Castanza

Raising capable kids seems dangerous to incapable adults. My son is 3 and I have him watering the garden, using some power tools (nail gun, impact driver, hammers, pliers, etc.) to help me fix things, helping with oil changes on the car, minor cooking on the stove. He's into all kinds of "dangerous" things like mountain biking, rope swings into the creek, etc. About a month ago he crashed his bike after trying to hit a jump. Tears ensued, and I ran to check on him and picked him up. He looked up at me with a bloody mouth and a skinned up chin and knee and says "I'm tough Dad, I got a big booboo but that was pretty cool." Got him cleaned up, and headed back out. 1000% ... I want to blame this fixation of efficiency culture that has tried to professionalize childhood. Society has basically ruined kids sports by sucking the fun out of it and making it all about practice, performance and trying to get a scholarship. It's also absurd to me that we want to take small children with tons of energy who are known to learn primarily through play and make them sit at a desk for 8 hours a day. Some structure and school is obviously important...but there is a lot of projection going on from parents that have all but ruined "normal childhood" these days. We teach for the test results now instead of trying to teach for success. "Don't let that boys schooling get in the way of his education." - Mark Twain

A close friend of mine is a Doctor of Psychology and specializes in autism disorders for young children. Now that I have two sons I pick her brain every so often on behavior that seems bizarre to me. She tells me it’s normal and also told me they are constantly flooded with parents bringing their kids in for evaluation. She said “End of the day, kids are just F&$@ing weird” By all means though it doesn’t hurt to get it checked out. The more info you have the better imo. It does seem like there is over propensity to diagnose these days and that the spectrum is ever expanding. I also think the term “autism” has changed quite a bit over the last few decades as there is more awareness and understanding.

Explains why you horde cash and are constantly paranoid about financial Armageddon.

Bread & Circuses

Word of advice....if you find yourself taking the opposite with just as firm of a stance you're likely just as bad of a rational thinker as the ones you're criticizing.

There are opportunities now!

How are you using the models?

Very true! But there is still a lot more nuance. It’s possible good enough is simple good enough though.

Yup, so far AI is probabilistic where human coders are deterministic. That difference is a glass ceiling for how far AI generated code can go. Still a very useful tool though especially when developed for specialized tasks. It gets you closer quicker.

Can't speak to whether AI pulled forward this trend, but companies SaaS companies have been switching their pricing model from per seat to usage since 2018. Many of them offered the choice for some time so it may not have been as obvious that this trend had already started. I deal with quite a bit of licensing fee bullshit and this for sure predates the AI boom. Same for PaaS and IaaS. I can see the token model accelerating this though. Covid was also a big driver of the shift.

Good luck with that when those "contracts" get canceled.....

I trimmed a bit of my GOOGL position yesterday. The BRK side of things doesn't make sense to me (agree with you)....but GOOGL signaling they have to raise cash in order to fund AI development doesn't sit right with me. The whole narrative last year was these companies will fund build out with fcf...now here we are one year later and the only Mega Cloud company sitting with a net cash position is Microsoft. Still a large position for me...but I can't help but think we are at the beginning of the debt funding spiral and at the end of all these buildouts there is always bag holders....

Yup, it's a known fact that too many business decisions creates a lot of drag on underlying performance. I mentioned in another thread, but good operators are going to be more and more important. Just because something can be done, doesn't mean it should be done. This whole AI boom has primarily been pitched from the engineer's perspective (we can do all these things!) but it's hardly been analyzed from the functional business perspective. General Magic (spin off of Apple in the 90's) had amazing ideas, top tier talent and almost no guardrails on development. It ended with products that were ground breaking. But they were too complicated, had too many features, lacked focus, missed deliverable dates because of complexity etc. There are already dozens of stories coming out of how companies aren't really sure how to effectively use tokens and "ration" them for productivity. Burnings a lot of tokens on rabbit trail ideas that ultimately don't pan out sounds expensive. IMO all AI is really doing is pulling forward the product development cycle while simultaneously increasing the complexity of sound business decisions. I come back to the book Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman....there is a balance to be had and right now we are all gas.

Based on?

Right direction of what exactly?