[FRIAM] Fwd: The coming AI crash-worse than the Dot Com stock collapse?
Steve Smith
sasmyth at swcp.com
Mon Nov 17 15:17:42 EST 2025
> We're between cycles of exploitation and exploration, and there's
some adaptation that is required.
Excellent point to amplify BTW... the engine/cycle/metabolic cycle of
growth of complexity seems to be exploration-exploitation-exaptation?
On 11/17/25 12:58 pm, Steve Smith wrote:
>
> synthetic modulators of the feedback loops of a socio-cultural
> metabolism of morbid obesity?
>
> GLP1: a new mono-myth suitable for (firstworld) recovery (metabolic
> reset) from a life of junk-news/info consumption and other poor
> collective life choices?
>
> Does such lead to teleonomic healing or teleonomic capture? This is
> the never-ending debate between rePubs and Dems, between
> hyper-disciplinarian dad and indulgent mom?
>
> On 11/17/25 12:41 pm, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>>
>> Eli Lilly for GLP 1s?
>>
>> *From:*Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> *On Behalf Of *Steve Smith
>> *Sent:* Monday, November 17, 2025 10:41 AM
>> *To:* friam at redfish.com
>> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] Fwd: The coming AI crash-worse than the Dot
>> Com stock collapse?
>>
>> I don't even know if I will send my response to this thread, I've
>> come to delete most of my "usual" offerings without sending, some
>> without finishing, others without starting. Some kind of
>> entropy-minimization strategy on "y'all's" side of my Markov Blanket?
>>
>> Lots of rich stuff here. I don't think I disagree with any sentiment
>> here (can they ALL be compatible?). Tom's original (implied)
>> question is probably as much about "should those of us with fat ETF
>> portfolios switch their mix from high-performing AI-fueled to some
>> other place with better risk/reward ratios?" as it is about "is there
>> even a 'there there' in the AI cascade of new affordances and
>> competencies being offered (hyped) by 'the market'. But maybe they
>> are fundamentally the same question in this highly human-conditioned
>> manifold of intersubjective reality we inhabit together?
>>
>> Obligatory anecdote: when a moved to my current property (2000), A
>> huge russian olive (50' tall, 3'diameter trunk, broad reaching
>> branches) hosted a huge magpie nest in one of the forking horizontal
>> branches... maybe 6-8' long made of branches from all over the
>> property (area) and many other elements. It had a half-dozen babies
>> in it when I first came to review the property but by the time we
>> moved in, they had fledged and the nest was fully abandoned (only for
>> the season?) Within the year we took it upon ourselves to remove the
>> nest and found the myriad bits of interesting detritus they had
>> gathered. The structure of the nest seemed fully rhymed and
>> reasoned in spite of being opportunistic to the
>> branch/twig/grass/fur/??? at hand and wabi sabi in the extreme, but
>> the strange bright bits of yarn, string, fabric, bottle caps, broken
>> glass, etc cetera, were much more arcane/occult-to-me. But
>> nevertheless alliterated, rhymed and likely reasoned. As did our
>> own slow picking-apart of the structure with the help of Jays,
>> Packrats, and the weather which had it's own uses for these "objects
>> of desire"?
>>
>> Within 3 years West Nile flared up the Rio Grande, killing (most
>> notably, but not exclusively) Magpies. Even now, 20 years later, the
>> populations have barely begun to recover in a small way, probably
>> migrated back down from the Chama/Rio-Grande headwaters and
>> environs? This anecdote could tangent into the (very few) people I
>> know of who contracted (and one died) of West Nile during that time,
>> and the cascade of influences/effects that had on the lives of the
>> people I know, but except for a vague "where did all the Magpies go?"
>> I hardly registered the *devastating* effect it had on the Magpies
>> (and likely many other corvids/birds in the region?). Or tangent to
>> the "Rabbit Hemorhaggic Fever Pandemic" which coincided with human's
>> COVID 19 which devastated the Jack and Cotton populations here (and
>> many other regions globally)...
>>
>> This is probably an allegory or parable or something. Re:Cautionary
>> Tales starring NRA wankers - I did just (re) watch two Charlton
>> Heston classics from my "coming of age" era: "Soylent Green" and
>> "Planet of the Apes" but was spared (paywalls) from "Omega Man". I
>> didn't tangent to "Ben Hur" nor "Moses" for different reasons, but to
>> quote Glen (who might have been quoting David Byrne?):
>>
>> "Same as it ever was!"
>>
>> On 11/17/25 10:57 am, glen wrote:
>>
>> That's the point. Some of us line our nests with robust things
>> like straw. Others line theirs with fantasies peddled by grifters
>> and then expect the rest of us to share our nests when theirs
>> collapse. We will *definitely* bail out the capitalists again ...
>> and again ... and again, even after/while they['re] deport[ing]
>> us, abusing us, killing us, sending us to kill foreigners,
>> stealing our water to run their data centers, etc.
>>
>> We are the gift that keeps on giving.
>>
>> On 11/17/25 9:17 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>>
>> I remember where I was when I saw Torvalds’ first Linux
>> release. I started downloading pretty much immediately and
>> looking for a PC to sacrifice. It was hardly capitalist hype.
>>
>> *From: *Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com>
>> <mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com> on behalf of glen
>> <gepropella at gmail.com> <mailto:gepropella at gmail.com>
>> *Date: *Monday, November 17, 2025 at 8:54 AM
>> *To: *friam at redfish.com <friam at redfish.com>
>> <mailto:friam at redfish.com>
>> *Subject: *Re: [FRIAM] Fwd: The coming AI crash-worse than
>> the Dot Com stock collapse?
>>
>> Exactly. That's Chris' basic argument. Even his point about
>> fscking Twitter. To argue that it's "running just as well as
>> it did" seems a bit discordant. But at some altitude, he's
>> right. It's just as much of a toxic wasteland as it was
>> before. Every time it crosses my gaze, I wonder why people
>> still use it ... or bluesky, or reddit, or <arbitrary-tag>.
>>
>> My experiments with Cline have just about ended. I've decided
>> to avoid it. It works great with Claude (and some others),
>> but not with gpt-oss or codestral. Both of those work fine if
>> *I* manage the prompting. Chris also mentions linux, which
>> I've been using as my daily driver since ~1995 (?) ... IDK,
>> maybe I was mostly using ultrix & minix in '95. But
>> sporadically, as with the Windows 11 update breaking
>> recovery, all the dorks get all riled up and talk about linux
>> finally being ready for the desktop. [sigh]
>>
>> The fact is that we're no smarter than rats or birds who'll
>> fill our nests with whatever stupid little shiny thing the
>> capitalists bother to hype.
>>
>> On 11/17/25 8:21 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>>
>> The first example that comes to mind are malls. Malls
>> aren't needed now so many of them are closing.
>> Some people see something bad about that. I see
>> something good about that: Ruts get erased and new
>> opportunities arise. Power gets redistributed.
>> We're between cycles of exploitation and exploration, and
>> there's some adaptation that is required.
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com>
>> <mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of glen
>> Sent: Monday, November 17, 2025 8:02 AM
>> To: friam at redfish.com
>> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Fwd: The coming AI crash-worse than
>> the Dot Com stock collapse?
>>
>> But Chris' argument isn't really about AI. Chris is as
>> guilty of preemptive registration as the others.
>> Short-term markets distort everything. The task is to
>> free up the terms coercively bound by the grifters and
>> marketeers. Once the terms are unbound, we can discover
>> which formalisms fit and which don't.
>>
>> If we're charitable, Chris is right that *something* is
>> amiss. The disagreement is about *what* is amiss. Same as
>> it Ever Was.
>>
>> On 11/17/25 7:45 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>>
>> But what ARE these investments right now? It seems
>> to me they are well established companies:
>> Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Google. NVIDIA has
>> existed and will exist should AI revenue dry up, just
>> like it outlasted Ethereum mining.
>>
>> The new players aren’t yet public companies. OpenAI
>> has a longer path to profitability, but Anthropic
>> (technical users) is already making good progress @
>> $7B. AI has already penetrated education and will
>> likely spread more. People will become dependent on
>> it like they are dependent on cars.
>>
>> *From: *Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com>
>> <mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com> on behalf of Prof
>> David West <profwest at fastmail.fm>
>> <mailto:profwest at fastmail.fm>
>> *Date: *Monday, November 17, 2025 at 5:14 AM
>> *To: *friam at redfish.com <friam at redfish.com>
>> <mailto:friam at redfish.com>
>> *Subject: *Re: [FRIAM] Fwd: The coming AI crash-worse
>> than the Dot Com stock collapse?
>>
>> Marcus and Jon are not incorrect. I do see a problem
>> that they do not, the fact that the vast majority of
>> users/adopters of AI are dramatically less
>> technologically compentent than either of these
>> gentlemen. The manager that is positive that AI will
>> eliminate most if not all of his human employees, the
>> student using an LLM to "cheat," the social media
>> addicts taken with the latest AI fad bots, etc. etc.
>> almost certainly will become disillusioned and turn
>> away from AI.
>>
>> Perhaps more importantly, all the capitalists who see
>> immediate—not long term—return on investment are not
>> going to remain invested. Lot's of other peoples
>> money will be lost as a byproduct.
>>
>> The market of Jon Marcuses is not large enough to
>> sustain all the current investment. Maybe one large
>> AI company will survive (ala Amazon that lost tons of
>> money for a long long time).
>>
>> davew
>>
>> On Sun, Nov 16, 2025, at 3:51 PM, Jon Zingale wrote:
>>
>> I mostly agree with Marcus' sentiment. The dot
>> com analogy may be apt, but it also smells too easy
>> an analog. I find the K-shaped AI adoption to be
>> bizarre. Personally, I do not believe LLMs, nor any
>> particular architecture, to be the be-all-end-all. I
>> suspect we will see a transition away from throwing
>> money at developing the most general form and a move
>> toward more idiosyncratic instantiations. For
>> instance, I continue to think that Deepmind did
>> meaningful work going the RL path with AlphaGo/Atari
>> games and it has yet to come to my attention what
>> happens when Transformers attempt to replicate these
>> successes. Almost every LLM I have met is really
>> really bad at go. This said, AI in their current
>> form, and from this perspective, has been here for a
>> decade. Some have adopted it and use it to surprising
>> effect, others treat LLMs as nothing more than a
>> robust database querying language. What people do
>> with it and how they perceive it will undoubtedly
>> have an impact. In the
>> meantime, I am excited to see what happens as
>> programmers learn to use formal type theories as
>> pidgins and LLMs become more amenable to
>> compositionality.
>>
>>
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