9 ms·

The Continued Trajectory of Idiocy in the Tech Industry

94 points by gmemstr 2y ago

rc00 2y ago
Rust and Solidity are interesting omissions from this ranty post, especially given the crypto attachments.
spacecadet 2y ago
Up and to the right! lol
yapyap 2y ago
[flagged]
andriesm 2y ago
The only thing better than to attach your startup tech to either AI or blockchain, is to attach to BOTH simultaneously, like the wave of AI blockchain tokens!
pmarreck 2y ago
Who else is not looking forward to cleaning up AI-written merely-accidentally-working garbage code for the next umpteen years?
- ziggyzecat 2y ago
  on a subscription basis?
- datavirtue 2y ago
  Been making bank doing this for decades. I really don't care who or what wrote the code. It's beautiful.
  - pmarreck 2y ago
    So you refactor bad code? How do you get these gigs?
    - dartos 2y ago
      Look for places hiring Java, C#, or COBOL enterprise developers
      - pmarreck 2y ago
        That explains why I haven't encountered this, but at least now I know
- jarsin 2y ago
  My plan is to blame all my bad code on AI even though I don't use it.
  - riskable 2y ago
    In reality you say, "AI" but in your head you really mean, "Analog Intelligence" that way you're never lying :thumbsup:
    - marcosdumay 2y ago
      There's a lot of argument about it, but it seems to me that the idea that our brain is digital is the one winning.
- thruway516 2y ago
  AI will clean up AI’s merely-accidentally-working garbage code
  - pmarreck 2y ago
    Nope. AI will not push the envelope in any way. People will still have to do that, because people are the only entities that care about these things, and "care" is not only fundamentally motivating but fundamentally measuring.
high_na_euv 2y ago
Lets be serious Just because your reddit or hn had non tiny amount of posts about blockchain or nft, then it does not mean that there was real and significant push towards those in real world There is huge world outside your twitters and reddits
- bdndndndbve 2y ago
  They talk about Bitcoin on financial news shows, which lends it a huge amount of credibility. It's like if Jim Cramer has opinions about last night's Powerball numbers.
  - high_na_euv 2y ago
    They talk about btc as financial instrument $$$$, not blockchains
  - 8338550bff96 2y ago
    If Cramer is your gold standard of credibility, then you're not so credible yourself
    - some_furry 2y ago
      Uh, that's not how I interpreted their comment. At all.
      - 8338550bff96 2y ago
        how'd you interpret it?
- a5withtrrs 2y ago
  As someone working at a very large bank. I strongly disagree. The bank spun up a new business to experiment with blockchain technology and went hard at it for several years until they recently sidelined those projects... In favour of AI The amount of internal hype across all areas of the business (especially in the tech areas of the business) with regards to AI has been frankly stunning to witness.
martythemaniak 2y ago
A big part of the idiocy in tech is the endless stream of generic, cynical neckbeard takes that are indistinguishable from AI slop.
- datavirtue 2y ago
  For some reason AI really brings out the neckbeard rage. I don't get it. AI assistants are amazing tools. It's like the rise of the PC industry all over again. So much value to unlock and our ideas barely scratch the surface right now.
  - bbor 2y ago
    Some of it's simply a benign failure in pattern recognition -- despite my argument below that AI isn't the same as blockchain, you can certainly see the surface level similarities if you're not familiar with the technologies involved. It's also triggering a lot of people's anti-capitalist sentiments, which I personally relate to in spades. They're just applying metrics that they've been applying for years, and they're backed up in their feelings by legions of peers. Plus, I think we can all agree that unexpectedly-effective AI is fucking terrifying -- Vinge didn't call it a "Singularity" out of admiration, but fearful respect. It's fascinating though, in a way... a lot of HN's rules are about "flaming", and I think this issue might be the first to really bring that out since the end of the distro/OS wars (I don't think Xbox v. Playstation ever made a splash here?). Perhaps there was a bit with Crypto, but IMO it never really took hold here in earnest, either. But AI brings out the vitriol, my god! "AI slop" is just the start -- just yesterday I saw someone on Substack call a random and obviously good faith data blogger a purveyor of "demonic machine filth". That's a new one!
    - dartos 2y ago
      > demonic machine filth People find the dark mechanicum creepy.
  - jjk166 2y ago
    It's not a perfect tool for my hyper-specific use case, and getting the most out of it requires a different form of esoteric knowledge than the one I've spent years curating. Clearly it's garbage.
VyseofArcadia 2y ago
> Does the company own any software patents? > This includes purely “defensive” patents, in industries where their competitors abuse intellectual property law to stifle competition. My own company was pretty staunchly opposed to software patents until we got sued by patent trolls. We are now pretty aggressive about patenting things so that doesn't happen again. Software patents were never great, and bad actors have made things even worse.
- ziggyzecat 2y ago
  the classic tale of the "make it proprietary" trolls. uuh! someone should make it a paper chase all the way to insurance companies!
  - slowmovintarget 2y ago
    Now I'm having fond nostalgia for Groklaw and coverage of SCO vs. everyone.
    - ziggyzecat 2y ago
      thank you for your memories.
- bloak 2y ago
  But you can't use patents to protect yourself against a typical patent troll. A typical patent troll doesn't do anything except sue people so they are unlikely to infringe anybody else's patents.
  - AnimalMuppet 2y ago
    You can patent the stuff that is essential to what you do as soon as you come up with it - before the troll can. Then the troll can't sue because they can't get the patent in the first place (or if they do, you can use yours to invalidate theirs).
    - 2y ago
istultus 2y ago
This is a commonplace corollary to Gell-Man Amnesia/Knoll's Law[1] - in truth every single field/category in the universe has varying degrees of stupidity, it's just that you only reacts emotionally to the stupidity in the fields you have a personal attachment to. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#Gell-Mann_amn...
- ziggyzecat 2y ago
  or the ones currently present, hyped, in trend? wait, I suggest: amplified/augmented attachment via exposure.
Reredjri49 2y ago
[flagged]
- gadflyinyoureye 2y ago
  You know the term authoritarian cuts both ways across the political spectrum? Not everything is right wing just because it’s authoritarian.
cies 2y ago
So what are the tech hypes that did end up being more than mere idiocy? SaaS? Cloud? Smartphone apps? Social media? Going back further: Internet? Wireless networks everywhere?
- some_furry 2y ago
  Successful technologies that were hyped up started with acknowledging a problem exists, then working to solve it. The blockchain / big data / Cloud Everything / LLM hype is largely a solution (the thing being hyped up) looking for a problem. I hope that's clear. The problem isn't the hype in and of itself. It's that there's a disproportionate amount of hype for things that aren't actually that valuable. I don't begrudge people for being excited about technology, only for being excited about excitement (and forgetting to actually solve problems for businesses and consumers).
  - dartos 2y ago
    I think LLMs have some killer features which solve real problems. Translation (the problem transformers were invented to solve), Document QA, Embeddings for more semantic search, and unstructured data ingestion are all areas where LLMs excel. When you have documentation to reference and keep in context, it’s pretty easy to achieve a low hallucination rate. The hype is around like content creation and AGI, which is a nothingburger.
    - soatok 2y ago
      > The hype is around like content creation and AGI, which is a nothingburger. Right, which is why TFA specifically talks about "Generative AI".
    - apwell23 2y ago
      what is 'document QA' ?
      - marcosdumay 2y ago
        My guess it's answering "how do I do X", where X is on the documentation. Still I don't understand the people that claim the shared LLMs can do that with internal documentation. That's bullshit and easily disproved, you can force it to work for toy problems, but only for toy problems.
Meganet 2y ago
Thats just not a good analysis. Blockchain and NTF are and were stupid. A lot of people knew about this and the hype was more of a news hype because we had nothing else to talk about (until ai came). I have seen so many really good and helpful ai demos/features internally, its impressive. With AI / ML we are getting self driving cars, robots (talking, listing, walking), agents etc. LLMs are not crazy good because they can generate stories, they are crazy good because they are a very very good interface to humans. Facebooks Segment Anything ml model basically solved segmentation problem. Alpha Fold solved protein folding. Nvidias Omniverse with Robots solved the robot motion problem. AI is not a hype, AI delivers left and right every week there is something really cool new. Instead of writing uneducated blog posts or just blindly rant about it, at least try to follow up on AI news, you will be amazed how much it solves. And Until we are seeing ANY slow down or ceiling, until then i do believe that this right now is what the iphone was or the internet just crazier. Its frustrating that people are not even able to understand AI, Blockchain and NFT good enough to be able to separate them. Just because something gets hyped doesn't mean its the same thing as the other thing which got hyped. And no you were not able to talk to a computer system as fast and good as you are able to do that today with OpenAIs voice input. And no you never had a system which was able to answer that many questions in such a high quality.
- some_furry 2y ago
  Which AI startup do you work for?
  - Meganet 2y ago
    [dead]
  - Meganet 2y ago
    The GenAI Stuff you don't like/hate helps blind people to navigate the world because generating images also allows to analyse images. There are plenty of other areas which will help a lot of people left and right including you. Cancer research, material research for energy. Cancer for example can be detected in xrays thanks to GenAI stuff. Its a lot easier to get an x-ray machine somewere around the globe but an expert is hard and we do not have enough radiologists anyway.
sebstefan 2y ago
The web was a hype-train, and then a bubble, too. It's not enough that a new technology is adopting the hype cycle, what matters is what's left of it afterwards How many of us got their workflow disrupted by AI? It's been a while since I've googled a "how do I..." type thing, because of how much I appreciate Bing Copilot or Phind Safe to say my life did not change with the arrival of Web3!
- betaby 2y ago
  > How many of us got their workflow disrupted by AI? Single digit percentage?
  - inanutshellus 2y ago
    You're kidding, I assume? Or maybe you misread "workflow" to mean something like "work-life"? For sure more than a single-digit percentage of people have tried a Q&A bot by now. Shoot, Windows just updated to insert Copilot into users' machines, with the icon right next to the Windows button. It can't not continue to grow. It's such an amazingly effective way to get information versus scouring through web pages.
    - soatok 2y ago
      > For sure more than a single-digit percentage of people have tried a Q&A bot by now. Tried is doing a lot of heavy lifting. https://meow.social/@crumbcake/113156927685392932 https://meow.social/@crumbcake/113156927685392932 > Shoot, Windows just updated to insert Copilot into users' machines, with the icon right next to the Windows button. This goes back to my point about consent and opt-in vs opt-out. > It can't not continue to grow. "If we shove this down people's throats enough maybe their gag reflex will adapt." > It's such an amazingly effective way to get information versus scouring through web pages. The only reason I stopped using Google isn't to choose AI instead. It's because the obtrusive "AI Overview" pissed me off.
    - thereddaikon 2y ago
      I hardly use it at all. ChatGPT was interesting at first but it slowly got worse and worse as changes had to be made to it so OpenAI wouldn't get sued. The same is true for all the other ones. LLMs can be great if they are allowed to blatantly violate copyright. But once everyone started circling the wagons and walling off their information they quickly started to lose their value.
hi-v-rocknroll 2y ago
Tech blogger hype has a history of cargo culting nonsense. This is nothing new. I think they killed AR by hyping GGlass as an artifact only for special people, while VR was handed a half-measured fate tempered by gaming (it's still impractical and rears its ugly head every 10 years compared to the potential utility of AR). Centralized blockchain ledgers for immutable data storage is immensely useful to detect silent corruption or malicious data tampering for specialized use-cases (backup & restoration with air-gapped storage processes are required to assure high-confidence data integrity to correct such data problems). GPU, server systems, and network access are so damn cheap and impressive with incremental advances that the killer apps challenges now are sanely management, planning, and cross-cutting concerns like emulation, resource allocation, configuration management, monitoring, security, and effective discovery and implementation of appropriate and benchmarked solution(s). The application of LLMs yet aren't to the point of complete silicon & PCB design, application development, or systems management assuring a level of correctness using iterative feedback, but probably will approach something useful over time. Perhaps in 50 years, all living humans will lack the understanding of what software will have "eaten" in certain areas if engineers allow it and corporations optimize for it.
ergonaught 2y ago
As with a number of other increasingly serious problems that people generally cannot or will not acknowledge as problems. You can’t have reasoned discussions about the problems, people won’t actually engage with the topics, concerns or warnings are simply dismissed by people who won’t think it through even to only second order consequences, and in the meantime the sharks scent blood in the water and the money frenzy is upon us all, directly or indirectly. There aren’t happy solutions to human nature at scale.
clwg 2y ago
The author’s premise brings me to a different conclusion. First, they detail Big Data, then the building of infrastructure to support it. New technology was then developed to harness insights from Big Data, and along the way, blockchain and smart contracts were developed, which are essentially cryptographically verifiable distributed state machines. Both of these innovations have also driven the development of hardware to support those activities. This seems like a solid trajectory. I'm a Trekkie, so having an interactive conversation with a computer still makes me smile, even if it's just a stochastic parrot. I'm also super interested to see what AR/VR and AI can do together. Additionally, I look at the Swedish model for direct democracy and see blockchain and smart contracts as viable technological solutions to make that process more efficient, secure and hopefully increase adoption of that sort of governance. The tech industry's main problem is grifters, and I think they mostly (not always) come from other industries (marketing, finance, crime). Somehow, they have convinced everyone that tech needs them to succeed (with their grifts). To me, the actual underlying technology is mind-blowing, but it’s the grift implementations that are the problem and make everything else look bad.
- nullorempty 2y ago
  Re democracy: we bank online I am sure we have enough tech to make voting secure
  - clwg 2y ago
    It's not just about security; it's about how democracy, in certain forms (i.e. canton type voting, certain diaspora communities, etc.) is implemented[0]. I'm not advocating for any anarchist ideals, and I believe cryptocurrency should be banned if for no other reason than to deal with cybercrime. However, I also recognize legitimate use cases for the underlying technology that are drown out by all these grifts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_democracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_democracy
bbor 2y ago
This is some of the most knee-jerk content I've seen outside of Tumblr in a while. Fun, engaging, and well written, but totally off base IMO. It's a simple fact of life that we have struck an unexpected (by most) breakthrough with LLMs, and begun meaningfully solving the Frame Problem decades -- or centuries -- before anyone (other than Vinge, who literally predicted it to the year 30y ago: https://users.manchester.edu/Facstaff/SSNaragon/Online/100-FYS-F15/Readings/Vinge,%20The%20Coming%20Technological%20Singularity.pdf https://users.manchester.edu/Facstaff/SSNaragon/Online/100-F...) thought we would. We can point out issues with AI all day, such as the ever-relevant impacts of automation on workers in a capitalist society, but this critique is both exceedingly vague and occasionally mistaken. Once upon a time, everyone was all hot and bothered about Big Data If your oldest example of a hype cycle is Big Data, you might not be old enough/reading enough history to comment effectively. Big Data is the same hype cycle as AI -- it's called "Machine Learning", and it's been going since full-bore since ~2017: https://subredditstats.com/r/machinelearning https://subredditstats.com/r/machinelearning To keep my (central!) critique here very short: "AI" isn't the same as blockchain because some people on forums sound similar when talking about it, it's the culmination of decades of research that started in earnest w/ Judea Pearl's 1984 Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems, or even the hubbub around Marvin Minsky's 1969 Perceptrons. It's an academic discipline, not a buzzword, and any professional or serious critique should engage with such work, not just quote-dunk the CEO of Jack-In-The-Box. There is no way to opt out of, or disable, this feature. ...Don't use it? Mozilla Firefox 128.0 released a feature (enabled by default of course) to help advertisers collect data on you. This is just 100% unrelated, and it's a clap-back to Google anyway. The problem here is the entire industry of Display ads, not Mozilla trying its best to keep them alive along with every other player in the industry (it's not gonna work, but that's a whole separate thread). Investors (read: fools with more money than sense)... Furthermore, there are a lot of gullible idiots that drank the Kool-Aid and feel like they’re part of the build-up to the next World Wide Web... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect, also this tone isn't very HN-friendly, just in general -- I say as one of the gullible idiots that has hope for the future. Some solutions are incredibly contentious, though, and I don’t really want the headache. For example: I’m sure that, if this blog post ever gets posted on a message board, someone in the peanut gallery will bring up unions as a mechanism, and others will fiercely shoot that idea down. It’s possible that we, as an industry, are completely in over our heads. A) Unions are great, but completely orthogonal to this discussion, and B) AI is a subset of capitalism (or, at worst, a synecdoche) not the whole thing. Hacker News, Lobsters, etc. are full of clueless AI maximalists that cannot see the harms they are inflicting. Sign me up as one of the clueless maximalists -- again, if I responded in kind, my comment would be flagged and removed. In the end, I think this person is a "cringe" writer "with more money than sense" who creates "binary excrement" because they're an "arrogant" "gullible idiot" who is openly more interested in "shame and ridicule" than academic discussion.
hnthrow289570 2y ago
I could deal with the hype cycles better if the industry had more solid foundations on the basic stuff like CRUD apps and websites. We're still pretty lousy at it. It feels like a sinking ship but we all know it's not going anywhere because humanity now depends too much upon getting messages anywhere in the world on the order of seconds. Maybe having a bunch of hype cycles is normal and we're meant to dig through the bullshit for gold. Kind of resembles prompting AI over and over until you get a good response. It would be nice if the industry admitted that instead of trying to pretend every hype cycle is a guaranteed existence-changer. It changes your mindset and mental fortitude if you know you're going to be dealing with bullshit instead of being lied to and finding it out once you've accepted the job. Also, don't forget a trend that was apparently so bullshit that people don't even mention it next to blockchain: VR/AR.
- bbor 2y ago
  https://www.coolest-gadgets.com/vr-headset-statistics https://www.coolest-gadgets.com/vr-headset-statistics The Global Virtual Reality (VR) Headset Market is projected to surpass USD 121.9 billion by 2032, growing from USD 13 billion in 2023
  - hnthrow289570 2y ago
    Which is small compared to Bitcoin + Ethereum's market cap (which will also grow). So if you think blockchain is bullshit, then VR/AR definitely is.
OnorioCatenacci 2y ago
Thing is, ultimately, some of these technologies may yield useful innovations. NFT's are the biggest load of speculative garbage to come down the pike in years but in terms of smart contracts (which may have some use) they're not total garbage. AI is in the "Peak of Inflated Expectations" portion of the hype cycle but that doesn't mean it will never yield anything of value. The Tech Industry isn't really unique in our chasing the latest shiny object behavior. Anyone recall when 3-D TV's were going to be the next big thing? The consumer electronics industry was practically salivating at selling us new TV's every couple of years.
- 23B1 2y ago
  > some of these technologies may yield useful innovations. Why not just focus on the useful innovations, then?
  - OnorioCatenacci 2y ago
    Because it's not often apparent where useful innovations will come from. If we could predict in advance what will be useful and what won't, we would surely save a lot of money and effort but life isn't that easy.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
acureau 2y ago
I don't understand how anyone is shocked by businesses trying to integrate "the next big thing" into their offerings. Objectively, there are new things we can do with the recent advancements in AI. Experimentation is natural, even if those in charge are not intimately familiar with the technology. Some experiments will be useful and some less so. How does seeing "generate image" on WordPress make you fume? Why would they implement the option to disable it? It's a perfectly sound idea. Instead of finding some stock image to use, allow users to generate one without leaving the platform. Regardless of any qualms with the technology itself and its implications, it now exists as a commercial offering. Businesses are going to try and use it to improve user experience and make more money.
- thr0w 2y ago
  > How does seeing "generate image" on WordPress make you fume? HN crowd is increasingly threatened by new technology.
  - etrautmann 2y ago
    That’s possible, but it also seems likely that the HN crowd is used to existing in a space where a tiny fraction of good ideas succeed. Figuring that out requires an appropriately tuned sense of technology and the market, for which it is objectively reasonable to be skeptical of new things, especially when in a high point of the hype cycle. It’s also important to stay optimistic though…
  - meiraleal 2y ago
    > HN crowd is increasingly threatened by new technology. Just because HN became bigger. But hackers are used to this, creating the new technology.
- etrautmann 2y ago
  Presumably there’s a middle ground between arguing for experimenting with new tech and somewhat disingenuously arguing that it’s the core of your business. The manner of delivery and applicability of the tech to a company’s products impact the credibility of the claim that AI is important to a business’s future.
msarrel 2y ago
Go hype! These are exciting times.
indigo0086 2y ago
Article Peppered with furry imagery
- some_furry 2y ago
  Yeah that tends to happen to furry blogs.

94 points by gmemstr 2y ago

rc00 2y ago

Rust and Solidity are interesting omissions from this ranty post, especially given the crypto attachments.

spacecadet 2y ago

Up and to the right! lol

yapyap 2y ago

[flagged]

andriesm 2y ago

The only thing better than to attach your startup tech to either AI or blockchain, is to attach to BOTH simultaneously, like the wave of AI blockchain tokens!

pmarreck 2y ago

Who else is not looking forward to cleaning up AI-written merely-accidentally-working garbage code for the next umpteen years?

ziggyzecat 2y ago
on a subscription basis?
datavirtue 2y ago
Been making bank doing this for decades. I really don't care who or what wrote the code. It's beautiful.
- pmarreck 2y ago
  So you refactor bad code? How do you get these gigs?
  - dartos 2y ago
    Look for places hiring Java, C#, or COBOL enterprise developers
    - pmarreck 2y ago
      That explains why I haven't encountered this, but at least now I know
jarsin 2y ago
My plan is to blame all my bad code on AI even though I don't use it.
- riskable 2y ago
  In reality you say, "AI" but in your head you really mean, "Analog Intelligence" that way you're never lying :thumbsup:
  - marcosdumay 2y ago
    There's a lot of argument about it, but it seems to me that the idea that our brain is digital is the one winning.
thruway516 2y ago
AI will clean up AI’s merely-accidentally-working garbage code
- pmarreck 2y ago
  Nope. AI will not push the envelope in any way. People will still have to do that, because people are the only entities that care about these things, and "care" is not only fundamentally motivating but fundamentally measuring.

high_na_euv 2y ago

Lets be serious Just because your reddit or hn had non tiny amount of posts about blockchain or nft, then it does not mean that there was real and significant push towards those in real world There is huge world outside your twitters and reddits

bdndndndbve 2y ago
They talk about Bitcoin on financial news shows, which lends it a huge amount of credibility. It's like if Jim Cramer has opinions about last night's Powerball numbers.
- high_na_euv 2y ago
  They talk about btc as financial instrument $$$$, not blockchains
- 8338550bff96 2y ago
  If Cramer is your gold standard of credibility, then you're not so credible yourself
  - some_furry 2y ago
    Uh, that's not how I interpreted their comment. At all.
    - 8338550bff96 2y ago
      how'd you interpret it?
a5withtrrs 2y ago
As someone working at a very large bank. I strongly disagree. The bank spun up a new business to experiment with blockchain technology and went hard at it for several years until they recently sidelined those projects... In favour of AI The amount of internal hype across all areas of the business (especially in the tech areas of the business) with regards to AI has been frankly stunning to witness.

martythemaniak 2y ago

A big part of the idiocy in tech is the endless stream of generic, cynical neckbeard takes that are indistinguishable from AI slop.

datavirtue 2y ago
For some reason AI really brings out the neckbeard rage. I don't get it. AI assistants are amazing tools. It's like the rise of the PC industry all over again. So much value to unlock and our ideas barely scratch the surface right now.
- bbor 2y ago
  Some of it's simply a benign failure in pattern recognition -- despite my argument below that AI isn't the same as blockchain, you can certainly see the surface level similarities if you're not familiar with the technologies involved. It's also triggering a lot of people's anti-capitalist sentiments, which I personally relate to in spades. They're just applying metrics that they've been applying for years, and they're backed up in their feelings by legions of peers. Plus, I think we can all agree that unexpectedly-effective AI is fucking terrifying -- Vinge didn't call it a "Singularity" out of admiration, but fearful respect. It's fascinating though, in a way... a lot of HN's rules are about "flaming", and I think this issue might be the first to really bring that out since the end of the distro/OS wars (I don't think Xbox v. Playstation ever made a splash here?). Perhaps there was a bit with Crypto, but IMO it never really took hold here in earnest, either. But AI brings out the vitriol, my god! "AI slop" is just the start -- just yesterday I saw someone on Substack call a random and obviously good faith data blogger a purveyor of "demonic machine filth". That's a new one!
  - dartos 2y ago
    > demonic machine filth People find the dark mechanicum creepy.
- jjk166 2y ago
  It's not a perfect tool for my hyper-specific use case, and getting the most out of it requires a different form of esoteric knowledge than the one I've spent years curating. Clearly it's garbage.

VyseofArcadia 2y ago

> Does the company own any software patents? > This includes purely “defensive” patents, in industries where their competitors abuse intellectual property law to stifle competition. My own company was pretty staunchly opposed to software patents until we got sued by patent trolls. We are now pretty aggressive about patenting things so that doesn't happen again. Software patents were never great, and bad actors have made things even worse.

ziggyzecat 2y ago
the classic tale of the "make it proprietary" trolls. uuh! someone should make it a paper chase all the way to insurance companies!
- slowmovintarget 2y ago
  Now I'm having fond nostalgia for Groklaw and coverage of SCO vs. everyone.
  - ziggyzecat 2y ago
    thank you for your memories.
bloak 2y ago
But you can't use patents to protect yourself against a typical patent troll. A typical patent troll doesn't do anything except sue people so they are unlikely to infringe anybody else's patents.
- AnimalMuppet 2y ago
  You can patent the stuff that is essential to what you do as soon as you come up with it - before the troll can. Then the troll can't sue because they can't get the patent in the first place (or if they do, you can use yours to invalidate theirs).
  - 2y ago

istultus 2y ago

This is a commonplace corollary to Gell-Man Amnesia/Knoll's Law[1] - in truth every single field/category in the universe has varying degrees of stupidity, it's just that you only reacts emotionally to the stupidity in the fields you have a personal attachment to. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#Gell-Mann_amn...

ziggyzecat 2y ago
or the ones currently present, hyped, in trend? wait, I suggest: amplified/augmented attachment via exposure.

Reredjri49 2y ago

[flagged]

gadflyinyoureye 2y ago
You know the term authoritarian cuts both ways across the political spectrum? Not everything is right wing just because it’s authoritarian.

cies 2y ago

So what are the tech hypes that did end up being more than mere idiocy? SaaS? Cloud? Smartphone apps? Social media? Going back further: Internet? Wireless networks everywhere?

some_furry 2y ago
Successful technologies that were hyped up started with acknowledging a problem exists, then working to solve it. The blockchain / big data / Cloud Everything / LLM hype is largely a solution (the thing being hyped up) looking for a problem. I hope that's clear. The problem isn't the hype in and of itself. It's that there's a disproportionate amount of hype for things that aren't actually that valuable. I don't begrudge people for being excited about technology, only for being excited about excitement (and forgetting to actually solve problems for businesses and consumers).
- dartos 2y ago
  I think LLMs have some killer features which solve real problems. Translation (the problem transformers were invented to solve), Document QA, Embeddings for more semantic search, and unstructured data ingestion are all areas where LLMs excel. When you have documentation to reference and keep in context, it’s pretty easy to achieve a low hallucination rate. The hype is around like content creation and AGI, which is a nothingburger.
  - soatok 2y ago
    > The hype is around like content creation and AGI, which is a nothingburger. Right, which is why TFA specifically talks about "Generative AI".
  - apwell23 2y ago
    what is 'document QA' ?
    - marcosdumay 2y ago
      My guess it's answering "how do I do X", where X is on the documentation. Still I don't understand the people that claim the shared LLMs can do that with internal documentation. That's bullshit and easily disproved, you can force it to work for toy problems, but only for toy problems.

Meganet 2y ago

Thats just not a good analysis. Blockchain and NTF are and were stupid. A lot of people knew about this and the hype was more of a news hype because we had nothing else to talk about (until ai came). I have seen so many really good and helpful ai demos/features internally, its impressive. With AI / ML we are getting self driving cars, robots (talking, listing, walking), agents etc. LLMs are not crazy good because they can generate stories, they are crazy good because they are a very very good interface to humans. Facebooks Segment Anything ml model basically solved segmentation problem. Alpha Fold solved protein folding. Nvidias Omniverse with Robots solved the robot motion problem. AI is not a hype, AI delivers left and right every week there is something really cool new. Instead of writing uneducated blog posts or just blindly rant about it, at least try to follow up on AI news, you will be amazed how much it solves. And Until we are seeing ANY slow down or ceiling, until then i do believe that this right now is what the iphone was or the internet just crazier. Its frustrating that people are not even able to understand AI, Blockchain and NFT good enough to be able to separate them. Just because something gets hyped doesn't mean its the same thing as the other thing which got hyped. And no you were not able to talk to a computer system as fast and good as you are able to do that today with OpenAIs voice input. And no you never had a system which was able to answer that many questions in such a high quality.

some_furry 2y ago
Which AI startup do you work for?
- Meganet 2y ago
  [dead]
- Meganet 2y ago
  The GenAI Stuff you don't like/hate helps blind people to navigate the world because generating images also allows to analyse images. There are plenty of other areas which will help a lot of people left and right including you. Cancer research, material research for energy. Cancer for example can be detected in xrays thanks to GenAI stuff. Its a lot easier to get an x-ray machine somewere around the globe but an expert is hard and we do not have enough radiologists anyway.

sebstefan 2y ago

The web was a hype-train, and then a bubble, too. It's not enough that a new technology is adopting the hype cycle, what matters is what's left of it afterwards How many of us got their workflow disrupted by AI? It's been a while since I've googled a "how do I..." type thing, because of how much I appreciate Bing Copilot or Phind Safe to say my life did not change with the arrival of Web3!

betaby 2y ago
> How many of us got their workflow disrupted by AI? Single digit percentage?
- inanutshellus 2y ago
  You're kidding, I assume? Or maybe you misread "workflow" to mean something like "work-life"? For sure more than a single-digit percentage of people have tried a Q&A bot by now. Shoot, Windows just updated to insert Copilot into users' machines, with the icon right next to the Windows button. It can't not continue to grow. It's such an amazingly effective way to get information versus scouring through web pages.
  - soatok 2y ago
    > For sure more than a single-digit percentage of people have tried a Q&A bot by now. Tried is doing a lot of heavy lifting. https://meow.social/@crumbcake/113156927685392932 https://meow.social/@crumbcake/113156927685392932 > Shoot, Windows just updated to insert Copilot into users' machines, with the icon right next to the Windows button. This goes back to my point about consent and opt-in vs opt-out. > It can't not continue to grow. "If we shove this down people's throats enough maybe their gag reflex will adapt." > It's such an amazingly effective way to get information versus scouring through web pages. The only reason I stopped using Google isn't to choose AI instead. It's because the obtrusive "AI Overview" pissed me off.
  - thereddaikon 2y ago
    I hardly use it at all. ChatGPT was interesting at first but it slowly got worse and worse as changes had to be made to it so OpenAI wouldn't get sued. The same is true for all the other ones. LLMs can be great if they are allowed to blatantly violate copyright. But once everyone started circling the wagons and walling off their information they quickly started to lose their value.

hi-v-rocknroll 2y ago

Tech blogger hype has a history of cargo culting nonsense. This is nothing new. I think they killed AR by hyping GGlass as an artifact only for special people, while VR was handed a half-measured fate tempered by gaming (it's still impractical and rears its ugly head every 10 years compared to the potential utility of AR). Centralized blockchain ledgers for immutable data storage is immensely useful to detect silent corruption or malicious data tampering for specialized use-cases (backup & restoration with air-gapped storage processes are required to assure high-confidence data integrity to correct such data problems). GPU, server systems, and network access are so damn cheap and impressive with incremental advances that the killer apps challenges now are sanely management, planning, and cross-cutting concerns like emulation, resource allocation, configuration management, monitoring, security, and effective discovery and implementation of appropriate and benchmarked solution(s). The application of LLMs yet aren't to the point of complete silicon & PCB design, application development, or systems management assuring a level of correctness using iterative feedback, but probably will approach something useful over time. Perhaps in 50 years, all living humans will lack the understanding of what software will have "eaten" in certain areas if engineers allow it and corporations optimize for it.

ergonaught 2y ago

As with a number of other increasingly serious problems that people generally cannot or will not acknowledge as problems. You can’t have reasoned discussions about the problems, people won’t actually engage with the topics, concerns or warnings are simply dismissed by people who won’t think it through even to only second order consequences, and in the meantime the sharks scent blood in the water and the money frenzy is upon us all, directly or indirectly. There aren’t happy solutions to human nature at scale.

clwg 2y ago

The author’s premise brings me to a different conclusion. First, they detail Big Data, then the building of infrastructure to support it. New technology was then developed to harness insights from Big Data, and along the way, blockchain and smart contracts were developed, which are essentially cryptographically verifiable distributed state machines. Both of these innovations have also driven the development of hardware to support those activities. This seems like a solid trajectory. I'm a Trekkie, so having an interactive conversation with a computer still makes me smile, even if it's just a stochastic parrot. I'm also super interested to see what AR/VR and AI can do together. Additionally, I look at the Swedish model for direct democracy and see blockchain and smart contracts as viable technological solutions to make that process more efficient, secure and hopefully increase adoption of that sort of governance. The tech industry's main problem is grifters, and I think they mostly (not always) come from other industries (marketing, finance, crime). Somehow, they have convinced everyone that tech needs them to succeed (with their grifts). To me, the actual underlying technology is mind-blowing, but it’s the grift implementations that are the problem and make everything else look bad.

nullorempty 2y ago
Re democracy: we bank online I am sure we have enough tech to make voting secure
- clwg 2y ago
  It's not just about security; it's about how democracy, in certain forms (i.e. canton type voting, certain diaspora communities, etc.) is implemented[0]. I'm not advocating for any anarchist ideals, and I believe cryptocurrency should be banned if for no other reason than to deal with cybercrime. However, I also recognize legitimate use cases for the underlying technology that are drown out by all these grifts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_democracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_democracy

bbor 2y ago

This is some of the most knee-jerk content I've seen outside of Tumblr in a while. Fun, engaging, and well written, but totally off base IMO. It's a simple fact of life that we have struck an unexpected (by most) breakthrough with LLMs, and begun meaningfully solving the Frame Problem decades -- or centuries -- before anyone (other than Vinge, who literally predicted it to the year 30y ago: https://users.manchester.edu/Facstaff/SSNaragon/Online/100-FYS-F15/Readings/Vinge,%20The%20Coming%20Technological%20Singularity.pdf https://users.manchester.edu/Facstaff/SSNaragon/Online/100-F...) thought we would. We can point out issues with AI all day, such as the ever-relevant impacts of automation on workers in a capitalist society, but this critique is both exceedingly vague and occasionally mistaken. Once upon a time, everyone was all hot and bothered about Big Data If your oldest example of a hype cycle is Big Data, you might not be old enough/reading enough history to comment effectively. Big Data is the same hype cycle as AI -- it's called "Machine Learning", and it's been going since full-bore since ~2017: https://subredditstats.com/r/machinelearning https://subredditstats.com/r/machinelearning To keep my (central!) critique here very short: "AI" isn't the same as blockchain because some people on forums sound similar when talking about it, it's the culmination of decades of research that started in earnest w/ Judea Pearl's 1984 Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems, or even the hubbub around Marvin Minsky's 1969 Perceptrons. It's an academic discipline, not a buzzword, and any professional or serious critique should engage with such work, not just quote-dunk the CEO of Jack-In-The-Box. There is no way to opt out of, or disable, this feature. ...Don't use it? Mozilla Firefox 128.0 released a feature (enabled by default of course) to help advertisers collect data on you. This is just 100% unrelated, and it's a clap-back to Google anyway. The problem here is the entire industry of Display ads, not Mozilla trying its best to keep them alive along with every other player in the industry (it's not gonna work, but that's a whole separate thread). Investors (read: fools with more money than sense)... Furthermore, there are a lot of gullible idiots that drank the Kool-Aid and feel like they’re part of the build-up to the next World Wide Web... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect, also this tone isn't very HN-friendly, just in general -- I say as one of the gullible idiots that has hope for the future. Some solutions are incredibly contentious, though, and I don’t really want the headache. For example: I’m sure that, if this blog post ever gets posted on a message board, someone in the peanut gallery will bring up unions as a mechanism, and others will fiercely shoot that idea down. It’s possible that we, as an industry, are completely in over our heads. A) Unions are great, but completely orthogonal to this discussion, and B) AI is a subset of capitalism (or, at worst, a synecdoche) not the whole thing. Hacker News, Lobsters, etc. are full of clueless AI maximalists that cannot see the harms they are inflicting. Sign me up as one of the clueless maximalists -- again, if I responded in kind, my comment would be flagged and removed. In the end, I think this person is a "cringe" writer "with more money than sense" who creates "binary excrement" because they're an "arrogant" "gullible idiot" who is openly more interested in "shame and ridicule" than academic discussion.

hnthrow289570 2y ago

I could deal with the hype cycles better if the industry had more solid foundations on the basic stuff like CRUD apps and websites. We're still pretty lousy at it. It feels like a sinking ship but we all know it's not going anywhere because humanity now depends too much upon getting messages anywhere in the world on the order of seconds. Maybe having a bunch of hype cycles is normal and we're meant to dig through the bullshit for gold. Kind of resembles prompting AI over and over until you get a good response. It would be nice if the industry admitted that instead of trying to pretend every hype cycle is a guaranteed existence-changer. It changes your mindset and mental fortitude if you know you're going to be dealing with bullshit instead of being lied to and finding it out once you've accepted the job. Also, don't forget a trend that was apparently so bullshit that people don't even mention it next to blockchain: VR/AR.

bbor 2y ago
https://www.coolest-gadgets.com/vr-headset-statistics https://www.coolest-gadgets.com/vr-headset-statistics The Global Virtual Reality (VR) Headset Market is projected to surpass USD 121.9 billion by 2032, growing from USD 13 billion in 2023
- hnthrow289570 2y ago
  Which is small compared to Bitcoin + Ethereum's market cap (which will also grow). So if you think blockchain is bullshit, then VR/AR definitely is.

OnorioCatenacci 2y ago

Thing is, ultimately, some of these technologies may yield useful innovations. NFT's are the biggest load of speculative garbage to come down the pike in years but in terms of smart contracts (which may have some use) they're not total garbage. AI is in the "Peak of Inflated Expectations" portion of the hype cycle but that doesn't mean it will never yield anything of value. The Tech Industry isn't really unique in our chasing the latest shiny object behavior. Anyone recall when 3-D TV's were going to be the next big thing? The consumer electronics industry was practically salivating at selling us new TV's every couple of years.

23B1 2y ago
> some of these technologies may yield useful innovations. Why not just focus on the useful innovations, then?
- OnorioCatenacci 2y ago
  Because it's not often apparent where useful innovations will come from. If we could predict in advance what will be useful and what won't, we would surely save a lot of money and effort but life isn't that easy.
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acureau 2y ago

I don't understand how anyone is shocked by businesses trying to integrate "the next big thing" into their offerings. Objectively, there are new things we can do with the recent advancements in AI. Experimentation is natural, even if those in charge are not intimately familiar with the technology. Some experiments will be useful and some less so. How does seeing "generate image" on WordPress make you fume? Why would they implement the option to disable it? It's a perfectly sound idea. Instead of finding some stock image to use, allow users to generate one without leaving the platform. Regardless of any qualms with the technology itself and its implications, it now exists as a commercial offering. Businesses are going to try and use it to improve user experience and make more money.

thr0w 2y ago
> How does seeing "generate image" on WordPress make you fume? HN crowd is increasingly threatened by new technology.
- etrautmann 2y ago
  That’s possible, but it also seems likely that the HN crowd is used to existing in a space where a tiny fraction of good ideas succeed. Figuring that out requires an appropriately tuned sense of technology and the market, for which it is objectively reasonable to be skeptical of new things, especially when in a high point of the hype cycle. It’s also important to stay optimistic though…
- meiraleal 2y ago
  > HN crowd is increasingly threatened by new technology. Just because HN became bigger. But hackers are used to this, creating the new technology.
etrautmann 2y ago
Presumably there’s a middle ground between arguing for experimenting with new tech and somewhat disingenuously arguing that it’s the core of your business. The manner of delivery and applicability of the tech to a company’s products impact the credibility of the claim that AI is important to a business’s future.

msarrel 2y ago

Go hype! These are exciting times.

indigo0086 2y ago

Article Peppered with furry imagery

some_furry 2y ago
Yeah that tends to happen to furry blogs.