I don't even know if I will send my response to this thread, I've come
to delete most of my "usual" offerings without sending, some without
finishing, others without starting. Some kind of entropy-minimization
strategy on "y'all's" side of my Markov Blanket?
Lots of rich stuff here. I don't think I disagree with any sentiment
here (can they ALL be compatible?). Tom's original (implied) question
is probably as much about "should those of us with fat ETF portfolios
switch their mix from high-performing AI-fueled to some other place with
better risk/reward ratios?" as it is about "is there even a 'there
there' in the AI cascade of new affordances and competencies being
offered (hyped) by 'the market'. But maybe they are fundamentally the
same question in this highly human-conditioned manifold of
intersubjective reality we inhabit together?
Obligatory anecdote: when a moved to my current property (2000), A
huge russian olive (50' tall, 3'diameter trunk, broad reaching branches)
hosted a huge magpie nest in one of the forking horizontal branches...
maybe 6-8' long made of branches from all over the property (area) and
many other elements. It had a half-dozen babies in it when I first came
to review the property but by the time we moved in, they had fledged and
the nest was fully abandoned (only for the season?) Within the year we
took it upon ourselves to remove the nest and found the myriad bits of
interesting detritus they had gathered. The structure of the nest
seemed fully rhymed and reasoned in spite of being opportunistic to the
branch/twig/grass/fur/??? at hand and wabi sabi in the extreme, but the
strange bright bits of yarn, string, fabric, bottle caps, broken glass,
etc cetera, were much more arcane/occult-to-me. But nevertheless
alliterated, rhymed and likely reasoned. As did our own slow
picking-apart of the structure with the help of Jays, Packrats, and the
weather which had it's own uses for these "objects of desire"?
Within 3 years West Nile flared up the Rio Grande, killing (most
notably, but not exclusively) Magpies. Even now, 20 years later, the
populations have barely begun to recover in a small way, probably
migrated back down from the Chama/Rio-Grande headwaters and environs?
This anecdote could tangent into the (very few) people I know of who
contracted (and one died) of West Nile during that time, and the cascade
of influences/effects that had on the lives of the people I know, but
except for a vague "where did all the Magpies go?" I hardly registered
the *devastating* effect it had on the Magpies (and likely many other
corvids/birds in the region?). Or tangent to the "Rabbit Hemorhaggic
Fever Pandemic" which coincided with human's COVID 19 which devastated
the Jack and Cotton populations here (and many other regions globally)...
This is probably an allegory or parable or something. Re:Cautionary
Tales starring NRA wankers - I did just (re) watch two Charlton Heston
classics from my "coming of age" era: "Soylent Green" and "Planet of the
Apes" but was spared (paywalls) from "Omega Man". I didn't tangent to
"Ben Hur" nor "Moses" for different reasons, but to quote Glen (who
might have been quoting David Byrne?):
"Same as it ever was!"
On 11/17/25 10:57 am, glen wrote:
That's the point. Some of us line our nests with robust things like
straw. Others line theirs with fantasies peddled by grifters and then
expect the rest of us to share our nests when theirs collapse. We will
*definitely* bail out the capitalists again ... and again ... and
again, even after/while they['re] deport[ing] us, abusing us, killing
us, sending us to kill foreigners, stealing our water to run their
data centers, etc.
We are the gift that keeps on giving.
On 11/17/25 9:17 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
I remember where I was when I saw Torvalds’ first Linux release. I
started downloading pretty much immediately and looking for a PC to
sacrifice. It was hardly capitalist hype.
*From: *Friam <[email protected]> on behalf of glen
<[email protected]>
*Date: *Monday, November 17, 2025 at 8:54 AM
*To: *[email protected] <[email protected]>
*Subject: *Re: [FRIAM] Fwd: The coming AI crash-worse than the Dot
Com stock collapse?
Exactly. That's Chris' basic argument. Even his point about fscking
Twitter. To argue that it's "running just as well as it did" seems a
bit discordant. But at some altitude, he's right. It's just as much
of a toxic wasteland as it was before. Every time it crosses my gaze,
I wonder why people still use it ... or bluesky, or reddit, or
<arbitrary-tag>.
My experiments with Cline have just about ended. I've decided to
avoid it. It works great with Claude (and some others), but not with
gpt-oss or codestral. Both of those work fine if *I* manage the
prompting. Chris also mentions linux, which I've been using as my
daily driver since ~1995 (?) ... IDK, maybe I was mostly using ultrix
& minix in '95. But sporadically, as with the Windows 11 update
breaking recovery, all the dorks get all riled up and talk about
linux finally being ready for the desktop. [sigh]
The fact is that we're no smarter than rats or birds who'll fill our
nests with whatever stupid little shiny thing the capitalists bother
to hype.
On 11/17/25 8:21 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
The first example that comes to mind are malls. Malls aren't needed
now so many of them are closing.
Some people see something bad about that. I see something good
about that: Ruts get erased and new opportunities arise. Power
gets redistributed.
We're between cycles of exploitation and exploration, and there's
some adaptation that is required.
-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <[email protected]> On Behalf Of glen
Sent: Monday, November 17, 2025 8:02 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Fwd: The coming AI crash-worse than the Dot Com
stock collapse?
But Chris' argument isn't really about AI. Chris is as guilty of
preemptive registration as the others. Short-term markets distort
everything. The task is to free up the terms coercively bound by the
grifters and marketeers. Once the terms are unbound, we can discover
which formalisms fit and which don't.
If we're charitable, Chris is right that *something* is amiss. The
disagreement is about *what* is amiss. Same as it Ever Was.
On 11/17/25 7:45 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
But what ARE these investments right now? It seems to me they are
well established companies: Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Google.
NVIDIA has existed and will exist should AI revenue dry up, just
like it outlasted Ethereum mining.
The new players aren’t yet public companies. OpenAI has a longer
path to profitability, but Anthropic (technical users) is already
making good progress @ $7B. AI has already penetrated education
and will likely spread more. People will become dependent on it
like they are dependent on cars.
*From: *Friam <[email protected]> on behalf of Prof David
West <[email protected]>
*Date: *Monday, November 17, 2025 at 5:14 AM
*To: *[email protected] <[email protected]>
*Subject: *Re: [FRIAM] Fwd: The coming AI crash-worse than the Dot
Com stock collapse?
Marcus and Jon are not incorrect. I do see a problem that they do
not, the fact that the vast majority of users/adopters of AI are
dramatically less technologically compentent than either of these
gentlemen. The manager that is positive that AI will eliminate most
if not all of his human employees, the student using an LLM to
"cheat," the social media addicts taken with the latest AI fad
bots, etc. etc. almost certainly will become disillusioned and turn
away from AI.
Perhaps more importantly, all the capitalists who see immediate—not
long term—return on investment are not going to remain invested.
Lot's of other peoples money will be lost as a byproduct.
The market of Jon Marcuses is not large enough to sustain all the
current investment. Maybe one large AI company will survive (ala
Amazon that lost tons of money for a long long time).
davew
On Sun, Nov 16, 2025, at 3:51 PM, Jon Zingale wrote:
I mostly agree with Marcus' sentiment. The dot com analogy
may be apt, but it also smells too easy an analog. I find the
K-shaped AI adoption to be bizarre. Personally, I do not believe
LLMs, nor any particular architecture, to be the be-all-end-all. I
suspect we will see a transition away from throwing money at
developing the most general form and a move toward more
idiosyncratic instantiations. For instance, I continue to think
that Deepmind did meaningful work going the RL path with
AlphaGo/Atari games and it has yet to come to my attention what
happens when Transformers attempt to replicate these successes.
Almost every LLM I have met is really really bad at go. This said,
AI in their current form, and from this perspective, has been here
for a decade. Some have adopted it and use it to surprising effect,
others treat LLMs as nothing more than a robust database querying
language. What people do with it and how they perceive it will
undoubtedly have an impact. In the
meantime, I am excited to see what happens as programmers
learn to use formal type theories as pidgins and LLMs become more
amenable to compositionality.
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