mystertea

Most of the time (with many notable exceptions), Hacker news comments are interesting and insightful, clearly written by intelligent and thinking people. However, in a number of AI threads, it seems like so many commenters are wearing the hype goggles when it comes to this technology.

Large language models have their uses, but calling them AI, or thinking of them as AGI, seems like a mistake. I'm no expert, but insofar as I can tell, these things are just complex stochastic parrots; pattern matching algorithms at a massive scale. They really don't seem that useful outside of more narrow use cases, like language translation and other forms of data analytics.

Just playing around with GPT/Bing chat for a while makes this obvious. The LLMs can't reason and have no actual awareness of the information they are regurgitating. A moments consideration of the output from these things shows them to be vapid and useless; a glorified parlor trick for the VC-funded tech industry to build hype around and make money. It's the next block chain/ crypto / NFT.

There are great uses for block chain tech, same with machine learning / AI. But the scope of the claims made about these technologies in their hype cycles is just insane. Crypto is not going to replace fiat currency anytime soon. NFTs are stupid. LLMs are useless stochastic parrots. Maybe people are just wising up to that fact, now. Good on them.

As a preemptive rebuttal: I don't think LLMs are useful for coding either. If you want lots of sloppy, poorly written code, sure they're useful. But to write good software, you have to think carefully about what you're doing and have a thorough mental model of what's going on. Relying on AI to generate that code prevents that from happening from the outset.

Really good info, thanks. I'll add the dividend cut metric to my list. Not sure what you mean by yield vs history. I do have a chart comparing the yield to the stock price over time, but the window is only 4 years back. I'll try and expand that window, too.

Thanks!! I'm happy it made it.

Appreciate the feedback grounded in personal experience, thanks! I was just looking into Adsense, and it does seem like a poor option for the reasons you mentioned: too much effort for too little return, not to mention the ugliness.

I'm glad you see some value in this! Based on the feedback I'm getting here, I have plans for some short-term wins that I can execute within the week, and beyond. I'm hopeful they can bare some fruit, or just add more value.

For now in the middle term, a few carefully positioned affiliate marketing links may be the way.

I was thinking about this too -- affiliate marketing could be a good route.

Just wanted to let you know that I added that feature. Hope it helps.

Valuable feedback here; I appreciate the link. This is a strong case for adding buybacks. I'll look into how I might go about this.

Awesome, thanks for the feedback! That filter seems like a good idea--I'll work on implementing it. An expansion at larger view sizes should be doable!

Good points, especially for value investing. It also seems likely that this logic holds whenever analyzing a traditional company. Once again, I'd ask whether the same logic holds for the ETFs and leveraged funds that encompass most of the stocks on this site?

There may be other reasons not to invest in such a stock, but I seem to keep seeing value investors trying to compare apples to oranges.

Thanks for the reply -- good info in here.

I'll consider adding a section / filter for stocks with repurchase programs. That is an interesting point I didn't consider. It's a bit tangential to theme of this site, but maybe I can make it work.

Factoring in the expense ratio is a very good idea--I'll look into how to add that.

Looking at your point regarding that earning call, it seems you're looking at this in light of a more traditional company and not an ETF/REIT/Leveraged fund. Forgive me if I'm wrong in that assumption. For conventional value investing, this is probably true, I'm no expert.

It does seem to me that there is room for a stock like this in one's portfolio though, as part of a larger strategy. Maybe a high yield leveraged fund is only a small portion of your stock, or you need to convert some of your assets to income for a few years.

Even if you follow a dividend reinvesting strategy?

Thanks! I agree that conventional stocks can be a hassle to manage, and intuitively like an income-based approach.

Yeah, it does seem that filtering for high yields and monthly payouts tends to return a lot of leveraged funds. Pulling more quarterly paying stocks may add more value-oriented companies. I'll consider this, as well as adding more filters to accommodate that.

Good idea, I'll look into adding that feature. And thanks for the compliment.

Thanks for the feedback, this is exactly the sort of info I've been lacking, not being an expert in the space myself (only a journeyman, if that). I'll check this out.

It looks like many of the high yield dividend stocks are leveraged funds. Does the same rule hold true in that arena? The historical data on those stocks doesn't seem to support that on first glance, at least.

You make some good points here.

1. I stated index in this post (whoops); luckily I called it a list on the website.

2. Partly, in seeking an income strategy, that seemed important to me. Also, frankly, it allowed me to limit the scope of my dataset a bit. Maybe I should go back to the drawing board and include quarterly stocks as well, though.

3. I'll look into it

I'll jump ahead and answer your last question as it's relevant to the others: I'm using Polygon.io's API to pull financial data. I too have noticed that the data can be unreliable, repeats, and has many records missing certain data. I've sanitized that data on my backend, checking for and removing duplicates, as well as only displaying historical records with adequate data. Beyond that, I'm not sure how to improve the quality.

4. What about dividend reinvesting? Can't you avoid taxes if you do that?

5. Is that also true with leveraged funds? It seems like many of these high yield dividend stocks are in that category.

6. Interesting, I'll look into that.

Hope I responded to all of these points adequately. I appreciate the thoughtful and intelligent answer. I'm still not sure (and need to do more research) on whether such a dividend strategy is useless. It seems like reinvesting could provide good returns as a strategy--when the stock dips, so long as the payout is constant, you simply get more income. Maybe I'm missing something, though.

No, in the about section I mentioned only pulling US stocks.

True, the trading sites are more comprehensive, but I found them difficult to use, at least eTrade, with clunky and confusing interfaces that require a lot of knowledge to use effectively. Though, Maybe that last bit is a necessary component, and my site won't be useful for the experienced investor.

Thanks for the constructive feedback here. Seems like this is the only way to go for something like this.

I was thinking the same thing. If the author's goal was simplicity, it seems like a strange choice to forgo using an existing SSG only to build a bespoke one on their own.

A PHP site (for the includes), or an out-of-the-box SSG would make much more sense, IMO.

Inadvertently, this guy also perfectly described the problem with large-scale immigration.

I am relatively young (32) and I feel the same way, as an avid fiction reader, and consumer of movies/tv; I don't think this observation is merely a symptom of getting old.

I suspect it has something to do with a few factors (just speculation):

1. Publishers / writers taking the safe route to content creation: using formulaic storytelling to generate "likely" successes (the pop music effect). They're treating writing more as a product than art.

2. Creative writing as a medium no longer attracts the best and brightest, who instead go into other expressive forms that are more on trend / current (movies, tv, video games, digital art, music, programming, etc).

3. People's attention spans are shorter, and novelty is not perceived as being rewarded (this is related to the first point)

4. A culture that is increasingly trending toward narcissism due to the effects of social media, pop culture, and more broken homes. People aren't writing for the sake of expression or art so much as to get attention and win prizes.

5. (Ties in with 1 and 3) An increasingly garbage information landscape full of click-bait and vapid content optimized for algorithms and views. This information landscape creeps into the culture at every level, I believe (to varying degrees)

It is ironic, and a poignant observation, that AI writing is nearly indistinguishable from much of the existing user-written content. I tend to agree, and blame that on the fact that in the past ten years, people have become intellectually lazy (perhaps for the above reasons?) and are really just parrots and synthesizers themselves.

Maybe so, but I suspect there are better ways to sort through information, even if they're opinions tied to narrative. The current model, driven by ad dollars and cheap information, seems to have led to a landscape of noise; too much low-quality information to sift through. I'd argue that even the system of expert gatekeepers that came before was more effective than this.

There ARE better and worse ideas, even in the opinions space, I daresay. Perhaps not always right or wrong ones, but they can be sorted more effectively than they currently are, I believe.

Reddit, Hackernews, Quora, all provide examples of what a better model might look like. There's more open discussion, upvotes and downvotes, etc. People have the opportunity to synthesize and draw their own conclusions.

Hahahaha, accurate. I was just lamenting the fact that AI feels like a summation of what 90% of internet tech today actually is: a vapid echo chamber, running on hype, with little actual value for end users. A sort of twisted, soulless hall of mirrors selling advertisements to bots. This edifice needs to crumble.

Praying for the day of google's collapse, (most) social media's demise, and an alternative business model to ads.

Call this a hot take, but it seems news media are painting a disingenuous picture with this incident, casting it in the light of a failure when it clearly was not one; the goal was only to get the rocket to clear the launch pad, as stated in the video.

The article even states (a few paragraphs down) how Musk said not blowing up the launch pad would be a win, and quotes industry experts on how the launch signified good progress. Yet even so, the title and attempted takeaway is FAILURE, ROCKET EXPLODES MINUTES AFTER LAUNCH.

You can even identity little attempts to cast further dispersion around the positive news, to throw the lemmings off the scent: small business owner's windows broke gasp; RICH people are already booking tickets (see, this isn't for you, average Joe, you're excluded); A little girl CRIED on seeing the launch, etc etc.

This is not journalism; this is maybe 40% news and 60% propaganda. Disgusting how blatant it is, and how so many (ostensibly) intelligent people fall for it.

In addition to some of the other great comments here, I'd mention that whatever you choose to do, every career path and job has its tradeoffs that you'll have to learn to work with.

I've spent most of my professional career as a front-end software engineer and started hating it a few years ago--thought I'd be happier as a plumber, electrician, or even a paralegal: I wanted to get away from screens, to do something practical, straightforward, and more people-oriented.

Then I did my research, took a few courses, talked to tradesmen, paralegals, and lawyers, and came out the other side realizing that working in tech isn't so bad, and that a lot of what I disliked about it could be mitigated from within the profession, without my having to start from scratch.

All that being said, to answer your question (which is admittedly very individual and hard to answer as a stranger) I'd say be an entrepreneur. Technology (including AI) empowers us as individuals to be far more productive and capable. Leverage this to your advantage and avoid the bullshit of office politics and bosses. Foster your curiosity and creativity, learn how to think, and how to tackle complex problems. Find cool opportunities that present themselves in the constantly shifting landscape our economy has become. You'll never be irrelevant.

Just throwing another positive comment into the fray: Amazing work on this article. Informative, and easy to digest despite being a complex subject. Well done! I learned a lot from this article.

US citizen/resident here: I've been submitted to a lot of logic puzzles as a web and software developer--asking me to solve complex algorithmic problems I'd never work on in the actual job; that has been pretty common. However, I've only ever had to take (what was equivalent to) an IQ test once, when applying to a job at Dish network. I was so annoyed that I quit halfway through and withdrew my application.