alpha_squared

> I think at this point it is safe to say that the whole bubble is having deep mental health problems

I'm starting to arrive at the same conclusion. It's very, very difficult to see the transition from intelligence to madness. You really do need to be connected (and close!) to people outside of tech, especially in the humanities, to fully grasp the insanity of this industry's development and evolution. The tech industry is, broadly, starting to be reviled in developed countries. I'm regularly having to qualify that I don't work in big tech when I share what I do.

When I connect with people who largely only have connections in tech, I'm finding I relate less and less with their thinking. I think "AI psychosis" is a very apt term.

Wouldn't OpenAI be in the same boat? As far as I'm aware, they don't control any means of distribution either.

I seem to recall OpenAI's CFO inadvertently proposing a bailout about a year ago. I'm fairly confident that the industry has been considering the possibility of one since before that statement.

Are you talking about SVB? Because FDIC paid out much more than just insurance, it made sure everyone was whole. I think that set a very dangerous precedent.

Didn't SpaceX partially admit they're a neocloud in their S-1?

Are you sick of whataboutism? Because I wouldn't equate what's happening now with Trump's prosecutions. It's incredibly disingenuous to do that.

It's not a 'prediction market', it's a gambling market. It's far more accurate to say 80% of gamblers were convinced Bolsanaro would win than to say there's an 80% likelihood he would win. It's not measuring likelihood as it's untethered from things that impact the actual results. Obscuring it basic gambling with the word 'prediction' doesn't change the fact that's naked gambling at the end of the day.

This is a good chance to remind people that laws can be changed. Including how pardons work by allowing Congress to override a pardon. This is all very clearly outside the bounds of the intent of the pardon power.

Most of the "loopholes" and gaps that the current administration takes advantage of are due to the thinking along the lines of "no one would stoop so low as to operate any other way." There's no way to close all the gaps, but you can certainly make an effort to narrow the number of gaps.

While you're right in a literal sense, I think it's pretty hard to dispute that Zuckerberg can operate unabated due to his majority ownership of voting shares.

This hits too close to home.

I started learning to write code when I was 11, in year 2000, out of pure curiosity of how tech works. I remember when a family friend opened up our very first computer, a Gateway desktop, to change out the modem that was no longer supported after an OS upgrade and the excitement and awe I felt seeing the boards and cables eager to know more. I got back online and immediately started learning how to build web pages.

I learned Flash and ActionScript in high school then got my first job as a developer building websites for local small businesses when I was 18 while in college. Most of those were largely custom Wordpress or PBBoard installs and configs. That was my 3rd job while I was majoring in aerospace, with no insight that programming could even be a career. It was just a fun part-time job for me.

A couple changes in major, a degree in computer science, several startups, and 19 years later here I am wondering whether I really want to stay in tech at all. The joy of solving problems using tech is just dead. My tagline on LinkedIn for a decade has been "Solving problems, sometimes with code" which is as true now as it ever was, but it's hard to reconcile what's happening now with why I got into this to begin with.

It was never about the money for me, otherwise I'd have worked at any of the big tech companies when I was getting hounded by recruiters for years. Instead, I've opted for the fun challenges at startups and getting to be closer to the customer, flexing my skills across disciplines and specialties. I'm mourning how the joy and spark are fading, but I'm also mourning what we are losing in the field. Things used to be about more than just the work, and you may think I'm naive for believing that, but it's very clearly just about the work and output now. It's soulless.

That is what sources told The Telegraph[0]

[0] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2026/10/16/musk-appro...

I've become cynical enough to expect the opposite at this point, which likely means reality will settle somewhere around the midway point.

It appears that one party has settled into reckless disregard for democratic and social norms because they can rest assured that the other party is feckless and only cares about "returning to normal" rather than holding anyone accountable or ensuring the harm can't be repeated. They're probably right.

All of this is thanks to the winners-take-all voting system which entrenches two parties and prevents any meaningful consensus to be reached at a national level. I think where the US is at now is inevitable given the voting system in place.

This seems like flame bait, but I'll take the question seriously: I would rather write a Svelte application by hand than manage a React one via LLM. It's just a more intuitive framework, fewer pitfalls, cleaner reactivity, and is much more performant out of the box.

A lesson I've had to learn is that, for some people, ethics is a paycheck. It can be incomprehensible to imagine someone acting against their own paycheck as a result.

This should be a pretty simple 1-line CSS fix, just default to standard system fonts if the "dg" font isn't available.

As someone with a CS degree, most of the people I know with CS degrees are not very good developers. This is regardless of schools, as my anecdotal experience includes people from ivy leagues. The strongest developers I've met and worked with often come from other STEM fields or, interestingly enough, philosophy backgrounds.

Again, purely anecdotal, but it is 20 years of anecdotal experience across a very broad range of industries.

It's only an acceptable answer when used sparingly. The more often it's used, the more questions arise about your role in that meeting.

> Fortune cookie ass statement.

> The social aspects are more important than the exam sitting most of the time.

To spell it out more clearly: every single aspect of your career is an exam. The interview is an exam, quite literally. The day-to-day responsibilities (meetings, planning, problem-solving, collaborating) are parts of the exam. If you're failing at those or automating them away, then what is your role? The assignments (solve X bug or add Y feature) are parts of the exam too. Failing to do these things will mean that, yes, you are failing the exam.

Your career is a continual exam and the assignments are just parts of it.

I think OPs question still applies.

> What person that was even mildly satisfied with living their life would want this?

On a meta topic, it seems there's quite a flame-war happening in the comments. At the time of this writing, there appears to be some brigading in support of Musk / Grok, with downvotes for comments critical of Musk, his politics, or Grok.

As a reminder, downvotes should be for comments that are off-topic, not comments you feel intrude on your worldview.

This is not Reddit. And if this type of behavior persists, I suspect I won't be alone in leaving this community.

Anecdotally, the essay is so spot-on. In my last job, I'd regularly have to review +20k-line change PRs from mid/junior devs only to reach a point where I'd have to just shut down the PR and ask for it to be broken apart. Sometimes, the issue would get escalated and I'd have to speak to their management/director chain. More often, they'd realize that if they spent some time trying to understand how to break it apart, the changeset actually needed to be much smaller and I'd come back to a 400 or 500-line PR to review.

In one particular case, a senior teammate of mine went the extra effort to actually explore what the intent of the change is and created a whole new PR for the junior dev that was a simple configuration change of 5 lines instead of the 14k lines they put for review.

This is utterly unsustainable and something will give at some point.

NIMBY is largely used for housing development discussions and to contort it in support of developing data centers is incredibly intellectually dishonest.

If we're going to rebrand things to blur lines, I propose rebranding data centers to pedophile content hubs.

The rest of your argument is full of similar cherry-picking for dishonest discourse.

The courts haven't turned against the administration, they just don't care to rubber-stamp things that don't advance their personal policy goals and only erode trust in the courts. This advances their policy goals and that's scary.

As another ethnic Copt, I'm also very fascinated by the language and history, particularly the differences between the Bohairic and Sahidic dialects.

> Copts do also maintain a significant amount of syncretism with ancient Egyptian religion as well, both within language (typically, Egyptian Arabic words that are “odd” to middle eastern speakers are pulled from Coptic or earlier stages of Egyptian)

This is true and also many of the characters in the language are believed to be derived from hieroglyphs.

> next opportunity isn’t until 2028

There's an election every year (including special and midterms). The fight is annual and it's completely unfair to believe it's a quadrennial event and lead others to believe the same. Participate in your local elections. It's where all of this starts. The national is mostly noise that bubbles up and out.

> Isn’t Apple potentially under a lot of pressure due to the DRAM prices as well as having to compete with AI for fab capacity?

I'd qualify this with for now. It's not entirely clear what happens in the event the AI industry implodes, but I do think there will be a glut of memory and hardware up for grabs. It very well could crash the consumer hardware market as a result. The AI obsession and investment has burrowed so deeply across the US economy that I can't think of a single industry that won't be impacted, including agriculture.

I don't think the parent is advocating adhering to their values, but instead just talking about the relativism of ethics and morality.

Society broadly cannot function without a shared set of morals (e.g. stealing sows discord which leads to anarchy, so we outlaw stealing). However, it can get quite complex and so there are infinitely many shades of grays. The base principal would still stand and you do your best to adhere to it in order to have a stable society.

> I have more meaningful intellectual conversations with LLMs in a given day than in a month on social networks.

This is kind of making the parent's argument for them about the dangers...

> And the LLMs never try to make me feel angry or stupid, they never ignore my arguments to go on their own soapbox, they almost never feed me misinformation (and never deliberately), and they've yet to tell me to my face that the purpose of their interactions with other people is not to convince or even communicate with those people but to perform for an audience (often one that doesn't feasibly exist).

You're basically asking to be coddled, affirmed, validated, and protected. The world has conflict. Not all conflict is bad. Yes, social media weaponizes that conflict for ads, but I think the opposite is more dangerous in creating completely distorted realities. What you're describing sounds worse than the worst nightmare I've ever had, a world in which I'd be constantly disconnected from everyone else and would be disillusioned into thinking I'm not.

> Some caveats here: my view of social media is biased by the fact that jerks tend to pull me out of the woodwork- I get ragebaited, although I think I avoid the literal bait- so many of my interactions are with jerks.

This is what therapy is for.