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Comment by lamename | Hacker News Reader

> But give it 5-10 years, or maybe less, and that will seem silly. People will be using LLMs for focused use cases and making sure they help the end users. You will be evaluated with a higher standard - of what you actually accomplish with your products.

This day cannot come fast enough in my opinion. Hype is tiring and ultimately detrimental in the long term (more disappointment than fulfilled wishes), in terms of opportunity cost of what could have been invested in instead.

How does one escape this?

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My life has been: The soviets are out to get us, computers are amazing and revolutionary, the muslim terrorists are out to get us, peak oil, the banks have collapsed, PV is amazing, oh no a pandemic, AI is god/the devil incarnate.

If that's reflective of the broader human condition, we only avoid hype by having a scapegoat to demonise… or possibly the causality is the opposite direction and we only avoid demonising scapegoats by hyping something up.

By ignoring it? Nobody's forcing you to read news, read tweets, or listen to every clown talk about AI. Just put your head down and solve real problems and focus on the end users and providing real value

Fair. More specifically what I meant was how can one avoid being subject to being pulled away from providing real value when superiors are wooed by hype. In that sense just ignoring it is not easy if you care at all about your work.

For those looking for some relatively light financial reading related to the question of "how does one escape this?":

Morgan Housel (a writer at the collab fund) has written about how cycles of boom and bust are inherent to markets.

https://collabfund.com/uploads/Collaborative%20Fund%20--%20T...

The first section "1: The Inevitability of Insanity Among Sane People" is probably the most relevant, and a more summarized version is from Housel directly: https://collabfund.com/blog/the-laws-of-investing/

And another great level-headed financial writer Howard Marks has a great "memo" about how bull markets (sometimes read: bubbles) rhyme. Specifically the section "Optimistic Rationales, Super Stocks, and the New, New Thing".

https://www.brookfieldoaktree.com/sites/default/files/2023-0...

I can't find the exact quote, but I feel that one of them basically once said that you wouldn't really want a market to not have bubbles, if something didn't have the ebbs and flows that financial markets have, there wouldn't really be any room to find niches or to innovate because innovation requires risk, and risk inherently destabilizes any existing stability (re: the first article).

I think the same can be said of crashes… Or at least recessions… You would not want a market without corrections or recessions.

I can’t stop beating this analogy to death:

A market that is never allowed to fall into recession is like a forest whose fires are always snuffed out immediately… One of these days it’s gonna go and when it does the resulting conflagration will be many, many times worse than if It had been allowed to burn a little bit here and there…

I personally give it no more than 1-2 years before the starry eyed believers come back down to earth and start selling off their stock whilst they can. Then it will be exponential backoff.

I'm not sure that you want to escape it. This is just part of how capitalism works. A large percentage of investments fail and a small percentage have massive returns. You don't get the big returns without making a lot of risky investments, too.

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