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- Hacker News
- This goes to show that everyone is an expert in a bull market, where everything you buy can go up. (until it doesn't)by rvz
- Everyone has some sort of category error to an extent. But more than that, the part about safety guardrails really resonates with my experience. I inevitably have to go down to the low-level to inspect memory, but because of safety issues, I can barely use Codex as it keeps prompting me for 'trusted access.' AI is actually really good at catching bugs, so I'd love to use it, but it does this every single time...by jdw64
- > I can barely use Codex as it keeps prompting me for 'trusted access.
If you run it in unsafe mode, it won't prompt. The problem is that you would probably want to run it in a container and that's annoying.
by Supermancho - > It’s much easier to say someone else’s job is going to be fully replaceable by AI when you don’t actually know what they do.
This exactly. As someone who once lived in Silicon Valley and then ended up interviewing 700+ CxO's of profitable (or nearly profitable) SaaS businesses in various domain specific fields, it amazes me how many prominent "experts" in SV believed they were consistently "right" simply because they made enough bets to eventually get one right. Maybe not in enterprise value terms, but in volume of companies there are FAR more successful and profitable SaaS businesses that you've never heard of because they were started by entrepreneurs in their respective domains (the MD who started an EHR platform or the truck driver who started a TMS solution, etc.).
by mbesto - The failure of an over-leveraged hedge fund run by someone with no investing background who was just regurgitating what other people have been saying does not mean that labor markets are going to survive. The author has intellectual arrogance of his own to consider.
- This accurately describes a large portion of the people working in "tech", and it doesn't look to be getting better anytime soon.by mrhottakes
- The worst materialization of this are the slew of startups that are going to “watch your employees work so they can learn their job” as if random clicks on a computer can be reversed engineered to automate someone’s job.
This sort of audacity is a large part of the reason people increasingly hate AI
by miguelspizza - Working in AI was once reserved for intellectually gifted people. But with the recent advances in compute performance, working in AI today is basically not much different from pounding on a black box as long and as hard as necessary to make its output correspond to what you want it to be.by amelius
- Does the actual outcome matter or does the promise/what is sold/pushed upon society matter?
Was social media a clean win for human social interaction? Was fast food the replacement of food that was promised in the 70s? Were doctors and shrinks in phone apps rather than real life a clean win for diagnosis, understanding and improvement of life?
But society was completely shaped by the market in these questions anyways in a way that is impossible to deny.
While the author might be right about the arrogant PhDs imposing their view on other fields they know jack shit about, it doesn't make it less true when you have billions backing it and making it a reality, it will eventually be it, even if it's arguably worse.
by augment_me - There’s a tremendous amount of naivety on display by the big labs.
A bit of that is to be expected from any disrupter, but there’s now serious questions about if these startups have the basic competencies required to survive long term.
by cmiles8 - This kind of turbo confident naivety is quite common among software engineers.
I know people preaching about LLMs being the Next Industrial Revolution, who couldn’t place the industrial revolution in the correct century.
I have people at work talking about jobs and technologies getting replaced by AI who don’t understand how a lawn mower works, who don’t know who Lenin was or what a differential equation is, because they’ve simply been writing JavaScipt since high school.
by Toutouxc - Wait is this real? Did a random 25yo get 45B under management because he got some interviews after getting fired from OpenAI? I missed all of this and it almost seems like performance art to me.by skrebbel
- Yeah. And he made good returns even after the downfall everyone was so gleeful about.by chermi
- And before OpenAI, he was at FTX.by luke5441
- >> Wait is this real? Did a random 25yo get 45B under management because he got some interviews after getting fired from OpenAI?
They though they would laugh all the way to the bank...but that laugh was already the problem...
"We Need To Talk About Leopold" - https://youtu.be/rE75WvOtcu8
- Well it's not a random 25 year old. He became valedictorian at Columbia and graduated at 19. He was then briefly a part of OpenAI's superalignment team.
After he got fired, he wrote a 165 page thesis on AI in early 2024 that all ended up becoming true in 2026; you can read it for yourself and be the judge: https://situational-awareness.ai
That's what he based the fund on.
It's generational foresight not available to 99.999999999999999999% of 25 year olds. I want to get ahead of the default cynicism and "oh it's just dumb luck woe is me" aspect of HN.
by askafriend - FWIW, I quite enjoyed this write up of it, and the state of AI investment at the moment. It doesn't entirely dwell on the blowup, but I found it worth the read:
https://xcancel.com/porterstansb/status/2083606266388029691
(I also enjoyed the meandering in to Amex and Wells & Fargo's founding stories)
by Quarrel - It's real. Obviously he's a pretty accomplished young guy, but that doesn't mean he knows anything about investments.
It's an interesting look into who gets opportunities in our society.
by lordnacho - Yes… and some folks gave him money. Per reporting from the NY Times he was broadly laughed out of the room with “East Coast” money which has a massive amount to invest but tends to hold a higher standard on where it goes. Per that reporting, the combination of a lack of experience and inability to give coherent answers to basic questions meant those folks stayed far away.
Regardless he was still able to build a giant pile of cash before alighting it on fire.
by cmiles8 - Yes, it’s real, and the failure is much more about risk management than about having wrong fundamentals.
His fundamental thesis is as an AI maximalist, with expertise on who will be the winners.
His fund completely blew up, even though his fundamental thesis still may be correct.
He made a ton of money early, but then he just kept increasing his bet size via leverage. The problem is that these stocks may be going up, but they are EXTREMELY volatile. When the whole market went down with some of the Iran news, his margin levels dipped too low, and his lenders issued margin calls. He had to sell his stakes at losses, and his fund collapsed.
Now, part of the problem is he was not a legacy hedge fund with great relationships with his banks, because if he was, he might have been able to postpone the margin calls. Had he been able to do that, he would have been ok, because his positions actually recovered within a few weeks.
It didn’t matter, though, because he was forced to sell at the low point.
In other words, even if your long term bet is correct, if you are maxing out your margin to max out your bet, you are one volatile dip away from blowing up.
No matter how good the bet, you have to be able to ride out the volatility to survive.
It’s like if someone offered you a bet on a coin flip, where they will pay 5x your bet if you win. How much should you bet on each flip?
Well, by expected value you should bet everything you have, because your EV is 2.5x, so the more you bet the higher your expected value.
However, if you bet it all, you have a 50% chance of losing all your money and not being able to make any more bets.
by cortesoft - What the author is getting at here:
> Climbing Mount Everest and getting a PhD are both hard. I wouldn’t say that doing one means you can do the other “no problem.”
and here:
> Surgeons and electrical engineers may be extremely smart and accomplished, but that doesn’t mean they have the ability to weigh in on climate science.
Feels tangentially like a version of Nobel disease[0], discussed here[1] a couple of weeks ago.
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by sarreph - I mean, in the meantime, the US president is weighing in on technical design decisions of aircraft carriers, and he has neither a PhD nor a Nobel Prize, so...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/13/trump-aircra...
by rob74 - Lookin at you, Terry Taoby Drupon
- > It’s much easier to say someone else’s job is going to be fully replaceable by AI when you don’t actually know what they do.
Too true. This isn't limited to AI, either. The most obvious example in my lifetime was during peak blockchain hype, when people who had never worked in finance convinced themselves that blockchain was going to act as the backbone for how money gets moved around. As if the problem that needing solving was Bank of America doesn't trust Capital One to update a number in their database.
The nice thing about AI, at least, is I can always push back and tell people, "Sure, we can do this with AI. I just need you to use Claude or ChatGPT manually to prototype how it would work." This normally results in the requestor realizing that there's human judgment calls involved in the inputs, process, or outputs that require meatbag intelligence.
by mjr00 - > As if the problem that needing solving was Bank of America doesn't trust Capital One to update a number in their database.
As I understood it, the attraction of blockchain was more that the money could get moved around without Bank of America and Capital One knowing about it, and therefore without those financial institutions reporting the transactions to the government as they are required to by law. Which of course screams "money laundering" and "tax evasion" to the government. Yes, there are possible legitimate reasons for wanting to be able to move cash around anonymously and invisibly, but they're basically rounding error compared to the ones mentioned above.
In other words, blockchain on this view was a classic example of the old saying that you can't apply a technical solution to a social (or in this case political) problem.
by pdonis - Yeah, ive seen the same thing in construction and agriculture. People take the most strikingly visible part of the job, try to automate it, then wonder why nobody wants to spend $1,000K buying the automation for the easiest and simplest and solved parts of the job.
"You don't got to frame walls anymore!", something that is the most enjoyable part of residential construction, takes like a day of work at most, and can be done while on autopilot. "We can instantly generate wall plans for stud location from top-down blueprints!", oh that thing people do in their head because they just space it all on 16 or 24 inch centers and it doesn't actually matter which side you start on? "We can wirelessly drive your tractors!", the easiest task on the farm which all the weeks of maintenance and planning and setup led up to?
Now don't get me wrong, there are many things that can be improved in those industries certainly, but you aren't going to know what those things are until you actually go on the job site and learn how they currently do it daily. Most all of the low hanging fruits have already been picked one way or another and a fancy step stool is not going to be industry changing.
by AngryData - The AI researchers I know often say they expect the AI to replace their own jobs.by modeless
- Anyone remember when YC declared they would replace Hollywood?by bazoom42
- The thing they didn’t want to say is that the problem is that Bank of America has legal reporting and compliance obligations.
On that one, they were right enough that there are an enormous number of businesses that use crypto to avoid something government related.
by MattGaiser - >> It’s much easier to say someone else’s job is going to be fully replaceable by AI when you don’t actually know what they do.
> Too true. This isn't limited to AI, either.
That's so true there's a term for it: engineer's disease/engineer's syndrome.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/engineer%27s_disease
https://ask.metafilter.com/297591/Origin-of-the-term-Enginee...
by palmotea