Author makes good points but suffers from “i am genius and you are an idiot” syndrome which makes it seem mostly the ranting of an asshole vs a coherent article about the state of AI.
I made the following comment about him in a conversation with a coworker: " The guy who authored the article is mad. Certifiably mad. Just spewing around pure unadulterated truth. (LinkedIn link goes here) What does it tell about me (or anybody) who so far hadn't found anything in his writings to disagree about? "
Krazam (search YouTube) is the other example of largely the same. But because it is visual it is a bit more obvious.
It tells they're too excited by the delivery and aren't thinking about the merit of what's being said.
Same mistake people made with all those "tells it as it is" vloggers and pundits.
Which is weird coming from a generation of devs, where actually doing this work yourself was the norm.
As for DS, from what little I've experienced from the field, he sounds right. Most people come in without a mathematically rigorous education, they talk fancy, but what they end up doing is pulling in dependencies from a pre-written library and using those without understanding the theory behind them.
They also ignore the fact that 99% of the value in data science is created by taking good data, understanding the domain, in which case fancy algorithms are unnecessary. And the acquisition of said things needs good data engineering, not data science.
But more often than not, the credit and prestige goes to folks who pull in fancy ML algorithms and run extensive experiments and build massive ML pipelines, feeding in truckloads of tangentially relevant data.
Telling self-righteous... friends, to wind their neck in is far more Australian than OP's behaviour.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_poppy_syndrome
Edit:
To clarify, I have no problem with his style of writing, which is great, but "I am clearly better than most of my competition"? Lord, get a grip.
In most people's minds success should come from a combination of talent and hard work. We think people who work hard and come up with good ideas should become successful. But usually working 'within the system' limits your ability to be succesful. If you save the day at your current job, you might get a 20% raise if you're lucky. If you are mediocre but change jobs often, you will probably beat that.
In software, getting a high paying job usually hinges on your ability to get someone willing to pay you a lot of money.
I'm sure there are people who are getting paid 10x more or less for doing work that is fundamentally the same, just with different presentation.
For example I know a guy who's a mediocre PHP dev, but managed to snag a couple of high paying clients, and got into OE over covid, and brings in a ton of money, despite the fact that somehow he still doesn't seem to be working that hard.
Does he deserve that money? Is he someone we should look up to? I don't wanna say no, but I also don't wanna say yes.
I think that's some sort of platonic ideal that hasn't really been all that true for a long time, though. What brings success is coming up with valuable[0] ideas, and then executing well on them. There are many ideas that are good that are unfortunately not so valuable. And there are many people who work hard but just aren't all that talented or effective or productive, and their work ends up not amounting to much.
> Does [someone who doesn't work that hard but has high income] deserve that money? Is he someone we should look up to? I don't wanna say no, but I also don't wanna say yes.
Maybe we should step back and consider that this is the wrong question. "Looking up to" someone is an emotional thing; IMO we should only look up to people for intangible "virtuous" reasons, not because e.g. they've managed to make a bunch of money. Look up to people because they are honest, have integrity, are kind, and help people.
"This guy makes a lot of money despite not working very hard" should be viewed dispassionately. Evaluate the work itself, and the representation and selling of that work. If it's done with integrity, the product of the work is as promised, and no one is harmed, then it may be worth emulating.
I personally think that the social conditioning we've all gotten that suggests that hard work is good and virtuous is garbage, and is an attitude and message that has acted as a tool of oppressors. I hesitate to repeat the "work smarter, not harder" buzz-phrase, but I think there's a lot of truth there.
[0] I don't even necessarily mean "valuable" in the monetary sense, though that too-often is a big driver.
Sorry but, being Australian doesn't get you a free pass to banter everywhere and still expect to be taken seriously. Let alone spill self-diagnosed superiority in form of text.
I'm not a fan of the "I'll break your neck" theme. He doesn't want people talking about AI but his own business website says he'll talk to you about AI in exchange for money.
Does he want to be Louis CK Live at the Beacon Theater AND a data scientist consultant? I don't think it's possible to be both.
In fact, since your comment is a putdown both of a nationality and of the community, it might be good to quote this from https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html: "Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community."
By the way, this has been a problem in the past: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20657986 (Aug 2019), and we've had to ask you several times not to break HN's guidelines in other ways too. Could you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and recalibrate how you're posting to this site?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38286445 (Nov 2023)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35619557 (April 2023)
I almost laughed out loud when he said he started working as a data scientist in 2019. Five years is not a very long time. And he claims he already had identified the entire field as full of fraud in the first two years of that!
I agree with a lot of the article's points, but the author took a serious credibility hit with me after asserting that two years of from-scratch experience is enough time to evaluate an entire subfield of computer science.
If someone is repeatedly threatening physical violence, as the author of this post is, that also tends to come off as an a-hole to some people even if the threats are not genuine.
I agree the author of this post is saying accurate things, and that will piss people off, too.
So we have two completely separate ways in which someone might think the author is an a-hole. They aren't all trying to hide some truth, like you imply.
The choice to use the writing tool in question makes the author come off like an a-hole.
Really? I think most people will agree that it's a writing style (not that I enjoy it) rather than the author really threatening actual violence.
> even if the threats are not genuine
My point is that using that writing style makes the author come off as an a-hole.
We have always been selling snake oil - its just the inexperienced and those who have never shipped anything of any value to the world that feel that the snake oil is where the buck stops - but those of us who have shipped tons of snake oil know that eventually that oil congeals and becomes an essential substance in the grinding wheels of industry.
Which this wanker (Disclaimer: Australian, can use it if I wanna, since I know a lot about snakes, too..) seems to not have fully understood yet, as there is a great deal of evidence to support the fact that their experience is mostly academic, and hasn't actually resulted in anything being shipped.
Academics seem too often to forget that software is a service industry and in such a context, snakes and oil are very definitely par for the course.
Nobody cares if you implemented the important bits all by yourself - what are your USERS doing with it? Oh, you don't have actual users? Then please STFU and let the snake wranglers get on with it ..
I got the opposite impression of the article that it was mostly about the fact that companies thought they needed to be to theoretical and academic and in fact taking advantage of AI should be looked at very practically. Granted it’s a long article and he makes lots of points, but I felt like most of the part of section 4 was that you don’t need to implement it yourself and gluing libraries together was probably the right tack, and that most companies were ignoring this in the gold rush of “AI good”.
Its getting into the art/performance category of code blogs.
The word you should have used is authoritarianism, which this writer has, alas, in spades.
Your users are more important than your sense of self worth, in this industry.
Nobody ships ego. We ship working software: to users who find it valuable.
I agree that's what's most likely to bring you financial and reputational success, but I also think there are a lot of things people can and do sell that are various incarnations of snake oil, at best.
This perhaps gets a little philosophical, but: is it ethical to sell someone something they don't need, and doesn't actually help them, even if they believe they need it, and over time even believe they've been helped by it?
I think a lot of the applications of "AI" today can fall under that umbrella, given the "right" customer.
It would only be unethical to remove their agency over the decision, in my opinion.
I don't find myself conducting much authoritarianism but admittedly I do keep a pretty tight grip on the movements of my budgies. It's for their own good you see.
Also being 5 years into his career thinking he actually groks how it all works is adorable. I get the impression he has the idea that work is supposed to be a rewarding passion project rather than getting shit done for your boss. Give me all the cushy bullshit AI projects please. I can play with the toys for 6 months and come back with whatever and it will be perfectly acceptable. Either "this is great, super helpful for the company" or "welp, the tech isn't there yet, but at least we tried". That's called riding the gravy train.
which is a weird thing, since I think in fields where most people can be assumed to be smart, there's usually not that much differentiation in cognitive ability.
Just for reference, if we take IQ as a proxy measure for intelligence, an average group of people (say, a high school class, a council meeting), the worst 10% will have an IQ of <80 with the best 10% will have an IQ of >120.
That's the difference of 40 points, and its a common enough scenario for most people to get a feel of what it's like.
In contrast, lets say you have a room of professionals, who have been screened to be in the top 10% of the population (not a huge stretch) as a cutoff. In this scenario, you'd need 100k people in this hypothetical room to get a similarly large IQ gap.
While I think the author might be a sharp guy, and probably studied his field deeper than most, to say there's an insurmountable chasm between him and the rest of his readers might be a bit of a stretch.
But hey, if you want to sell your unique genius as your upscale consulting brand, I guess this is how you market yourself.
Very true. A thread about it here is a hat on a hat.
The very sort of hypemongers and grifters the author complains about often hide unsustainable claims behind complicated language and opaque terminology, with the intent of portraying themselves as experts and making clear-headed criticism seem uneducated or uninformed in comparison.
The author here is making a deliberate choice to use a ranty tone to cut through that sort of bullshit, and in doing so, successfully expressed his frustration with the pervasive level of hype in AI discussions.
I personally would stay far far away from either of these two camps.
For me the writing felt authentic and entertaining. Emotionally charged but rightfully so. It is incredibly disturbing to see people lying with a straight face and getting insane investments.
1. "ludic" means playful[1].
2. The blog's tagline implies this is satire:
> "Wow, if I was the leader of this person's company I would immediately terminate them." [2]
It seems like most of the comment thread failed to pick up on this.
That's understandable. The post's humor is a style which won't make sense if you're not fluent in both English and online culture.
Even if you understand the style, you also might not like it.
This is the only blog that I actively look forward to reading.
I am not fluent in either and I'm in love with his style and substance!
At that point, is it a problem of most of the comment thread, or the way it was written?
I may say something that comes across really snarky to my coworker. Just because I didn't mean it to be snarky does not mean that it won't be interpreted that way.
Also, I have a feeling a lot of the comment thread are fluent in both English and online culture. This doesn't come across as a good-faith argument.
It's like I say something that comes across as snarky, my coworker confronts me about it, and I say "oh don't worry about it, if you came from low-context culture you would understand." It's very demeaning. Not to mention unsympathetic.
Maybe OP's fault for posting it here, then. It's angry cathartic humor, so you're right not everyone will appreciate it.
> This doesn't come across as a good-faith argument.
It was meant to be, but you're also right that it no longer seems to be true:
* the aggressive knee-jerk stuff is getting flagged quickly
* more comments have been posted
> It's very demeaning.
I see your point given the way the thread is evolving. However, the posts I was referring to were implying OP is a schizophrenic[1] or bipolar.
However, since we are talking about people being rational, then the points and links above that show this is satirical should lead people to make their own decision.
Hopefully, this doesn’t become a place for people to draw lines in the sand.
I think the difference is knowing your audience. You probably have a decent handle on which of your coworkers will appreciate and understand your snark, and which won't. You'll change your tone and what you say accordingly. Sometimes you'll get it wrong, because you're human, and we all get things wrong sometimes. In those instances you might briefly apologize for creating confusion or causing offense, and you both quickly move on with your day.
But if you're writing a blog post, you don't really know your audience. If you have a regular audience, that audience probably exists because they "get you" and like what you write and how you write it. So in a way you do know your audience: by definition, they've self-selected to be people who get your writing.
But then you decide to submit one of your blog posts to a community of varied individuals like HN. Some people on HN are like your existing audience, and will like it. Some people on HN are not going to get it, or not going to like it.
That's... just life. So I think "is it a problem [with] the way it was written?" is the wrong question. There really can't be a problem with how it was written. Certainly there are (mostly subjective) standards for how well something is written, regardless of the way it's written, but you can't really say the author was wrong to write in the combative, extreme style that they've chosen as their entire online shtick. Because it's meaningless to be "right" or "wrong" about that; those terms aren't defined for that. It's only what someone may like or dislike, and the author should (rightly, IMO) not be particularly concerned about that in this context.
I personally didn't enjoy the article that much; I don't find joking about violence to be funny, and it even makes me a little uncomfortable. I read through the whole thing because I found the topic interesting and his opinions on it worth reading. But that's just my own personal subjective take, and it's both fine for me to feel that way, and fine for others to enjoy the humor more than I did.
Oh, please. That's like saying that only native speakers with a university degree can understand a 6 year old's fart jokes.
The humor in this article is juvenile shock-jocking. It starts from the trashy clickbait headline, and is never elevated past that. There's no particular sophistication needed to understand it. It's just not particularly funny or insightful; it's just taking some rote complaints about AI and the hype cycle, and threatening to kill people in various graphic ways. Hilarious.
But he's still nowhere near as unhinged as the rabid AI bullshittery shitting up the airwaves for the past year
Not a lot of room for nuance when the subject matter is this polluted. Typical HN convention of preferring nuance to outright dismissal is bad at filtering BS