DESCRIPTION: It is over.
It is that simple. It explains almost everything correctly. This is just another way of saying that familiarity and 10,000 hours of practice are not optional.
The best books about trading the stock market has been published before the dot-com bubble, in the late 90s, driven by the emerged opportunities of computerized trading (using dial-up modems to download the data and to access the broker).
People who were familiar with trading back then and have had enough experience were prepared to participate in the crapto craze, while “we” have to learn anything on the go, under a tremendous emotional and cognitive pressure, and fail, because we didn’t know what information is relevant and what signals are meaningful, along with the lack of solid trading practices. It is that simple.
People who have studied mathematics were well-prepared to the absolutely crazy the US software development market, where one could yearn hundreds of thousands by quickly picking up a current fad. Having a decent background in CS theory and FP makes one prepared to make things like Watsapp (in Erlang by just a less than 10 people), or Binance or whatever it was. “We” have to jump into the train on at the full speed and to keep analyzing and learning new useless shit on the go, while the train is moving at full speed, and we are not prepared for that.
Now the both games are over. The Wild-West crypto trading first became a mandatory-KYC abomination, and now it, at last, dominated by institutions, and the normies will never return to shitcoins to create necessary liquidity and momentum. It is over, this time for real. I have lost not too much in money, but a lot in stress-related disorders.
The software industry as we know it (and the related tech and education bubbles) are about to collapse right before our eyes. The era of 100k+ salaries is over with the advent of GPTs. It does not matter how crappy and buggy code they produce (I have written miles about it), it is the fact that the code snippets cost almost literally nothing, compared to a payroll of a full staff of mediocre replaceable coders in software factories.
Again, the code is shit, it is generated on a purely syntactic level, without any kind of understanding whatsoever, leave alone proper semantic analysis, but this code is cheap and abundant and can be easily “automated” (via tests, which does not prove anything, of course) into “something that runs” and (crashes time and again) – just as it was before GPTs with all that crappy software everywhere.
So, all your laboriously and painfully developed expertise in, say, CS and PL theories, which make you a top Rust programmer, lets say, (because your understanding easily zooms back and forth from the most esoteric Curry-Howard isomorphism all the way down, via the proper Algebraic Data Types, that simply follow from it. to the mostly-functional impl blocks) becomes devalued and even almost useless, since a decent GPT (like Grok3) spits out, when being prompted (constrained) intelligently-enough, the code that is on par with the best-of-the-best, most refined textbook code you have ever seen (and yes, you should always program in a textbook style code. LLMs will do all the performance optimizations).
This is how “we” are late to the party. The party is over. GPTs are there to stay and grow. They won’t be able to do any “understanding” in principle, but they will capture the most fundamental and commonly used patterns correctly at the level of mere syntax and probabilities of the next token, given the “context”.
I am always way too “slow” with my conclusions, but I almost never wrong, at least about the underlying principles. The fact that no improvements in existing open-source software were made driven by availability of decent GPTs spells trouble too. It is all a bubble since the dot-com.
So, at least be prepared for the crash and chaos. Layoffs are already started and only will accelerate. The “Indian” software corporations (relying on cheap, loyal but low-skilled labour) will collapse sooner or later. This is only the very beginning.
That “Software Is Changing Again” meme is, this time, for real. “You will know or understand nothing and you will be happy”.
And, yes, when “Music” suddenly became a bubble in the early 70s, those who studied it in serious schools and practiced their instruments or vocal always outperformed those who jumped into the moving train unprepared. The same pattern is literally everywhere.