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Comment by LumeEcho | Hacker News Reader

97 pointsLumeEcho41 comments

Dreamforce is definitely not an "AI event". I know that Salesforce themselves are billing it as an AI event, but nobody in attendance considers it an AI event, including Salesforce themselves. They announced some new platform called "Agentforce", which seems to be a rebranding of some existing AI features with some new vaporware thrown in for good measure. [1]

The audience for Dreamforce is mostly non-technical (managers, sales, etc), and they are mostly there to drink a little Salesforce kool-aid, meet up with other industry contacts, and enjoy a free trip to SF on the company tab. I went one year with a couple of coworkers, and we spent 80% of our time at a local restaurant that Salesforce had rented out and turned into an open bar.

Check out the keynote to get a sense of what Dreamforce events are actually like [2]. Yes, that is Jim Cramer sitting in the front row and high fiving Mark Benioff. Definitely ripe for mockery, and I imagine Mulaney's set went over well with a lot of the attendees too, who are probably getting pretty tired of Salesforce's dog and pony show after a couple days at Dreamforce, and are looking for some release.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/salesforce/comments/1fkhl9v/i_have_...

[2] https://www.salesforce.com/plus/experience/dreamforce_2024/s...

"It's funny but it doesn't apply to me." - most of the people in tech

That's true of a lot of standup comic jokes that rely on generalizations. Because they're generalizations.

Tech is pretty diverse these days, so that isn’t hard to achieve. If they lean on big corporate tech, though, I think that can provide a lot of relatable laughs. But really, that’s already true without a roasting comedian (like with Trump, the memes write themselves).

To be fair, not _just_ in tech. :)

Apply in what way? That John Mulaney could write a joke about it? He has literally dedicated his life to that skill. Of course he can.

AI has repeatedly experienced the same fate: there's some interesting progress, it gets hyped all out of proportion, and finally reality kicks in and some sort of backlash hits hard.

Most of this repeating trope could have probably been avoided if the field had not been given the name "artificial intelligence".

The issue isn't AI. It is that we went from a mentality of "How can $NEWTECH improve the lives of millions and make earth an utopia?" to "How can I use $NEWTECH to sell people a thing they don't need, lock them in and become meta in the market so I can please the shareholders?".

And there is a whole caste of people in the latter camp who all pat each others backs and believe they are the absolute elite, with all kind of self-lies why what they do is actually good.

Of course capitalism always had people like these, but what feels new is how they celebrate themselves as saviors while being anything but. And the worst thing is that this often isn't some mask, they truly believe that.

Capitalism gives them all the excuses to take character traits that in any good functioning society would mark them as social outcasts and pretend they are strengths.

The robber barons of the gilded age had the same beliefs in their innate superiority, and thought they were the ones pushing humanity forward, in spite of the "stupid masses". All the while paying private militia to shoot at striking workers.

So no, sadly this is not new. I'd even say things have gotten somewhat better.

I'm not sure this is new; it's easy to forget (there's a success bias in what people end up remembering; people remember the iPhone, but not, like, Windows for Pen Computing), but the tech industry has been trying to fob all manner of bullshit off on the general public for decades. Most of the exhibits at CES fall into that category. I think maybe what _is_ new is the _scale_ of the efforts; we start to see this with blockchain stuff about a decade ago, where really quite significant amounts were spent by major players before quietly giving up, then a step up with 'metaverses' (where amounts spent get into the tens of billions), and now LLMs.

Actually, maybe the real inflection point was 3D TVs, about 15 years ago; there was quite a big push and many industry participants damaged themselves quite badly on it. Amazon Alexa-type things are another possible example.

It's actually genius though. The cynical will focus on the emptiness of the hype, when in reality it is making more than enough progress to be a great detriment to society.

All of AI's successes get re-branded as not-AI. Quadcopters were AI when I was in school a few decades ago. Image recognition/classification was AI. Recommendation algorithms were AI. Voice recognition was AI. Smart speakers were AI.

I fully expect generative AI to get rebranded as something else once it becomes useful someday. AI is just a catch-all term for math that looks like magic.

I have an Addams Family pinball machine. There's a flipper in the middle of the playfield that automatically kicks the ball if the ball passes through a certain lane.

That too is AI, according to the machine's manual.

Next concept: "artificial dickheads"? :)

Source article & discussion (51 points, 4 days ago, 44 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41602877

Reminds me of George Carlin when he was a regular in Vegas and was lucky enough to get tickets to his show during CES - he just railed on it the attendants etc. Not sure if there are any recordings, but felt a little special catching a show of his geared toward us.

Is there any recording of this around? It sounds hilarious

I looked on Salesforce's website for the talk, but couldn't find it (they seem to list most, if not all, other talks) [1]. Sounds a bit like what Ricky Gervais did to the unfortunate Golden Globes attendees - roasted them mercilessly.

[1] https://www.salesforce.com/plus/experience/dreamforce_2024

This site simply rewords the original SF Standard article with zero additional news or insight.

There's two Futurism articles on the front page right now. They're both submitted by the same person (a green name), both of them are rewritings of other articles, both of them are ragebait articles against AI (the other article headline failed to mention California; this headline failed to mention Salesforce), both of them are upvoted very highly.

Of course I'm biased, but I think this is pretty awful. It's just people here upvoting poorly-titled ragebait.

(The other one was about the California X Hollywood bill.)

Yeah i'm fairly fed up with typically thoughtless or low-info anti-AI rhetoric. I'm disabled and in our community AI solves big problems at large scale and it's doing so vastly more efficiently than 5 years ago

I understand the anxiety people possess, for the record. Just wish things weren't so reactionary and emotional. Wish people took more time to educate themselves but I also don't know what it's like being non-technical reading about AI

The video seems hard to come by.

[dupe] spam futurism submission?

Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41602877

I never understood what's the point of stand-up comedians (and never heard a single actually funny joke from these folks), but isn't that the whole point why people who find this nonsense amusing invite them? For them to insult you, and you laugh and pretend that it was very funny and you are having a great time? That's literally what stand-up comedians are paid to do at these events (again, I never understood why anybody would pay for that, but that's literally what constitutes a stand-up comedian performance). So what's the news here?

My wife and I saw him the next night where he told many of the same jokes.

We both, and an entire theater full of people had an amazing time, laughed all night.

If you haven't found a single laugh from the collective works of all the amazing stand-up comedians we have had, I don't really know what to say.

What about "who's on first", that's funny right?

Uncharitably, I think this article headline is just ragebait.

It made me feel "an AI event (yuck) hired a comedian (implying they wanted something non-insulting). The comedian roasted them (lol, the comedian did that instead? The AI event deserved it! I hope they feel bad about themselves)". I think that was the intended effect of the headline, which as you mentioned doesn't really make sense, which is why I call it ragebait.

No, that is not what stand-up comedians do. You’re dismissing a whole profession with surface understanding, like a computer illiterate octogenarian from the 90’s saying their programmer grandson “plays with computers”.

A stand-up comedian is someone who tells jokes at a live audience while standing up (hence the name). A small number of these comedians are insult comics, whose whole schtick is making fun of others. I personally don’t like that brand of comedy, but I’m not going to accuse people who do of pretending to have fun.

John Mulaney is not an insult comic. Neither is Ricky Gervais. Which is why them roasting the audience they were hired to entertain is news.

No, that's exactly what they do. That's Ricky Gervais' entire career. And it's not even slightly funny - none of it is.

> That's Ricky Gervais' entire career.

Ricky Gervais has had a very varied career, so I politely suggest that you don't know what you're talking about.

I have unfortunately seen plenty and that is still my assessment. I am not obliged to like your heroes.

I don't understand why you’re so irate. No one is forcing you to laugh. Different people find different things funny but that does not change their definitions. Stand-up comedy and insult comedy are well-defined terms.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stand-up_comedy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insult_comedy

The majority of stand-up comics are not insult comics.

>I don't understand why you’re so irate.

I'm just casually speaking my mind. You are here to debooonk people who don't have the same taste as you.

>Stand-up comedy and insult comedy are well-defined terms.

Cool, you've defined yourself to be right. But the vast majority of stand-up comedy is still centered around insults. And I find none of it to be funny.

If you find that to be casual, I invite you to reexamine if anything is bothering you and clouding your judgement. You are hurling negativity and ascribing wrong intentions at strangers on the internet unprovoked. That is not healthy.

Whatever’s bothering you, I hope you are able to resolve it quickly and well. Have a peaceful day.

>invite you to reexamine

>bothering you

>clouding your judgement

>hurling

>ascribing

>not healthy

>bothering you

>resolve it

This is just a thinly veiled list of ad hominems. All because I don't like stand-up comedy and said as much, lol. And I still don't.

When Ricky Gervais isn't roasting people in the audience or cohosting his podcast he's roasting people who aren't present instead. Ricky Gervais not making fun of somebody is very rare.

Well now I'm very curious. What sort of things do you find funny? What sort of entertainment and diversion do you enjoy? Do you engage in any forms of escapism, like videogames or fiction novels?

That’s what he’s paid to do, yeah. This keeps popping up but the truth is most people enjoy this stuff and can easily handle some humour that is non threatening like this.

Tech has forked into three parts. The og hackers, the vc adjacent I can change the world and am very rational, and the leetcoders.

I think the people who talk publicly about Tech, but not the people who work in tech, and still you need to add the Business Analysts of tech.

or “it’s just my 9-5”

is salesforce tech? what is MLM for javascript boot camps then?

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