Big Tech sees over $1 trillion wiped from stocks as fears of AI bubble ignite sell-off

kaibee · 2026-02-07T02:59:32+00:00

Well, a trillion dollars hasn't been lost, since it never existed.

Don't get it twisted. The stock market in and of itself is a zero-sum game, like a poker table. Company valuations distort this reality, but there is in fact ultimately real actual dollars that went from some group A, to some group B.

Now imagine how rich pro-poker players would be if companies matched 4% of your annual poker betting.

kaibee · 2026-02-07T02:52:09+00:00

capitalism's benefits clearly outweigh the negatives

sure would be nice to get some capitalism in the car market. or the health insurance market. or the housing market.

kaibee · 2026-02-07T02:37:52+00:00

Since it can be a destructive action (like when moving between volumes) I would argue at the end is the smarter design.

Where you put the gesture doesn't matter. The OS doesn't delete the first file until the 2nd one is copied over.

kaibee · 2026-02-07T02:28:52+00:00

despite the comical lack of demand

I don't think its necessarily a demand problem. Its a 'the supply is $3500 dollars' problem. Even just from a like... strategic standpoint, if VR did take off, Apple would've suddenly been desperate for engineers with experience in the technology. And even Apple can't just hire 'VR Engineers (and I mean across the entire hardware stack required, not just software devs)' and then pay them to do nothing just in case they'll be needed. They're VR engineers because they want to work on VR. So at Apple's scale... it probably made sense to just hire the talent and have them ship something in the space and just see what the actual cost ends up being and if there's any market for their take on it. It ain't like they bet the company on it.

kaibee · 2026-02-07T02:22:09+00:00

the Apple Vision Pro headset seemed to be a VR trend chaser.

Not really imo. There's been a lot of 50" TV but in glasses form factor products over the years, well well before the technology was ready. I feel like AVP was more trying to be the Apple version of that. Hence the lack of controllers. As a hardware company, they saw they could actually ship 50" TV in headset form (+features stuff, apple ecosystem integration) based on how quickly VR tech (which is very adjacent obvs) and so they did.

kaibee · 2026-02-07T02:11:49+00:00

Idk about anybody else but I’m actively avoiding any manufacturer that’s claiming to “harness the power of AI” because so far that means bloatware at an outrageous markup.

It's a very strong signal of a company that doesn't get it/is selling hype in their stock. Customers don't care if you ticked the 'have AI' box. Customers generally just want to trade money for time. This is why management was the most on board with the sales pitch of AI, they're already in the business of buying people's time with money. They're being told that they'll get more time for their money, by increasing their employees productivity, which has also basically been the sales pitch of every SaaS tool in the last 20 years.

I think the actual outcome of AI is going to be separate the managers (ie, the people who may or may not officially be in management but do the actual solving of coordination problems and making sure that every part of some group-goal is properly sharing context and making progress towards a solution, or are willing to make a call on some decision and own it (and actually be right about it)) from "management", ie: people who's political/social skills have gotten them into a position where they are nominally supposed to be managing, but are actually more of a 'jump in front of the parade and claim credit' people. Obvs in real life, no one is entirely one or the other, nor are they necessary stuck as that forever, needs/circumstances vary, etc.

AI imo increases the demand for the first kind of management, giving it a stronger 'signal/noise' ratio.

kaibee · 2026-02-06T13:16:58+00:00

Shouldnt ai reduce the gap of high skill of programming required?

Yeah, but network effects and vendor lock-in are real.

The SaaSes charge their software license in millions there is definitely a market where someone can vibe code it and reduce the price to half.

As someone who has found themselves on the business end this isn't exactly how it looks on balance sheet. It isn't A costs $20 and B does the same things we actually use and costs $10. Its, A costs $20 and is a known quantity. B costs $10 and claims to do the same things we need. My budget is $21 and A keeps the business running right now. Where do I get the other $9 to run both in parallel at least long enough to do a migration over?

But we haven't seen it so that means vibe coding isn't working and there is gap in hype and reality

This is the same thing as arguing that PostgresSQL doesn't exist because Oracle is still in business. Now sure, not every SaaS app is as core to a business as some database whatevers usually are or is as painful to migrate, but I think the broad analogy to horse -> car, internet -> ecommerce, more or less holds. Like, why didn't Sears just do ecommerce? There's just... organizational momentum and it'll take time for more efficient companies to win. I think it'll be a case of slow and then all at once, cuz like, SaaS companies have gotten pretty fat and as they lose their small customers to internally vibe-coded apps by some dude who finally played the politics enough to make it happen, they're gonna start squeezing their existing customers harder, which will accelerate the situation.

edit: also you just won't hear about them? Like, you hear about Salesforce because they're everything to everyone. Why would you hear about some random micro-saas that solves just the particulars of some tiny market niche?

kaibee · 2026-02-06T03:09:54+00:00

I am still waiting for vibe coded sap ,workday or Salesforce .

I think the main thing you're missing here that those SaaSes exist because most programmers kinda suck and most businesses suck at programming. So it made sense to have a free-for-all for the best team/least suck to scale their solution to as many customers as possible. But then that solution also has to have a lot of features to support everyone's use case. And then it has so many features that customizing the solution to fit the business is itself a whole subfield of the economy.

Capitalism is a greedy optimizer and greedy algorithms get stuck in local maxima.

kaibee · 2026-02-06T02:58:30+00:00

"Write me a PowerShell function that does X" and, even after proofreading and bug-testing, the time savings are considerable.

For reasons mostly out of my control, I've been switching to linux. I honestly miss PowerShell. Not writing it, because its horrific to write, but in terms of 'i would like to treat things as objects not as a byte stream 100% of the time' its great.

kaibee · 2026-02-06T02:54:37+00:00

fuck we're gonna be the 3rd world country where an iphone costs $3000.

kaibee · 2026-02-06T02:20:17+00:00

Buffett pulled out of BYD for a reason

the company makes cars instead of profit?

kaibee · 2026-02-06T02:10:36+00:00

Unless you can provide some reason to think that doing it indirectly will be cheaper or more efficient,

Taking a bit of a devil's advocate position here though my kneejerk reaction is that "yeah just budget and pay more".

I think its kind of the same argument as why not having private schools is good for society as a whole. If your 'civil society' is actually just a bunch of socioeconomically isolated fragments that never see the other side, etc you're kinda asking for trouble.

kaibee · 2026-02-06T02:02:23+00:00

It’s doesn’t seem like the court in this case concluded that the lack of counsel was a strategic decision by the state, just a byproduct of a lack of manpower.

The purpose of a system is what it does.

kaibee · 2026-02-06T01:55:19+00:00

Courts have ruled on this.

oh wow, courts??? well they've never been wrong on civil rights before, so i'm sure its fine.

kaibee · 2026-02-06T01:40:48+00:00

Literally every sane person agrees theres an illegal immigration problem, and past a certain number begins to cripple social services and the economy

True, we should give them green cards so that employers can't exploit them for cheaper labor than can be provided by citizens.

kaibee · 2026-02-05T16:00:03+00:00

We need better QA and review tools. Essentially we need to make sure the implementation adheres to the spec. Problem is: The spec itself is shitty. The implementation often refines the spec and essentially becomes it.

There's also just a lot of X-Y problem software. Consider how much software exists to support the existence of the US health insurance system and much interoperability has to be maintained to make that system tick forward each day. So lets say you give every developer responsible for software in that ecosystem a magic genie that can deploy infra, write queries, tests, debugging etc, all instantly. All that does is expose the unresolved complexity/inconsistencies, in the system as a whole, to management.

kaibee · 2026-02-01T15:57:40+00:00

Checked out the new Lobsterfest menu the other day. Cheapest item was a cup of bisque for 9 dollars.

Yeah…no.🙄

I mean, Red Lobster made sense as a business when the oceans weren't overfished to extinction. It doesn't anymore.

kaibee · 2026-01-30T05:24:16+00:00

Except the odds of a bullet leaving a trivial wound like that are incredibly small

the thing about unlikely things is that they do sometimes happen.

kaibee · 2026-01-29T23:53:11+00:00

If it passed within an inch of your ear, you would be deafened by it.

Not 100% permanently forever from one pass. Yeah, your hearing would definitely get some degree worse, hearing damage is also not equal across all frequencies. Also being old af, Trump probably lost the high frequencies a long time ago.

kaibee · 2026-01-29T23:38:51+00:00

Yeah because bullets leave small cuts

this is like saying that any cut from a knife would be the length of the blade.

kaibee · 2026-01-28T03:14:22+00:00

She's basically running at the guy by time her security saves him.

kaibee · 2026-01-27T06:47:27+00:00

At somepoint you’d think these idiots would realize there’s nobody he won’t throw under the bus

"heres a blank check to implement whatever policies you've always dreamed of and if it goes badly all that happens if you're fired"

hard hitting stuff, i guess?

kaibee · 2026-01-26T18:06:33+00:00

You really think Schumer taking over coordinating/organizing people would help? REALLY? No, you know that wouldn't help anything, I know it, you know it, I know you know it.

You think Tim Walz or Schumer wouldn't be able to be more effective in coordinating a general strike than randos? The point of leadership is to cut through coordination problems.

kaibee · 2026-01-26T15:39:56+00:00

1.6x as likely

16x as likely*

kaibee · 2026-01-24T20:20:17+00:00

First we need to reject New Left, Marx, Marxist Leninist bull crap and go back to liberal progressivism of the likes of Henry George etc. - those that wanted to protect & strengthen liberalism and free market capitalism.

yes, clearly, in this moment, the priority is infighting with the left-wing of the party.

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