkedIn just replaced its Jobs page with AI Slop. You can't do
| regular searches anymore, they've filtered and normalized all
| results, and they stopped labeling promoted content. (All
| searches now return the same number of results, many of which
| have little to do with your query) So now I'm deleting my
| LinkedIn account. Much of the internet is already dead.
| ankit219 wrote:
| The study where developers lost productivity due to using AI
| tools should always be mentioned with caveats.
|
| This comment by simonw for reference:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44522772
|
| 1/ They tested on 16 experienced developers. 2/ They only used
| cursor. No mention of other tools at the time. Cursor is
| notoriously bad on bigger codebases, while even Windsurf
| (competition at the time) would have shown different results. 3/
| They only allowed training for 30 mins on cursor. 4/ As simonw
| mentions, the ones who improved had some previous experience with
| cursor. 5/ Yet, the study is definitively mentioned as AI
| actively ruining productivity and none of the other factors.
| pedalpete wrote:
| I think this is just a symbol of the current hype cycle.
|
| We are living in a strange time because there is a combination of
| fear and greed in the market.
|
| Yesterday I learned that market leverage (credit) is trending
| towards levels of the dot-com bust and great recession
| (https://en.macromicro.me/collections/34/us-stock-relative/89...)
|
| When the tide goes out, the real swimmers remain and the tourists
| leave.
|
| I quite enjoy that time in tech specifically, though I'm sure
| other industries face similar in-and-out flows.
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