Sure but there’s no way Enron was the last Enron. Also keep in mind something can be “legal” and still misleading to shareholders. I’m sure there are loopholes, some of which may have been reintroduced by Republicans in the last 20 years.
So a PE of 500 means it would take 500 years for the earnings of the company to equal the current market cap (price per share X number of shares). This implies absurd (almost certainly impossible) growth over the next 500 years. Of course anyone expecting to pull their investment out and spend it on retirement can’t be looking at a 500-year investment horizon. I suppose the 1% can, though. What the hell else are they going to spend their cash on?
I think most people just vote for whoever’s mailer they like more. Where I live, the Republican candidate just sends out a mailer with him standing next to a firefighter and a cop and that’s really it. Maybe some garb about reducing crime and taxes at the same time. That’s enough for many (most?) to decide whether that’s the candidate they want to vote for.
I think it's worth noting that the "work" these LLMs are doing is digital. ChatGPT cannot plow fields, or construct buildings and roads, or otherwise interact with the physical world. LLMs are useful because humanity has evolved (devolved?) into so much intangible work- documents, code, powerpoint presentations... One solar flare and that's all wiped out, and then we can say definitively that LLMs were a waste of time and energy.
Anecdotally I am seeing websites/web portals/et al. are much buggier. I have no doubt that software quality has declined since ChatGPT was made public, and tools like Claude Code are accelerating that "enshittification" of the world's codebase.
I think we should investigate the backgrounds of those making claims one way or another and rely on those backgrounds for determining credibility. I suspect that we'd find that those who are saying LLMs write great, bulletproof code with "100% unit test coverage" (true story- a coworker was bragging about 100% unit test coverage) are not really qualified to be software engineers. This is a trend I have noticed in my org. Those drinking the most LLM kool aid do NOT have an engineering/comp sci degree, have relatively little experience, resumes are incredibly weak (e.g., generic stuff that we've all done as software engineers).
We no longer have the luxury of welcoming bootcamp engineers into our field with open arms. We need to protect our craft. Call these fools out or they'll keep spreading hype/FOMO.
The unit test example has been my team's experience as well. The unit tests look good on the surface, but their passing or failing has little predictive value on whether there are actually bugs in the code.
Some people have suggested you write the unit tests by hand to basically "check" the LLM's work and keep it honest, but to write good unit tests you have to understand the underlying code, which takes time (since you didn't write it), so to me this is another bullet point that suggests LLMs will eventually be relegated to "StackOverflow+" duty - give me snippets, but I'll still write effectively all the code.
I think of housing as a better example- KB Home cookie cutter special for $400k or 100-year-old craftsman house for $800k. Most are okay with the $400k cookie cutter special that probably has piss in the walls, because $800k is such a huge increase. I fear most companies won’t want to pay the extra cost for “the same software” to be written by hand.
Even though the synthetic benchmarks paint a picture of LLMs coming a long way since 2022, my practical experience has been that they aren’t tangibly better. No doubt someone reading this will chime in and say LLMs are way better at writing code or whatever, and maybe that’s true, but there’s no difference between ChatGPT 3.5 and Claude Opus 4.8 as far as my trusting the output. Opus 4.8 still messes up plenty. It’s particularly bad with identifying and fixing CI yaml, but it struggles in the usual areas too.
So I’m thinking we’ve just about reached apex with LLMs, and they have failed at replacing software engineers (companies can freeze hiring juniors at their own, future peril using any excuse they like).
Yep, that has been my experience as well. There hasn't been any meaningful improvement in LLMs since ChatGPT first launched. They still fall over, in the same ways, and with more or less the same high rates.
The difference for me has been that you can use llm as your main typing interface, you couldn't do that (without being annoying) before I think opus 4.5
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