Reminds me of Vitalik Buterin. I spent a lot of my starry-eyed youth reading his blog, and was hopeful that he was applying the learned-lessons from the early days of Bitcoin. Turned out he was fighting the wrong war though, and today Ethereum gets less lip service than your average shitcoin. The whole industry went up in flames, really.

Nerds are good at the sort of reassuring arithmetic that can make people confident in an idea or investment. But oftentimes that math misses the forest for the trees, and we're left betting the farm on a profoundly bad idea like Theranos or DogTV. Hey, I guess that's why it's called Venture Capital and not Recreation Investing.

I'm curious why you think that? I thought the talk was pretty grounded. There was a lot of skepticism of using LLMs unbounded to write software and an insistence on using ground truth free from LLM hallucination. The main thesis, to me, seemed like "we need to write software that was designed with human-centric APIs and UI patterns to now use an LLM layer in front and that'll be a lot of opportunity for software engineers to come."

If anything it seemed like the middle ground between AI boosters and doomers.

How can someone so smart become a hype machine? I can’t wrap my head around it. Maybe he had the opportunity to learn from someone he worked closely with?