I am in no way a republican apologist, but how many people were clamoring for the immediate releasing these documents, saying it "should be easy" and all that? Laws were passed ordering their sudden speedy disclosure. How would you have handled this?
I clicked and starting reading this expecting some actual connection between said markdown files and losing money. There was nothing at all like that in this blog post.
I don't understand why people think they know why stocks move up or down. There are clear cases from time to time, but in general the market doesn't explain itself. The reasons may not even be explainable in a way that's comprehensive to a human.
Reminds me of this question - why did the USSR collapse? You can describe dozens of influences which acted all at the same time, but there isn't a one paragraph summary answer.
> I don't understand why people think they know why stocks move up or down.
Inferring overly generalized and usually incorrect causal relations from extremely limited data and treating them as conclusive is a very strong human tendency; the idea of avoiding that and taking a systematic, structured, and conditional approach to assessing causal claims is fairly recent and, even among people who generally support it, often adhered to more as an aspirational principal than a consistent practice. And it certainly doesn't sell clicks the way the old way does.
> Reminds me of this question - why did the USSR collapse? You can describe dozens of influences which acted all at the same time, but there isn't a one paragraph summary answer.
Decisions made in greed caught up with people in power
Price of oil collapsed leading to mass shortages of everything. They also decided to allow more individual freedoms to protest which people promptly used to overthrow the system.
Humans seek to understand phenomena and they use narratives to accomplish that. Accepting that there are multiple factors always involved and chaos reigns is disturbing.
edit: specifically, I imagine that macroscopic political and economic changes can be aptly modeled as phase changes due to changes in correlation distance[0] holding the system together.
The connection is implied: technology companies quite suddenly lost a $285bn in market valuation, which means that the owners of these companies (either as stock or other forms of equity) have a combined $285bn less net worth. And apparently people are linking this sudden decrease in market valuation to "Anthropic launching a legal tool", which essentially consists of said markdown files.
Clearly the author is implying that, but with zero evidence to back that implication up. Not even an attempt to link the two other than saying "this happened" and "this exists." And hacker news is upvoting it like it's actually an interesting article. Have we lost our brains?
Hi, author here. Sorry if I skipped over the "evidence". If you read/watch financial news, every single outlet was claiming that it was caused by this legal tool launch. I was commenting on that - somewhat in jest. I'll update the article to make it clearer what I was trying to get at.
Thanks for the feedback, it was front page of the FT and I need to remember not everyone reads financial news!
1. Yes we treat them as Enterprise SaaS and have done so since the late 2000s.
2. The selloff was largely due to Amazon's massive capex commitment for GPU compute buildout, as Amazon (and a couple other BigTechs) are used as market benchmarks and because a large portion of us have been holding since 2021-22 or even earlier so we have reached a point where we have hit returns that we were advised to hit in our portfolios. HNWIs with advisors and Institutional Investors (who advisors use) aren't daytrading.
I try to challenge myself by reading the article to form an opinion, and then I learn by testing my opinion for faults (using good HN comments). Sometimes I test myself by writing comments.
My recent binge has been trying to understand what's going on when smart people simplify complex topics down to single root causes (causes that often feel like memes to me).
The connection isn't just implied. It's explicitly the entire foundation of the article.
And it's positively ludicrous.
I mean, to be clear the submission basically does exactly what most financial columnists do. Take every movement of the market, ascribe it to something/anything (when in the real world it's massively multifactorial) because that is pat and seems informative.
The market is massively overvalued, crypto has seen hundreds of billions dissolve, OpenAI has serious questions about its realistic ongoing viability (and a number of majors have a lot of their valuation based upon basically going all in on it -- Oracle, Microsoft, nvidia), the US is headed by a diddler simpleton who has no idea how anything works and thinks it's 1982, and so on. Volatility is a given.
It cannot be overstated how absurd the marketing campaign for AI was. OpenAI and Anthropic have convinced half the world that AI is going to become a literal god. They deserve to eat a lot of shit for those outright lies.
Thank you. That was a long article that started with a claim that was backed up by no proof, dismissing it as not the most interesting thing they were talking about when in fact it's the baseline of the whole discussion.
When we say generating code is only a small percentage, that does not imply that the rest is just talking. Simon, you were part of a relatively small fast moving project in Django and the news website it powered, with from I understand a pretty small team. Have you worked as part of a team of 10, 20, 100, 1000 engineers? It's different.
"Talking" here doesn't literally mean talking. It means figuring out the scope of the problem, researching solutions, communicating with stakeholders, debating architecture, building exploratory prototypes, breaking down projects - it's all the stuff that isn't writing the code.
I've worked at various sizes of organization. Most notably I joined Eventbrite when they were less than 100 developers and stayed while they grew to around 1,000.
Not extreme? Have you seen his interviews? I guess his wording and delivery are not extreme, but if you really listen to what he's saying, it's kinda nuts.
I understand what GP is saying in the sense that, yes, on an objective scale, what Sam is saying is absolutely and completely nuts... but on a relative scale he's just hyping his startup. Relative to the scale he's at, it’s no worse than the average support tool startup founder claiming they will defeat Salesforce, for example.
I've been thinking along these lines. LLMs seem to have arrived right when we were all getting addicted to reels/tic tocks/whatever. For some reason we love to swipe, swipe, swipe, until we get something funny/interesting/shocking, that gives us a short-lasting dopamine hit (or whatever chemicals it is) that feels good for about 1 second, and we want MORE, so we keep swiping.
Using an LLM is almost exactly the same. You get the occasional, "wow! I've never seen it do that before!" moments (whether that thing it just did was even useful or not), get a short hit of feel goods, and then we keep using it trying to get another hit. It keeps providing them at just the right intervals for people to keep them going just like they do with tick tock
There are plenty of technologies that have not become cheaper, or at least not cheap enough, to go big and change the world. You probably haven't heard of them because obviously they didn't succeed.
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