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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Luu is pretty specific about the predictions Zitron is making, has taken the time to pull them out and date them, and they're both risible and not rescuable with vibes.

His point isn't that Google or Meta are doing well or have bright futures. Luu is generally critical of tech giant engineering and product culture. He's critical of Google in particular in this very article.

But the point of the article is that it's not enough to have directionally satisfying vibes. If you made concrete forward-looking predictions and they're catastrophically wrong, that matters. If you make backwards-looking predictions that were literally wrong the moment you published them, that matters even more.

"Did you read the article" is a frowned-upon response on HN. The better way to write that kind of response, per the guidelines, is "the article mentions that". So: the article mentions that.

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I don't know if directed at me because I didn't ask if one read article.

> it's not enough

It's enough for some of us, like his broad predictions that work on timescale of business cycles seem directionally correct. Even considering we're dealing with fast hardware deprecation cycles it will take years to play out especially with investors and incumbents burning through accumulated war chest. Luu seem oblivious to notion that companies with trillions in market cap can certainly out manipulate fundamental short / medium term market sanity. Part of Zitron's rant I find similarly compelling is the danger of dismissing directionally "satisfying" vibes because $$$ can capture reporting distort reality, which is only going to lead to bigger/more painful correction because directionally "correct" was dismissed as merely directionally "satisfying."

Let’s say it’s fine to give emotionally based arguments the same credence as rational arguments. That’s a huge cede, and yet, it doesn’t change anything, let’s see here:

If my cousin kept ranting about my other cousin was going to go bankrupt and fail and it was 3 years later and their income was up 2x I think I’d stop listening.

I worked at Google from 2016 to 2022 and agree with everything he says and you say, modulo the companies who are 2-3x on revenue and profits are going to 0. I worry that both of you have found a real problem but misattributed it, and insisting emotional arguments are the same as rational prevents you from participating in real fixes (ex. metas problem isn’t AI, it’s that they have a god-king CEO who cannot be deposed and monopoly profits. Imagine a twin of you and Zitron but instead of AI it’s 2020-era VR. If they weren’t focused on how their emotional argument was fine, they’d be your compatriots in noticing something’s off in Big Tech. Instead, we don’t hear about them because that battle was fought and lost years ago, and they lost credibility due to imagining Meta was going to 0)

What if the cousin goes bankrupt in year 5?

Zitron gives timelines, and they don't come true --- in fact, the opposite thing happens. You can't come back to that with "well, it hasn't happened yet". By that logic, no prediction is ever wrong; wait long enough and maybe it'll come true. That can't possibly be the logic you'd hang your hat on here.

Thank you, I have attempted to modify my original reply with one a little less dickish.

> Luu is pretty specific about the predictions Zitron is making

He is not, though. He precisely points to imprecise predictions, decontextualize them so he misses the point of the ones this thread is focused on, analyzes them with even less precise rationales that don't really rebut the prediction, and points suggestively (enough that you seem to have got that suggestion) that this rebuttal destroys the main prediction of every Zitron piece, while saying otherwise several times at the end of the rationale.

Zitron's predictions aren't all very good, but this article isn't either.

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