Which bubble was that?

AFAIK none of the previous AI bubbles really had much investment. There was hype, but it was hype within the computer science, or cognitive science fields. But, maybe there’s a financial bubble bit that I’m missing.

Uber used accounting tricks to hide their true losses for years. They’ve only recently managed to become profitable by squeezing both drivers and passengers at the same time. Is that sustainable? Almost certainly not, but, for the moment, they’re getting away with it.

That’s the only reason I don’t think it will pop in the next 6 months or so. Even Biden or Obama would have stepped in to try to prevent the economy from crashing. But, there’s the Trump factor. First of all, some of his biggest backers are from the AI “industry”. His VP is tied to Peter Thiel, his biggest donors are Crypto and AI bros. The vast majority of his own personal money is tied up in the current Crypto bubble. In addition, he’s obviously so easily bribed. Even if he he wasn’t interested in intervening otherwise, he could easily be bribed to intervene.

Because of Trump, and the fact that the house, senate and judiciary are all Trump lackeys, I think the bubble will survive until at least the 2026 midterms. If the Democrats take back control of the House and Senate they could take control over spending from Trump, which might mean the bubble is allowed to pop. But, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Trump hand over literal trillions in taxpayer dollars to keep the bubble inflated.

Comparing the coming crash to the dot com crash is like comparing a rough landing to the various crashes on Sept 11th, 2001.

The dot com crash was mostly isolated in high tech. Because it was lead by the Japanese economy starting to fail, and followed by the Sept 11th attacks, the various combined crashes resulted in the S&P 500 falling by about 50% from its peak to the bottom, but it was already back up to the peak value in 2007, then the global financial crisis hit.

This bubble is much bigger. Some analysts say the AI bubble is 17x the size of the Dot Com bubble, and 4x the size of the 2007/08 real estate bubble. AI stocks were 40% of all US GDP growth in 2025, and 80% of all growth in US stocks.

Nvidia’s stock price has gone up 1700% in just 2 years. OpenAI is planning to go public on a valuation of $1 trillion despite losing vast amounts of money. Just 7 US tech companies make up 36% of the entire US stock market, and they’re all heavily betting on AI.

At least when the dot com bubble popped, it left some useful things behind, like huge amounts of dark fibre. But, the AI processors are so specialized they can’t be used for much of anything else. They also wear out, sometimes within months. The datacenter buildings themselves can maybe be repurposed to being general purpose datacenters, but, a lot of the contents will have to be thrown out.

I also remember hearing how the Japanese word “ramen” is comes from a pretty different Chinese word.

It’s cool though that a tonal language like Mandarin / Cantonese is strongly related to a non-tonal one. I wonder what happened there historically.

I don’t know much Japanese, but the bits I do know suggest it’s a very different language than English. Not just different sounds, but also just a different approach to expressing things. Like, I think instead of saying “I’m hungry”, they just say “hungry!” Presumably though, they do use “I” when it’s needed for disambiguation.

For, example, if you’re with a friend and someone asks “are you guys college students?” The response would probably be something like “He is but I’m not”, right?

Yeah, well it’s hard to do it without any errors, but it’s an error every 5 minutes or something, whereas a perfectly competent normal person when sight-reading text will probably make an error every 30s.

Watashi wa nihonjo ga wakarimasen.

I’ve heard, and I don’t know if this is true, that voice actors who specialize in narrating books have to be superstars at this. Not only are they expected to be able to sight-read an entire book without making mistakes, they also need to do the required acting so exciting scenes are exciting, happy scenes are happy, gloomy scenes are gloomy, etc. Plus, as they come across new characters in the book, they’re supposed to be able to give them distinct voices and remember and recreate those voices as they show up later in the book.

Of course, a blockbuster book with a big budget for the audio version won’t have an actor wing it. They’ll be able to pay to have an actor and a director read the book first, and then have the director work with the actor to tease out the best possible performance. But, for a smaller budget, you have to deal with tighter margins so every second in the voice over booth counts.

One thing I love doing is to learn to say “I don’t speak <language>” as well as possible in a language I don’t speak. If you’re good enough at it, people will assume it’s a joke and try to speak to you in that language you don’t actually know. Apparently I’m pretty good at saying it in Portuguese, but I wouldn’t know.