The Continued Trajectory of Idiocy in the Tech Industry

> Does the company own any software patents?

> 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.

The web was a hype-train, and then a bubble, too. It's not enough that a new technology is adopting the hype cycle, what matters is what's left of it afterwards

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!

Lets be serious

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

This is a commonplace corollary to Gell-Man Amnesia/Knoll's Law[1] - in truth every single field/category in the universe has varying degrees of stupidity, it's just that you only reacts emotionally to the stupidity in the fields you have a personal attachment to.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#Gell-Mann_amn...

I don't understand how anyone is shocked by businesses trying to integrate "the next big thing" into their offerings. Objectively, there are new things we can do with the recent advancements in AI. Experimentation is natural, even if those in charge are not intimately familiar with the technology. Some experiments will be useful and some less so.

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.

The only thing better than to attach your startup tech to either AI or blockchain, is to attach to BOTH simultaneously, like the wave of AI blockchain tokens!

Thing is, ultimately, some of these technologies may yield useful innovations.

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.

I could deal with the hype cycles better if the industry had more solid foundations on the basic stuff like CRUD apps and websites. We're still pretty lousy at it.

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.

As with a number of other increasingly serious problems that people generally cannot or will not acknowledge as problems.

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.

Tech blogger hype has a history of cargo culting nonsense. This is nothing new. I think they killed AR by hyping GGlass as an artifact only for special people, while VR was handed a half-measured fate tempered by gaming (it's still impractical and rears its ugly head every 10 years compared to the potential utility of AR).

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.

So what are the tech hypes that did end up being more than mere idiocy?

SaaS? Cloud? Smartphone apps? Social media?

Going back further: Internet? Wireless networks everywhere?

The author’s premise brings me to a different conclusion. First, they detail Big Data, then the building of infrastructure to support it. New technology was then developed to harness insights from Big Data, and along the way, blockchain and smart contracts were developed, which are essentially cryptographically verifiable distributed state machines. Both of these innovations have also driven the development of hardware to support those activities. This seems like a solid trajectory.

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.

Rust and Solidity are interesting omissions from this ranty post, especially given the crypto attachments.

Article Peppered with furry imagery

A big part of the idiocy in tech is the endless stream of generic, cynical neckbeard takes that are indistinguishable from AI slop.

Go hype! These are exciting times.

Who else is not looking forward to cleaning up AI-written merely-accidentally-working garbage code for the next umpteen years?

Up and to the right! lol

This is some of the most knee-jerk content I've seen outside of Tumblr in a while. Fun, engaging, and well written, but totally off base IMO. It's a simple fact of life that we have struck an unexpected (by most) breakthrough with LLMs, and begun meaningfully solving the Frame Problem decades -- or centuries -- before anyone (other than Vinge, who literally predicted it to the year 30y ago: https://users.manchester.edu/Facstaff/SSNaragon/Online/100-F...) thought we would.

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

If your oldest example of a hype cycle is Big Data, you might not be old enough/reading enough history to comment effectively. Big Data is the same hype cycle as AI -- it's called "Machine Learning", and it's been going since full-bore since ~2017: https://subredditstats.com/r/machinelearning

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.

...Don't use it?

  Mozilla Firefox 128.0 released a feature (enabled by default of course) to help advertisers collect data on you.

This is just 100% unrelated, and it's a clap-back to Google anyway. The problem here is the entire industry of Display ads, not Mozilla trying its best to keep them alive along with every other player in the industry (it's not gonna work, but that's a whole separate thread).

  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...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect, also this tone isn't very HN-friendly, just in general -- I say as one of the gullible idiots that has hope for the future.

  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. 

A) Unions are great, but completely orthogonal to this discussion, and B) AI is a subset of capitalism (or, at worst, a synecdoche) not the whole thing.

  Hacker News, Lobsters, etc. are full of clueless AI maximalists that cannot see the harms they are inflicting.

Sign me up as one of the clueless maximalists -- again, if I responded in kind, my comment would be flagged and removed. In the end, I think this person is a "cringe" writer "with more money than sense" who creates "binary excrement" because they're an "arrogant" "gullible idiot" who is openly more interested in "shame and ridicule" than academic discussion.

Thats just not a good analysis.

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.