YZF (u/YZF) - Readit News

YZF commented on The AI boom is causing shortages everywhere else washingtonpost.com/techno... · Posted by u/1vuio0pswjnm7

henry2023 · 3 days ago

Of course they can. if you’ve ever stepped a foot inside big tech you’ll know the bottle neck is not dev output.

YZF · 2 days ago

100%- which is what I'm telling everyone. I am in big tech and it doesn't matter that I can write what I used to in 1 week in 5 minutes. Meetings, reviews, design docs, politics, etc. etc. mean how much code is written is irrelevant. Productivity in big tech is pretty low because of organizational overhead. You just can't get anything done. Being able to get more work done with less people is the real game changer because less people don't suffer from those "coordination headwinds".

YZF commented on The AI boom is causing shortages everywhere else washingtonpost.com/techno... · Posted by u/1vuio0pswjnm7

peterlk · 3 days ago

I have been having this conversation more and more with friends. As a research topic, modern AI is a miracle, and I absolutely love learning about it. As an economic endeavor, it just feels insane. How many hospitals, roads, houses, machine shops, biomanufacturing facilities, parks, forests, laboratories, etc. could we build with the money we’re spending on pretraining models that we throw away next quarter?

YZF · 2 days ago

It's not a zero sum game. We could build hospitals and data centers. The reason we are not building hospitals or parks or machine shops have nothing to do with AI. We weren't building them 2 years ago either.

YZF commented on You Are Here brooker.co.za/blog/2026/0... · Posted by u/mltvc

jdub · 3 days ago

History suggests otherwise, and there's nothing particularly special about this moment.

Microsoft survived (and even, for a little while, dominated) after missing the web. Netscape didn't eat its lunch.

Then Google broke out on a completely different front.

Now there's billions of dollars of investment in "AI", hoping to break out like the next Google... while competing directly with Google.

(This is why we should be more ambitious about constraining large companies and billionaires.)

YZF · 2 days ago

Well, I made my predictions. Let's come back in a few years.

Netscape didn't attack Microsoft's business software, operating systems or other pieces of their offerings.

Google also didn't seriously attack Microsoft's business.

And neither had the capability to build large software very fast.

Google is both a software company and an infrastructure company as is Microsoft today. Their software is going to become more of a commodity but their data centers still have value (even perhaps more value since all this new software needs a place to run). It's true that if you're in the business of hosting software and selling SaaS you have an advantage over a competitor who does not host their own software.

YZF commented on A Fresh Look at IBM 3270 Information Display System rs-online.com/designspark... · Posted by u/rbanffy

somat · 3 days ago

Articles like this always paint a rosy picture of the 3270 but consider the limitations. Async style updates as commonly found on a VT designed program were tricky.

Now admittedly my own experience with the 3270 was through about three layers of obtuse IBM operating systems. Perhaps if I sat down with a 3270 and a bare OS I would consider them differently, but I always found them terribly limiting compared to a VT. More efficient sure, but much harder/impossible to do cool stuff on.

source: I was a night shift tape monkey for a IBM place for a few years. A fair amount of down time, access to a full set of manuals and an understanding boss meant I was doing more hacking on production mainframes than I probably should have been.

YZF · 3 days ago

They optimized for different things. The instant responsiveness of the 3270 vs. the VT at Xbps for local editing was nice. You could do async updates and even async input (via polling) as well though there was this annoying thing where the input could clash with the output and you'd get this weird icon that you had to clear (my brain is iffy on the details) e.g. when you hit a PF key while the display is updating. I think there was some workaround. I wrote some games that ran on the 3279 in an async mode (using some utilities a friend of mine built for that).

YZF commented on You Are Here brooker.co.za/blog/2026/0... · Posted by u/mltvc

falloutx · 3 days ago

> Small companies using AI are going to kick the sh*t out of large companies that are slow to adapt.

Big companies are sales machines and their products have been terrible for ages. Microsoft enjoys the top spot in software sales only due to their sales staff pushing impossible deals every year.

YZF · 3 days ago

It's true the big company products have been terrible but they also enjoyed a moat that made it harder for competitors to enter.

With this moat reduced I think you'll find this approach doesn't work any more. The smaller companies will also hire the good sales people away.

YZF commented on You Are Here brooker.co.za/blog/2026/0... · Posted by u/mltvc

ossa-ma · 3 days ago

With all due respect to the author, this is a lot of words for not much substance. Rehashing the same thoughts everyone already thinks but not being bold enough to make a concrete prediction.

This is the time for bold predictions, you’ve just told us we’re in a crucible moment yet you end the article passively….

YZF · 3 days ago

Predictions

- Small companies using AI are going to kick the sh*t out of large companies that are slow to adapt.

- LLMs will penetrate more areas of our lives. Closer to the STTNG computer. They will be agents in the real life sense and possibly in the physical world as well (robots).

- ASICs will eat nVidia's lunch.

- We will see an explosion of software and we will also see more jobs for people who are able to maintain all this software (using AI tools). There is going to be a lot more custom software for very specific purposes.

YZF commented on Systems Thinking theprogrammersparadox.blo... · Posted by u/r4um

readthenotes1 · 4 days ago

A major factor supporting evolution over big up-front design is the drift in system requirements over time. Even on large military like projects, apparently there's "discovery"--and the more years that pass, the more requirements change.

YZF · 4 days ago

Even if the requirements are indeed fixed your understanding of the problem domain evolves.

YZF commented on Systems Thinking theprogrammersparadox.blo... · Posted by u/r4um

qwertyuiop_ · 4 days ago

Software cannot be built like skyscrapers because the sponsors know about the malleability of the medium and treat it like a lump of clay that by adding water can be shaped to something else.

YZF · 4 days ago

But software is in fact not very malleable at all. It's true the medium supports change, it's just a bunch of bits, but change is actually hard and expensive, perhaps more than other mediums.

YZF commented on Systems Thinking theprogrammersparadox.blo... · Posted by u/r4um

bestham · 4 days ago

“A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system.” Gall’s Law

YZF · 4 days ago

So true.

YZF commented on The Great Unwind occupywallst.com/yen... · Posted by u/jart

msejas · 5 days ago

Fully agree market psychology has a big influence in prices, TESLA is a great example of this.

My main point is that most people, including the media, whenever there is a big crash in prices, like silver going down double digits, they act like the money evaporated and everyone that invested lost money.

My point is that it's not the case, it dropped because there was a huge volume of people selling, making it cheaper. The people selling converted it all for liquidity, they just 'got' a lot of money in cash to spend, and they needed it or will use it for one reason to another.

Retail investors don't have the time (unless you work in finance) to read all the news and information to be aware of situations that will trigger liquidity crunches like these past few months, while institutional investors will.

My point here is you could have performed all of the value investing in the world and you are still eating losses, standard diversification theory is to put in gold when the markets are unstable, as it appreciates in time of high volatility, we are in times of extreme volatility and gold crashed, it makes no sense unless you have visibility in the institutional investing trends.

YZF · 5 days ago

People lost money on paper. The loss turns real when they try to sell their assets.

Prices can drop on very low volumes. All that prices tell us is what someone agreed to buy and sell at a given point in time. Some (most?) sellers are likely selling because they are planning to buy when the price is lower (i.e. they are betting the market will go down) not because they need to use it.

Generally gold is not considered an investment or a hedge against marker instability and most diversified portfolios would not have gold in them.

Yes- if I own the S&P 500 and the S&P 500 goes down then the current value of my investment has gone down.