YTD Kospi is +173%, after the sell-off, compared to +10% for the Nasdaq. Not exactly... worrying territory there.
But yeah, I'm sorry this whole circular financing bubble with AI should crash. As someone who's in community with people outside tech, things are pretty fucking dire and a correction in asset prices would probably be better long term.
It's pretty awful outside tech. I know a lot of people struggling to find work, and those that have jobs are struggling to keep up with their bills. Nobody's wages are keeping up with costs.
Where are you geographically? The data indicate this varies wildly, with the West Coast seeing pain and the rest of the country seeing stability or even tightness [1].
That data is just unemployment. It doesn’t address real wages.
Out here in California, I see headlines like “inflation hits 3.8%”, which seems right until I realize they mean YoY and not monthly, seasonally adjusted.
I know the Trump administration fired a bunch of economists for putting out honest numbers in 2025, so I trust the anecdotes and consumer sentiment stories over official numbers anyway.
I’d love to see third party CPI and inflation numbers, preferably by zipcode or at least state.
> I see headlines like “inflation hits 3.8%”, which seems right until I realize they mean YoY and not monthly, seasonally adjusted
Seasonally adjusted, month over month annualized, inflation was 7.2% in April [1]. (3.8% YoY.) Until December, the California economy was doing well, with average weekly wages up 4.6% YoY [2].
But in 2026, “real average hourly earnings for all employees [nationwide] decreased 0.5 percent from March to April, seasonally adjusted” [3]. And as of March, we know California’s electricity prices have risen faster than national average, 15 to 20% versus 7.2% nationally [4], causing it to be one of the few states where retail consumption decreased.
Put together, we’d expect real earnings in California to have fallen faster than the national average. What you’re seeing is real and clearly present in the data and representative of a bad trend being compounded by regional headwinds.
Midwest USA. Friends and family across Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, Colorado, and Ohio.
Gas and food prices have skyrocketed. Rent has gone up massively in formerly dirt-cheap cities like Omaha the last several years. Many people are severely underemployed and struggling to save, moving in with roommates or parents to get by. People that had stable working-middle class employment through the entire 2010s.
Lots of possible stories if you write "and then it crashed" on the last line of a sheet of paper and work backwards.
e.g.
1. US economy becomes lopsided towards AI as per Dutch disease
2. US exports become relatively expensive, imports become relatively cheap, collapsing employment opportunities in general outside making more data centres
3. Nobody in the US except hyperscalers can afford anything
4. Fixed output from people still making consumer RAM not anticipating this
5. Oversupply relative to demand
6. Market price of consumer RAM collapses to shift stock
Of course, the ease of writing backwards is also why, famously, 11 of the last 2 recessions have been predicted. Or whatever the exact quote was.
Or a different sort of Internet appears. free and open internet is polluted with commercialization and greed, eventually cleaner spaces will be created with stronger restrictions like geo, social trust chains, and cost of posting going up so high it’s uneconomical to spam. What good is a single international internet for social media when everyone is bots?
Or just maybe it’s heavily economic. Yea there are many people with lots of money who are anxious about being rendered unneeded, but can we talk for a minute about all the people trying really hard to save who are needing to rent at market rates, or maybe they have a mortgage and desperately need their current income in order to not lose their home? Let alone that the people more likely to be replaced are those paid the least!
If the hype train keeps going for another year, Sam and co will have to resort to direct gaslighting like saying the model is improving but nobody can feel it anymore, oh and I need 10 trillion dollars
I wonder how much it’s due to the fact that homes are such an incredibly expensive endeavor compared to other things. I could see significant economies of scale in most of the materials and parts, but perhaps there has been a steady increase in quantity in those materials?
> homes are such an incredibly expensive endeavor compared to other things
Jet engines are more complex and complex than homes. We still see productivity increases in their manufacture year after year. Same for turbines, rockets, et cetera.
> Tech companies are now more focused than at any time in the past two decades
Citation needed. In fact, I find the utter opposite - the pivots are happening hard and fast, planning is taking a major back seat, and it’s a ship with speed and look good and be visible at all costs mentality.
The truth is the guardrails are being ignored in the frenzy. Style is winning over substance. I think if you revisit this hot take in a year it’ll have aged so poorly it will seem like a parody.
I reject the typology. Engineers are expected to do a lot of things, those things are different in different environments, and judgement is usually a key consideration. Pidgeonholing someone as a “type” of engineer can help with shallow comparisons but can’t predict behavior in all situations.
Some people's brains don't work the way that people who set up interviews think. If they require memorizing, they don't end up hiring those people (except strangely in upper management, where utterly different signals are looked for).
> what it means to live a virtuous life and about ethics and morality and so forth
> I don't have any answers (and I'm not looking for them, really, just musing)
I'm not sure why, but even in my general pessimism it hadn't occured to me that there are people out there who are uninterested in what living a virtuous life means. I truly just assumed that just about everyone had some sort of convoluted self-justification. That you say you don't even try, and want to read about it from "those whose job it is to think about", blows my mind. Do you think of yourself as an ameoba without free will or something?
The best thing to convince you to not use AI for writing is to watch a friend who used to be a writer utterly lose their voice while having no idea how they come across. They have started losing longtime friends and relationships because they are so engaged with AI they keep shoving their genAI output in everyone’s faces and feeling insulted when they balk.
It does not help that their work gave them a major promotion for being so pro-AI adoption.
There’s a sickness that AI brings, and the cost to everyone is under appreciated. There’s benefits too, but the validation loop is like a poison, and it seems especially potent for management types.
But yeah, I'm sorry this whole circular financing bubble with AI should crash. As someone who's in community with people outside tech, things are pretty fucking dire and a correction in asset prices would probably be better long term.
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