I was around during the dot-com bubble. When it popped it popped pretty quickly. It wasn't a slow leak. Everything needed to be a dot-com and everything was centered around being a dot-com no matter what the business actually did. Money was pouring and almost anything dot-com was getting funding.
I moved to a dot-com right at the tail end of it. We built a pretty decent startup from scratch within the first two months and debuted at one of the largest trade shows in the world. We had our own private label factoring credit card and we did credit card transactions over the internet and with handheld cellular devices. It was built to scale, colocated, and we were getting customers. When the floor dropped out it was done in less than two months. dot-com was a very negative thing for a while after that.
It's definitely looking like we've passed the peak of the S-curve here.
But there is one difference between now and the dot-bomb that could make the shape of what's next different (note, only "could"; it might very well be very similar): with the massively increased financialization of everything, the link between reality and stocks/private equity investment has become much more tenuous. Speculative investors, as a group, know to some extent that they can keep the bubble going just by continuing to buy.
For a time.
But eventually they will have exhausted all they can squeeze from the "greater fools", and someone's risk analysis department will say "if we don't sell it all now, we'll be stuck holding the bag." And that will start a cascade. Because the other big difference between 2000 and today is the degree of automation in trading....
I was a teenager around the dot-com and to this day I feel an idealized sense of longing for participation in the exciting times of the dot-coms. You guys got to enjoy the blazing innovation of the new internet, so full of endless possibilities. Tough luck on your bubble popping moment though.
Well, it was exciting I guess. I even knew someone who worked for pets.com!
On the other hand, I worked for a startup selling product information management software to large retailers, and was about as non dot-com as you could get. When the bubble burst, all the funding disappeared for all tech companies, not just the dot-com ones, so we were also all out of a job. Which was not fun.
It was watching all the potential being squandered and the internet basically being relegated to click farming and selling people crap they don't need.
All the really cool stuff seems to have died with the bubble...
I think the sad part was the people entering the IT workforce for only money. Don't get me wrong, I understand why and not gatekeeping. But it was the first time I know that people with computer skills were highly in demand, so anyone who had turned on a computer was able to get a job even if they knew nothing of how a computer actually worked, or networking.
I made a really big flowchart diagram of all of our services and how they interrelate by giving Claude Code the description of what I wanted starting at the entry point project and working its way through the entire system to the data ingestion point. I gave Claude my GitHub access token so it could look through or clone each repo it needed. I also had many of the projects already cloned in my workspace folder through years of working on the various projects.
Claude was able to determine the project, analyze the code, and infer the infrastructure. It worked through the projects as it went drawing a higher level diagram first. Then I iteratively asked for more detail around the sections I thought needed more detail.
This was just an experiment that I spent a few hours on. Months later I misplaced the mermaid markdown file so I asked Claude to reproduce the mermaid markdown from the png image so I could have it add more detail around another section that looked incorrect because it encapsulated the database and worker for one of the systems in a single box. The detail made the diagram in that area much more clear.
To me it is very good at writing/reading/reverse engineering mermaid diagrams.
I am using GLM-5.1 in pi.dev through Ollama Cloud. I am able to get by on the $20 plan. I use it a lot and the reset is hourly for sessions and weekly overall. This is the first week I got close to the limit before reset at about 85% used. I am probably using it about 4 hours a day on average 6 or 7 days per week.
I have been using GLM-5.1 with pi.dev through Ollama Cloud for my personal projects and I am very happy with this setup. I use pi.dev with Claude Sonnet/Opus 4.6 at work. Claude Code is great but the latest update has me compacting so much more frequently I could not stand it. I don't miss MCP tool calling when I am using pi.dev; it uses APIs just fine. I actually think GML-5.1 builds better websites than Claude Opus. For my personal projects I am building a full stack development platform and GLM-5.1 is doing a fantastic job.
The limits seem higher on Ollama Cloud to me than paying for API access. I don't have solid stats on that though. I have an OpenRouter account and the service I am creating is going to need to use that. I will have better measuring stick then.
Email: bink [dot] lynch [at] gmail [dot] com (bink.lynch@gmail.com)
About Me: I am an accomplished, team-oriented full-stack web developer, fluent in all levels of the architecture, specializing in Agile software development, product development, user experience, database design, and unit and acceptance testing.
This is great! One feature I would love, the ability to edit the markup in the left pane, see it "live" in the right pane, get it the way I like it, then copy.
The article describes two columns, dateEffective and dateEnd. If dateEnd is null, the row is still effective. When the row has been updated or deleted, the dateEnd field is set.
This was implemented in a regulated industry where we had to show the state of the system at given points in time. It worked well for this purpose.
I moved to a dot-com right at the tail end of it. We built a pretty decent startup from scratch within the first two months and debuted at one of the largest trade shows in the world. We had our own private label factoring credit card and we did credit card transactions over the internet and with handheld cellular devices. It was built to scale, colocated, and we were getting customers. When the floor dropped out it was done in less than two months. dot-com was a very negative thing for a while after that.