AI is more of a religious cult.

Let’s rewind:

- Doomsayers with Yudkowsky et. al. at the helm calling to bomb datacenters

- “Roko’s Basilisk”

- General AI psychosis and treatment of AI as something with consciousness. Any attempts of rebuttal are met with lazy “but how do you know you are conscious. haha got ‘em”

- Inquisitorial purges of non-believers: “our CEO mandates you shall use AI in your work, or else”

- Communion with a God: “I was talking to ChatGPT and I realised <something personally profound>”

- “You are just using it wrong” aka “You are not praying hard enough”

- Cult Executive Officers

- Promise of incoming salvation with AGI taking over and making a Heaven (or Hell - caveat emptor) on Earth

Man, it must be hard to be a tech CEO these days./s Even if you take a realistic position on AI, you can’t get off the train. Wall Street and your investors will hang and quarter you the moment you start expressing doubts. So you grind your teeth, make grandiose investment promises, sign lofty budgets, and hope it all works out.

Comparisons with luddites are absurd. AI is much closer to a religion.

The curve has always been the bog standard S curve of technological development. In Paul Saffo’s words: “…we routinely overestimate short-term change and underestimate long-term change.”

YCombinator but for cults

Absolute power corrupts absolutely

I concur. In one of my previous teams we told people to avoid using "best practices" and replace it with "good practices" instead. It may sound like some semantic nitpicking, but I've seen far too many cases of target fixation on "best practices" disregarding the actual problem people were trying to solve.

What do you folks think Loom's revenue was in the recent years? I'm curious what the ARR multiple would be in this deal. 20X? 40X?

Probably much much lower. If this was 2020 or 2021, perhaps, but multiples haven't even in that high in the public market for high growth companies for the past few years

You can do approximate math from Series C, where they raised $130M at $1.5B valuation - announced in May 2021. The ARR multiples in 2021 was 50X NTM ARR. They potentially hit $30M by end of 2021 (raised sometime late 2020/early 2021).

Now even if they grew at 40-50% YoY CAGR (which is on the bullish side) - $60M-$70M ARR, approximately giving them a 10-12x ARR multiple for NTM revenue, put them squarely in the median to high-end valuation mutiple for PLG companies growing at 30-50% YoY (https://www.meritechcapital.com/benchmarking/historical-trad...)

Patiently waiting for the detection of a neighbouring neutron star passing through the Solar System at 250AU in the next century.

What does constitute “absolute proof”? Holographic 4d scans of military men waving their respective flags whilst planting charges on the dam?

I've had a similar problem with YouTube. What helped me was a) disabling the history; b) heavily curating my subscriptions. I only try to consume content that comes from either my specific searches (e.g. "how to change oil in a motorcycle") or from the channels I follow. You still get occasionally sucked into "recommended" videos, but it is much better than having to rely on the front page of my account feeding all kinds of garbage.

Using the "Not Interested", and "Don't recommend this channel" options on recommendations you don't like does seem to help a fair bit too.

I strongly recommend RYS: <https://lawrencehook.com/rys/>

You can achieve close to the same thing using uBlock element zapper, without installing extra plugins. I use the same trick for SO ('Hot Network Questions' darkpattern) and other sites.

Well, yes, but only assuming that YouTube does not change anything. If they do, then your uBlock rules won’t work, but RYS will presumably be updated to still work.