Comment by potatolicious | Hacker News Reader

Comment by potatolicious | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I think there's some overlap in the thrust of both pieces but they're pretty distinct topic-wise?

The first piece strikes me as a paean against "enshittification" - the idea that the industry has done good things, but now subsists on a combination of hot air and making existing good things worse. It further makes the specific point that LLMs belong in the "hot air" category and that it shares little with other innovations of the past.

It does touch on what he perceives as overly-friendly press coverage of the above, but I didn't read the piece as focusing on that point.

FWIW, I find Zitron to be an... unreliable commentator on this subject, to put it mildly, but I am not entirely unsympathetic to the point.

The second piece is more specifically focused on the overly-friendly press coverage, and the idea that journalists are either overly credulous, especially to fantastical claims about the tech, or openly corrupted by the parties they are meant to cover.

I feel like I pick up all that stuff but I don't really understand who the audience is for it. It would make more sense to me if these companies were public and taking investment (I mean, Google and Meta are, but they're not "AI plays", and this most recent piece focuses on Anthropic and OpenAI). Then the point of the piece would be, like David Gerard's blockchain pieces, "don't invest in this".

That's kinda my main beef with Ed's writing - it's pretty unfocused. Both pieces you linked demonstrate this - he careens from point to point.

The lack of focus I feel like comes from the fact that his audience is an amalgamation of multiple groups, much of which is the "tech is over, it's all grifters now" cadre, so a lot of this isn't really meant to be a persuasive argument of anything but rather just a dumping ground of grievances.

I alluded to finding him an unreliable narrator of this topic, and this is why. So much of this audience is so fully committed to "this is spicy autocomplete, a totally non-functional grift on par with NFTs" as a position that it compromises any of the other points he's trying to make.

FWIW I do find some things of his sympathetic - particularly around how much structural risk we're taking on every time the VCs decide to line up the hype cannon behind something. That said, I think it's also fair to say that this is my projection of his argument, because his actual arguments are often too muddied to even draw that level of specificity.

[edit] I continue to follow Ed's writing because a) I think there are glimmers or something in there and b) I treat it as a temperature read of a substantial minority of public opinion. The level of disillusionment and rising anger against our industry is concerning.

I'm not a subscriber, and I find Zitron's style to be too rage bait to really absorb it all, but I share his tech skeptic perspective. I don't think he has an exhortation as direct as Gerard's "don't invest in this", but his general "there's something fundamentally grifty about tech" resonates, and I think TFA's basic "the press is recklessly credulous to tech industry claims" premise is more or less on point.

(I looked up the interview [0] to be sure and I wanna say I remembered this perfectly I am the greatest) My anecdata here is I quit listening to Hard Fork (Kevin Roose & Casey Newton's NYT podcast about tech) after Roose was interviewing... the Cruise CEO. I'll put the exchange here:

Kevin Roose: Do you feel a similar sense of responsibility for the people who are currently driving for a living to find them new work or to create new work for them?

Kyle Vogt: I think we have to contribute to it, for sure. You know, I think — and that could take the form of to the extent we’re able providing training programs or alternate jobs for people. But more than that, I think it’s interacting with our government and our regulators and letting them know this is coming, when and how, and giving them some notice so we can plan ahead a little bit.

---

I quit listening because I wanted _any follow up_ to that at all (there are zero followups in the entire interview--they should rename the podcast to "No Followups" or "Spew Literally Anything To Our Listeners"), like, "who in Congress are you talking to", "what are your plans for training programs", "how have you staffed these efforts", but like, they start joking about rolling gyms or some bullshit (the irony of putting a fuckin stationary bike in a self-driving car honestly is too much, it just is too much I can't take it). I wouldn't write a screed like Zitron did. I would simply say the press doesn't treat tech seriously. Can you imagine a political interview where you have color commentary? It would literally be a joke.

I don't know if this is a satisfying answer to your "who is the audience for this" question, but TL;DR: I think it's basically... I wouldn't call them tech skeptics but rather people who think tech is actually hugely important and deserves to be treated with greater seriousness.

[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/12/podcasts/googles-ai-bonan...

Ok so this all makes sense but it is basically the exact message I got off the other Zitron post. Tech skepticism I get! But these posts are like 8,000 words; are people skepticizing tech... recreationally?

The post upthread that suggested this was basically just a criticism of how journalism operates was clearer to me (still a point I think he could have made in half as many words, but at least a distinct point).

The canonical post length at Pivot to AI is 250 words and the canonical video length is 4 minutes, though I go over way often these days.

> are people skepticizing tech... recreationally?

As recreations go, it'd be a socially productive one! But do you seriously not understand that Ed is writing this stuff because he means it?

We may be being a little hard on him; I do think he's sincere (I think a lot of stuff gets audience captured, but I absolutely don't think that's the case here). Maybe the way I would phrase it is to me, Zitron's writing is preaching to the choir. But to someone kind of at the beginning of the "hey this feels... a little rotten" journey I think he's a great entree, and I love linking people there.

I 100% believe they mean it.

Oh this is fair; I haven't deeply read a Zitron article in like... some time. If you're looking for the Matt Levine of tech you'll have to keep looking.

Ed and I basically agree that this shit is shit. People whine about his tone in direct proportion to how many directly useful worked-out numbers he provides. I also agree strongly with his declaration that he will never forgive them for what they've done to the computer. I'm a techie and he's a non-techie, but, y'know, he's not wrong at all.

Yeah maybe I should subscribe. I read Never Forget What They've Done which I don't remember getting linked on HN and is it a little much? Yeah. Do I feel exactly the same? Also yeah. OK I convinced myself to subscribe haha, I did it.

[0]: https://www.wheresyoured.at/never-forget-what-theyve-done/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com