[FRIAM] Fwd: The coming AI crash-worse than the Dot Com stock collapse?

[Steve Smith]

On 11/17/25 2:34 pm, glen wrote:
> There's a very real risk. 

guessing you are referring to the "entropy minimization strategy" 
reference?

> The itch the chatbots scratch is partly (mostly, imnsho) vocal grooming. 
I don't know about vocal literally but perhaps if you mean "verbal" or 
more generally "linguistic"?   This is a significant component of the 
"bar friend" mode I've referenced.  Someone I can "rattle on with" and 
get a variety of disagreeable agreements and vice-versa...  at best 
exercising social muscles with the main reward being the tiny bits of 
fatty protein I find down in the fur to pop in my mouth and down my gullet.
> But it's also partly co-construction/collaboration. I'm antipathetic 
> to the former. So I don't miss that part. But the 2nd part is 
> critical. Conversations with the chatbots *feel* to me like living in 
> a planned community ... i.e. flat-out yucky ... no stigmergy ... no 
> graffiti ... no crabs living in soup cans. 
It does remind me from time to time of those all-agreeable conversations 
(some) sports fans and political-awfulizing gaggles do when we get 
together...   on a good day it feels like chatting with someone who 
really does want to understand my point of view and (if encouraged to be 
argumentative)help me explore the negative/complementary space I've 
neglected.   A little like the conversations I'd get stuck in when I 
went to college with Jesus Freaks (the hippy/jesus looking ones, not the 
overgroomed, back-from-mission versions).
> In this case, no long-winded friend constantly polluting the air with 
> tangent after tangent. >8^D No bent threads. Etc.
I resemble that comment!  Just think of it as Performance/Graffiti Art?
> I suppose if you want your world to be all grids and bullet points, 
> hyperreal veneer, then fine. Have your chatbot.
I rarely need help bulleting/gridding my unruly garden, but it is nice 
to have a plow and seeder that normalizes the planting grid (a little) 
in spite of being more of a one-straw-revolution kinda guy.  My garden 
art is more edward-scissorhands than Disney but ... not. a forest either?
>  But the world's looking a bit grim to those of us who prefer the 
> forest to Disney World. And if you run across someone who can't tell 
> the difference between a forest and Disney World ... well, IDK ... 
> that's "uncanny" to me ... like talking to a sociopath.
Maybe I have a fetish for drawing the inner sociopath out in people?  
  Or just recognizing it.  Maybe not sociopathic but more 
socio-divergent, but not the performative kind, the deeply 
ideosyncratic, unselfconscious kind... like the roadrunner who seems to 
be trying to join my small herd of 6 chickens.  I hope she's teaching 
them some anti-wiley-T-Coyote tricks...   on that note, I'd better go 
run them into their coop before they freak out over the northern lights 
again?
>
> On 11/17/25 10:41 AM, Steve Smith wrote:
>> 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> on behalf of glen 
>>>> <gepropella at gmail.com>
>>>> *Date: *Monday, November 17, 2025 at 8:54 AM
>>>> *To: *friam at redfish.com <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> 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> on behalf of Prof David 
>>>>>> West <profwest at fastmail.fm>
>>>>>> *Date: *Monday, November 17, 2025 at 5:14 AM
>>>>>> *To: *friam at redfish.com <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.
>>>>>
>>>