As a security engineer, I implore anyone to have an LLM walk you through standing up an SIEM.

Like don't get me wrong. They're phenomenal. But they just aren't capable of complex tasks yet.

That's pretty horrific.

Still don't get this take.

Buying low only works if you can sell high.

At the rate we are going. Yer gonna have King Ratfuck fighting King Shit over a an empire of dirt.

Real estate

I saw that you put a caveat in there about it, but I'm going to make it a little more clear.

If anyone here has lived through the dot.com bubble in Seattle (and probably the bay area), they'll have seen that real estate is great if it's paid for. If you go underwater on your loan and kicked out, which is how the banks got so much real estate in 08, you're fucked. There *are no general rules, but guides.

Real estate is a trouble prone investment normally, much less in this crazy market; I specifically wouldn’t want to touch that right now.

Can’t speak for metals, but also be careful there…

Thing about a bubble like this is you don’t know when it’s going to pop. I like the saying “the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.”

What I’m saying is to be careful about going all in on more pure hedges. If this lasts another 4 years and one's into stuff like XMAG and metals, and they drop in a crash anyway, you may end up in a worse position than if you had held the S&P 500. I think a better perspective is to avoid “buying a hedge” and instead invest in companies (or other assets) one thinks will be productive and grow with the bubble or not. They’ll grow however long the bubble goes, and keep growing after.

an ounce will remain an ounce

Buy cocaine futures, got it.

I'm also going to watch replies.

Be in debt and cross your fingers for hyperinflation!

This time it’s different, though.

Why?

Homelessness world wide is at an all time high, and a huge swath of people can’t afford all the basic necessities anymore.

I highly doubt your homelessness stat. If it is at an all time high by any metric, it is almost certainly a statistical artifact from (1) increased homelessness in developed nations, where tracking is decent and (2) improved tracking in developing nations. Meanwhile the people who can't afford "basic necessities" are, again, in developed nations - places where the notion of what constitutes basic necessities would be considered grand opulance in many parts of developing nations.

Instead, the majority of people in the world have seen improvements to their quality of life over the past 20, 40, and 60 years. Improved water and sanitation systems, more robust and resiliant food systems, greater access to life saving medical care, huge drops in infant mortality, hugely increased access to technology and education.

If an economic crash happens now, will the 99% of the people finally wake up and just TAKE the resources from that 1%, like it or not?

This is, quite frankly, a ridiculous fantasy. The wealth of the top 1% primarily exists not in vaults of gold bars, but in the ownership of what are intangible human constructs. Particular segments of land (lines on a map); businesses (organized structures of people); intellectual property (literally just ideas).

Elon Musk, for example, has a large portion of his wealth in Tesla. Of course, Tesla has physical assets in its factories and such. But most of the value of the company is speculative - people expecting Tesla to be wildly successful in the future. The next part of its value comes from IP - the exclusive ownership of its various inventions and innovations. And another part comes from the organizational structure itself and the knowledge and intelligence of the individuals who make up that structure. At its root, the value of Tesla is the goose that lays the golden eggs (Musk's cult of personality and the expertise of the individuals that make up the business) and investor confidence that the goose will continue laying golden eggs. In your glorious revolution, presumably Musk will be beheaded, and all the Tesla employees will scatter to the far winds as the proletariat storms their offices. Without the stable interaction of these technical experts, no more innovation happens, and investor confidence dries up (assuming the investors weren't also beheaded). The wealth of Tesla, then, does not go to the people, but goes up in smoke.

A revolution premised purely on taking assets from the rich has a predictable ending: in the slim chance that the revolution succeeds, even if the tangible wealth is equally distributed to the people (also a slim chance), the engine that generated that wealth has been destroyed and, deprived of the ability to generate new wealth, the people eventually spend away their windfall and are left with less than they had before they started. This sort of phenomenon was literally the impetus for Adam Smith to write The Wealth of Nations. Spain had spent a couple centuries robbing the Americas of its gold via murder and slavery - enough to literally collapse the price of gold in Europe. And yet, during Smith's time, Spain was in dire financial straights while England was the world's predominant economic power. Why? Because England had invested in technology and had developed industrial factories. It had invested in public and private institutions (ie, structures of people) that would continuously generate new wealth, rather than relying on hoarding gold bars.

The "glorious revolution" fantasy, meanwhile, is largely counterproductive to the actual goal of improving normal people's lives and improving the equality of political and economic power, because it plays into the childish notion that if we just throw a big enough temper tantrum, then we will get our way. And maybe that might be true for a brief moment. It is certainly true for some children some of the time that if they yell and scream and cry enough, they will be given the ice cream they want. But they only get that ice cream because there is an adult there, listening to them cry, who has a job that makes money that they can then use to buy the ice cream. The problem is that, ice cream or not, at the end of the day the child is still a child, completely dependent on the adult to provide for all their needs and make all their important descisions. The child gains real autonomy in their lives not when they throw "The Glorious Temper Tantrum" - they gain it when they get a job outside the purview of their caregivers and are able to spend the money they make at that job on the things of their own choosing.

So, too, with average people growing out of the controlling influence of the political and economic elite. Independence is achieved via building things - communities, relationships, physical infrastructure, businesses, governments, unions - which can be relied on instead of the options presented to us by the elites. And building things takes time and effort. It doesn't happen overnight with a few molotovs and a good photo op - that's the narrative the elites want you to believe, the one they put in all the popular movies and tv shows, because it is the strategy that is absolutely sure to fail. The idea that The Great Battle will be followed by Happily Ever After serves the elites because it tells us that we will win when we just put in a reasonable amount of effort right at the very last moment, and then we can relax. This is not how the world works. No - the world gets better when people put in unreasonable amounts of effort right now to gradually improve things and build things bit by bit, and keep putting in that effort for years and years and years. Sure, maybe there will someday be a tipping point or a big marker in history that we can point to and say "ah, that's when things changed". But make no mistake - that moment can only happen, and will only lead to a better world after the fact, because of the long term, boring hard work of people who care more about building things to help their friends than destroying things to hurt their enemies.

they will think it will be safe to flee to thier bunkers or compounds, in other countries, but they dont have the forethought of having staff they need to pay , or even services like waste removal down.

They all have been building bunkers.

Your #3 is problematic.

The basis of the question is where to invest in order to avoid the coming AI crash. Your answer fails.

Normally I would agree.

But the weight of this one obviously hyped sector is measurably, historically huge: https://www.apolloacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/ExtremeAIConcentration-090825.pdf

With a lot of “circular investment” reminiscent of previous bad behavior: https://www.axios.com/2025/09/25/nvidia-openai-investment-ai

Obviously don’t sell after a crash, or sell the absolute least you can to live; that is rule #1.

…But I think it’s prudent to save a bit extra and shuffle some investment out of the S&P 500 pre-emptively, as it’s starting to resemble an AI evangelism hype fund. I’m not that old/experienced, but I’ve never seen anything like this in the market, especially from my perspective in the ML tinkerer community where, ironically, it’s obvious how much this all stinks. All the academics know it.

The seven primary companies that are trading around the same tens of billions of "investment" and "credits" are worth 34% of the S&P 500.

Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Nvidia, Meta, Tesla.

All of them are betting HARD, because CEO types think they can be first to market with the singularity and win. (That may be oversimplifying a bit, but every one of these companies is run by Nazi collaborators. Make stupid calls, win shitty reputation.)

Buy low when everything crashes and wait for it to recover in 3-5 yrs.

I haven't seen a job with a pension in the last 18 years being in the workforce.

“The markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent”, as the old saying goes.

Some made big money in 2008.

It also depends what you mean by “hurt.”

Nvidia/AMD stocks, for example, are going to drop like meteors, but the physical companies themselves will be fine. They’re like the picks and shovels makers of the California Gold Rush; they’ve made their piles of cash and will go back to business as usual. Hence, I’m not selling my long-held AMD, even though I’m certainly not buying more. Yet.

And some totally unrelated companies may be disproportionately hurt by the pullback of a serious recession.

One comment I will make on LLMs specifically is it’s more of a “race to the bottom” than you’d think. Between sparsity research (with the recent MoE trend being a rather crude stopgap if you ask me), alternate attention schemes, finetuning advancements, computing shifts like BitNet all in the pipe, and all the open models from China and others, well…

The end point feels like local inference of specialized, freely licensed models. As useful, niche tools, not superintelligence.

They're low power basically free, hence seemingly inevitable.

That’s utterly apocalyptic if you’re someone like Sam Altman or Jeff Bezos. OpenAI can’t make money off that, which is why they’re lobbying to kill it and preaching infinite scaling that won’t work.

people who don’t even seem to invest are the ones worrying about it. I can’t help but wonder why that is.

If I had to guess it's probably because those people, like OP and myself, have very limited funds so losing that investment is losing "everything" and putting them back to having nothing.

Having a very inadequate income makes losing your investments tremendously impactful as you know it will take many many many years just to get close to whatever level of investment you had before. We're counting on years of growth to make it something worthwhile, but if we get kicked back to nothing then by the time we catch back up to where we were the amount of time left to invest and grow is so much shorter.

Saving to invest is hard, sometimes. And finance knowledge/attention is finite. Some folks are at risk of drawing from investments after a crash.

And not everyone here was invested during the 2008 crash, and may have only experienced the ultra-bizzare COVID rebound.

I don’t mean to be rude, but there are a lot of legit reasons most of Lemmy is probably not into ultra long buy-and-hold investing.

The Japanese stock market crash of 1987 only recovered in 2020. That's over 30 years.

If that happened in the US, the average american who invested in the stock market and is relying on a 401k to retire would be screwed.

I'm 54 and expect this to be the first depression of my life. It'll be like nothing we've seen since October of 1929.

This is all great stuff to have on hand, but not relevant for OP's question. They're wondering how to prepare for the equivalent of the dotcom burst or the 2008 recession, not a grid-down scenario.

I don't know that the OP or anyone else necessarily disagrees with you here. It's one of the reasons that I believe we're fucked when the bubble pops. Every other sector is shrinking otherwise, which is only making the mania more extreme.

Trump has fucked the economy, but I don't expect the next administration to be able to pull off a miracle and fix the mess we've created within the next 10 years. Foreign relations and our status as the reserve currency are shot to hell. The US is going to have to answer for our behavior.