Having lived through both ... the job market was INSANE during dot-com. Getting a job was like falling off a tree. If this is 17 times bigger, where are the jobs (serious question)?
Definitely interested to see where my thinking is off here, if anyone can help. This just doesn't seem much like a bubble to me.
Are there tons of uses for 2023 crypto farm hardware?
A trillion dollars of GPUs in various stages of obsolescence and/or shagged-outness in data centres might be useful to the right people but it's a depreciating asset.
If you're talking about purpose-built ASICs, probably still yes? It's not like it's performing some incredibly unique action when farming for crypto.
The secondhand electronics market is fairly strong.
Still, I think it's always something of a gamble. Maybe look for reputable dealers on there.
The property will still be worth something but nowhere near the expected value pre-crash. For those still liquid when the dust settles, they'll be able to get great bargains on compute or even whole data centers.
Maybe the land will be dotted with half-finished data centers that sit for years, like unfinished condo high-rises post 2008 crash
Jonathan Blow took this notion to task when said that the means of production are a $200 laptop you can buy at Walmart.
What's really going on is industrial grade existential angst. "If my competitor trains a robot to do this job, they can run their factory 24x7, dramatically lowering their costs. If they do it and I don't, I can't compete. Therefore, I've got to do it or die." Rinse and repeat for call centers, web shops with "assistants," or software feature mills.
Those CEOs and CTOs are convinced that the other guy is doing it, and their business will fail if they don't. There are a few that know better.
This isn't a class struggle. It's cold-sweats-at-night fear of the future.
That is bunk, in the current age. The means of production is a $200 laptop and a $1B nvidia cluster.
> What's really going on is industrial grade existential angst. "If my competitor trains a robot to do this job, they can run their factory 24x7, dramatically lowering their costs
This is not exclusive to what I said. All this "lowering of costs" is archieved by a reduced dependence on the working class.
No struggle but the class struggle.
Well, to the extent you're right, the capitalists are behaving rationally. What would Marx say about that?
But you seem to be looking for some sort of political argument on top of corrupt and twisted logic, so I don't know exactly what you're looking for here.
No, see, there are other struggles. The reason Marxism is fundamentally totalitarian and always devolves into a single party dictatorship is EXPLICITLY because it attempts to explain all suffering as caused by class conflict. Thus: if class is destroyed, utopia is achieved.
This is of course farcical.
"no struggle but x struggle" is the very the definition of a totalitarian ideology. You really think there's no struggle but class struggle? When you are suffering because a loved one has died of old age, is that struggle the class struggle?
Fuck off with that totalitarian nonsense.
But let's assume for the sake of argument that you are wrong. What are the logical implications? Can your worldview allow for the possibility that you might be wrong?
This kind of a statement assumes that all those CEOs did exhaustive, detailed, independent research to arrive at the conclusion that AI is the next big thing.
IME more often than not, they're just following the herd in a way that ends up being a circle.
The real issue is: what are the consequences if they are right - and what should be done to mitigate them.
The guy is smart, but many of his opinions are those of a man who doesn't get much pushback on what he says. It's a common curse of success that you get surrounded by yay men.
This isn't a serious comparison, but Jonathan Blow is one to oversimplify concepts outside of his domain.
Could Jonathan Blow host his streams off his $200 laptop?
You may be right on the other parts, but, theoretically, yes? We've had the capabilities since BitTorrent to build p2p streaming tools: our main limitation for such situations is not capital, but the ability to coordinate making such tools simple and resilient enough for everyone to use.
Someone else downthread said "No struggle but class struggle", which it really does require a Marxist outlook. My take is "No problems but coordination problems" -- we have enough capital, labor, and raw resources now to solve most of our remaining problem set, we just need ways to coordinate better. Some of that is about aligning incentives. Marxists try to do this too! I just haven't seen them succeed very well without having to fall back on other, more general methods.
Digital technology, the domain of people here, is the main engine of better coordination in the modern era. We need to keep working on it to make it work better for everyone trying to solve problems.
You saying "he could theoretically stream off his laptop" is no different than saying a luddite could "theoretically sew clothes with needle and thread". It really comes across like a lack of respect for the argument Marxists make. I'm not asking you to be a Marxist but if you aren't willing to engage the argument seriously, I'm not sure what I can say.
Even your "solution", is exactly what the early Marxists thought. They needed to coordindate to overcome the sole power of factory owners and they did that through striking. What is striking, if not coordinated market power? The rest of your post comes off as Marxism, but in a different font. It's as wishy-washy as the solutions proposed by the Marxists on Bluesky. "if only we would come together and coordinate, the revolution will be here soon!".
The issue with "No problems but coordination problems", is that today, in our society, capital solves coordination problems. And before that was monarchy, and before that was religion. The entirety of human civilization can be distilled with "how do we get n-million people to do x?"
I don't consider myself as a Marxist but the actual problems he highlights are very salient even if his followers have failed to solve them. Just because there's no found solution for P=NP, doesn't mean the entire field of computational complexity is a wash.
The point though, is that you really can stream off a laptop: we had BitTorrent; we have WebTorrent. We've built peer-to-peer infrastructure that works. In the last 25 years we have built great collective works with minimal capital outlay -- so minimal that we saw an explosion of capital investments because the returns to low capital were so high. Heck, you're using one of those low-capital, capital-adjacent artifacts right now.
In the class of problems, scaling up peer-to-peer collective action is (I would suggest) difficult, but not as difficult as it would have been to coordinate peer production in the 19th century. We've just barely begun to explore their potential.
I mean, you come on here and rave about how everybody should unionize and grab their pitchforks and struggle against the machine and what-not, and then you wonder why everybody is rushing to replace you with a robot.
When they take too much, that's how they make revolutions. They only have power and wealth because we let them.
> and then you wonder why everybody is rushing to replace you with a robot.
Why not rush to replace them with robots, instead? What social function do the rich serve that can't be replaced with a badly-tuned LLM?
That has nothing to do with it. Really.
Anyone in the powerful position you describe who "earned" it, that is got themselves there somehow, is fully aware of the basis of their power and of the risk represented by it resting on workers. They will try to replace them, regardless of whether or not they are currently at that moment agitating for unionization.
Not old enough for the dotCom (36) but my educated guess is that because the internet was new and exciting, companies were prepared to train and take risks.
Training for AI now requires specialist skills which can be syphoned from within an existing organisation or from those with existing skill sets.
Unlike the latter where anyone can pick up a programming language. Not everyone can do quantum algebra mechanics or whatever AI/ML uses.
Plus the cost of running AI is expensive. SME's don't have the resources to hire those for new jobs; AI kit and training. So it's easier to hire from within then outside.
AI is a rich boys toy.
Sounds editable. But from what I understood is that they're correction coordinates to something thats not sitting straight on a curve; I'll pass.
I never got given maths at school.
Fortunately I'm employed but I have limited ideas on how to gain an edge for the next jobsearch, whenever that is.
1. Living in a tech hub like the Bay Area or Seattle. There may be tech hubs in RTP, Austin, Boston, etc but these tend to be inshoring offices and are oftentimes the first on the chopping block when offshoring is considered, because they never built the internal gravity needed to own P/L and roadmap, and those offices that did are few and far between.
2. Concentrate on doing a reputable online or part-time MSCS (eg. GATech, UIUC, UT Austin) and concentrating on fundamental courses. Coding is commodified, but programming isn't. Just understanding how to glue together Python, C/C++, or whatever language and associated libraries is not enough. Technical complexity is rising, and skills like understanding OS internals, understanding the fundamentals of SGD, or truly understanding how to derive a path tracing algorithm matters.
3. Hyper-specialize in a specific industry. "AI" is broad, just like "Mobile" was broad. What matters is how these platforms are applied to a specific industry subdomain. If I'm a cybersecurity company working on building an AI SOC, I'd rather hire Engineers who understand both core fundamentals of AI and Cybersecurity. If you are an engineer who can understand how to communicate both the business incentives as well as the engineering incentives you are worth your weight in gold.
The thing is, this isn't 2000 anymore. Eastern Europe, China, India, ASEAN, LATAM, and other regions of the world have fairly large and robust dev and tech scenes, and async+remote work has been proven out during COVID, thus removing one of the biggest barriers to offshoring. Additionally, there has been a reverse brain drain since the mid-2010s from the US to those countries that is making it easier to find talent to open an office following American norms.
I think as a mid-career engineer, you have the tools to survive this kind of a change. Any American SWE who graduated in the last 10 years is in a worse position because their universities failed them by watering down curricula to compete with bootcamps, reducing the business justification for building a domestic new grad pipeline aside from a couple top target programs.
As a former SWE-turned-PM, you won't survive as a PM or Designer if this is the reason you became one. This is how bad PMs become PMs.
The PM and Designer market is very competitive, and PMs are expected to be domain experts of their entire market category and have engineering chops to not get BSed by engineers and have showmanship to successfully manage sales.
> I simply lack the time (and brain, maybe)
I'd try to find the time if possible. Maybe take a single course a semester to ramp up. Despite the negativity on HN, there is a lot of interesting innovation in the AI/ML world - both on the math/algos side as well as the infra/platform side.
Alternatively, as mentioned by others, really leverage your network and friendships to get jobs. It's a superpower you have as an old-timer in the industry - leverage it.
Assuming you are located in a major tech hub, I don't see a reason that you should be too worried about chronic underemployment - especially in an AI-driven world which has made domain experience even more critical.
Honestly, just working on your side projects like you mentioned, and finding companies that are aligned with what your side projects aim to do puts you ahead of 95-97% of candidates.
The job hunt has been hard for people, but most candidates (especially the noisiest ones) don't really have your profile or background, but demand principal or staff level salaries and roles.
> thinking of something that combines left/right brain
Staff/Sr Staff/Principal Engineer or Architect type roles might fit the bill for you. And with your YoE, I think if you were to job hunt you could leverage your network to land that kind of role with ease.
Honestly, you are not the type of persona that has difficulty landing jobs (holding for geography ofc).
An AI/Vibe Coding market only makes domain experience more critical because hallucinations can cause significant monetary damage, so people who can act as the voice of reason for both the technical and business needs are extremely valuable.
If you can bridge the gap between nerd and corporate, you should be able to sail fine on to the next. You won't get any of that sweet prompt engineering money but pushing your skill set with a hint of AI should settle something.
I hope anyway.
And you have a boom in hardware manufacturing, in Asia mostly, but even in europe you see new companies popping up (before Covid we had like 2 comapnies that could print custom pcbs, both german, now i found like 5 in France (2 of them are the german who expended but still))
If we were still in ZIRP things would be insane.