Having lived through a couple big market busts over the past 30 years, it's interesting to see that almost all of them were caused by a loosening of standards.
e.g.
- DotCom boom was letting companies IPO even if they had no revenue
- Great Recession was due to loosening credit restrictions for mortgages e.g. giving people NINJA (no income, no job) loans
If you're curious, the longest uptime I've had someone report back was in excess of 4 years.
P.S. I also remember working at a big investment bank and the oldest Good Till Cancel order in the mainframe was a Buy CSCO @ $6 from the late 1990s (this was in 2010).
until quite recently I dealt with a machine that had uptime in excess of 16,000 days. Before anyone panics, it was on a closed network. It was a second hand machine and we were very worried that if it was shut down the disk wouldn't recover, hence just not touching it. It was in a hut in the back of beyond so exceedingly tedious to replace if we needed to.
Having done multiple martial arts (Judo, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and Filipino martial arts and, if you count it, fencing) I've come to the conclusion that Aikido is the Lisp of the martial arts world:
- it's considered very beautiful
- it takes a long time to become fluent in it
- it "expands your mind"
- in theory it can "work on the street" but in practice people reach for other tools
Not having practised Aikido, but somewhat familiar with Lisp:
> it's considered very beautiful
Funny, I've heard it described as 'porridge with fingernail clippings', which doesn't seem to me like a description evoking a 'very beautiful' image.
> it takes a long time to become fluent in it
Not more so than many other programming languages. Of course, most people don't start with Lisp, so their frame of reference is off.
> it "expands your mind"
A fairly meaningless statement which is claimed of a great many things. Is Lisp any more or less mind-expanding than, say, marijuana?
> in theory it can "work on the street" but in practice people reach for other tools
What do you mean, 'in theory'? Lisp has been used, in practise, by NASA, for running a robot on Mars: <https://www.corecursive.com/lisp-in-space-with-ron-garret/>. If that isn't 'working on the street', then, by golly, that's a mean street you've got there.
I agree. And it gets better with age as you won't care too much if it works on the street or not; you'll have acquired better tools like firearms and good lawyers to defend yourself.
My dad was a stock broker in the late 1970s and remembers when most of trading was 100% manual and firms actually had "runners" who would take stock certificates back and forth between trading firms.
He has this great quote about when computers came out:
"We were told 'computers will save you so much time on work tasks that you won't even know what to do with your free time'. I spent the next 30 years working the same number of hours. "
> He has this great quote about when computers came out: "We were told 'computers will save you so much time on work tasks that you won't even know what to do with your free time'. I spent the next 30 years working the same number of hours. "
From about one hundred years ago:
> Now it is true that the needs of human beings may seem to be insatiable. But they fall into two classes --those needs which are absolute in the sense that we feel them whatever the situation of our fellow human beings may be, and those which are relative in the sense that we feel them only if their satisfaction lifts us above, makes us feel superior to, our fellows. Needs of the second class, those which satisfy the desire for superiority, may indeed be insatiable; for the higher the general level, the higher still are they. But this is not so true of the absolute needs-a point may soon be reached, much sooner perhaps than we are all of us aware of, when these needs are satisfied in the sense that we prefer to devote our further energies to non-economic purposes.
[…]
> For many ages to come the old Adam will be so strong in us that everybody will need to do some work if he is to be contented. We shall do more things for ourselves than is usual with the rich to-day, only too glad to have small duties and tasks and routines. But beyond this, we shall endeavour to spread the bread thin on the butter-to make what work there is still to be done to be as widely shared as possible. Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while. For three hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us!
* John Maynard Keynes, "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren" (1930)
An essay putting forward / hypothesizing four reasons on why the above did not happen (We haven't spread the wealth around enough; People actually love working; There's no limit to human desires; Leisure is expensive):
In some European countries, you can actually go on welfare and never work again. It takes some tricks because the state doesn’t like it; and maybe you‘ll want to do some undeclared side jobs for 15h a week and you’ll be comfortable.
I don’t know how such people can live with themselves. But apparently, if you’re immune to the second factor, it is possible, nowadays, to work 15h or less, without any wealth, and lead a good life.
The only thing threatening this status quo is corporations and rich people pulling their wealth into other states; and related, being net importers. I don’t understand why the EU is allowing this to happen. They should grow some teeth finally.
Oh sure, you get free stuff indefinitely if you abuse the system. You sound like that tiktok post about the "infinite free money glitch" that is check fraud.
Interestingly, this is how a lot of rich people make their money. They do something bad and then get the state to bail them out. For example, bankers trading recklessly, taking the bonuses and then leaving govt to sort out the mess, effectively back-paying their bonuses.
Another example is privatisation in the UK: scrap all investment, load the company with debt, leave the consumer and govt to sort out the mess.
So the rich do it too, just on a much grander scale.
> The net of law is spread so wide, \ No sinner from its sweep may hide. \ Its meshes are so fine and strong, \ They take in every child of wrong. \ O wondrous web of mystery! \ Big fish alone escape from thee!
"Good" life might be bit questionable. But Finland at least it is possible. Existence will be meagre without other cashflows in cash. Might even be okay if you can make proper amount of cash.
Unemployment (JobSeeker payment) is actually pretty brutal here, we have a thing called ‘mutual obligation requirements’ where you have to go to meetings with (very ineffective but extremely profitable) private job service providers who force you to apply for enough jobs per week (no matter if they’re relevant or not).
Decades ago there was what I have read was an extremely effective Government department called the ’Commonwealth Employment Services’ but that was disbanded and contracts handed to private firms for excuses like “efficiency” that (surprise) didn’t end up panning out.
> Australia no problem. Most liberal welfare in the world
Jobseeker is a maximum of $26k per year, but for most people it's going to be around $21k [1]. What else are you using supplement that because that feels like it would be close to the poverty line.
I think the FIRE movement is a response to how absurd this is, but it feels kind of wrong that you have to front load all of the saving for your whole life in the first 30 years.
I'd love to work 3 days a week now and be paid a livable amount, rather than grind 5 days a week, getting paid more than I need so I can retire fast. But tech companies don't want you for 3 days a week, its 5 or nothing for most of them.
IDK about UK but in Germany it’s the law that employees can request 80% work at 80% pay and can’t be denied except for significant operational reasons and such.
As you said, it can be a double edged sword to be the 80% worker in the otherwise 100% team.
I get your point, but people still have chores to do today. Ultimately, there is a big difference between doing work for yourself, and doing work for someone else for a wage.
In one instance you keep the value you are creating, in the other it goes to your employer.
Given the choice between the two I would much prefer to work for myself, as a matter of dignity.
I don't think this is an accurate picture for a number of reasons, first and foremost that these people regularly died from trivially preventable reasons. That luxury today takes a lot of effort from a lot of people.
I'm pretty sure most of white collar HN crowd isn't being ground into dust. It'd be cool to work less though!
People waited around a lot before, and since the baseline speed for everything was slower, no one had an edge. Now everything is fast and instantaneous and that’s available to everyone. It’s part of the reason why our lives are so stressful now. I remember my parents working and their work had significantly less stress on a day-to-day basis. Everything was at a nice relaxed human pace. They would be responsible for one excel sheet’s worth of work per week, which we can now do in an hour or two.
Environment doesn't impose stress on us. Our reaction to it does. Learn to control that response, can use it to your advantage when you choose to let it in.
I’m pretty certain there are physiological limits that you can’t just muscle through and stress _can_ be an indicator that you’re reaching said limits.
People work 5 days a week because of protracted violent strikes by unions and socialist revolutionaries forcing governments to recognize labor rights. Prior to that the norm was working 7 days a week, sunup to sundown, with only Christmas off, from adolescence until you died.
When rights are equal, force wins. This is true for either the worker or the employer. Hence why employers frequently employed private firms to commit said violence on unions.
Weekends, sick days, vacation days, being paid in legal tender and not company scrip, maternity leave, safety regulations, disabled affordance, banning child labor, civil rights and womens' rights (while they lasted) and the minimum wage. All due to socialist activism and a non-zero amount of violence.
Hold your socialist jihad propaganda a bit off, sundays were definitely off days for festivities, visiting church etc. Definitely all over Europe, its still frowned upon in many places to do any amount of ie house work during sundays.
Banning child labor is literally the "I'm helping" meme but for government.
Child went away mostly on its own (as did labor by the disabled) because industrialization made all that non-competitive compared to a normal adult operating some machine. Then, once child labor was relegated to a few niches of limited overall economic importance the government showed up and banned it to win a few brownie points from some jerks.
Child labor isn't a success of some socialists 100yr ago. It's a success of some propagandists 100yr ago.
Computers feel like a pretty good analogy for how AI will affect the workforce.
I suspect productivity will massively increase, the complexity and cognitive load of our work will similarly multiply, and yet we'll still being doing the now-more-complex work in some capacity for a similar number of hours.
No, the average worker does not live to work. The average shareholder and executive lives to extract every ounce of work possible out of the average workers.
I'm not particularly religious but I did give up Twitter for lent as a test of my self control.
I highly recommend everyone occasionally do this with social media as it was somewhat eyeopening how much better I felt overall. This was mostly due to not being exposed to the doom scrolling you can eventually get pulled into (despite efforts not to).
I did miss feeling like I was "plugged in" to the stream of news/memes etc though.
I was in college in the late 1990s/early 2000s and I distinctly remember an econometrics professor state the following:
"As cable TV and Pay Per View came out, there were studies done about how many movies people would watch if given unlimited access to films. The results were bandied about as proof that we should build out all this infrastructure to support this line of business. When the data was further analyzed by statisticians etc, it turned out that people claimed they were going to watch films 10-12 hours a day, every day of the week. Impossible."
I feel like we are in a similar boat here where some people are assuming:
- EVERYONE is going to be using max tokens
- tokens will NEVER get cheaper due to improvements in hardware, software, design, market forces etc etc
>I feel like we are in a similar boat here where some people are assuming:
>- EVERYONE is going to be using max tokens
>- tokens will NEVER get cheaper due to improvements in hardware, software, design, market forces etc etc
I feel like the reverse assumption is being made, that the current model looks like IBM doubling down on Mainframes soon to become cheap enough to deploy everywhere, when the real action is that the costs coming down represents cheaper hardware or more efficient software, and that a big chunk of "cheaper" AI will be eaten by smaller products deployed by individuals. Whatever the Personal Computer of AI looks like is going to be more disruptive than just an API endpoint you can fling tokens at.
We already see this with things like chrome auto installing an LLM.
You cant tell me with complete certainty that theres a moat here for the people spending 1 trillion + on this infra.
>When the data was further analyzed by statisticians etc, it turned out that people claimed they were going to watch films 10-12 hours a day, every day of the week. Impossible.
I also think this applies to people suggesting that companies will sack workers for AI, when the costs of replacing everything someone does in a day is more expensive in terms of tokens (likely even at a reduced price) than just hiring a bloke.
> it turned out that people claimed they were going to watch films 10-12 hours a day, every day of the week. Impossible."
I realized it long ago: one needs output to make meaning. Input can only be the cherry on a cake in one's life. That, actually, makes FIRE or Fat FIRE not so sustainable unless one has other hobbies.
What people: I'm sure some people are watching 10-12 hours per day - in places like nursing homes or hospitals. I know a reasonable number of people who watch a film nearly every day: 2-3 hours. Most people watch something every few days - often a tuesday night movie night for the family (or something like that). There are some who never watch anything. I don't know what the statistics are on this.
My friends in day care tell me the kids hate "movie day" because movies are all the get at home and they are sick of them - they want to play all day. (but I'm not sure if this is representative of anything other than the types of people who put their kids in that particular daycare)
I've encountered plenty of people who have the TV on all the time when they are at home (and awake). That's from when they get back from work right up til when they go to sleep. So that could easily be five hours. TikTok and YouTube have eaten into that but are much the same thing.
> they were going to watch films 10-12 hours a day, every day of the week. Impossible.
A lot of these LLM demand scaling scenarios make broad "up and to the right" assumptions about things which in practice have finite limits. Only some percentage of knowledge work benefits from acceleration, optimization or other improvements, and even then the amount of economic gain is capped.
It's vaguely disturbing that people "watch" films 10-12 hours a day. Many of them are using it as a radio, for background noise, without really caring what the program is beyond vague genre, tuning in and out without particular regard to the plot… and yet we have all the cost of transmitting high-resolution video point-to-point.
Surely we could just put better stuff on the radio, and accomplish most of the same goals for a far lower price?
My Dad was in the hospital, and just wanted to watch the Pirates play. The TV was filled with apps, some of them free to watch, others demanding a subscription and log in once you selected something.
None of them had the Pirates game.
I was thinking how the transistor radio was a far superior experience for this use case. Just tune to the channel broadcasting the game.
Radio has not gone anywhere you know? There is of course podcasts, but for instance Radio France has amazing music services like FIP: https://www.radiofrance.fr/fip
Then there’s NTS, BBC… Ypu can listen to them from online service, but at least in Europe there’s amazing national FM broadcastimg services.
The quote in the original comment assesses the survey responses as "impossible". A good-faith reading of the comment is that the professor was not talking about a handful of respondents.
Nobody is doubting that there are some people who watch films 10–12 hours a day, every day of the week.
anthropic already hunts down OpenClaw users for using too much on their plan.
I'll give different example: When LED lights started to be more popular, the power usage didn't drop by the amount of power saved
>- tokens will NEVER get cheaper due to improvements in hardware, software, design, market forces etc etc
Well, first, improvements in computing stalled or even rolled back just purely because price of everything compute shot up cos of AI and that will NOT be fixed for a while and ESPECIALLY if AI usage will continue to increase
Second, the token per model might go down in time but better models have more expensive tokens, so we quickly get into spot when:
* price increase in token might not be worth marginal improvement next, better model brings
* more and more models are passing "good enough for the task" threshold so for less and less companies there is any economic sense to pay for the "best" instead of paying deepseek or some other company to run "previous gen" models
e.g.
- DotCom boom was letting companies IPO even if they had no revenue
- Great Recession was due to loosening credit restrictions for mortgages e.g. giving people NINJA (no income, no job) loans
so very curious to see how this plays out.
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