I’m going to guess that you’re younger and if you were alive through the dot com bubble that you weren’t really old enough to understand what was going on. Back then, no one was seriously saying that the internet was a fad or going away or anything like that, although you can find a few prognosticators that will contradict me, no one took them seriously and ridiculed them even then. No, it was a bubble because people were irrationally throwing money at companies that did “web stuff” and added “dot com” to their names. Investors were so hyped up about the potential of the internet that they threw all common sense out the window and gave money to anyone, and companies in turn dumped money into salaries and expensive perks to hire people who barely knew what they were doing.

The amount of waste and excess was appalling to people when the bubble popped and they saw how much companies had spent on unnecessary bullshit. I remember auctions where you could pick up super expensive Aeron chairs for dirt cheap because clueless companies didn’t know how to spend money and all the big internet companies had plenty of chairs like that. There was a ton of money dumped into infrastructure too. Cisco made a boatload of money during the bubble and after it popped they had so much used equipment floating around that their stock is only now recovering to their dot com peak twenty five years later. Companies like Worldcom blew up because of this infrastructure boom, but when the bubble popped they engaged in fraudulent accounting shenanigans in order to appear healthy.

I would argue the demand for “the web” in 1999 far exceeds that of AI today, and yet there was absolutely a crash like the housing market collapse. It’s not that there’s no use for AI or that some of the capital expenditures might prove useful in the decade ahead, it’s that so much money was thrown around irresponsibly to anyone that claimed to have a web presence or something to do with the internet, even when they didn’t, that there was a huge economic contraction when people finally sobered up - ie. the bubble popping.

I see the exact same excesses now:

• Companies that have nothing to do with AI shoehorning it in to claim they’re part of this big boom
• investors throwing money at ludicrously bad ideas because they are added “AI” to a product no one wanted to begin with
• People with expertise in the field having absurd amounts of money thrown at them to gain competitive advantage
• Brand new companies worth billions of dollars that are not pulling in a fraction of the revenue necessary to justify that valuation

That said, I believe that this is even worse than the dot com bubble for at least two reasons:

1. Back then, these companies were public, and were required to disclose a bunch of financial information as a result. Sure a lot of people ignored the warning signs and got caught up in the hype and FOMO, but the fraud was so much easier to unravel because their numbers weren’t hidden like today’s private AI companies.
2. Dark fiber after the bubble popped is still useful today, so a lot of the money spent then enabled future services, as you alluded to. On the other hand, today’s GPUs will be obsolete in a few years. Aside from being surpassed by newer technologies, the cards themselves will only run for so long before failure. The data centers themselves will still have some value, and some of the electrical generation being built will be useful, but overall, the long term benefits won’t be nearly as transformational.

So yeah, it’s a bubble, it will pop, and it will suck when it does. AI isn’t going away but most of the companies soaking up money now will end up as historical footnotes, like Netscape or Yahoo are today. LLMs and other generative AI will remain inefficient, continue to “hallucinate”, be used for propaganda, and further alienate people from one another. Yay?

If you’re not planning to live there long, I don’t think you shouldn’t be buying; that’s one of the few times I’d choose to rent. I guess maybe if home prices are rising then you can accrue some equity, but then you risk buying at the top of the market. I genuinely how it would compare to a fixed rate mortgage though.

If you think interest rates are going to decline, you can easily refinance a fixed rate mortgage as well. I don’t see any benefit in that scenario, but there’s a downside in that if rates don’t go down you still have that balloon payment to worry about, and if you don’t qualify for a traditional mortgage, you’re really in a bind.

Maybe if you’re flipping a house it makes sense, especially if you want to minimize cash outflow. Otherwise, there are so many more downsides that are much more severe than the mild upsides that you might gain. Perhaps there’s a few niche applications that I haven’t considered though.

Not sure if this is what they were talking about, but balloon mortgages are a thing here too. I can’t ever imagine considering one, but they exist.

If he extended the analogy just a little I think it might make more sense to you?

The “freeze up” is when all those thoughts are competing for attention and you can’t focus on just one, so you either choose your favorite color (your current hyperfixation for example), or literally just sit there, not doing anything of value. The dysfunction literally is the inability to choose one of those thoughts and run with it, at least not without expending significant amounts of energy to do so (meaning we get tired out while doing less) or coming up with some system to trick our brain into choosing and focusing on something.

Neurotypical brains have many of the same traits that ADHD and autistic people have… just not as many, and they’re not as crippling. It’s like pain in that regard - everyone experiences pain, but someone with chronic pain may have difficulty doing normal tasks, or if the pain is bad enough, unable to do those tasks at all.

In the case of ADHD I can take some medication and sometimes my brain acts like a normal person. Without trying, I realize a couple hours later that I accomplished a bunch of stuff without doing or thinking any differently. I just… suddenly can do stuff. First time I tried medication it really was magical; I didn’t feel or think any differently, I just… did stuff. It was weird.

It’s not just prioritization, it’s just picking one task from the list and going with it. The longer my list gets, the worse it gets, because holy shit that’s a long list. Each item makes it more and more difficult to focus on just one.

It’s like a crowd of people yelling at you all at once. Someone at a press conference or outside a courtroom can point to a reporter and everyone shuts up to let that one ask a question, answer it, and then point to the next one. The person doing the pointing is the executive function in the brain directing the flow of questions from the crowd, forcing everybody to quiet down while each question gets answered.

It’s not that the questions or reporters are prioritized… they may not even get an even distribution of questions because the person may be choosing favorites, or looking at the loudest or most obnoxious person trying to get their attention. Just the act of picking a person and quieting everyone else long enough to focus on them, to be able to hear and answer their question, before moving on to the next, that’s what makes the difference.

Someone who is well organized may have a press conference that is regimented. Questions have to be put into a list and someone is sorting that list and ensuring that every person gets their turn. There’s no shouting or jostling to get that person’s attention, it’s just a smooth process of moving from question to question. Like a debate.

My brain has no pointer… everyone is shouting questions and me and I may look at a person and try to understand them and shout back at them, but more than anything I just want to run home and do something that I want to do rather than be yelled at. Eventually I feel burned out and run away to do exactly that - the defendant who comes out of the courtroom, has a bunch of reporters yelling at them, and is just trying to get to his car to get away.

It’s a perfect analogy because it seems like an improvement because it seems like an improvement and on paper it is. But as I got a bit older I realized that:

• I primarily used one color, meaning that it would run out of ink before the others
• The colors that didn’t get used would be gummed up by the time I did switch to them because it didn’t have a proper cap
• The barrel of the pen was wider to accommodate those extra cartridges inside making it more uncomfortable to use.
• The pen was more expensive than a box of cheap pens, so I only had one; since I’d lose pens all the time this meant that I’d have to use a cheap pen anyway, if I even had any.

Like AI, it’s a novelty that is worse in almost every way while appearing to convey an illusory benefit!