The Continued Trajectory of Idiocy in the Tech Industry
soatok.blog
soatok.blog
> 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.
Crap patents are granted daily.
That's the theory. In practice it tilts the odds in your favor, but is not an absolute safety net.
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!
Single digit percentage?
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.
Tried is doing a lot of heavy lifting. 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.
Yep, this was one of those tries:
Me: "I was billed twice for the same storage unit"
Highly Intelligent Chat Bot: "Let me check on that...you have two storage units so you receive 2 charges each month"
Me: "I was charged two times in the same day for unit #X"
HICB: "Unit #X is charged Y amount on date Z each month"
Me: "I received two charges for amount Y on the same day for unit #X"
HICB: "That's correct, you have two units and get charged Y amount for each one. Please let me know if you have any other questions"
Me: "Is it possible for you to be any less helpful?"
There being negative cases don't mean the prolific amount of positive cases don't tell me the world has shifted.
Seriously I was very skeptical of using ChatGPT, worried it'd give me bad advice but I keep not finding quality content in google searches ("Hey googz, what's the flag in a bash if statement that verifies a file does not exist? --> oh here's a page full of every possible thing bash can do") and i ask ChatGPT and it's just bam, the answer.
It helped me recover a crashed harddrive, verify how `in` and `out` variables work in pl/sql functions ("yes, all `in`s have to come before any `out`s")... it's just so right so concisely that, like it or not, it's here to stay.
Some recent examples:
* "I installed windows and now I can't access my linux partition" * "I want to add an `in` variable to an existing pl/sql function, can it go on the end of the parameter list? (Answer: No, because...)" * "What size soccer ball does AYSO U10 use?" * "what is the name of that python library that handles command line arguments, and could you provide an example that demonstrates required flags?"
nothing earth shaking. not things that're impossible to find, but... instead of reading someone's blog post in which they work as hard as possible to belabor the point so you'll scroll through all 14... this thing just gives you the answer.
There are some reports of people hired to write low quality spam articles that fit this. There isn't much else.
There exist lots of people that claim some small gains, mostly because they use shitty tools that can't do what some tools could do 15 years ago (often the same tools). I'm afraid that's not enough to keep our current LLMs alive.
Yep, a large part is Google. But the most popular IDEs seem to be less capable of providing useful information nowadays too. (Yet, there exist good ones out there, and they haven't been explicitly enshitified, it's the languages and ecosystems that changed.)
Realistically how many people are currently employed "writing low quality spam articles"
That's not reality. That's just reddit crapping on strawmen because a lot of the visible results from AI is 1) Crap creative work and 2) Polluted search results/comment sections
These are red herrings
There's real people doing real productive things with AIs that do boring things right now.
The ability to search for things that are still fuzzy in my mind, ask open-ended questions and get an answer back, or find something when you can't come up with a good keyword
I've never had the google-fu that some other developers have so this was something that often required asking a peer before. Sometimes a forum or some Discord, even.
Now you just feed your garbage question to a large language model that swallowed the entirety of the internet and a few seconds later it's spitting back something useful.
It's the first time I have access to a robot that's on stand-by with surface level knowledge of everything.
I suspect people who don't find this extremely valuable in their day-to-day life are just not catching the moments when they could've used it -- while on the other side of the spectrum the value it removes from comment sections/image search results is impossible to ignore.
Up until LLMs started eating their lunch, a lot. I knew several people who wrote softball slop articles for no name tech blogs. Lots of generic how-tos in basic Java or Python questions, etc.
Now that's all automated and its mostly slop being used by AI to generate more slop.
> There's real people doing real productive things with AIs that do boring things right now.
elaborate.
I can think of at least a couple, but most of their approaches are only "AI" in a marketing sense, like Moderna using data driven, highly automated testing to create vaccine candidates. Absolutely nothing to do with LLMs as they exist in most places.
> Now you just feed your garbage question to a large language model that swallowed the entirety of the internet and a few seconds later it's spitting back something useful.
citation needed. I'm about 4 for 8 in terms of real technical questions and real, correct answers. Feeding Copilot and ChatGPT some questions about CVEs exploited in the wild got me wildly wrong answers until I started doing a lot of prompt work, but by that point I could have just googled the CVEs myself and got an answer I knew was accurate.
Ditto with fixing some MongoDB calls that look correct but didn't work, and took me longer to understand than just trying random shit, or asking on reddit.
Maybe it will get there, eventually, but outside of mass content generation I can't see a reason to trust the results.
My guess is the GP is talking about things like Perplexity. What is indeed ChatGPT, but it's set so that it can point you to useful sites instead of just giving you an answer. (I don't know why so many people think they answer itself will be useful, it can only be good if it was taken verbatim from some site.)
And yeah, those things are useful. But to say they'll disrupt one's workflow is a bit too much.
I did about an hour ago. AI answers run the gamut from boilerplate that's useful that still ends up needing tweaking to utterly making shit up that doesn't exist. I did a copilot search once that referred to an entire framework that it just made the fuck up, and you know it would've been great if it did exist, the framework would've suited my needs perfectly, it was just complicated by the fact that it didn't.
I'm off that train, I hate having my time wasted and until they can guarantee veracity in answers it's just a google search that's even less reliable than google, which is saying something lately.
I've asked it pretty niche questions and I've never seen it make up anything, much less a whole framework
Plus it gives you its sources so I don't see how this could've happened. A whole framework?
I dunno maybe that would help, but it seems like a deeply un-serious product then.
If you're asking it to write a story about a camel in a hat you probably shouldn't choose "precise" mode
Bing Copilot is your old regular ChatGPT applied to searching the web.
* Generating Bing queries based on what you're asking
* Reading the web results
* Giving you an answer based on those (highlighting in the answer where it got the facts from and linking to it latex-style at the end)
It has a Creative/Balanced/Precise slider to inform how close it should stay to the info it just read online
"Copilot" alone is the coding companion that's integrated in your IDE
It does not have that slider
Same, but you’re missing planet-sized elephant in the room here. This use-case has been technically solved for 20 years. What’s happened is that web search was ripe for consumer value extraction (aka enshittification). Have you ever seen a market more saturated with perverse incentives, from ad delivery, content farms, data mining, and of course the very search engine that prints money from it?
Now, if you wanna do an apples-apples comparison, imagine popups, consent forms, hidden influences from advertisers, recommendation engines, arbitrary lock-outs from community guidelines violations, ads while waiting for responses, JS bloat at recipe-website levels, and so on and so forth.
By all means, enjoy ChatGPT or whatever in its naked current form. But make no mistake that this is the honeymoon phase. Potential doesn’t govern the direction of new tech. Incentive does.
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
So while every example may not permeate out of the echo chambers, there are some that are reasonably widespread.
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.
This is the one and only "big real world market" (not financial products, not lower tx costs, not governance issues) that crypto currency solved. Quite ingenious.
Cryptocurrency is also useful for ransomware payments.
> EA’s CEO called generative AI the “very core of our business”
Yeah just little twitter and reddit things like WordPress and EA.
How many orders of magnitude of difference?
Edit: El Salvador not Al Salvador
Just like Facebook =/= HTTP
[1]: https://english.elpais.com/international/2023-09-02/two-year...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#Gell-Mann_amn...
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.
I think its that normally biz leaders manage to seem reasonable (maybe they aren't), so they seem like level headed "we will explore this option" type of people. Often they don't really understand it because they have MBAs not degrees in fields.
Most people who work there would tell you the primary value they have at the company is that they hold the purse strings. Nothing else.
But now, possibly because they took a prompt from some AI, they exuberantly shout about how they "love AI" and you get that bad feeling when you see someone and you know they were taken in by a snake-oil salesman selling a pyramid scheme...
So the facade has dropped and everyone's just like "oh wow, I guess <level-headed company> is run by idiots"...
HN crowd is increasingly threatened by new technology.
Just because HN became bigger. But hackers are used to this, creating the new technology.
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.
Why not just focus on the useful innovations, then?
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.
The Global Virtual Reality (VR) Headset Market is projected to surpass USD 121.9 billion by 2032, growing from USD 13 billion in 2023So if you think blockchain is bullshit, then VR/AR definitely is.
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.
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.
SaaS? Cloud? Smartphone apps? Social media?
Going back further: Internet? Wireless networks everywhere?
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).
If that doesn't turn into something as profitable as Google, that's actually great for all of us but terrible for the investors. I'm actually hoping for this scenario.
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.
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.
But if you properly pre-process the documents and create a RAG type system (which uses embedding to find semantically similar docs before inserting them into LLM context) then it actually works quite well.
It’s good for big organizations with internal wikis, I’ve found.
It also works well for ingesting articles from online publications.
It did so by just reading the hugo documentation without any RAG.
And it was 10x better than the huge documentation in itself.
You won’t find that kind of ease of use with say webgpu+winit for building a small renderer in rust.
Right, which is why TFA specifically talks about "Generative AI".
big data: is just data bigger than fix on one computer, many had this problem before and after the term got popular, many more got sold they have the problem without actually having it
cloud: as a user I love being able to get a new workstation running with just installing a password mgr, not loosing files in fires
LLM: being able to search through my pictures by text
- Smart phones from iPhone and onwards
- CI/CD pipelines
- Containers
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.
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.
Mix that with very aggressive marketing, (with some outright lies thrown in) difficulty finding jobs under the threat of AI, and with the fact that LLMs can and hallucinate and you have a recipe for people not liking it.
They’re far from useless and I think people are reacting more to the marketing than to the capabilities.
You can’t even get that dataset anymore and the people who made the scripts that generated it got arrested.
Same goes for fb using all text data from almost all adults on their platform in Australia and the US. OpenAI seemingly used YouTube data, without permission, to train their sora model. Copilot was trained on all public GitHub repos, regardless of license.
If you don’t think there are ethical concerns there… then I think we have different definitions of “ethics”
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!
People find the dark mechanicum creepy.
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
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.
Mozilla Firefox 128.0 released a feature (enabled by default of course) to help advertisers collect data on you.
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...
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.
Hacker News, Lobsters, etc. are full of clueless AI maximalists that cannot see the harms they are inflicting.
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.
Do you have an example of a tool that uses an LLM as an interface? Seems like that'd be the fastest way to show people this is a superior interface.
We're obviously a long ways away from star-trek style natural interaction with computers, so I'm curious what you're doing that can work today. Aside from straightforward content generation, of course.
Its great for people with mobility issues, since speech to text is so good now.
v0.dev kind of has a hybrid traditional interface mixed with LLM content generation. May not be exactly what you were asking for.
The mouse was controversial on release as well, since most computers weren’t graphical at the time.
Let the LLM backed interfaces cook. I don’t think they’re a replacement for graphical UIs, but that doesn’t mean they won’t be better for some applications.
Braille, for example, can be read by blind people AND non-blind people in dark rooms. Not strictly better than regular text, but far from useless.
your comment seems to based on reading AI clickbait 'news' that claims everything is 'solved' by ai .
I agree with your main point, to those of us on HN there is obviously more substance to the current AI wave than (say) web3.
But I can hardly blame people who aren't actively following tech news from believing that it's more of the same -- many of the VCs and tech media boosters are the same every cycle. If anything, I think it's more of an onus on those of us who do follow closely to sound the alarm on the bullshit. (And there is bullshit this AI wave, too, on top of the obvious substance.)
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.
You are lumping together many different things in this post. For example:
> With AI / ML we are getting self driving cars, robots (talking, listing, walking), agents etc.
The "AI / ML" part of this sentence is telling. I am aware of exactly zero self-driving cars that are powered by LLMs (what the general public almost always means when they say "AI" these days).
Self-driving cars are enabled by physical sensors in combination with various ML algorithms which have been around in some form for literally decades. I'm not an expert in this field, but my understanding is that what's actually happened in the last ~decade which has allowed them to flourish is the development of better _hardware_, that is, hardware that can run these algorithms fast enough, at a large enough scale, and still be small and cool enough to fit into a car.
Ditto to some extent with your other examples, though maybe a general-purpose robot could be made better by interfacing with an LLM.
I realize this may not be your intent, but by writing in this way, you are confusing the layperson into thinking that all of these innovations were enabled by ChatGPT-style "AI," when in fact some of them have nothing to do with that type of tech at all.
I really wish we'd all be more honest, and not conflate transformers/LLMs with other "AI" algorithms. In fact, I think it'd be good if we stopped saying "AI" completely, though I realize this will never happen given that term's stickiness with the public at large.