Let me make sure I understand. That pretty picture is what is required to create a bulletin board like the old message boards of yesteryear (which I once ran knowing not much of anything internety) to handle the 3 of us poster people?

QuoteUnder the hood, yes.

Many of the connections are abstracted away from the programmer and are essential plumbing.  But before anything was written on the page you are seeing now the code was four function calls deep.  And as code was building the page it was jumping all over the place inside that mess.

Quote from: K-Dog on Sep 21, 2026, 02:09 PMBy me 😀

I knew that you weren't tinkering just to make the Diner spiffy. lol.   Figured that out as soon as I worked out how the "AI" actually worked.

RE

It does make it spiffy, we have custom text colors now.

And we have a cool mobile pages which trackbacks link to.  With the 'assistance' it only took a week to get that working.

And it makes recovering from the white screen of death much easier.  This is not 'VIBE' coding.  My overall workflow is the same but I have a chatbot that can examine the codebase.  It is called opencode.  It helps and the biggest danger is not breaking the Diner for an in-determinant period of time since it can roll a mistake back easily any more.  The danger now is the chatbot doing improvements on its own, or following instructions too literally or not literally enough.  Then I have to pull the plug and roll it back myself.  We have wound up in a tangled mess a few times.  I have had to to a Trump on the session, nuke it and start over.

It is some seriously crazy shit.

And my perspective which might be worth something since I am actually doing this.

I am not understanding software people not being able to get jobs if there is any truth in the pro-ported AI revolution.  A novice could not be doing what I am doing.  AI technology only replaces coders in a one off application that is a rubber stamp of what has been done before.  Anybody can ask AI to build a simple app that seems amazing.  But those apps are Potemkin.  Your are not going to develop a complex software app just by talking.  If it has any complexity you are going to need a formal specification.  Writing software is implementing a specification, even a hacker will make notes about what they are doing. 

So  I do not see why entry level jobs are not more available for code jockeys, I think a personal assistant lowers the bar because if you do not know something you can ask about it.  My mofo will even check something  on the web if we are not sure.

It doubles what I can do at least.  It is a wonderful tool, but a tool it is, and nothing more than that.

A little more detail on the REAL risk posed by AI to the global financial system.  It's similar to the debt crisis of 2008 in some respects, but much larger because it features an equity component as well, and the debt isn't distributed amongst millions of individual debtors like the mortgage crisis.  In this case the debt is concentrated amongst the very rich and the stock purchases are counted as part of the capital structure of banks & hedge funds that bought the stock.  A large loss in the stock value would force many of these owners into bankruptcy or at least a liquidity lockup, soit wouldn't just be the Hyperscalers going bust, it would be the TBTF Banks who underwrote the stock on them as well.  IOW, not just one AIG to bailout, there could be a dozen or more of these systemically important banks in the deep doo doo.  With Goobermints already in a deep debt crisis of their own, it's not clear how they could do a bailout of this scale.  The longer the bubble goes, the worse it gets.  In terms of equity losses, it's far more than $132B, it's in the $TRILLIONS$

A real clusterfuck in the making.

RE

Morgan's estimate is probably on the low end of the off balance sheet liabilities, but that obscures the fact that their on balance sheet liabilities are at least equal and probably double or triple that number.  So if the bottom falls out on the stock price, you're going to have a whole lotta hardware and a lot of expensive real estate going to auction.  Even if they could get 50 cents on the dollar for the hard assets (unlikely) your shortfall is probably $2T minimum.

On the upside, hobbyists and tinkerers will be swimming in cheap memory cards.

RE

The 'opencode' tool I am using is normally set up to use an LLM from a data-center.  I modified it to use a particular LLM that is modified to be a code jockey and nothing else.  When it is running it fills most of the video cards.  The Diner dreams of a 5090 but the price is now 70% over MSRP.

Because the tool is made to be used over the web and not use my video card, there is a counter in the interface that keeps track of how much you are spending to use the tool.  Ours is stuck at $0.00.  We don't even have an API key to log onto a data center.  We do not want one.

Chatbots can generate a lot of tokens.  Good I do not have the problem of paying for them.

* If you watch You-Tube videos on how to do anything AI the first half of the video wastes your time telling you how to sign up for an account.  You need a credit card they say, but don't worry you won't use enough tokens for what we are about to do to cost anything.  And they are telling the truth.  It appears to be a rite of passage, no corporate sponsorship without pushing the borg solution.

Their tutorials are examples.  Put software to real work in a loop and tokens matter.  But what can I say, I doubt it is possible to have a You-Tube channel without being a rabid ass kissing capitalist.


As far as cheap memory cards go, until there is an economic crash the shortage will continue.  Nvidia is all about making money, and if that makes everyone else poor.  Their attitude is too fucking bad.  I regret not getting a 5090 last November now it is too much.  But Nvidia will say too much for you, but not for somebody else.  They love the shortage.