They're not saving money. They're retasking office workers who make $100+ per hour to do work they usually pay a lot less for.

OTOH, if it keeps customers from having bad experiences because the system is overwhelmed, it may be a good use of those expensive workers.

Nah. These are salaried workers being asked to do something during their normal work hours. It's basically not possible to avoid paying them.

Weekdays 10 am to 6 pm. That's normal work hours. Unless they're being forced to use vacation time, they're being paid.

More likely 100-200/hour, more if they're software engineers or similar highly-paid office workers. $30/hour is only $60k/year. There's no way Amazon white-collar workers in NYC are making that little.

Around 2000 we had the dot com bubble, which was a whole bunch of "irrational exuberance" about over-inflated evaluations of companies that were doing *anything* on the web. The poster-child of the dot-com crash was Pets.com. In the lead-up to the 2008 real estate bubble and crash I used to hear advertisements on the radio for "interest-only mortgages" and people would say things like "real estate is the one thing they're not making any more of" and "real estate prices always go up". Well, then someone in Detroit famously traded his house for an iPhone just to get rid of it. In the early 2020's people were buying NFTs, and the peak Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT price at the time was 10 times the current price.

See a pattern? We've all been playing with the new AI technology. The demos are amazing, but we know that outside a couple niche uses, there's nowhere near as much value there as the market is implying. At best it's similar to 3D printing's usefulness - helpful for making quick prototypes, etc. There's no actual intelligence; no actual reasoning or thinking happening. It's going to take a huge breakthrough to get to AGI, and sure that might happen tomorrow but it's more likely to be decades away, or maybe not even in our lifetimes.

How are people so duped by these companies? Is it just blind optimism? Why are we so predisposed to falling for this hype cycle?

This just raises the question of what it means to "know". The LLMs clearly have a large and fairly comprehensive model of the world, the things in it and the relationships between them. If they didn't, they couldn't produce output that makes sense in the context of the models we have of the world, the things in it and the relationships between them.

Two-timing on women or jobs is very risky. Not a good way to get sleep. I knew of a guy who worked two full-time jobs (in the 90's) for two months until he got caught. He would say, "I'm going down to the lab" and then go out to his car and drive over to his other job, and vice-versa.

That has nothing to do with the comment you replied to. I was talking about Trump's cluelessness what is needed to retain the dollar's status as the world's reserve currency which is at best weakly related to its valuation relative to other currencies.

Only if hedge fund managers don't understand how the Fed chairmanship works. Trump can't replace Powell until February 2026, when Powell's term expires. Not unless Trump can make the case that he needs to be removed for cause, which would require evidence of misconduct, not just policy disagreement.

It's much easier to get hired if you already have a job, just like it's easier to get a girlfriend if you already have a girlfriend.

This is interesting and all, but they recovered the black box either a day or two after the crash. Won't that tell you what was going on with the engines? Everything else is speculation.

Some hackathons exist to generate new ideas quickly, and I could see this being useful. But most game dev hackathons also exist for devs to build skills. I don't think there's much skill building happening here. And I doubt you could apply this to larger codebases. A little bit you have to wonder why ChatGPT spits out source code. Why not just spit out compiled machine code? Aside from the ubiquity of source code online for training data, wouldn't it be more efficient to produce compiled binaries? If it can't do that... why not? Programming languages only exist for humans to comprehend.

. . . And secure? The first thing I think of when I hear a new wave of non-coders are about to create a bunch of public-facing tools and sites is that we're going to get the Internet-of-things style approach to security. Which is just plain ignoring it.

These things connect end-users directly to code generation, so the loop to polish off the end-product to get it exactly how they want it to look and feel is real tight. But these people have no clue if something is secure or not. I had some guys paint my house, I didn't want to do the ladder work. The owner comes up and chats about how he's vibe-coding a tool for subcontract work and asks if authentication is really needed when users log in.

Strap in kids, we're about to have another playground.

So clueless.

The fact is that the trade imbalance is the largest single factor that makes the US dollar the world currency -- and also helps to keep the federal debt cheap. All of those countries that have a trade surplus with us send us lots of goods and in exchange they get lots of dollars. What do they do with them? They buy US-denominated securities, including treasury bonds. So many people and organizations around the world holding large reserves of US-denominated securities is what makes the dollar the world's default currency.

To the extent that he succeeds at "correcting" the trade imbalance, he'll undermine the dollar's status. And trying to bully countries into sticking with the dollar by threatening action that will make the dollar worth less to them is just... clueless. And that's assuming his actions to explode the debt while escalating financing costs doesn't result in enormous devaluation of the dollar, which would make it worthless rather than just worth less.

On balance I think I'm mostly glad that Trump is a moron, because if he weren't he would be really dangerous. On the other hand, if he had either a brain or the humility to listen to people who do, he might understand that he's trying to destroy what he's trying to control, and that winning that sort of game is losing. Probably not, though. He's amoral enough to be okay with ruling over a relative wasteland, because he and his will be better off.

Sorry, you've misunderstood me. Let me try to clarify. When I said "the goal of the US" I didn't mean the traditional republican politicians. I mean the majority of the political will in the US. The voters. The large number of people who first voted for Obama, then wanted Sanders, and then, probably begrudgingly, voted for Trump. These are working class folks who don't want to drive for Uber or work in an Amazon fulfillment center, and would rather have a good paying factory job like they hear some previous generation had back in the 50's, 60's, and 70's. They want to shift the supply and demand economics of American labor. They want to shrink the supply by reducing immigration and increase the demand by adding manufacturing jobs, which they believe will make general laborer wages rise (relative to the rest of society).

I live in Canada. Every time you hear news about the dollar, it's bad news, whether it goes up or down. If it goes up the news reporters go and interview exporters who complain that this hurts their business, and when it goes down the reporters interview importers who explain how this is going to make all the products we buy more expensive. It's honestly very tiring. I mostly just ignore stories like this.

If a currency is functioning normally (not being manipulated) then it works to automatically balance trade. If Americans start buying more and more from overseas, then supply and demand in the currency market will cause the dollar's value to go down, which makes American products and investments more attractive to everyone else. You just have to understand that the US buys a lot of cheap products from overseas, but mostly exports expensive high end products like aircraft parts and machinery. People around the world really like investing in US companies (and even T-bills) because the US market is large, profitable, and safe. Therefore the long term trend has been that Americans import a lot of cheap products in exchange for a lot of investment capital flowing into the US. This kept industry humming, but also had the effect of pushing up housing prices, as a lot of people invest in US real estate.

The dollar has traditionally been so high because the US was considered to be such a safe place to invest. Investors around the world wanted better returns, and foreign governments wanted a safe reserve currency, and for the most part the US government took advantage of this because it gave the US access to very cheap capital (borrowing) which allowed deficit spending, and it also gave the US enormous leverage over pretty much every other country in the world financially. For instance, the sanctions against Iran, North Korea, and Russia are based on the fact that the global system of trade is mostly based on the US dollar.

The US dollar is falling because even though Americans are still buying lots of stuff from overseas, there's a notable concern about the stability of the US as both a safe place to invest, and as a good investment return. Now I personally think there's still a potential for high return on investment if I were to invest in the US, but I do also have concerns about any money I have in US investments because you just don't know if the US government would do something drastic like confiscate foreign investment, etc. I don't consider it likely, but it's not something I would have worried about 10 years ago, but it's at least a remote possibility now.

I think the goal of the US is to bring more manufacturing back onshore. I think this is a reasonable goal. There are always winners and losers in any change. Bringing back manufacturing jobs tends to help the working class, as does limiting the supply of cheap labor by deporting lots of people. Note that while this is probably a net benefit to the working class, corporations won't like it. They prefer a strong US dollar which makes borrowing cheap and they prefer low wages too, so they're generally pro-immigration. But that's the story of the last few years... the working class has now gained political influence, not just in the US but across the western world, and the right-wing political parties have embraced them, which is a bit surprising because the right-wing parties have traditionally been the party of big business.

Big business now finds itself politically homeless, or certainly far less influential than they used to be. I suspect they're just hoping to ride this out. I'm not convinced this is a temporary situation. I believe that Trump has proven that the working class is now in play politically, and both parties will bend themselves towards catering to their interests. We even saw this in Canada with the liberal party running a guy who's very moderate, perhaps even right-of-center in some ways, and reduced immigration significantly even before the election earlier this year. I think this is just the new political reality. That doesn't mean the democrats won't win again, but they certainly won't win if they don't start adopting some of the populist rhetoric ("working class vs. the elites") that has worked so well for Trump. People clearly wanted Sanders to win the democratic primary, but the democratic party has super-delegates and wouldn't let Bernie win because the party itself (the people running it) are very much against populism. The republican party doesn't have super-delegates, which is why a populist like Trump was able to win the primary in that party.

So it's interesting to see this story trying to paint a low US dollar as a bad thing. It's bad for big business, but not for the working class. I find it surprising because I wouldn't normally think of msmash as a pro-big-business editor. But here we are.