MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by DavidPiper | 2025-07-20 11:39:18+00:00
Not OP, but I've been thinking about this and concluded it's not quite so clear-cut. If I was going to go down this path, I think I would bet on competitors, rather than against incumbents.

My thinking: In a financial system collapse (a la The Big Short), the assets under analysis are themselves the things of value. Whereas betting on AI to collapse a technology business is at least one step removed from actual valuation, even assuming:

1. AI Agents do deliver just enough, and stay around long enough, for big corporations to lay off large number of employees

2. After doing so, AI quickly becomes prohibitively expensive for the business

3. The combination of the above factors tank business productivity

In the event of a perfect black swan, the trouble is that it's not actually clear that this combination of factors would result in concrete valuation drops. The business just "doesn't ship as much" or "ships more slowly". This is bad, but it's only really bad if you have competitors that can genuinely capitalise on that stall.

An example immediately on-hand: for non-AI reasons, the latest rumors are that Apple's next round of Macbook Pros will be delayed. This sucks. But isn't particularly damaging to the company's stock price because there isn't really a competitor in the market that can capitalise on that delay in a meaningful way.

Similarly, I couldn't really tell you what the most recent non-AI software features shipped by Netflix or Facebook or X actually were. How would I know if they're struggling internally and have stopped shipping features because AI is too expensive and all their devs were laid off?

I guess if you're looking for a severe black swan to bet against AI Agents in general, you'd need to find a company that was so entrenched and so completely committed to and dependent on AI that they could not financially survive a shock like that AND they're in a space where competitors will immediately seize advantage.

Don't get me wrong though, even if there's no opportunity to actually bet against that situation, it will still suck for literally everyone if it eventuates.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-07-20 11:39:53+00:00
Two things:

1. Quality has been dieing mainly because people are addicted to cheap shit. The cheaper things are, the more they can buy. The amount of personal possessions people have nowadays is totally insane and unsurprisingly lots of cheap stuff.

2. Planned obsolescence is not a thing. Maybe it's happened a few times with a few products. But it certainly doesn't deserve a name. I have been on the engineering side of many business and consumer products and swam in waters of the industry for years.

No one has ever used that term. There is no engineering associated with it. No books or talks or specialists.

It's purely a function of point #1. People want the lowest cost above all else, so lower quality parts get used. Warranty durations are pretty standard too, 1 year 2 year 5 year. You never see a 566 day warranty like you would expect from a calculated failure model.

Also, the best way for 25 years now to make a product fail just after warranty is to program it in software. Everything has a microcontroller nowadays. How many devs here have written that code?
by pas | 2025-07-20 11:40:25+00:00
there are of course more than enough "natural resources" to sustain such consumption, the problem is paradoxically the opposite, too much easy to extract shit that we then emit into our own environment

the fix is also not complicated (remove GHG from the air, remove endocrine disruptors from the food cycle, etc.)

the costs are high though, but not that high, compared to - for example - the famines of past

but as population will peak - at least for now - and as we continue to ramp up renewable energy generation these problems are not insurmountable in any sense

...

places affected by storms and extreme heat/cold days need better infrastructure, but since urbanization continues to drive people to cities (as it did for the last few hundreds of years) these places need new and better infrastructure anyway!
by bartread | 2025-07-20 11:40:46+00:00
And this as well:

> The company expects the figure to reach about $330 million in 2025, roughly 10% higher than it was six years earlier despite a huge increase in the number of products offered.

It’s not like they have any growth potential to speak of that would enable them to service that debt.

It’s a bit hard to see who their target market is or, rather, it’s a bit hard to see that the market segment they’re aiming for is big enough for them to grow at an appreciable rate. To me it reads like they just didn’t do their homework up-front - e.g., an in depth segmentation - in determining their addressable market.

Vegetarians and vegans I know want protein sources in their diets but they don’t necessarily want meat substitutes, so perhaps BM’s products aren’t that appealing to them.

Meat eaters possibly have low awareness of BM and, unless they’re particularly principled - and wealthy enough to absorb the additional cost - are unlikely to pay the same price, or more (at least here in the UK), for meat substitutes than they’d pay for actual meat.

Moreover, people I know who are trying to cut down on meat, like their veggie and vegan counterparts, mostly aren’t looking for meat substitutes in their meat-free meals either.

If BM’s products were more affordable and better advertised they’d have a better chance at widespread adoption but it’s very hard to plot a route from where they are now to there. Also, this doesn’t solve for the portion of the market who aren’t looking for explicitly meaty meat substitutes.

As you say, it does appear hopeless.

(FWIW, I’ve eaten BM burgers on several occasions. They’re excellent but I’m not normally willing to pay the premium for them versus actual beef patties, or making our own.)
by rimeice | 2025-07-20 11:42:24+00:00
Shame. This is a poorly made case for an important phenomenon.

> “the first thing car ads highlighted was their longevity.“

This is table stakes now for cars so it would be weird for a car company to highlight it. So in the case for cars the baseline quality expectation has significantly increased.

The case is much easier to make for fashionable items like clothes and interiors.
by layer8 | 2025-07-20 11:42:47+00:00
Many comments here are arguing that quality has actually gone up over the past decades. However, a common experience for me is that I own something of good quality from 5/10/15 years ago and now buy the successor model from the same brand, but the product has gotten worse, being cheaper made. And I have a hard time finding a replacement that matches the quality of the old version. It’s a regularly reoccurring frustration.

My suspicion is that when products are successful and mature but reach market saturation, profit growth pressure leads to cutting some corners on every iteration, and hence to a slow decline in quality over the years.
by ben_w | 2025-07-20 11:42:49+00:00
> They literally have patented processes to alter protein structures.

This is like saying "the main chemical in vaccines is just one atom from bleach!"

In that it informs absolutely nothing, is true, and sounds scary.

The main chemical in vaccines being water: H2O -> H2O2; and the processes humans have been using for millennia to alter protein structures being "cooking", "mixing it with alcohol or vinegar", or "adding lots of salt".

Unfortunately, patents being what they are, even if you linked me to the patent in question I expect it to be borderline incomprehensible, which is definitely the opposite of reassuring for anyone who cares about health.
by ofrzeta | 2025-07-20 11:42:53+00:00
Even though I was impressed with the original article (so kind of contrary to the author) in the meantime I tried the same thing with Claude Sonnet 4 (because some people here criticized the approach due to not using a proper "coding model") and got no better results. Now I tried about a dozen iterations but it did not manage to create a "BASIC programm for Atari 800XL that makes use of display list interrupts to draw rainbow-like colored horizontal stripes", although this is like a "hello world" for that technique and there should be plenty of samples on the Internet. I am curious to see if anyone can make that work with an LLM.
by dns_snek | 2025-07-20 11:43:13+00:00
Prosperity according to which metric?

"GDP growth" and "investment rate" are just really terrible proxy indicators for the thing most people actually care about, i.e. quality of life for the common person. Without context they're just distasteful weasel words that strongly imply that GDP is somehow representative of the quality of life, which only serves to trick people into voting against their own interests.
by dlenski | 2025-07-20 11:43:15+00:00
> I think America doesn't manufacture semiconductors because it is a very unclean process, full of nasty chemicals. It's expensive to make semiconductors and deal with the clean-up. There are less environmental restrictions and cheaper labor in other parts of the world.

> Nobody in the U.S. really wants that in their back yard.

Disagree. I worked in Intel's flagship semiconductor r&d division in Oregon in the 2010s.

Everybody wanted Intel in their backyard. It was a huge source of high paying and stable jobs, both for engineers with PhDs, like me, and for thousands of technicians and support staff.

There were protected wetlands on Intel's campuses, and parks and fields around them. Certainly Intel wasn't perfect from an environmental point of view, but it was not a high source of pollution.

I've worked at/with many other semiconductor fabs around the US and around the world, and they're mostly similar in this regard. Far "cleaner" than factories in many other industries.
by ACCount36 | 2025-07-20 11:43:37+00:00
Currently, there are billions of devices that are capable of storing and running a 4B LLM locally. Hundreds of millions for 32B LLMs. It would take an awful lot of effort to destroy all of that.

If you're doomsday prepping, there's no reason not to have both. They're complimentary. Wikipedia is more reliable, but also much more narrow in its knowledge, and can't talk back. Just the "point someone who doesn't know what he's dealing with in a somewhat sensible direction" is an absolute killer feature that LLMs happen to have.
by jrexilius | 2025-07-20 11:43:50+00:00
The thing that sucks about it is maybe his english is bad (not his native language) so he relies on LLM output for his posts. Im inclined to cut people slack for this. But the rub is that it is indistinguishable from spam/slop generated for marketing/ads/whatever.

Or it's possible that he is one of those people that _realy_ adopted LLMs into _all_ their workflow, I guess, and he thinks the output is good enough as is, because it captured his general points?

LLMs have certainly damaged trust in general internet reading now, that's for sure.
by panick21_ | 2025-07-20 11:44:00+00:00
And yet almost no industry is actually a monopoly, funny how that works. Even even if it is, most of the time its only in certain region. And even then, often the pricing power of those 'monopolies' is not very strong.

In fact, historically most monopolies were state sanctioned, and that is still mostly true.

Literally non of the things mentioned in the article are monopolies. Cloths, absolutely not even close to a monopoly. AI, nope. Flying, nope. Maybe airplanes is duopoly for certain kinds of planes and that is one of the closest things to a monopoly. And yet despite that, prices for actually flying between places are incredibly low, the expect opposite of what you expect to happen in a typical monopoly.

Food industry, no monopoly. Computer, no monopoly. Hotels, no monopoly. Property, no monopoly.

In fact the largest global industries (just google list):

Global Life & Health Insurance Carriers

Global Car & Automobile Sales

Global Commercial Real Estate

Global Pension Funds

Global Oil & Gas Exploration & Production

Global Car & Automobile Manufacturing

Global Direct General Insurance Carriers

Global Auto Parts & Accessories Manufacturing

Global Engineering Services

Global Wireless Telecommunications Carriers

Not a single monopoly in the list.

So please tell me what you are talking about. Maybe some Health insurance have some limited monopoly in some place.

Please post here, from your monthly budget, how much of that budget goes to what you would call monopolies?
by mihaic | 2025-07-20 11:44:40+00:00
While it's something with a myriad of causes, the main one to me is the decrease of real wages for the middle class, not just consumer culture.

Some products and services managed to decrease in price to match this, and but the culture of craftsmanship had to be sacrificed to match lower purchasing parity.

Product culture ends up being the culture in which the middle class are engaged in.
by jltsiren | 2025-07-20 11:44:46+00:00
Cost per square meter is a misleading measure. A model that assigns a fixed price to a 0 m2 home and an additional price for each square meter is a better match for both construction costs and subjective utility.

Or maybe the additional price should be based on the number of rooms instead. Adding empty space by making the rooms bigger is cheap, but extra rooms are usually more valuable to those on a limited budget.

Where I live in California, construction itself has become unaffordable. Even if the land were free, construction and permits are now so expensive that it's impossible to build affordable housing without subsidies.
by nonameiguess | 2025-07-20 11:44:53+00:00
The US government already does this. Presumably, many governments do, but I've only ever worked for the US, so it's the only one I know of. Every day, the NSA does a dump of Wikipedia, the Stack Exchange network, and God knows what else to import into self-hosted versions of clone sites on classified networks, so US intelligence and military personnel can access this information without needing an Internet connection. The places these get hosted are already inside of military installations, in SCIFs that are behind several-foot thick concrete and radiation shielding that is probably quite a bit more likely than you to survive some kind of event that otherwise collapses civilization. They, of course, also have all of the military field manuals and technical manuals that more or less form a complete guide to how to survive in the wild with no equipment.

That said, I still think I understand why individuals like to do this kind of thing. You're not really concerned about human civilization itself preserving its structures and knowledge. You're concerned about the possibility that you personally will survive some civilization ending event and whatever is left of global militaries and various larger-scale data archiving systems won't care about you or have any way to share the information.

Just be warned, as someone with past experience being in the military and having to actually do these "remote survival with no gear" things, just reading about it is typically not enough to succeed on your first try. You need practice, and it helps quite a bit to have friends, co-workers, some sort of trusted companions who have at least as much and ideally more experience than you. Whoever figures out how to build the first new piece of "technology X" after catastrophe wipes out the last one we had before is far more likely to be someone who built this kind of thing before than someone who spent the pre-apocalypse data hoarding but never actually practicing what they're trying to learn how to do.
by constantcrying | 2025-07-20 11:45:50+00:00
No, it is not "mathematically impossible". It is empirically implausible. There is no statement in mathematics that says that agents can not have a 99.999% reliability rate.

Also, if you look at any human process you will realize that none of them have a 100% reliability rate. Yet, even without that we can manufacture e.g. a plane, something which takes millions of steps, each without a 100% success rate.

I actually think the article makes some good points, but especially when you are making good points it is unnecessary to stretch credibility with exaggerating your arguments.
by throw0101d | 2025-07-20 11:46:02+00:00
Meanwhile there are many places with on-person operation already (and for years):

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-person_operation

And even zero-person operation (GoA4):

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_driverless_train_syste...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_train_operation
by bluedino | 2025-07-20 11:47:55+00:00
Cars still rust what was solved?

These days the bigger problem with cars is one piece breaks and it isn't made anymore so you total it when 90% of the rest of the car is still good.

https://youtu.be/e7c2_JMxR0s?si=diMVZ_YBXtW48LOy
by nfriedly | 2025-07-20 11:49:14+00:00
> I'm not saying that a high price label guarantees high quality, just that the spectrum of cost vs quality has broadened, even within big name brands.

I think this needs to be repeated. People tend to think more expensive equals higher quality (I want this to be true!), and I think brands frequently take advantage of that to increase margins without significantly increasing quality.

For example: I've been through three or four pairs of my $180 Sony link buds hitting various issues before giving up on them entirely. Meanwhile, my $5 Auki bluetooth earbuds keep on chugging.
by rob_c | 2025-07-20 11:49:29+00:00
>declining quality

Just like this article I'm afraid.

If it's making a point it's lost by meandering to too long.

If it's point it's simply longevity then it's missed the point about how LLM are simply here to stay, the genie is out of the bottle with regards to that tool.

If the point is some anti hyper-capitalist rant then it's a thinly veiled option piece.

If the point is the breakdown of the social contract/elevator. Then why when you're interviewing experts who study this aren't you asking poignant questions like "when do you think this happened?" or "can this be fixed?". Rather than ranting about the dreams of the nuclear (pub intended) family to China and "AI".

If it that if you're not chasing these answers you're either afraid to admit you know them or are scared of them?
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-07-20 11:50:13+00:00
> clearly processed foods aren't harmful because they are processed

The processing is done with a purpose.

> All the correlations go away when you control for basic things like sugar and vegetable consumption

Source?

Processed food is, in a sense, pre digested. The simple fact that e.g. starches and sugars are unbound from the cells that contained them before any of it hits the mucous linings of your mouth and duodenum dramatically changes the food’s physiological effects. And it’s difficult to undo the gastric, gastrobiomic, metabolic, cellular and other effects of UPFs with an otherwise-healthy diet.
by alganet | 2025-07-20 11:50:22+00:00
Animal analogies! They're fun, aren't they?

I think synthetic data generation can make leapfrog improvements to AI and finally get us somewhere where the technology pays off.

However, leapfroging has its risks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scorpion_and_the_Frog

So, the idea is to gather a very large amount of such scorpions (people that are only in for the hype and will definitely sting you), and do a tremendous scorpion barbecue on the other side of the river (when we finally discover some good use for AI).
by Greyfoscam | 2025-07-20 11:50:33+00:00
Do you honestly think the government would stop at His holdings once that floodgate is opened. Feinstein selling US post office properties via her Husband to friends and business partners with government oversight removed because of her status at Hundreds of millions below market value to while tacking on a 6% commission is how that would go. The further intimidation that any business that contributed to the ruling politica parties opponents would face the same result is probably the next result. This would be an extremely bad road to travel down
by throw0101d | 2025-07-20 11:50:55+00:00
> What matters is who votes in the Democratic primary, a pool that is usually much smaller than the total number of eligible voters.

Most "blue-collar" / "working-class" voters lean GOP nowadays:

* https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/meet-the-press/gop-rapidly-...

* https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/11/04/new-republ...

Which is ironic given GOP policies are generally anti-worker.

A lot of folks are voting due to their (perceived) grievances and not in their actual self interest.
by Mordisquitos | 2025-07-20 11:51:46+00:00
I disagree that objective vs subjective is a false dichotomy with regards to quality. Not because I believe it is false, mind you, but because I don't believe they are a dichotomy; they are actually two essential axes when perceiving and discussing quality. And each of those two axes are measured empirically and valued ethically and aesthetically.

The subjective axis of quality concerns values. What do you value the most in a mobile phone? Is it battery life? Is it photo quality? Is it durability? Is it features? Is it security? Is it screen size? Is it repairability? Is it social approval? Is it free software support? Is it less effort due to habit?

The objective axis of each of those values (and their subvalues) can be empirically measured. Some of them trivially, such as screen size or battery life. Some are harder to measure but still quite easily, such as features, photo quality, or repairabilty. Others may end up in a quagmire of subvalues, some of them subconscious, but could ultimately be measured empirically with great effort (social approval, security, habit...)

What often happens is that, when debating quality, people make the mistake of using empirical arguments about objective characteristics without realising that they are disagreeing on their ultimate subjective preferences. Subjective values can of course be debated, sometimes successfully. However, I am never going to convince an average middle-class American teenager to prefer a Fairphone over an iPhone empirically proving its repairability and support for FOSS Android alternatives, and they are never going to convince me to prefer an iPhone because it's cooler and it takes awesome photos.

Going back to the main topic of the article, I believe that ultimately the problem is that the market has over-fitted and heavily optimised for specific axes of subjective preference, due to their alignment with profitability and ease of development, together with an inefficient feedback loop, to the detriment of large numbers of consumers such as myself who value less intrinsically profitable characteristics.
by weinzierl | 2025-07-20 11:52:05+00:00
I grew up in Germany and as a kid I always thought when I grow up I will drive a Mercedes. Why? Because taxis were 100% Mercedes back then and if a car is good enough to be a taxi it will be good enough for me.

Of course I never got a Mercedes because it always was way to expensive.

Nowadays every Uber driver seems to drive a BYD Dolphin. They are nice cars and obviously good enough as "taxis". The BYD Dolphin Surf costs 8000 EUR in China (called Seagull there) and between 13000 EUR and 20000 EUR in most other places where it is available.
by jiggawatts | 2025-07-20 11:52:05+00:00
There are scenarios where retrieving the just-inserted value without first cloning it isn't possible. E.g.: when inserting a value into a non-empty hashset and then needing it again immediately.

But yeah... that's a bit of a contrived example and can be solved by a simple change to the insert function without specialised support from the language.