If anyone was around for the dot-com bubble any company internet related or with a web like name was irrationally funded, P/E didn't matter, burn didn't matter, product didn't matter.
AI has all the same markers of a the dot com bubble and eventually venture capital will dry up and many AI companies will go bust with a few remaining that make something useful with an unmet niche.
If smth is bubble it does not mean that said smth has no value. It just means that there is over investment and thus inefficient investment. Like housing bubble - nobody argues that houses are not needed and are not big part of economy.
From where I sit, smartphones completely ruined the internet.
If you're defining "successful" in the sense of people-making-a-lot-of-money I completely agree.
If you're talking about the internet in 2005 vs 2025, smartphones completely ruined the internet. At one point I had half my high school using HTML in their AIM profiles because they thought mine was cool.
Now kids can hardly even type on an actual, physical keyboard.
Yes, but generally not for the companies who were closely involved in the dot-com bubble; Amazon is probably literally the only exception of any significance.
And, well, not all bubbles go as well as that. See the cryptocurrency one, say. Or any of a number of _previous_ AI bubbles.
I had a job at a small investment firm at the time in college and to me it is nothing like the dotcom bubble.
The dotcom bubble was the "new economy", the old economy had changed forever and was dead. No one thought it was a bubble. Even when the bubble popped it took until 9/11 to wake us up from the mass hysteria.
I can't think of another "bubble" that practically everyone thinks we are in a bubble. To the point that I think many would find it irrational to believe we are not in a bubble. That is not what bubble is. A bubble is the madness of crowds, not the wisdom of crowds and the crowd certainly believes we are in a bubble.
There were front page news stories about a possible bubble back then.
The chair of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, famously made a speech warning of "irrational exuberance". It can't get much more direct than formal government warnings at the highest level.
"the old economy had changed forever and was dead."
Ehem - what is the difference compered to now? Wasn't programmers obsolete by 6mths ago and nobody would work so we do need UBI?
However your point that if everybody are thinking there is buble there is none is valid. Ironically your whole post undermine this point. And you are not alone in your analysis. General bubble wisdom is not settled as one might think.
Plus famous Alan Greenspan "irrational exuberance" was in 1996. And AFAIK in 1999 everybody know there is buble but it busted only in 2000. On top of that I have seen overlying plots of stock prices now and before dot com suggesting there is 1-2 years of increases still to go.
> Ehem - what is the difference compered to now? Wasn't programmers obsolete by 6mths ago and nobody would work so we do need UBI?
You're applying an arbitrary time constraint to the realization of AI's promise in order to rubbish it. This is a logical mistake common among critics: not yet, so never. It doesn't seem as if there is a near limit to the tech's development. Until that changes, the potential for job wipeouts and societal upheaval is real, whether in 5 or 50 years.
Sorry but that was not my point. My point was refuting of the thesis (in the comment that I am replying to) that nobody was making grand claims about AI contrary to grand claims about internet pre dot com. Obviously in both cases there were/are grand claims made.
Have you considered that your investment firm and other peers at the time were in an information bubble?
In fact outside of tech if the dotcom bubble wasn’t being discussed it’s because most folks—being not, or barely, online yet—weren’t paying any attention to it per se. The bubble they cared about was the broader stock market bubble, which was definitely widely perceived as a bubble.
Very untrue, economy doesn't happen on online forums in echo chambers but out there. Every major company invests into AI however they can for the classical FOMO emotion.
This is how movers and decision makers think. No CEO thinks - this will crash, so lets invest into it massively and spread our company finances more thinly when the SHTF comes.
25 years time. "I remember the LLM bubble, everyone knew we were in a bubble but they carried on as if the music would never stop. Don't worry, our situation is nothing like that, there is no talk of a bubble."
It doesn't even significantly matter whether it's a bubble or not, but whether its a "bad" bubble.
I think Steve Eisman (of housing bubble fame) recently made the argument that it's probably a bubble, but it doesn't seem to have the hallmarks it would have to turn it into a crisis. e.g. no broad immediate exposure for the general populace (as in housing/crypto bubbles).
the "why not xxxx?" comments really are the height of disrespect, ignoring someone else's effort to instead show how smart they are, while being lazy about it. I bet 9/10 people who make such comments never even look at the original project in any depth, let alone try it out in anger.
That might be the case sometimes but it is incredibly uncharitable to assume so by default. This is a discussion forum for the technically inclined. "Why not X" is an entirely reasonable, even valuable, question. It's not ignoring the other party's efforts but rather attempting to learn from them. Why _didn't_ you use this framework that at first glance appears to be the obvious and easy thing? There must be a good reason and I'd like to learn about it.
There could instead be warm fellow-feeling where everyone maintains respectful silence about alternatives, everybody with a new project gets a lovely ego boost, and I remain uninformed about what else exists.
If that doesn't come in the form of a discussion grounded in the original post, I could just as well have asked chatgpt and wouldn't have known the difference.
I mean, there's room for both things. It would be bad if nobody at all was willing to fawn over a new project and call it exciting instead of shooting it down. (After all, it might be my project ...)
Shouldn't be sensitive about people asking "why didn't you do this?" though, or "that reminds me of my own thing that I made back in the stone age". Those are useful and reasonable points, if not made unkindly. Reality is unkind.
Proper CI/CD for Gitops is actually really hard, how do you alert to failures that doesn't tie you to a specific provider and follows an alert chain? How do you chain dependent Gitops pipelines without coding a giant pipeline mess? How do you do healthchecks in a portable manner on what is deployed without giving the CI/CD runners basically global root?.. and on and on and on, this is all solved by Fluxcd or Argocd.
The whole business model of cloud providers is to charge a premium for their ecosystem and to create lock-in by making everything interdependent. A Kubernetes deployment could cost 100k/yr a similar cloud deployment would be ~1m/yr.
Have you worked at an organization without RFCs, ADRs, etc? The alternative is really just the wild west and whatever politics or pull a person has. RFCs and ADRs are good in the sense that they document _something_ even if the document is junk it's better than an assumption.
Really though it's the organization (and people) that makes or breaks anything.
I generally agree that it's better than nothing. That said, it's possible that sometimes these processes become bureaucratic shields for avoiding certain processes.
For example, a broken RFC process might be a way not to actually involve and gain useful consensus from people (I.e., I did my presentation during the weekly session, nobody had feedback), which instead would be the natural way in a company without that process.
100% agree that it's all about the people (and the culture shaped by them).
It's strange organizations want to push users off of a minor $100/yr/user cost when there are many other ways to save money that don't involve making a power user useless for years.
I just want prettier default diagrams in d2, the default theme (and other ones) is a hard sell to orgs where management isn't technical. Something similar to the Obsidian diagram theme
I recently looked into this at it looks like the IETF(?) RFC draft for SSH3 was abandoned? It's great this exists but I think the standard needs to be done as well.
What I don't understand is why not use what I've seen in industrial processes? Why not a low boiling point liquid and a heat exchanger? Or even better power a turbine like biogas plants do
AI has all the same markers of a the dot com bubble and eventually venture capital will dry up and many AI companies will go bust with a few remaining that make something useful with an unmet niche.
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