brucethemoose @ brucethemoose @lemmy.world

Posts

39

Comments

3,574

Joined

2 yr. ago

Moderating

---

There’s a distinction between Tech Bro transformers scaling hype and legit AGI research, which existed well before the former.

Things are advancing extremely rapidly, and an AGI “cap” would be a good idea if it could somehow materialize. But it honestly has nothing to do with Sam Altman and that tech circle, at least not the tech they currently have.

I have respect for some of those researchers from Tsinghua University. Can’t speak to most others without looking up their citations.

Also funny to see Steve Bannon, Susan Rice, and other folks all in the same pool.

Well Musk’s quote there isn’t wrong.

Musk isn’t an engineer, but neither are those consultants. They should all be deferring to deeper within the company for technical decisions instead of conflating some sci fi literacy with practical decision making, and leave musk to making much coarser ones at most.

They certainly do if they have to draw cash at a loss after they, say, lose a job from a crash. Or draw because of inflation like we’re at a huge risk of now.

Other times, it’s big funds (like retirement funds) folks are “automatically” invested in that make some bad forced decisions during a crash.

You’re right, there is an unfortunate tendency to panic withdraw during a crash (that’s the idea, right?), but it’s not always a choice.

It also depends what you mean by “hurt.”

Nvidia/AMD stocks, for example, are going to drop like meteors, but the physical companies themselves will be fine. They’re like the picks and shovels makers of the California Gold Rush; they’ve made their piles of cash and will go back to business as usual. Hence, I’m not selling my long-held AMD, even though I’m certainly not buying more. Yet.

And some totally unrelated companies may be disproportionately hurt by the pullback of a serious recession.

One comment I will make on LLMs specifically is it’s more of a “race to the bottom” than you’d think. Between sparsity research (with the recent MoE trend being a rather crude stopgap if you ask me), alternate attention schemes, finetuning advancements, computing shifts like BitNet all in the pipe, and all the open models from China and others, well…

The end point feels like local inference of specialized, freely licensed models. As useful, niche tools, not superintelligence.

They're low power basically free, hence seemingly inevitable.

That’s utterly apocalyptic if you’re someone like Sam Altman or Jeff Bezos. OpenAI can’t make money off that, which is why they’re lobbying to kill it and preaching infinite scaling that won’t work.

Normally I would agree.

But the weight of this one obviously hyped sector is measurably, historically huge: https://www.apolloacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/ExtremeAIConcentration-090825.pdf

With a lot of “circular investment” reminiscent of previous bad behavior: https://www.axios.com/2025/09/25/nvidia-openai-investment-ai

Obviously don’t sell after a crash, or sell the absolute least you can to live; that is rule #1.

…But I think it’s prudent to save a bit extra and shuffle some investment out of the S&P 500 pre-emptively, as it’s starting to resemble an AI evangelism hype fund. I’m not that old/experienced, but I’ve never seen anything like this in the market, especially from my perspective in the ML tinkerer community where, ironically, it’s obvious how much this all stinks. All the academics know it.

Saving to invest is hard, sometimes. And finance knowledge/attention is finite. Some folks are at risk of drawing from investments after a crash.

And not everyone here was invested during the 2008 crash, and may have only experienced the ultra-bizzare COVID rebound.

I don’t mean to be rude, but there are a lot of legit reasons most of Lemmy is probably not into ultra long buy-and-hold investing.

Real estate is a trouble prone investment normally, much less in this crazy market; I specifically wouldn’t want to touch that right now.

Can’t speak for metals, but also be careful there…

Thing about a bubble like this is you don’t know when it’s going to pop. I like the saying “the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.”

What I’m saying is to be careful about going all in on more pure hedges. If this lasts another 4 years and one's into stuff like XMAG and metals, and they drop in a crash anyway, you may end up in a worse position than if you had held the S&P 500. I think a better perspective is to avoid “buying a hedge” and instead invest in companies (or other assets) one thinks will be productive and grow with the bubble or not. They’ll grow however long the bubble goes, and keep growing after.

And I am convinced that LLMs are fundamentally incapable of delivering on the promises being made by the AI CEOs.

As a, uh, atypical American, and someone into the ML scene and previously employed in an LLM dev job… I agree.

I don’t think ML is going away, as what’s been made so far are niche tools in the same way a hammer is, but the level of hype and conning is literally criminal.

If you can shift stocks around, take them out of indexes and put the cash in crash-resilient stocks like Berkshire Hathaway (which somewhat famously/infamously saves cash to buy dips during crashes), or Walmart. I’m thinking on such a “Noah’s Ark” basket for myself.

I’m not knowledgeable enough to comment on bonds, gold, or whatever else your savings may be in. But don’t believe a word anyone says to you about crypto.

Start saving a bit extra too, if possible, as the crash may not come for some time. And you want to avoid selling invested savings when the markets at its lowest.

On the tech side, you can get more into self hosting to not be so dependent on Big Tech. You're on the perfect site to learn that.

If you ask me, that even includes dabbling in open-weights ML stuff, as that might suddenly become a more marketable skill once all the OpenAI hype implodes, and companies sipping the Koolaid turn more practical/frugal.

Other than that… I dunno. Depends on your work and lifestyle, I suppose. I think this will be a bumpy ride no matter what we do.

The other half of this meme is how vacuous and hollow social media is, especially insta algorithmic-style, to the point this is even a thing.

I know showing off wealth was a social issue before that, but Big Tech definitely abuses it.

I dunno about that. We got a pile of architecture research out of it just waiting for some more tests/implementations.

And think of how cheap renting compute will be! It’s already basically subsidized, but imagine when all those A100s/H100s are dumped.

Apparently the situation with freight is the opposite, where the US networks are efficient compared to Europe (and even China), hence so much stuff is trucked across Europe instead.

As always, take YT videos with grains of salt, but it makes good points:

https://youtu.be/77pIj8kURoY

Meanwhile, other videos suggest that the US's own passenger rail suppliers (like manufacturers/designers) are basically gone because the situation is so bad, hence companies like Amtrak end up importing EU stuff.

the press loves to give disproportionate airtime and column inches to far-right demagogues

Bingo.

Now you basically understand how we got here.

Holy shit.

Off topic, but I searched "cartel pretends to be ice" on DDG, and literally got hundreds of cheap AI slop YT videos of supposed ICE cartel busts. Replies are either bots or idiot believers; no one is calling them out! YT is not taking them down. Most uploaded today or yesterday.

The internet is toast. RIP.

But yeah, if big orgs are doing this, it doesn't seem high profile yet.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure working Nvidia on wayland is a very recent thing.

Honestly I just boot from my (AMD) IGP for linux, which is better for compute anyway.

I guess it depends on what that 'something' is.

My box used to be like this (mostly Nvidia issues), but its been relatively well behaved. And now my Windows install has become a pain with UWP apps, printers, and LAN drives, specifically, that I've just given up trying to resolve TBH. Not to speak of some programming stuff.

Both OSes are tools that make specific things easier.

Man.

Hypothetically (no, FBI, I’m not opening up), it’d be so easy for crooks to dress up and pretend to be ICE.

Especially cartels. They must be having a field day with this, on top of all the attention drawn off them.

I am 50/50.

It’s link free, and while citing a few details, mostly vague with a suspicious format.

But sfg.media seems to have a real history; it’s not an SEO farm:

SFG Media was launched in 2022 by a small group of Kyiv-based journalists and volunteers during the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It identifies as a non-commercial, non-registered media collective run by six individuals. According to their About page, they publish English-language content primarily to offer independent Ukrainian perspectives to international audiences. While not a formally registered media outlet, they describe their work as journalism reflecting their “social and political position.”

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/sfg-media-bias-and-credibility/

And the point the article makes is pretty reasonable.

I’d feel a whole lot better if they link citations like the ISW or Wikipedia. And I know that can be a slop pattern too, but it’s still good practice these days.

So many folks seem to be the opposite of me…

Linux just works now. Shit with my printer, device drivers, LAN things, stuff like like is like wrestling an animal on Windows for some reason, and… just works with KDE. It’s like they’ve swapped places.

Random Windows apps works better in wine than they do in actual windows, sometimes. With no fuss: I double click and they launch, that’s it.

Don’t even get me started on security.

But Linux is (mostly) not performant for gaming, at least not on Nvidia. It’s… fine, but I’m not going to take a 10%+ hit, sometimes much more severe, and poorer support for HDR, frame limiters, mod tools and such when I can just boot neutered Windows instead.

So I’m not getting away from Windows in the near future, but to frank, I don’t understand why more folks (who get past the admittedly tall hurdle of learning about partitioning and installing an OS) don’t dual boot, or seek to use certain poorly supported Linux native apps when double clicking exes mostly just works.

But my point is you don’t have to pick and choose. And there’s no commitment. You can have your cake and eat it, and send the cake back if you don’t like it.

No, I just skimmed the transcript because it’s an hour long, heh.

I did get that bit about SETI and the original paper, which is interesting, and also agree that astronomers looking for them over the paper is hilarious and stupid.