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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

40 minute read.

The problem with this guy is that it's always the same 40 minutes on loop.

I have been strongly-tempted to make Zitron and Marcus GPTs... But every time I think about getting started I realize a simple shell script would work better.

Oh wait Claude did a better job than I would have:

https://claude.ai/share/32c5967a-1acc-450a-945a-04f6c554f752

wow claude gave them both pretty scathing descriptions and you didn't even provide much context lol.

maybe claude is funny.

That's why I wanted to share that session specifically -- usually I provide a heck of a lot more context than that. But ... They were so well-known in personalityspace that that's all it took, which was its own funny.

I'm not even saying he's "wrong"; I wouldn't want to be long OpenAI (I don't think they're doomed but that's too much risk for my blood). But I would bet all my money that Zitron has no idea what he's talking about here.

Yeah, I'm also not saying that, I'm not "OMG AGI tomorrow" either. I think he was one of the first to voice concerns about the financial situation of AI companies and that was valuable, but if you look at his blog he's basically written the same post nonstop for two years. How many times do you need to say that?

(I also flatly disbelieve in AGI).

Mind sharing why you think that (genuinely curious)?

I think Ed hit some broad points, mostly (i) there were some breathless predictions (human level intelligence) that aren't panning out; (ii) oh wow they burn a ton of cash. A ton; (iii) and they're very Musky: lots of hype, way less product. Buttressed with lots of people saying that if AI did a thing, then that would be super useful; much less showing of the thing being done or evidence that it's likely to happen soon.

None of which says these tools aren't super useful for coding. But I'm missing the link between super useful for coding and a business making $100B / year or more which is what these investments need. And my experience is more like... a 20% speed improvement? Which, again, yes please... but not a fundamental rewriting of software economics.

Well absent any actual explanation from him, this is the "My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts" guy. I'm assuming he's got a pretty hefty pro-LLM bias.

Yeah; if this ends up as “some people and companies find this to be a useful programming tool and will pay a moderate amount for it”, then you have essentially recreated Borland, or Jetbrains, business-model-wise. The current valuations are based on something else altogether.

> But I would bet all my money that Zitron has no idea what he's talking about here.

So who does? Genuinely curious. I, for one, don't really trust CEOs raising mountains of debt.

I absolutely would not trust an AI CEO either, though all of them understand the basics of technology more than Zitron does; Zitron has said some really cringe things (he's not a technologist by background, and it shows).

Maybe if you click on all the links and go down rabbit holes. It doesn't take more than a few minutes to get through otherwise.

Read time estimated by AI*

they failed to estimate that when they create a popup, i will close the website so it's 0 min read

That can’t be right. It is not that long at all.

The rest is paywalled

didn't even realize that, have to double check and saw the "read full story" banner

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