Post by @pluralistic@mamot.fr

@pluralistic You can also look for mutual funds or exchange traded funds (ETFs) called something like ExMag-7. Equal weighted funds are an easy way to dilute the effects of the Mag-7 (Enshitified7?) without avoiding them completely.

@pluralistic You can also look for Equal Weighted funds and ETFs that dilute the influence of the #Enshittified7 by investing equal dollar amounts in each of the S&P500 Index stocks.

@chertridge @pluralistic indeed. https://www.defianceetfs.com/xmag/ 1 month and 3 month performance is negative but 6 months performance is very positive. We shall see where it goes.

@pluralistic It was always peculiar to use the S&P500 as a measure of American business health because fewer than 10 firms paper over the cracks of probably over a hundred duds and possibly 200 mediocre performers.

1/2

@lennardvanotterloo @pluralistic I would be cautious, however, to use the S&P493 as a measure of non-AI business. Or the Mag7 as a measure of AI business.

Firstly, many AI companies, including OpenAI and Anthropic, are neither in the S&P500 or Mag7.

Secondly, some Mag7 constituents, such as Apple, have fundamentals that are only moderately influenced by AI.

2/2

@lennardvanotterloo @pluralistic

That's a feature, not a bug. Wall Street is a game of convincing people with money to put the money into the market because the market will beat inflation. Aside from a small minority of contrarians, everyone benefits from using optimistic metrics that keep the narrative of growth alive as long as possible.

(See also, the reclassification of the Finance sector in the early 90's which has kept American GDP growing on paper even as the real economy has stalled)

@pluralistic
I love the winnowing down of the S&P 500 to the S&P 493, the losing part. But there’s also something terribly wrong that this is so.

#USPol #sharemarket

@pluralistic At the tech conference I was at last week, which was of course 2/3 AI, it was often taken as self-evident that AI had given us huge gains. I should look up some of those people and send them this ...

@veronica You can probably anticipate their reactions as much as I do. It's pointless. AI is a waste of time. Even warning of AI is a waste of time.

@burningTyger There were several good talks on AI there too, so a good chunk of the audience got a balanced message overall. I also attended a few talks on AI usage, but only those directly relevant to my work (they did after all pay for my ticket).

@pluralistic One talk, that was quite interesting, was from a company with 180 developers that did a slow and careful rollout of AI, mainly due to high demand. They did a self-assessment, and developers claimed increased productivity. They said it was too early to say if it was actually true though, and promised to come back with results (presumably another year) if they had any.

It's the same where I work. Developers *feel* more productive, but I have yet to see any numbers backing it up.

@veronica @pluralistic I think they are more productive, given a definition of 'productive' that measures output.

You can definitely produce much more... 'stuff'. Some of it might even be useful. A lot of it turns out to waste other people's time. But as long as you have a definition of productivity that only measures output and not bottom line results, it's a useless metric.

@loke Indeed. If your metric is output, then sure. It's the age old "quality or quantity" conundrum. If it's not useful output, or you need to frequently replace it with new generated code, is it then productive in a meaningful sense? Or, in my opinion, worse: Is it just increased complexity and fragility for no or minimal gain?

@pluralistic

@veronica @pluralistic The metric is output. And it is that because everything else is difficult to measure. And if it's difficult to measure it's better to just ignore it or something. I'm sure it won't show up in the next quarter's earnings.

@alan I find the VSCode auto-complete feature highly annoying and I mostly just keep it off. Some of the stuff I work on is pretty obscure, like parsing streaming binary subtitle data from DVD/Bluray, and it keeps suggesting code that is obviously stolen from somewhere else (and also doesn't fit my use case). I've also had it echo back my own code too, when it's relatively rare stuff. Funnily, it came with a license warning last time. I cannot recall them asking to ingest my code without credit!

@veronica The sort of stuff my line completion (well, line plus a bit) is I type, in a loop, "if variable is empty" and it suggests completing the if with a continue statement, so a tab saves 10-11 keystrokes. I can live with that.

@veronica @pluralistic @alan

We learn by doing. Reviewing isn’t doing, or you could just read existing code to learn a language.

Evidence I have seen so far is that AI will stop development of expertise.

@ThreeSigma @veronica @pluralistic with a few exceptions (eg. APL, Lisp) a new language is just syntax and a handful of different operators. I say this as someone with experience with maybe two dozen programming languages, many obscure.

@ThreeSigma @veronica @pluralistic That said, your concern is valid for people just entering the field. There's little market for junior developers if an AI can fulfill that role cheaper and faster.

How we educate developers is going to have to undergo radical change.

@veronica @pluralistic @alan
Then why need the AI at all? You’re being inconsistent. Either the language is trivial and you could just do it yourself, or it’s tricky and the AI saves you time (that I claim is valuable learning).

I’m also an old hand at this but I’m still learning or I get bored.

@pluralistic

Now would be the time to hedge a few bets and make some real cash.

@rythur go on

@pluralistic it starts right off with referencing “Revenue per worker” and I HATE this metric. CEOs juice this number by firing people that they actually need in order to sustain revenue. It drives short term fixation.

@pluralistic Take one part "Press claims economy is good because the stock market is up" and mix with four parts "create companies selling hype with other people's money", bake in political chaos for a year and then you've go the illusion of a strong economy at a time when it's crashing to feed the bottomless financial hunger of the oligarchy.

Deceiving us while we are being robbed was always the plan.

@pluralistic Then where are the productivity gains we were promised?

@pluralistic It is?

@pluralistic When the Draghi report came out I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation to compare the EU and US-minus-BigTech economies and it was very similar in size and growth.

(Disclaimer: not an economist and the EU needs reform for sure)

@lennardvanotterloo @pluralistic Awesome, thanks!

@pluralistic "AI may be a great calculator, but in business, intelligence is mostly judgment."

I feel like you have to have had your head under a rock to casually claim AI is a good calculator.

@bipolaron @pluralistic Yikes! For a couple minutes I was very concerned that Cory had written that, but then I calmed down, checked the link, and discovered to my deep relief that it was just the dopey author of the article.

@bipolaron @pluralistic I feel like the belief in the "judgement" part here is mostly survivorship bias by big egos.

I've looked at a lot of businesses over time, and there are three successful types:

a) work way too hard to be healthy.
b) be lucky, but attribute it to your own skill.
c) calculate carefully.

There's often a mixture. E.g. CEO is B, but there's a CFO that is C and some folk are A.

But "mostly judgement, not calculation" does not exist as a successful business.

@jens @pluralistic

d) be either independently wealthy or married to someone who is and attribute "having infinite chances at the business lottery" to their skill

still seems to be number one factor 😂

@bipolaron @pluralistic I would argue that being independently wealthy is a sub-category of being lucky, but it's not something I care deeply about 😂

@pluralistic Reuters already reporting that the AI Bubble in China is burst due to slump in retail, especially sections that pushed AI/LLMs hard into their products & customer ecosystems: https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-ai-bubble-has-already-burst-2026-10-26/

@pluralistic related, the breathless articles about Anthropic's revenue/worker which don't seem to mention their losses are ca 5x their revenues. Presumably they are also pretty high on the overall losses/worker metric.

@pluralistic Liked this from that report: "Perhaps most importantly, AI does not understand accountability, trust, culture, unwritten rules, ethical trade-offs or fairness, all of which shape reputational risk and ultimately drive revenue growth and profit margins."

@pluralistic GROUCHO: "I've always wondered, why do you call yourselves 'The Firehouse Five plus Two'?"
WARD KIMBALL: "Because there's seven of us."

@ridetheory @pluralistic "Have you got the anvil ready, Eddie?"

@pluralistic@mamot.fr This had me wondering the origin of "Mag 7" / Magnificent Seven...

From wikipedia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Tech#Magnificent_Seven ) :

"The nickname Magnificent Seven was coined in May 2023 by Bank of America analyst Michael Hartnett as a reference to the 1960 film of the same name, and popularized by Jim Cramer on Mad Money."

The 1960 film :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magnificent_Seven

@himysyed @pluralistic and that was a remake of the Seven Samurai by Kurosawa

@himysyed @pluralistic
In days of old, there were the Seven Sisters, the seven large oil companies that made up the Consortium for Iran:

Anglo-Persian Oil Company (now BP)
Shell plc
Standard Oil of California (now Chevron)
Gulf Oil
Texaco
Jersey Standard (now Exxon)
Standard Oil of New York (also now Exxon)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Oil

@RealGene@hachyderm.io @pluralistic@mamot.fr Data is the New Oil;

GPU Data Centres are the New Refineries.

Smartphone is the New Cigarette;

Notification is the New Nicotine.