7 ms·

Have I reached the Douglas Adams Inflection point?

108 points by edent 4y ago

duckhelmet 4y ago
Most of the tech infrastructure is held together with twine and chewing gum. One great solar storm could knock it out. A.I bla-bla .. blockchain bla-bla .. cloud bla-bla-bla
wikitopian 4y ago
If anything, it's the middle aged who refuse to believe that technology and music can just sort of stop progressing, while the young are downloading old music and shrugging about all the the tech hype surrounding corporate stock market bubbles.
- jpswade 4y ago
  > downloading old music What?
  - wikitopian 4y ago
    https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/01/old-music-killing-new-music/621339/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/01/old-music-...
    - dmonitor 4y ago
      I think this is just a symptom of the fact that there will always be more "old music" than "new music" The stagnant pop music industry probably doesn't help, though.
      - wikitopian 4y ago
        But why is the pop music industry stagnant, though? There are fewer producers, executives, and financial/logistical obstacles to creatively expressing ourselves with music than ever. Has everything been expressed? Are we as a people becoming less inspired? Is this part of an inevitable process with any medium of expression? If so, has our collective muse moved somewhere other than music? Will technological progress be found somewhere other than digital hardware?
weeksie 4y ago
The conspicuously missing tech in the rundown he gave is ML, which actually seems to be meeting up to a lot of the hype and I think will be pretty revolutionary, though not as revolutionary as a lot of the enthusiasts believe. Even if ML models hit an unexpected scaling problem, they're still very very useful. Extremely disruptive, too. Then again, it could be ages before we figure out how to put them to the best use.
- edent 4y ago
  Do feel free to write your own blog post about ML. But, if you want my take on it, there's a lot of hype and not much substance there. There's a good article at https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/did-googleai-just-snooker-one-of https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/did-googleai-just-snooker-...
  - weeksie 4y ago
    I've read a few of Gary Marcus' posts and I like him. My position is much more that the capabilities of current models are good enough for a lot uses. I certainly don't think language models are "real intelligence" or that we're anywhere near achieving that, just that excellent search and mashup engines (current language models) are proving to be extremely useful.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - vintermann 4y ago
    A guy who can look at stable diffusion and audio LM and go bah, It's not all that great and it's certainly not AI... has definitively passed the inflection point. I'm on team "What a time to be alive".
    - shanusmagnus 4y ago
      Agreed. AI over the last few years is so far ahead of what I thought would be possible it's dizzying. Progress is so often not in the place, or delivered in the manner, that you're expecting. Maybe the one human constant?
benj111 4y ago
In the spirit of The Meaning of Liff, I think the Douglas Adams inflection point should be christened something else. I suggest Barton Turn.
makach 4y ago
I am still excited about new technology (45+) Douglas Adams inflection point is not real. It's the result of an author having fun with his audience very much in the same way horologists make fun of their followers.
- jhbadger 4y ago
  I'm 52 and while I'm excited by some new technologies (I think AI art like DALL-E and Stable Diffusion are fascinating), I find I'm less and less excited by new gadgets, even though when I was younger I was an "early adopter" who liked to buy these things even in their first versions that often didn't work that well.
  - mattkrause 4y ago
    My interest seems to depend on why the device doesn't work well. - The problem is intrinsically hard --> fun regardless - The problem is hard but we're pretending it isn't --> maddening - The problem isn't that hard (anymore) but the code/gizmo was rushed out or is pointlessly convoluted --> enraging.
    - mrandish 4y ago
      This is exactly how I look at new tech too. Makes me crazy when something new could work but doesn't for stupid reasons.
- mordechai9000 4y ago
  > horologists make fun of their followers Is this a reference to something in the article? I've never heard of horologists having followers, let alone being smug enough to mock them. I'm sure the best can make their craft sound very interesting, their are probably some YouTube rabbit holes there...
  - makach 4y ago
    I am terribly sorry! English is not my first language, I meant astrologer not horologist. Considering its real meaning, I have to admit it is as funny as it should be-
Lendal 4y ago
I really don't understand why Alexa hasn't gotten any better, or why FSD is still in beta after so many years of promises from Elon.
- fullshark 4y ago
  I was thinking almost every B2C tech product has gotten worse or stagnated the last 5 years. Even if the underlying technology may have improved (e.g. perhaps YouTube/FB content is hosted more efficiently now) the end product for the user has basically not improved or gotten worse.
- randcraw 4y ago
  I think it's largely because speech recognition operates on only one sentence at a time. If you need to clarify a term said earlier or provide an explanatory phrase describing an earlier one, it can't connect the second utterance to the first. No context is retained. That's a surprisingly big limitation in terms of human conversation. Until NLP can create a short-term memory model to retain info on prior utterances, Alexa's comprehension will be limited to self-contained single phrases -- spells and incantations.
  - jimbokun 4y ago
    Which is strange because that's exactly what very large language models like GPT-3 are good at. Keeping the context and generating plausible next sentences, paragraphs, etc. Wonder what's blocking that from being applied to systems like Alexa.
    - groby_b 4y ago
      Unpredictability. You (Amazon) don't want your precious little bot say random things that land you in the press. And oh, GPT-3 will. Point two is that models that can be goaded to a specific place. So you'll need to account for that too, or... oh look, press. Point 3 is that they're trained on the Internet at large, and you don't want that in your house :)
kranke155 4y ago
Nope. Blockchain is amazing. NFTs have already changed the art world. Augmented Reality with large FOV and black light blocking pixels will be amazing. AÍ is progressing (see image generation). He’s just ignoring things because he doesn’t care anymore.
- Sebguer 4y ago
  How have NFTs changed the art world?
  - wins32767 4y ago
    Funneled a bunch of money into artist's pockets.
    - AlexandrB 4y ago
      Which artists? Certainly not the deviantart artists who had their art stolen and sold as NFTs or the artists who drew the Bored Apes one of whom described her compensation as "definitely not ideal"[1]. Most small artists who I've heard talk on podcasts about NFTs say it's a pretty raw deal because minting costs money with no guarantee of returns. I think the largest beneficiaries of NFTs are speculators and businesses. The art and artists seem to largely be a means to an end in this space. [1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3vn5b/bored-ape-yacht-club-artist-says-compensation-definitely-not-ideal https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3vn5b/bored-ape-yacht-club-...
      - kranke155 4y ago
        You can trust folks at HN to find whatever edge case is necessary to disprove the usefulness of anything crypto.
        Sebguer 4y ago
        Can you find an edge case showing the usefulness? Because that was my root question and "putting money into the pockets of artists" is not changing the world. It's a new revenue stream, and one that isn't particularly well-distributed.
coldtea 4y ago
Well, I for one, don't find most things invented between my 15-35 exciting and revolutionary either. And didn't find thme as such, even when I was that age... Some things just suck. And the products of some eras, wher marketeers and hype-men take the lead, suck more than others...
severak_cz 4y ago
Some of these rubbish technology is just "human worker, but cheaper/mechanized one" use case: - self-driving cars are just chauffeurs for ppl without money for real chauffeur - same with Alexa as virtual secretary
- jimbokun 4y ago
  Isn't that technology in a nutshell? Doing tasks that used to require human labor in an automated fashion.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
travisgriggs 4y ago
What I grow tired of is the increasing complexity. There was a period early in my career where “do more with less” was a key contributor to decisions in tech. But it almost feels like complexity exists for economics sake to allow more people to participate (i.e earn money) in it.
- daniel-cussen 4y ago
  Yeah more people to participate that are not you and me.
- dsr_ 4y ago
  I spend an awful lot of time and energy investigating new complexities in order to have good arguments why we should not use them. Economically, I think this approach has been very successful. Psychologically, it's rather wearying to repeatedly answer questions from non-technical folks with variants on "that solves a problem we don't have" or "that would cost much more than what we do right now".
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    > Psychologically, it's rather wearying to repeatedly answer questions from non-technical folks with variants on "that solves a problem we don't have" or "that would cost much more than what we do right now". Even worse is when there's a technical person with more pull than you who's built an identity around being "an X professional", where X is some overhyped-and-unimpressive-for-general-use thing. You end up feeling like fucking Cassandra: able to perfectly predict the future, but everyone who matters ignores you.
  - uoaei 4y ago
    I think the commenter above was talking about complexity in the backend ("serverless" architectures, all the data brokerage siphons, leading to 10s to 100s of requests per click at times) as much as the frontend (new noisy notifications, plethora of "tools" that don't add much value).
    - 4y ago
throw7 4y ago
It may be said in another way: when you're young you can more easily overlook the tradeoffs because you don't really know what you're missing. Things that used to work fine to you suddenly became an order of magnitude worse e.g. credit card chip transactions are slow, changing digital tv stations is an exercise in aggravation...
drewzero1 4y ago
I think this hit the nail on the head, honestly. I've been bored of hype for years now, but there are so many developments in tech that are worth getting excited about. Processors, GPUs, storage, and networking are faster, more powerful, more efficient, and cheaper than I ever could have imagined growing up. The rumors of the internet's death have been greatly exaggerated; I still see interesting personal websites and projects online every day. I've got power in my pocket I never could have dreamed of, and when companies close doors to users there are still people working hard to open windows.
tartoran 4y ago
> I don't really get what's so gloomy or un-interesting about the tech It is probably the hype that’s the least favorable part that eventually tires us, all the noise… Undoubtedly, technology keeps on improving across the spectrum incrementally or in larger spurts. After a certain age though (mid 40s) I fail to be excited at every new announcement, I guess I started to care about other things… The other day I downloaded an app that scans a lego pile and comes up ‘creations’ out of those parts. I decided to play with my 4 year old. A bad pattern fooled me into paying for it as I was in a rush and pressed the wront button, though no actual credit card is attached to my iOS identity. Regardless of dark patterns, I eventually went on with the free version which crashed a few times when I came to the realization that I don’t frigging need this, my kid and I don’t need to tie an app to our creative play, we could do much better without. Back in the day Id go along with this type of thing but Im less and less inclined to and instead lean on classical technology like pen and paper for note taking and so on. Im excited about technology about the technology on the horizon line but I try to live my life without tying too much into it unnecessarily.
hateful 4y ago
The article's list of technologies, at first glance, seems like it has examples from different technologies. But they are all really the latest pieces of the same line of technology: Personal Computing/Internet. The author (and I'm assuming a lot of people on HN, myself included) came up when the Internet and Personal Computing was growing. The next technology that people are excited about probably isn't the latest in Personal Computing/Internet, it's something else altogether. I'm in the same bubble you guys are, so I'm not sure what that is. Maybe it's Energy (lots of Solid Hydrogen articles and/or Clean Energy). Maybe it's something else altogether...
- georgeecollins 4y ago
  Personal Computing / Internet is really just the latest piece of a technology called electricity.
  - cduzz 4y ago
    Actually it's lithograph and electricity. Without lithography electricity is just a compact steam engine/gas lamp.
    - hateful 4y ago
      yes, we've just moved the fire very far away. "And if you were alive around the year 1900, you’d probably equate modern tech with electricity, much the way we today equate modern tech with computers, smart phones and the internet. Edison and Tesla were their Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. The idea of powering transportation with a fiery engine dated back to the earliest locomotives almost 100 years earlier, which would seem about as modern to a person in 1900 as black-and-white silent films seem to us today. By 1900, you weren’t supposed to have to deal with how the energy sausage is really made anymore—the burning fire happened in some remote generator now, allowing consumers to only have to interact with the silent, clean, convenient magical butler—electricity." https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/06/how-tesla-will-change-your-life.html https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/06/how-tesla-will-change-your-li...
    - perilunar 4y ago
thom 4y ago
I thought 5G was dumb until I downloaded Witcher III onto my SteamDeck through my 5G iPhone on holiday. Frivolous, but not uncool.
joshe 4y ago
I think for all the tech he's bored of, he's reading cynical media accounts instead experiencing them himself. And this is how you age into old man shouts at cloud. Why his boring stuff is actually cool: Block chain is cool, I agree that we haven't figured out what to do with it. In the papers you read about NFTs and using too much energy. But if you listen to interviews with Vitalik Buterin instead you can realize that there are smart people trying to figure out what to do with this cool new thing. (I hold no crypto btw). I remember the first VR too. They've fixed a lot of the problems. I've had amazing artistic experiences just sitting in a little tiny apartment in Hong Kong. Beat Saber is fun, and different from other video games. Flight simulator is much better with it. I don't get the Meta/Zuckerberg media push, but if you avoid taking journalists seriously then it is a cool new thing. Also I'm more excited about AR than VR, will love to have the world annotated. Self driving cars are amazing. After about 15 minutes using a Tesla on the Highway, you realize you don't have to monitor it. You get to relax and be a passenger. It works pretty well in towns too, but you have to monitor it. Again don't listen to journalists and it seems like a miracle. I don't like voice assistants either, but it's cool that they kinda work. Five year old kids can play songs they like. I don't understand 5G in phones either. But! It turns out that it's a great way to get internet service in your house. Now you have a competitor to your awful cable company. Even if you never use it, your price for high speed internet will go down. When sonic fiber optic came to my neighborhood in SF, I couldn't get it. But my cable internet bill came down $25 per month and they upgraded the speed. Anyway stop reading dumb cynical journalists, experience things for yourself and you will age gracefully.
- standyro 4y ago
  I can attest firsthand from having worked alongside journalists that almost all have never daily driven a Tesla and are incentivized by their bosses to write contrarian articles ~ which leads to a whole lede about how journalists are underpaid and addicted to the Twittersphere's warped Brooklynish view of the world...
- StrictDabbler 4y ago
  Self-driving cars will save tens of thousands of lives a year and hundreds of thousands of expensive fender-benders, whether due to sleepiness, inattention, or drunk driving. The algorithms don't have to be perfect to stop a sleepy driver from slamming into a minivan. That's one of the coolest things that's happened in a long time. Being "pretty well served by public transport" and uninterested in that improvement is self-absorbed. Going on about how it's useless in a public forum? Yes. That's the inflection point and Adams pointed it out because it's narcissistic and sad. If you can't empathize enough to care about all the people self-driving will help, who aren't you, then you've lost something.
giantrobot 4y ago
The last paragraph is a much better descriptor of the article's premise than the opening paragraph. It's rarely the technology itself that's tiring but the hype around it. I'd also add it's people's odd obsession with tying their egos to that hype around technology. Far too often in the tech press there's supposedly independent articles that are just warmed over press releases. So you don't just get hype about technology X but the breathless hyperbole or marketing copy. That's bad enough but then people get tribalistic about that marketing copy. They repeat the "this will change everything" mantras and inject that into any discussion of technology X, or even unrelated discussions of technology Y. It's tiring and frustrating. When it was magazine articles you could put it down and the marketing copy went away. Now it's every other person in a thread bleating out lines from press releases, often not even realizing they're doing so.
jccalhoun 4y ago
I'm rapidly nearing 50 and I might have been a crypto bro if I was in my 20s. However, I still think VR is never going to be a thing. I have randomly predicted that self-driving cars will be for sale by 2035 and I stick by that I use Alexa for timers and my alarm clock and that's about it. I never use google or siri's voice stuff. 5G? I don't have a 5G capable device so I don't know if it really is better or not but the commercials were clearly hype just like every new wifi version.
- bnjms 4y ago
  VR will be a thing at some level if only to have a portable multi monitor setup on the road. I need at least one monitor additional to my laptop to do my job and I can’t easily fly with a decent sized monitor.
ouid 4y ago
The main problem with technology in the past (~2) decades, aka modern technology, is that it has been virtually all developed under the business model of advertising. I don't care how much of your income comes from advertising, you should be alarmed that so much of the world runs on the ability to efficiently and effectively manipulate people for money. Advertising, and especially the technological improvements to advertising, are a threat. If you are of reasonable intelligence, trying to ignore this threat, or write it off as funding "a lot of good things", will cause cognitive dissonance and you will find yourself feeling "like a crotchety old man" in the face of new technology, even if you are not honest with yourself as to why. I think Doug was reasonably self-aware, and would probably write, today, about how his wisdom about technophobia did not age well.
- 6510 4y ago
  Well put. I would add that successfully targeting groups of people forces technology to serve that group. There as many groups to target as categorically excluded. The target audience of technology is distorted all over the landscape with as much fine detail as there are targeting formulas. Now that we are getting to the era of maximized add revenue there is no more need for social engagement on facebook or for search results on google. Things are changing into pure manipulation now. It is like radio first gave people new songs to sing but then they forgot all of their own songs. Every village and every porch had its own songs. The winning implementation of technology seems to depend much more on how much noise it makes vs how sensible it is. With each upgrade we can move further away from the sensible. If a husky can run 40 miles, if we have fine batteries and fine electric motors, why should we not do our commute with hybrid carts partially pulled by dogs? We have quite reasonable small gen sets, pedal vehicles, at times there is sunlight and there is wind to use? There are so many possible combinations of those 6, how do we tell they are not viable with Musk holding the megaphone? With the complexity of combining those it would take quite a bit of time and effort to perfect. The TV was the ultimate opportunity to bring 1000 channels of education to the masses. We could have done reasonable tests and examination over the phone long ago. But if you can extract money from the TV audience and have people pay rent for phone lines - why bother? We could have spend those hundreds million movie budgets on nice courses which would have given us a huge spectrum of employability with much higher wages AND a much more sophisticated voter. I don't expect the manipulation industry to stop any time soon. With the AI generated imaging it is more likely to reach an ultimate form where those who desire it can directly write desires into people.
stagger87 4y ago
> Open Source has comprehensively won. Won what? By what metric?
ncmncm 4y ago
Hydrogen will be important, just not necessarily for personal vehicles. But it still could be, if battery cost bottoms out. A hydrogen/fuel cell car weighs much less than a battery car, or even an ICE car. Making H2 at home may end up more practical than charging your battery at home, particularly if your car is away from home when power is free. Facebook was an obvious yawn even in 2005.

108 points by edent 4y ago

Most of the tech infrastructure is held together with twine and chewing gum. One great solar storm could knock it out. A.I bla-bla .. blockchain bla-bla .. cloud bla-bla-bla

wikitopian 4y ago

If anything, it's the middle aged who refuse to believe that technology and music can just sort of stop progressing, while the young are downloading old music and shrugging about all the the tech hype surrounding corporate stock market bubbles.

jpswade 4y ago
> downloading old music What?
- wikitopian 4y ago
  https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/01/old-music-killing-new-music/621339/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/01/old-music-...
  - dmonitor 4y ago
    I think this is just a symptom of the fact that there will always be more "old music" than "new music" The stagnant pop music industry probably doesn't help, though.
    - wikitopian 4y ago
      But why is the pop music industry stagnant, though? There are fewer producers, executives, and financial/logistical obstacles to creatively expressing ourselves with music than ever. Has everything been expressed? Are we as a people becoming less inspired? Is this part of an inevitable process with any medium of expression? If so, has our collective muse moved somewhere other than music? Will technological progress be found somewhere other than digital hardware?

weeksie 4y ago

The conspicuously missing tech in the rundown he gave is ML, which actually seems to be meeting up to a lot of the hype and I think will be pretty revolutionary, though not as revolutionary as a lot of the enthusiasts believe. Even if ML models hit an unexpected scaling problem, they're still very very useful. Extremely disruptive, too. Then again, it could be ages before we figure out how to put them to the best use.

edent 4y ago
Do feel free to write your own blog post about ML. But, if you want my take on it, there's a lot of hype and not much substance there. There's a good article at https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/did-googleai-just-snooker-one-of https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/did-googleai-just-snooker-...
- weeksie 4y ago
  I've read a few of Gary Marcus' posts and I like him. My position is much more that the capabilities of current models are good enough for a lot uses. I certainly don't think language models are "real intelligence" or that we're anywhere near achieving that, just that excellent search and mashup engines (current language models) are proving to be extremely useful.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- vintermann 4y ago
  A guy who can look at stable diffusion and audio LM and go bah, It's not all that great and it's certainly not AI... has definitively passed the inflection point. I'm on team "What a time to be alive".
  - shanusmagnus 4y ago
    Agreed. AI over the last few years is so far ahead of what I thought would be possible it's dizzying. Progress is so often not in the place, or delivered in the manner, that you're expecting. Maybe the one human constant?

benj111 4y ago

In the spirit of The Meaning of Liff, I think the Douglas Adams inflection point should be christened something else. I suggest Barton Turn.

makach 4y ago

I am still excited about new technology (45+) Douglas Adams inflection point is not real. It's the result of an author having fun with his audience very much in the same way horologists make fun of their followers.

jhbadger 4y ago
I'm 52 and while I'm excited by some new technologies (I think AI art like DALL-E and Stable Diffusion are fascinating), I find I'm less and less excited by new gadgets, even though when I was younger I was an "early adopter" who liked to buy these things even in their first versions that often didn't work that well.
- mattkrause 4y ago
  My interest seems to depend on why the device doesn't work well. - The problem is intrinsically hard --> fun regardless - The problem is hard but we're pretending it isn't --> maddening - The problem isn't that hard (anymore) but the code/gizmo was rushed out or is pointlessly convoluted --> enraging.
  - mrandish 4y ago
    This is exactly how I look at new tech too. Makes me crazy when something new could work but doesn't for stupid reasons.
mordechai9000 4y ago
> horologists make fun of their followers Is this a reference to something in the article? I've never heard of horologists having followers, let alone being smug enough to mock them. I'm sure the best can make their craft sound very interesting, their are probably some YouTube rabbit holes there...
- makach 4y ago
  I am terribly sorry! English is not my first language, I meant astrologer not horologist. Considering its real meaning, I have to admit it is as funny as it should be-

Lendal 4y ago

I really don't understand why Alexa hasn't gotten any better, or why FSD is still in beta after so many years of promises from Elon.

fullshark 4y ago
I was thinking almost every B2C tech product has gotten worse or stagnated the last 5 years. Even if the underlying technology may have improved (e.g. perhaps YouTube/FB content is hosted more efficiently now) the end product for the user has basically not improved or gotten worse.
randcraw 4y ago
I think it's largely because speech recognition operates on only one sentence at a time. If you need to clarify a term said earlier or provide an explanatory phrase describing an earlier one, it can't connect the second utterance to the first. No context is retained. That's a surprisingly big limitation in terms of human conversation. Until NLP can create a short-term memory model to retain info on prior utterances, Alexa's comprehension will be limited to self-contained single phrases -- spells and incantations.
- jimbokun 4y ago
  Which is strange because that's exactly what very large language models like GPT-3 are good at. Keeping the context and generating plausible next sentences, paragraphs, etc. Wonder what's blocking that from being applied to systems like Alexa.
  - groby_b 4y ago
    Unpredictability. You (Amazon) don't want your precious little bot say random things that land you in the press. And oh, GPT-3 will. Point two is that models that can be goaded to a specific place. So you'll need to account for that too, or... oh look, press. Point 3 is that they're trained on the Internet at large, and you don't want that in your house :)

kranke155 4y ago

Nope. Blockchain is amazing. NFTs have already changed the art world. Augmented Reality with large FOV and black light blocking pixels will be amazing. AÍ is progressing (see image generation). He’s just ignoring things because he doesn’t care anymore.

Sebguer 4y ago
How have NFTs changed the art world?
- wins32767 4y ago
  Funneled a bunch of money into artist's pockets.
  - AlexandrB 4y ago
    Which artists? Certainly not the deviantart artists who had their art stolen and sold as NFTs or the artists who drew the Bored Apes one of whom described her compensation as "definitely not ideal"[1]. Most small artists who I've heard talk on podcasts about NFTs say it's a pretty raw deal because minting costs money with no guarantee of returns. I think the largest beneficiaries of NFTs are speculators and businesses. The art and artists seem to largely be a means to an end in this space. [1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3vn5b/bored-ape-yacht-club-artist-says-compensation-definitely-not-ideal https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3vn5b/bored-ape-yacht-club-...
    - kranke155 4y ago
      You can trust folks at HN to find whatever edge case is necessary to disprove the usefulness of anything crypto.
      - Sebguer 4y ago
        Can you find an edge case showing the usefulness? Because that was my root question and "putting money into the pockets of artists" is not changing the world. It's a new revenue stream, and one that isn't particularly well-distributed.

coldtea 4y ago

Well, I for one, don't find most things invented between my 15-35 exciting and revolutionary either. And didn't find thme as such, even when I was that age... Some things just suck. And the products of some eras, wher marketeers and hype-men take the lead, suck more than others...

severak_cz 4y ago

Some of these rubbish technology is just "human worker, but cheaper/mechanized one" use case: - self-driving cars are just chauffeurs for ppl without money for real chauffeur - same with Alexa as virtual secretary

jimbokun 4y ago
Isn't that technology in a nutshell? Doing tasks that used to require human labor in an automated fashion.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

travisgriggs 4y ago

What I grow tired of is the increasing complexity. There was a period early in my career where “do more with less” was a key contributor to decisions in tech. But it almost feels like complexity exists for economics sake to allow more people to participate (i.e earn money) in it.

daniel-cussen 4y ago
Yeah more people to participate that are not you and me.
dsr_ 4y ago
I spend an awful lot of time and energy investigating new complexities in order to have good arguments why we should not use them. Economically, I think this approach has been very successful. Psychologically, it's rather wearying to repeatedly answer questions from non-technical folks with variants on "that solves a problem we don't have" or "that would cost much more than what we do right now".
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  > Psychologically, it's rather wearying to repeatedly answer questions from non-technical folks with variants on "that solves a problem we don't have" or "that would cost much more than what we do right now". Even worse is when there's a technical person with more pull than you who's built an identity around being "an X professional", where X is some overhyped-and-unimpressive-for-general-use thing. You end up feeling like fucking Cassandra: able to perfectly predict the future, but everyone who matters ignores you.
- uoaei 4y ago
  I think the commenter above was talking about complexity in the backend ("serverless" architectures, all the data brokerage siphons, leading to 10s to 100s of requests per click at times) as much as the frontend (new noisy notifications, plethora of "tools" that don't add much value).
  - 4y ago

throw7 4y ago

It may be said in another way: when you're young you can more easily overlook the tradeoffs because you don't really know what you're missing. Things that used to work fine to you suddenly became an order of magnitude worse e.g. credit card chip transactions are slow, changing digital tv stations is an exercise in aggravation...

drewzero1 4y ago

I think this hit the nail on the head, honestly. I've been bored of hype for years now, but there are so many developments in tech that are worth getting excited about. Processors, GPUs, storage, and networking are faster, more powerful, more efficient, and cheaper than I ever could have imagined growing up. The rumors of the internet's death have been greatly exaggerated; I still see interesting personal websites and projects online every day. I've got power in my pocket I never could have dreamed of, and when companies close doors to users there are still people working hard to open windows.

tartoran 4y ago

> I don't really get what's so gloomy or un-interesting about the tech It is probably the hype that’s the least favorable part that eventually tires us, all the noise… Undoubtedly, technology keeps on improving across the spectrum incrementally or in larger spurts. After a certain age though (mid 40s) I fail to be excited at every new announcement, I guess I started to care about other things… The other day I downloaded an app that scans a lego pile and comes up ‘creations’ out of those parts. I decided to play with my 4 year old. A bad pattern fooled me into paying for it as I was in a rush and pressed the wront button, though no actual credit card is attached to my iOS identity. Regardless of dark patterns, I eventually went on with the free version which crashed a few times when I came to the realization that I don’t frigging need this, my kid and I don’t need to tie an app to our creative play, we could do much better without. Back in the day Id go along with this type of thing but Im less and less inclined to and instead lean on classical technology like pen and paper for note taking and so on. Im excited about technology about the technology on the horizon line but I try to live my life without tying too much into it unnecessarily.

hateful 4y ago

The article's list of technologies, at first glance, seems like it has examples from different technologies. But they are all really the latest pieces of the same line of technology: Personal Computing/Internet. The author (and I'm assuming a lot of people on HN, myself included) came up when the Internet and Personal Computing was growing. The next technology that people are excited about probably isn't the latest in Personal Computing/Internet, it's something else altogether. I'm in the same bubble you guys are, so I'm not sure what that is. Maybe it's Energy (lots of Solid Hydrogen articles and/or Clean Energy). Maybe it's something else altogether...

georgeecollins 4y ago
Personal Computing / Internet is really just the latest piece of a technology called electricity.
- cduzz 4y ago
  Actually it's lithograph and electricity. Without lithography electricity is just a compact steam engine/gas lamp.
  - hateful 4y ago
    yes, we've just moved the fire very far away. "And if you were alive around the year 1900, you’d probably equate modern tech with electricity, much the way we today equate modern tech with computers, smart phones and the internet. Edison and Tesla were their Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. The idea of powering transportation with a fiery engine dated back to the earliest locomotives almost 100 years earlier, which would seem about as modern to a person in 1900 as black-and-white silent films seem to us today. By 1900, you weren’t supposed to have to deal with how the energy sausage is really made anymore—the burning fire happened in some remote generator now, allowing consumers to only have to interact with the silent, clean, convenient magical butler—electricity." https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/06/how-tesla-will-change-your-life.html https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/06/how-tesla-will-change-your-li...
  - perilunar 4y ago

thom 4y ago

I thought 5G was dumb until I downloaded Witcher III onto my SteamDeck through my 5G iPhone on holiday. Frivolous, but not uncool.

joshe 4y ago

I think for all the tech he's bored of, he's reading cynical media accounts instead experiencing them himself. And this is how you age into old man shouts at cloud. Why his boring stuff is actually cool: Block chain is cool, I agree that we haven't figured out what to do with it. In the papers you read about NFTs and using too much energy. But if you listen to interviews with Vitalik Buterin instead you can realize that there are smart people trying to figure out what to do with this cool new thing. (I hold no crypto btw). I remember the first VR too. They've fixed a lot of the problems. I've had amazing artistic experiences just sitting in a little tiny apartment in Hong Kong. Beat Saber is fun, and different from other video games. Flight simulator is much better with it. I don't get the Meta/Zuckerberg media push, but if you avoid taking journalists seriously then it is a cool new thing. Also I'm more excited about AR than VR, will love to have the world annotated. Self driving cars are amazing. After about 15 minutes using a Tesla on the Highway, you realize you don't have to monitor it. You get to relax and be a passenger. It works pretty well in towns too, but you have to monitor it. Again don't listen to journalists and it seems like a miracle. I don't like voice assistants either, but it's cool that they kinda work. Five year old kids can play songs they like. I don't understand 5G in phones either. But! It turns out that it's a great way to get internet service in your house. Now you have a competitor to your awful cable company. Even if you never use it, your price for high speed internet will go down. When sonic fiber optic came to my neighborhood in SF, I couldn't get it. But my cable internet bill came down $25 per month and they upgraded the speed. Anyway stop reading dumb cynical journalists, experience things for yourself and you will age gracefully.

standyro 4y ago
I can attest firsthand from having worked alongside journalists that almost all have never daily driven a Tesla and are incentivized by their bosses to write contrarian articles ~ which leads to a whole lede about how journalists are underpaid and addicted to the Twittersphere's warped Brooklynish view of the world...
StrictDabbler 4y ago
Self-driving cars will save tens of thousands of lives a year and hundreds of thousands of expensive fender-benders, whether due to sleepiness, inattention, or drunk driving. The algorithms don't have to be perfect to stop a sleepy driver from slamming into a minivan. That's one of the coolest things that's happened in a long time. Being "pretty well served by public transport" and uninterested in that improvement is self-absorbed. Going on about how it's useless in a public forum? Yes. That's the inflection point and Adams pointed it out because it's narcissistic and sad. If you can't empathize enough to care about all the people self-driving will help, who aren't you, then you've lost something.

giantrobot 4y ago

The last paragraph is a much better descriptor of the article's premise than the opening paragraph. It's rarely the technology itself that's tiring but the hype around it. I'd also add it's people's odd obsession with tying their egos to that hype around technology. Far too often in the tech press there's supposedly independent articles that are just warmed over press releases. So you don't just get hype about technology X but the breathless hyperbole or marketing copy. That's bad enough but then people get tribalistic about that marketing copy. They repeat the "this will change everything" mantras and inject that into any discussion of technology X, or even unrelated discussions of technology Y. It's tiring and frustrating. When it was magazine articles you could put it down and the marketing copy went away. Now it's every other person in a thread bleating out lines from press releases, often not even realizing they're doing so.

jccalhoun 4y ago

I'm rapidly nearing 50 and I might have been a crypto bro if I was in my 20s. However, I still think VR is never going to be a thing. I have randomly predicted that self-driving cars will be for sale by 2035 and I stick by that I use Alexa for timers and my alarm clock and that's about it. I never use google or siri's voice stuff. 5G? I don't have a 5G capable device so I don't know if it really is better or not but the commercials were clearly hype just like every new wifi version.

bnjms 4y ago
VR will be a thing at some level if only to have a portable multi monitor setup on the road. I need at least one monitor additional to my laptop to do my job and I can’t easily fly with a decent sized monitor.

ouid 4y ago

The main problem with technology in the past (~2) decades, aka modern technology, is that it has been virtually all developed under the business model of advertising. I don't care how much of your income comes from advertising, you should be alarmed that so much of the world runs on the ability to efficiently and effectively manipulate people for money. Advertising, and especially the technological improvements to advertising, are a threat. If you are of reasonable intelligence, trying to ignore this threat, or write it off as funding "a lot of good things", will cause cognitive dissonance and you will find yourself feeling "like a crotchety old man" in the face of new technology, even if you are not honest with yourself as to why. I think Doug was reasonably self-aware, and would probably write, today, about how his wisdom about technophobia did not age well.

6510 4y ago
Well put. I would add that successfully targeting groups of people forces technology to serve that group. There as many groups to target as categorically excluded. The target audience of technology is distorted all over the landscape with as much fine detail as there are targeting formulas. Now that we are getting to the era of maximized add revenue there is no more need for social engagement on facebook or for search results on google. Things are changing into pure manipulation now. It is like radio first gave people new songs to sing but then they forgot all of their own songs. Every village and every porch had its own songs. The winning implementation of technology seems to depend much more on how much noise it makes vs how sensible it is. With each upgrade we can move further away from the sensible. If a husky can run 40 miles, if we have fine batteries and fine electric motors, why should we not do our commute with hybrid carts partially pulled by dogs? We have quite reasonable small gen sets, pedal vehicles, at times there is sunlight and there is wind to use? There are so many possible combinations of those 6, how do we tell they are not viable with Musk holding the megaphone? With the complexity of combining those it would take quite a bit of time and effort to perfect. The TV was the ultimate opportunity to bring 1000 channels of education to the masses. We could have done reasonable tests and examination over the phone long ago. But if you can extract money from the TV audience and have people pay rent for phone lines - why bother? We could have spend those hundreds million movie budgets on nice courses which would have given us a huge spectrum of employability with much higher wages AND a much more sophisticated voter. I don't expect the manipulation industry to stop any time soon. With the AI generated imaging it is more likely to reach an ultimate form where those who desire it can directly write desires into people.

stagger87 4y ago

> Open Source has comprehensively won. Won what? By what metric?

ncmncm 4y ago

Hydrogen will be important, just not necessarily for personal vehicles. But it still could be, if battery cost bottoms out. A hydrogen/fuel cell car weighs much less than a battery car, or even an ICE car. Making H2 at home may end up more practical than charging your battery at home, particularly if your car is away from home when power is free. Facebook was an obvious yawn even in 2005.