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Comment by davidw | Hacker News Reader

Yes of course there have always been people who clock in and clock out and don't have a ton of passion for what they do. I don't begrudge that, but personally I need some of the curiosity and joy in hacking on stuff. And I enjoy the camaraderie of being around others who feel that way too.

It just feels like "it's a job" is more of the zeitgeist these days.

And yes, I'm also well aware of what came before 'my time' - mainframes and such were definitely an era where the power was more with the large companies. One of the reasons Linux (and *BSD) was so cool is that finally regular people could get their hands on this powerful OS that previously was the exclusive purview of corporations or, at best, universities.

As to cool projects, sure. They're fun, interesting and creative, but perhaps not part of (a very vague, admittedly) "something bigger", like "the open source movement" was back in the day.

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The frontier moves over time. If you stay at any one spot, it will eventually mature and become less fun and interesting. There will be more of the clock-in / clock-out types, and that's perfectly fine -- as you pointed out above, at different stages in life, people may be looking for different things, like stability.

But if you're looking for that spark and excitement again, you need to get back out to the frontier. One frontier that is particularly exciting to me is using AI to speed up the tedious parts of the development process, and to tackle areas where I don't have specialist knowledge. Similarly to how Linux opened up a powerful OS to individuals, AI is enabling individuals to create things that would have previously required large teams.

You're correct about AI seeming to be "where it's at" right now, but I'm really not thrilled with the corporate concentration that seems to be the natural result of requiring massive amounts of computing power.

Perhaps over time it'll get efficient enough to run outside of huge companies; that could be an interesting aspect to keep an eye on.

I don't see how over time we could get to a place where an entity with orders of magnitude less computing power can run AI that is anywhere near as powerful as the huge companies. Maybe for certain narrow applications, maybe even for many such applications, but hard to imagine it happening in a way that un-concentrates power.

Though certain novel uses could lead to new individuals or entities gaining power.

I'd like to be hopeful and would like to hear good arguments for how this could happen - but it seems to me improved technology on the whole leads to increased concentration of power - with exceptions and anomalies but that being the dominant trend.

I am sure the same thing was thought about never getting to a point where every person would have a tiny computer in their pocket that was orders of magnitudes faster than the multi-million dollar computers that took up whole rooms and were only owned by the largest companies.

You mean a tiny computer in your pocket that you can mostly just consume content with and chat with others. Sure there are some neat, useful apps out there, but you can't really learn how technology works on a tablet or phone unless you're allowed to build that specific kind of app. You don't even have a filesystem. 10 year old me in today's world would have not been able to break my phone like I did my old DOS / Win95 PC and actually learn something. Shit I used to spend hours just browsing the filesystem, and the install media to see what I could find and learn and use. That's how I found the Weezer music video, and the pinball game on the Win95 I still CD. There is no equivalent to this with phones.

My comment has nothing to do with that.

It was about how only big companies have the resources to make big computers that take up a whole room that are powerful enough to run smart AI models.

But if tech progress is any indication, in say 50 year or probably less, we will have the power of a modern day datacenter in our pockets and be able to run smart AI models locally without it being a large corp monopoly.

If you take human brains as the limit (a questionable assumption) they do it all for 20 watts (and hardware that makes itself!) The training is often years and can be expensive.

In all seriousness though there’s plenty of room for improvement both in current models and hardware.

(Apologies for the bad form of replying twice…)

> it seems to me improved technology on the whole leads to increased concentration of power

Which is why we are dominated by IBM, AT&T, Kodak and Xerox.

few here recall the "mainframe versus PC" era, as it was.. Basically, there has always been an Oracle

I agree entirely; just because VC focused startups are eager to "rub some AI on" their products doesn't mean that AI itself is boring; it's incredibly cool! Some of the applications are ghastly, but LLMs and diffusion models? Oh my!

Or, you know, if AI is the mainstream hotness or just doesn't float your boat, look for what the iconoclasts are up to and go dive into that, not whatever the VCs are flinging their gold at today.

> I enjoy the camaraderie of being around others who feel that way too.

But... they're still there. They're a little diluted, but I've not yet worked somewhere where I had no like-minded tinkerers amongst my colleagues. I don't think I'd want to, but it just hasn't come up.

> As to cool projects, sure. They're fun, interesting and creative, but perhaps not part of (a very vague, admittedly) "something bigger", like "the open source movement" was back in the day.

But the free software movement dates back to the early 80s, not the 2000s that we're talking about. Open source itself was being seen as a dilution of the principles of free software in the late 90s/early 2000s. More to the point, free and open source software is still very much here - we're absolutely surrounded by it.

> mainframes and such were definitely an era where the power was more with the large companies

It's oscillated. DEC used to be the zippy young upstart snapping at IBM's heels you know. Microsoft didn't start out big and evil; nor did Google if it comes to that. Put not thy faith in shiny new companies for they shall surely betray thee once they devour the opposition... :D

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