17 ms·

Tech companies are irrational pop cultures

228 points by pietroppeter 4y ago

magwa101 4y ago
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BSerhere 4y ago
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madsbuch 4y ago
It's a shame that this has negative connotations. There is a case that this is essential. It seems like we are overcoming an AI winter, using the same technologies that was deemed infeasible 20 years ago. When I did competitive programming 20 years ago. I would somewhat jokingly say that I would want to write and AI to solve all the problems. Our mentor laughed it of clearly not considering it even feasible – today ChatGPT would like outperform a highschool competitive programming competition. We probably needed to look away from that generations presumptions in order to leap frog on some of these technologies.
- yrgulation 4y ago
  “ today ChatGPT would like outperform a highschool competitive programming competition.” Google did it first. You input a search string, find results on first or second attempt and then copy and paste the code.
  - ben_w 4y ago
    Not even a close comparison. At best, Googling StackOverflow gets me one function, but only if I know the right keywords and it is short. ChatGPT, I can (and have!) given it example data and said "make a python script to parse this", and it not only gives me code, not only does it work, but when I ask it to extend this to do more or differently, the changes also work coherently with the previous results. For example: https://github.com/BenWheatley/Studies-of-AI/blob/main/coding-assistant/daily-plan-parser-conversation.md https://github.com/BenWheatley/Studies-of-AI/blob/main/codin...
  - qu4z-2 4y ago
    Your highschool must have had pretty terrible programmers...
    - yrgulation 4y ago
      [dead]
- ibizaman 4y ago
  A contrary anectdotal exemple. We use MongoDB where I work and the only justification is it was the new fad at the time. Now it bites us because we use it as a relational DB. PostgreSQL would’ve been much more suitable in our case but it wasn’t in vogue.
  - Traubenfuchs 4y ago
    Is there any regret in technology selection more widespread and common than having picked MongoDB during its bizarre new hotness phase? That phase where SQL database administrators where crying, thinking they'd lose their jobs tomorrow and many people claimed SQL was now absolutely deprecated.
    - hot_gril 4y ago
      This was probably the worst. Fads in business logic code or even APIs don't have anywhere near the lasting impact of a fad in screwing up the least easily replaceable part of your system, the DB.
    - edgyquant 4y ago
      In my experience the sql guys were laughing because they knew mongo was a fad and not an actual replacement.
    - CSMastermind 4y ago
      In the last 20 or so years I can't think of one. I've migrated 4 different companies off of Mongo to Postgres and it's a huge project each time.
      - hot_gril 4y ago
        Probably nearly a full code rewrite, right? My job the past 4 years has essentially been to clean up from bad DB decisions.
    - CoolGuySteve 4y ago
      I think using language-provided async calls everywhere will be the next mistake. Instead of callback hell, you get callback hell along with weird async race conditions and a contagion of async functions.
- rpdillon 4y ago
  I don't think the notion is that we should be relying entirely on cached results from prior generations. Rather, we need to understand what was tried and what worked and what didn't, and why. With this knowledge, we can see when innovation has invalidated prior assumptions, and we can try again.
  - madsbuch 4y ago
    Yep, as nobody argues we should completely forget previous generations. The question is where to set the needle. The author definitely thinks we do not dwell enough on the past and should spend more time studying it.
- k__ 4y ago
  I know it's a hype right now, but I didn't get good results with any AI, be it text or image generation. It all looked impressive the first few days, but the novelty wore off quite quickly.
  - poszlem 4y ago
    You are looking at a Nokia 3210 generation of AI.The most primitive version of what is to come. So the fact that the novelty has worn off is not really a good indicator of how much this will transform our everyday lives. Wait for the iPhone generation of AI, always in your pocket, interacting with you multiple times a day, changing how you consume news, how you communicate with the outside world, your friends and family.
    - Existenceblinks 4y ago
      Here we go again "it's early day", "it's like how the internet was born"
      - poszlem 4y ago
        Here we go again. "640K ought to be enough for anybody". "The horse is here to stay but the automobile is only a novelty—a fad."
  - ajmurmann 4y ago
    Have you tried midjourney for image generation? Especially for photography style images, I've gotten some really cool results that I go back to occasionally
- dgreensp 4y ago
  An essay about academia (versus software engineering in industry) would probably make slightly different points. Academics definitely know their history. Also, when an actual disruptive new technology is first invented, jumping on it and trying to do something with it is both trendy and arguably rational, but this is a relatively rare occurrence.
- ad404b8a372f2b9 4y ago
  The entirety of AI innovation is driven by hardware improvements. Almost all AI research is done at the edge of our compute capabilities, and most of the models which produce results today existed in some form 20 years ago. We didn't leap-frog our predecessors presumptions, we built exactly what many envisioned but were unable to put to fruition with the computers of their time.
  - madsbuch 4y ago
    The point is that we retried something that was previously deemed infeasible. Had you been too much aware of the history, you might not have done that.
- marcosdumay 4y ago
  It was deemed infeasible because it was infeasible. It took 2 generations time for computers to improve enough that it became feasible. And also a huge unexpected discovery about 20 years ago, that you can pre-train a neural network and cost your costs by an order of magnitude.
blitzar 4y ago
> The symptoms of pop culture: A “disdain for history”. Pop cultures believe history doesn’t have anything to teach them. This almost completely falls to pieces in the framing ... how does one explain the pop culture of 80s nostalgia that is prevalent in a lot of media? An 80's casio watch is, in some circles, the pinacle of timepiece fashion. Of course there are times where pop culture is a rejection of the prior art, but also there are times when current pop culture icons show deference to the past and their influences.
- pif 4y ago
  Calling 40 years ago “history” is actually “disdain for history”. History is not what you can find at an older cousin's place. History is what someone had to make an effort to save for you, and you cannot experience it any more.
  - edgyquant 4y ago
    When I was in 8th grade in 2007 our history book ended with a chapter on 9/11. History is the past and even history forums tend to say anything more than a generation ago is history.
  - blitzar 4y ago
    Here is a perfectly preserved sony walkman from 1987 - maximum effort and all. https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O315300/walkman-personal-radio-cassette-sony-corporation/ https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O315300/walkman-personal-...
  - 3-cheese-sundae 4y ago
    There is a lot that occurred 40 years ago that can no longer be experienced, or even known by anyone today. Wouldn't refusing to call it history be disdain for history?
  - dimitrios1 4y ago
    History is simply what we chose to remember and how we remember it. There's no minimum length it needs to be in the past. A "historical moment" can happen in the present.
poszlem 4y ago
<<A “disdain for history”>> A common problem in contemporary culture is a disregard for history, which can be seen not only in startup companies and the technology industry, but throughout society as a whole. During times of significant change, it is common for people to believe that they are much more intelligent and advanced than previous generations, who they may view as ignorant or backward. As the consequences of the revolution inevitably become clear, when the revolution turns on its children, people often begin to appreciate the positive aspects of the past and recognize that revolutions are usually not the solution you want (for the exact same reason why you usually don't want to rewrite a huge software project). Let us hope that the current period of revolution is coming to an end.
- valand 4y ago
  Sometimes people disregard history in a very obvious way. One time there is a person who wants a system rewritten, because of some perceived complexity. The original builders who built the system from the ground up is still actively maintaining it, but there is no attempt to understand whether the perceived complexity is incidental or essential, which in fact most of them are the latter. Some people just want things to fit their world. But, on the bright side, there are people who just don't know history, but they would be happy to learn. There's a hopeful number of those people!
- pif 4y ago
  > Let us hope that the current period of revolution is coming to an end. Let us hope that the current need of revolution is coming to an end. FTFY
fullshark 4y ago
I agree with some of what he is saying, but don't really get the "pop culture" framing. Isn't pop culture just popular cultural artifacts? I'm under the impression they are mostly looked down upon for class reasons more so than any of the intrinsic problems stated.
- bluetomcat 4y ago
  "Pop culture" is a post-WW2 US phenomenon that creates a shared societal reality through movies, TV shows, household items and brands, etc. As of late, it has infected the whole world through social media "virality". Something new appears, then thousands of outlets, youtubers and "tech" journalists are repeating it and most of society starts talking about it without any historic or technical background whatsoever. It's an overly-expressive culture based on hype and reactivity.
  - fullshark 4y ago
    Not sure you are the author but I don't really think that's what pop culture is considered colloquially. And you're basically just describing any cultural ideas that can be considered "viral." I guess a sufficiently large number of people accepting that viral idea makes it popular but pop culture to me is just music/movies/books etc that are popular. Basically this piece is just saying "the dominant (read: popular) culture in tech companies is bad" and they all have basically slight variations on this bad culture.
    - shapefrog 4y ago
      Its even more micro, the current on trend tiktok dance from the last 15 minutes that everyone is doing is what everyone is doing. Lemmings as a construct perhaps. Naive social media obsessed teens perhaps.
    - bluetomcat 4y ago
      I am describing the transmission mechanisms of pop culture and what it's rooted in. It's inherently linked to consumerism, advertising, mass media and fashion. The currently popular music/movies/books are just a manifestation of that. Important scientific, political or philosophical ideas can also go "viral" among intellectual circles, but you wouldn't hear about them in an entertainment TV show or in an advertisement.
4k3aa4 4y ago
I think it's easy to mistake the concept of fads within technology with the application of arguably necessary abstractions. Most of what is new and faddish is just another abstraction around some (probably, relatively) archaic system. The abstraction is the new thing, not the technology or the language that it's written in.
lucaw 4y ago
Yes, tech companies are building an image of pop cultures, but they are not. For example, layoffs are never "mimicking" what other companies are doing. Pop culture people may think it is, but business people -- who tech CEOs really are -- always tries to make the right decisions.
- Zigurd 4y ago
  Whoa whoa whoa. Regarding "layoffs are never 'mimicking' what other companies are doing" layoffs are getting hyped like other trends in tech. Tech management is very trend-driven. Over-hiring to lock down talent, swinging to lean to the point of dysfunction, is characteristic of the tech industry. Entrepreneurs managing on the basis of pop management books and gurus is rife in tech.
  - rcarmo 4y ago
    Having a lot of exposure to early stage startups, I get that most founders have essentially zero management experience, but the Darwinian process of VCs and go-to-market doesn't seem to favor them actually going out and acquiring some.
    - Zigurd 4y ago
      A lot of those VCs aren't really experienced trained managers themselves. The most visible ones tweet in ways that confirm this.
- SpicyLemonZest 4y ago
  Layoffs are in very large part about mimicking what other companies are doing. I have no doubt that most CEOs are honestly trying to make the right decision, but (just like in pop culture!) the mere fact of what everyone else is doing has a substantial impact on the right business decision for you. If layoffs are a big trend this year, that substantially reduces both the reputational cost of doing your own layoff and the number of high performers you can expect to jump ship afterwards.
- mempko 4y ago
jrochkind1 4y ago
The thing about churn (of developers/contributors) rings so true to me from my career, and I think is really under-appreciated. In "the industry", or just among "people who make things in teams" (including open source). > Constant churn in a software development team, both among the programmers and designers, is absolutely devastating. It is the death knell for a software project. Makes deadlines meaningless. It turns software into a disposable, single-use product like a paper towel. Anything that increases team member churn threatens the very viability of the project and the software it’s creating. From an essay that is worth reading in full, "Theory-building and why employee churn is lethal to software companies": https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2022/theory-building/ https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2022/theory-building/ I think it's exactly right about the importance of "mental models" and "theory building", and if we could keep that in mind we could build better more maintainable software. ("More maintainable" over the long-term I think is almost synonymous with "has easy to grasp mental models that are sufficient to guide your work with the system")
- thrwaway011023 4y ago
  Churn is worse now that we have split everything into microservices that often use their own libraries, frameworks and languages. That adds a lot of overhead when employees inherit a pet project
  - ericmcer 4y ago
    Really true, ownership is a huge part of microservices. I have been on teams that have adopted orphaned services, then been called into meetings to advise on use of a service I am barely aware of. It is a really easy way to make your employees overwhelmed, but you can always hire someone else to take ownership once they quit.
  - Pet_Ant 4y ago
    I feel like microservices are specifically chosen because they work best with lots of churn. You can throw away the code. You only need to learn only the code in your service. It is an architecture (often) chose not for it's technical merits but rather how it works in high-churn environments.
drewcoo 4y ago
They're more like cults. "a system or group of people who practice excessive devotion to a figure, object, or belief system, typically following a charismatic leader" https://study.com/learn/lesson/cult-characteristics-types-behavior.html https://study.com/learn/lesson/cult-characteristics-types-be...
ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
> older is inherently inferior. As an “older,” I’ve encountered this exact attitude. Really uplifting. As a positive, it pissed me off enough, to “drop out,” and lean into early retirement. I spent the majority of my career at the antithesis of “pop culture,” which was a 100-year-old Japanese company. I am grateful for the lessons and habits I got, there. Plenty of stuff that they did wrong, but they also did a lot of stuff right.
- robomartin 4y ago
  > As an “older,” I’ve encountered this exact attitude. Same here. I was frustrating to watch young engineers insist on ignoring well-established knowledge only to go out and make mistakes that cost the company 6 to 8 months and hundreds of thousands of dollars, maybe more. And they were warned about the very things that happened during design reviews. Two examples (without getting into identifiable details): A complex mechanical assembly intended for challenging thermal and dynamic (vibration) environment. After studying the design I told the 20-something mechanical engineer the approach she took to the distribution of loads would fail instantly. This was done professionally, one-on-one and without any "attitude", to use the term. Her response: "I have a Masters degree in Mechanical Engineering from MIT, I think I know what I am doing.". Six months later the assembly, quite literally, exploded during the vibration test. Even after that she still refused to listen to my recommendations. This joke easily cost the company a million dollars and six months of wasted effort. If you consider this in the context of the larger project, the cost and delays could have been an order of magnitude greater. Second example. A EE designing a board to drive a bunch of LEDs. Again, 20-something. If I remember correctly, the board had 15 independent channels. He executed this as what I call "datasheet design". He picked a switched-mode LED driver, used the circuit from the datasheet with little modification and stuffed the board with 15 of these circuit blocks. The board ends-up having hundreds of components, it bigger than what we wanted and complexity/reliability/RFI were of concern. After studying this I had a meeting with him and explained that we could use an analog circuit with somewhere around four components per channel to drive the LEDs with excellent efficiency. The board would shrink to 1/4 the size, use 80% less components, have a less intense RF signature, etc. In this particular case, he actually laughed at me and said something like "Are you crazy? Everyone knows linear drive of LEDs is the most inefficient thing you can do". Of course, this is precisely the kind of thing a book-smart engineer who just copies circuits from datasheets would say. Not only is this not true, it is ridiculously easy math to show how you can build efficient LED drivers in the analog domain with just a few components (hint: control the power supply voltage with an efficient switched-mode regulator set to a precise voltage based on the LED string Vf range). Once again, this design was implemented. It caused untold problems in the context of the greater project, all of which required mitigation in some form. I don't know what it is. When I was a 20-something engineer I was eager to listen to and work with the older engineers. I learned more this way than I can possibly describe. Not just about engineering, about life.
msarrel 4y ago
Startups are pop culture cults.
sanitycheck 4y ago
I think there's some rationality. Let's say as a company you need money. Money comes from investors and/or customers. Customers or (especially) investors may want you to make "modern" software using "modern" technology. Developers (especially the young talented ones you can afford) are also attracted to modern tech for rational ($£€) reasons. So you can ignore that, and miss out on money and talent and thus maybe success. Or you can take the easier route and do what everyone else is doing.
- mempko 4y ago
  I mean, it's turtles all the way down isn't it. I would just call that second hand irrationality. Why? Because investors chasing shiny new things because they are new is also irrational.
q845712 4y ago
I expected the example at the end to be kubernetes, but instead it's layoffs. I think the article works almost equally as well if you swap in k8s, blockchain, or a few other buzzy buzzwords, which is kind of a testament to the truthiness of the argument.
- SpicyLemonZest 4y ago
  Everyone I've ever met with experience deploying to heterogeneous environments wholeheartedly endorses Kubernetes.
  - WFHRenaissance 4y ago
    If you use a managed version of k8s like AKS/EKS - it's a literal no-brainer for running containerized workloads.
genericacct 4y ago
"$bigcompany uses it so we must use it as well" is modern-day cargo cult programming and i've seen it in lots of places.
- ajmurmann 4y ago
  It's also wishful thinking. Your problem isn't scaling to a hundred million users, your problem is finding simple product/market fit!
kerblang 4y ago
Well I think the author got one thing right: > The “Pop” in “Pop Culture” stands for “popularity”. If it’s popular then it must be right. And that's social media simplified. The internet is filled with pop-seeking garbage because pop was the best metric anyone could fathom. Even now the AI's are struggling to reach for a better version of "right". But more to the author's point, yes, modern tech startups and their funders are absolutely obsessed with being trendy, even moreso than an 80's teenager (a lot of the big players were 80's teenagers, btw).
- entropicdrifter 4y ago
  Kind of a nitpick, but AIs mostly don't get to choose what's "right". I mean they're trained with a particular goal in mind already, so either their training data or whatever metric their self-training is set to optimize defines "right" for them in advance. It's not AIs that are struggling to find a better version of "right", it's people building AIs.
- dcow 4y ago
  It’s true. People believe you can raise money on having a trendy feeling product idea with very little merit… and sadly they are right. It baffles me.
retrocryptid 4y ago
If tech companies are pop cultures, then HN is Teen Beat.
- 082349872349872 4y ago
  I'm looking at https://tigerbeat.com https://tigerbeat.com now and wishing I had the 'shop skills to do a HN front page. Buzz are stories, Crush is "Tell HN", and Polls are "Ask HN"; the mapping practically writes itself... [Edit: and Beauty are the automatic YC front page spots?]
  - 082349872349872 4y ago
    🆃 𝐓𝐢𝐠𝐞𝐫 𝐁𝐞𝐚𝐭 buzz | music | beauty | style | crush 1. ▲ Everything we know about 'Outer Banks' Season 2 2. ▲ Ask TB: Which New Song Off 'Sour' is Your Favorite? 3. ▲ Pick a Yearbook Superlative and We'll Tell You... (Style transfer in the other direction was a bit easier)
marban 4y ago
Tech is a 24/7 popularity contest where everybody can have their 15 minutes of fame. Enjoy the ride.
renewiltord 4y ago
> There are two kinds of fools. One says, "This is old, therefore it is good"; the other says, "This is new, therefore it is better" The former is a little Lindy. The latter is ready for paradigm shifts. Ideal is if you don't choose based on age. But I'll say something contrary: neither of these things matter in technology. The layoffs are good for the firms that 2xed in the pandemic. The kubernetes is survivable or beneficial.
mjw1007 4y ago
I think some programmers need to hear the advice "don't assume that newer is necessarily better", and others need to hear "don't dismiss new things as being created by a cascade of attention-deficit teenagers". Maybe the author of this article is meeting more of the first kind, but it's dangerous to issue advice that amounts to "wherever you are on this balance, move further East".
zackmorris 4y ago
A better way to state this is that the problems we're facing today are due to the whims of capital owners and management, not labor. We could have a system where companies don't do layoffs, and workers sit on 50% of board seats, and democracy in the workplace is standard. I wonder how many majority shareholders truly want the billions of dollars in stock that comes with that, knowing that their wealth deprives countless thousands/millions of people of their opportunity. Would they be ok with a different kind of corporate structure? Something like a cooperative where management and the CEO are elected by workers, and difference in pay doesn't exceed perhaps 10:1?
gerbilly 4y ago
This article echoes a few of my most unpopular opinions. * The current generation could not invent the internet. They don't have the attention span or the culture for it. * People who spurn well thought out technologies like SQL or relational databases, are doomed to re-invent them, badly.
- kortilla 4y ago
  > The current generation could not invent the internet. They don't have the attention span or the culture for it. You vastly underestimate how much thought went into the internet. Look at: - TCP delayed acks + Nagle’s algorithm - IPv4 address size (Vincent said 32-bits was roughly as likely as 24 or 48). - the 7 layer OSI - class-based (A, B, C, …) routing - most of the options in IPv4 headers The Internet was as much hacks and a playground as other layers of the stack are today. The good stuff is still in use but there is a vast graveyard of bad ideas that didn’t pan out because they were security nightmares, couldn’t scale, etc. The same applies to core protocols like BGP. BGP hijacking is still possible today.
  - betaby 4y ago
    > BGP hijacking is still possible today. .. in the same sense as http hijacking is possible today, i.e. without httpS. For BGP we have RPKI ROA for a quite a while, and ASPA is coming.
    - kortilla 4y ago
      RPKI ROA is trivially by-passable with a path modification attack. It only helps stopping hijackings of really well connected networks. And sadly it’s still not required. > and ASPA is coming Yeah, but it’s not here and requires verification at each AS append, which means we’re a good 5 years before it’s really enforceable on arbitrary prefixes across transit networks.
  - LarryMullins 4y ago
    > > Old thing was hard, too hard for this generation > You're vastly underestimating how hard the old thing was Sounds like you're agreeing with him, if anything. Where is gerbilly's 'underestimation'?
hot_gril 4y ago
This article has a broad title but focuses on layoffs. I've seen the theory thrown around that it's a form of big tech collusion: They can't collude openly, but if one huge player makes a move like layoffs, it sends a signal to the others. Pandemic and work-from-home gave employees a lot more bargaining power, with the ability to get competing job offers without leaving their desks, so companies want to take that back. I don't see enough evidence to call it, but I wouldn't put it past them, given how several big players including AAPL and GOOG were caught and fined for making no-cold-call agreements several years ago. And it does seem like the tech scene has been less competitive lately on the consumer side.
vehemenz 4y ago
I regularly wonder how much of the "tooling" in modern development stems from not knowing or making an attempt to understand what GNU applications from 30+ years ago offer out of the box.

228 points by pietroppeter 4y ago

magwa101 4y ago

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BSerhere 4y ago

[dead]

madsbuch 4y ago

It's a shame that this has negative connotations. There is a case that this is essential. It seems like we are overcoming an AI winter, using the same technologies that was deemed infeasible 20 years ago. When I did competitive programming 20 years ago. I would somewhat jokingly say that I would want to write and AI to solve all the problems. Our mentor laughed it of clearly not considering it even feasible – today ChatGPT would like outperform a highschool competitive programming competition. We probably needed to look away from that generations presumptions in order to leap frog on some of these technologies.

yrgulation 4y ago
“ today ChatGPT would like outperform a highschool competitive programming competition.” Google did it first. You input a search string, find results on first or second attempt and then copy and paste the code.
- ben_w 4y ago
  Not even a close comparison. At best, Googling StackOverflow gets me one function, but only if I know the right keywords and it is short. ChatGPT, I can (and have!) given it example data and said "make a python script to parse this", and it not only gives me code, not only does it work, but when I ask it to extend this to do more or differently, the changes also work coherently with the previous results. For example: https://github.com/BenWheatley/Studies-of-AI/blob/main/coding-assistant/daily-plan-parser-conversation.md https://github.com/BenWheatley/Studies-of-AI/blob/main/codin...
- qu4z-2 4y ago
  Your highschool must have had pretty terrible programmers...
  - yrgulation 4y ago
    [dead]
ibizaman 4y ago
A contrary anectdotal exemple. We use MongoDB where I work and the only justification is it was the new fad at the time. Now it bites us because we use it as a relational DB. PostgreSQL would’ve been much more suitable in our case but it wasn’t in vogue.
- Traubenfuchs 4y ago
  Is there any regret in technology selection more widespread and common than having picked MongoDB during its bizarre new hotness phase? That phase where SQL database administrators where crying, thinking they'd lose their jobs tomorrow and many people claimed SQL was now absolutely deprecated.
  - hot_gril 4y ago
    This was probably the worst. Fads in business logic code or even APIs don't have anywhere near the lasting impact of a fad in screwing up the least easily replaceable part of your system, the DB.
  - edgyquant 4y ago
    In my experience the sql guys were laughing because they knew mongo was a fad and not an actual replacement.
  - CSMastermind 4y ago
    In the last 20 or so years I can't think of one. I've migrated 4 different companies off of Mongo to Postgres and it's a huge project each time.
    - hot_gril 4y ago
      Probably nearly a full code rewrite, right? My job the past 4 years has essentially been to clean up from bad DB decisions.
  - CoolGuySteve 4y ago
    I think using language-provided async calls everywhere will be the next mistake. Instead of callback hell, you get callback hell along with weird async race conditions and a contagion of async functions.
rpdillon 4y ago
I don't think the notion is that we should be relying entirely on cached results from prior generations. Rather, we need to understand what was tried and what worked and what didn't, and why. With this knowledge, we can see when innovation has invalidated prior assumptions, and we can try again.
- madsbuch 4y ago
  Yep, as nobody argues we should completely forget previous generations. The question is where to set the needle. The author definitely thinks we do not dwell enough on the past and should spend more time studying it.
k__ 4y ago
I know it's a hype right now, but I didn't get good results with any AI, be it text or image generation. It all looked impressive the first few days, but the novelty wore off quite quickly.
- poszlem 4y ago
  You are looking at a Nokia 3210 generation of AI.The most primitive version of what is to come. So the fact that the novelty has worn off is not really a good indicator of how much this will transform our everyday lives. Wait for the iPhone generation of AI, always in your pocket, interacting with you multiple times a day, changing how you consume news, how you communicate with the outside world, your friends and family.
  - Existenceblinks 4y ago
    Here we go again "it's early day", "it's like how the internet was born"
    - poszlem 4y ago
      Here we go again. "640K ought to be enough for anybody". "The horse is here to stay but the automobile is only a novelty—a fad."
- ajmurmann 4y ago
  Have you tried midjourney for image generation? Especially for photography style images, I've gotten some really cool results that I go back to occasionally
dgreensp 4y ago
An essay about academia (versus software engineering in industry) would probably make slightly different points. Academics definitely know their history. Also, when an actual disruptive new technology is first invented, jumping on it and trying to do something with it is both trendy and arguably rational, but this is a relatively rare occurrence.
ad404b8a372f2b9 4y ago
The entirety of AI innovation is driven by hardware improvements. Almost all AI research is done at the edge of our compute capabilities, and most of the models which produce results today existed in some form 20 years ago. We didn't leap-frog our predecessors presumptions, we built exactly what many envisioned but were unable to put to fruition with the computers of their time.
- madsbuch 4y ago
  The point is that we retried something that was previously deemed infeasible. Had you been too much aware of the history, you might not have done that.
marcosdumay 4y ago
It was deemed infeasible because it was infeasible. It took 2 generations time for computers to improve enough that it became feasible. And also a huge unexpected discovery about 20 years ago, that you can pre-train a neural network and cost your costs by an order of magnitude.

blitzar 4y ago

> The symptoms of pop culture: A “disdain for history”. Pop cultures believe history doesn’t have anything to teach them. This almost completely falls to pieces in the framing ... how does one explain the pop culture of 80s nostalgia that is prevalent in a lot of media? An 80's casio watch is, in some circles, the pinacle of timepiece fashion. Of course there are times where pop culture is a rejection of the prior art, but also there are times when current pop culture icons show deference to the past and their influences.

pif 4y ago
Calling 40 years ago “history” is actually “disdain for history”. History is not what you can find at an older cousin's place. History is what someone had to make an effort to save for you, and you cannot experience it any more.
- edgyquant 4y ago
  When I was in 8th grade in 2007 our history book ended with a chapter on 9/11. History is the past and even history forums tend to say anything more than a generation ago is history.
- blitzar 4y ago
  Here is a perfectly preserved sony walkman from 1987 - maximum effort and all. https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O315300/walkman-personal-radio-cassette-sony-corporation/ https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O315300/walkman-personal-...
- 3-cheese-sundae 4y ago
  There is a lot that occurred 40 years ago that can no longer be experienced, or even known by anyone today. Wouldn't refusing to call it history be disdain for history?
- dimitrios1 4y ago
  History is simply what we chose to remember and how we remember it. There's no minimum length it needs to be in the past. A "historical moment" can happen in the present.

poszlem 4y ago

<<A “disdain for history”>> A common problem in contemporary culture is a disregard for history, which can be seen not only in startup companies and the technology industry, but throughout society as a whole. During times of significant change, it is common for people to believe that they are much more intelligent and advanced than previous generations, who they may view as ignorant or backward. As the consequences of the revolution inevitably become clear, when the revolution turns on its children, people often begin to appreciate the positive aspects of the past and recognize that revolutions are usually not the solution you want (for the exact same reason why you usually don't want to rewrite a huge software project). Let us hope that the current period of revolution is coming to an end.

valand 4y ago
Sometimes people disregard history in a very obvious way. One time there is a person who wants a system rewritten, because of some perceived complexity. The original builders who built the system from the ground up is still actively maintaining it, but there is no attempt to understand whether the perceived complexity is incidental or essential, which in fact most of them are the latter. Some people just want things to fit their world. But, on the bright side, there are people who just don't know history, but they would be happy to learn. There's a hopeful number of those people!
pif 4y ago
> Let us hope that the current period of revolution is coming to an end. Let us hope that the current need of revolution is coming to an end. FTFY

fullshark 4y ago

I agree with some of what he is saying, but don't really get the "pop culture" framing. Isn't pop culture just popular cultural artifacts? I'm under the impression they are mostly looked down upon for class reasons more so than any of the intrinsic problems stated.

bluetomcat 4y ago
"Pop culture" is a post-WW2 US phenomenon that creates a shared societal reality through movies, TV shows, household items and brands, etc. As of late, it has infected the whole world through social media "virality". Something new appears, then thousands of outlets, youtubers and "tech" journalists are repeating it and most of society starts talking about it without any historic or technical background whatsoever. It's an overly-expressive culture based on hype and reactivity.
- fullshark 4y ago
  Not sure you are the author but I don't really think that's what pop culture is considered colloquially. And you're basically just describing any cultural ideas that can be considered "viral." I guess a sufficiently large number of people accepting that viral idea makes it popular but pop culture to me is just music/movies/books etc that are popular. Basically this piece is just saying "the dominant (read: popular) culture in tech companies is bad" and they all have basically slight variations on this bad culture.
  - shapefrog 4y ago
    Its even more micro, the current on trend tiktok dance from the last 15 minutes that everyone is doing is what everyone is doing. Lemmings as a construct perhaps. Naive social media obsessed teens perhaps.
  - bluetomcat 4y ago
    I am describing the transmission mechanisms of pop culture and what it's rooted in. It's inherently linked to consumerism, advertising, mass media and fashion. The currently popular music/movies/books are just a manifestation of that. Important scientific, political or philosophical ideas can also go "viral" among intellectual circles, but you wouldn't hear about them in an entertainment TV show or in an advertisement.

4k3aa4 4y ago

I think it's easy to mistake the concept of fads within technology with the application of arguably necessary abstractions. Most of what is new and faddish is just another abstraction around some (probably, relatively) archaic system. The abstraction is the new thing, not the technology or the language that it's written in.

lucaw 4y ago

Yes, tech companies are building an image of pop cultures, but they are not. For example, layoffs are never "mimicking" what other companies are doing. Pop culture people may think it is, but business people -- who tech CEOs really are -- always tries to make the right decisions.

Zigurd 4y ago
Whoa whoa whoa. Regarding "layoffs are never 'mimicking' what other companies are doing" layoffs are getting hyped like other trends in tech. Tech management is very trend-driven. Over-hiring to lock down talent, swinging to lean to the point of dysfunction, is characteristic of the tech industry. Entrepreneurs managing on the basis of pop management books and gurus is rife in tech.
- rcarmo 4y ago
  Having a lot of exposure to early stage startups, I get that most founders have essentially zero management experience, but the Darwinian process of VCs and go-to-market doesn't seem to favor them actually going out and acquiring some.
  - Zigurd 4y ago
    A lot of those VCs aren't really experienced trained managers themselves. The most visible ones tweet in ways that confirm this.
SpicyLemonZest 4y ago
Layoffs are in very large part about mimicking what other companies are doing. I have no doubt that most CEOs are honestly trying to make the right decision, but (just like in pop culture!) the mere fact of what everyone else is doing has a substantial impact on the right business decision for you. If layoffs are a big trend this year, that substantially reduces both the reputational cost of doing your own layoff and the number of high performers you can expect to jump ship afterwards.
mempko 4y ago

jrochkind1 4y ago

The thing about churn (of developers/contributors) rings so true to me from my career, and I think is really under-appreciated. In "the industry", or just among "people who make things in teams" (including open source). > Constant churn in a software development team, both among the programmers and designers, is absolutely devastating. It is the death knell for a software project. Makes deadlines meaningless. It turns software into a disposable, single-use product like a paper towel. Anything that increases team member churn threatens the very viability of the project and the software it’s creating. From an essay that is worth reading in full, "Theory-building and why employee churn is lethal to software companies": https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2022/theory-building/ https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2022/theory-building/ I think it's exactly right about the importance of "mental models" and "theory building", and if we could keep that in mind we could build better more maintainable software. ("More maintainable" over the long-term I think is almost synonymous with "has easy to grasp mental models that are sufficient to guide your work with the system")

thrwaway011023 4y ago
Churn is worse now that we have split everything into microservices that often use their own libraries, frameworks and languages. That adds a lot of overhead when employees inherit a pet project
- ericmcer 4y ago
  Really true, ownership is a huge part of microservices. I have been on teams that have adopted orphaned services, then been called into meetings to advise on use of a service I am barely aware of. It is a really easy way to make your employees overwhelmed, but you can always hire someone else to take ownership once they quit.
- Pet_Ant 4y ago
  I feel like microservices are specifically chosen because they work best with lots of churn. You can throw away the code. You only need to learn only the code in your service. It is an architecture (often) chose not for it's technical merits but rather how it works in high-churn environments.

drewcoo 4y ago

They're more like cults. "a system or group of people who practice excessive devotion to a figure, object, or belief system, typically following a charismatic leader" https://study.com/learn/lesson/cult-characteristics-types-behavior.html https://study.com/learn/lesson/cult-characteristics-types-be...

ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago

> older is inherently inferior. As an “older,” I’ve encountered this exact attitude. Really uplifting. As a positive, it pissed me off enough, to “drop out,” and lean into early retirement. I spent the majority of my career at the antithesis of “pop culture,” which was a 100-year-old Japanese company. I am grateful for the lessons and habits I got, there. Plenty of stuff that they did wrong, but they also did a lot of stuff right.

robomartin 4y ago
> As an “older,” I’ve encountered this exact attitude. Same here. I was frustrating to watch young engineers insist on ignoring well-established knowledge only to go out and make mistakes that cost the company 6 to 8 months and hundreds of thousands of dollars, maybe more. And they were warned about the very things that happened during design reviews. Two examples (without getting into identifiable details): A complex mechanical assembly intended for challenging thermal and dynamic (vibration) environment. After studying the design I told the 20-something mechanical engineer the approach she took to the distribution of loads would fail instantly. This was done professionally, one-on-one and without any "attitude", to use the term. Her response: "I have a Masters degree in Mechanical Engineering from MIT, I think I know what I am doing.". Six months later the assembly, quite literally, exploded during the vibration test. Even after that she still refused to listen to my recommendations. This joke easily cost the company a million dollars and six months of wasted effort. If you consider this in the context of the larger project, the cost and delays could have been an order of magnitude greater. Second example. A EE designing a board to drive a bunch of LEDs. Again, 20-something. If I remember correctly, the board had 15 independent channels. He executed this as what I call "datasheet design". He picked a switched-mode LED driver, used the circuit from the datasheet with little modification and stuffed the board with 15 of these circuit blocks. The board ends-up having hundreds of components, it bigger than what we wanted and complexity/reliability/RFI were of concern. After studying this I had a meeting with him and explained that we could use an analog circuit with somewhere around four components per channel to drive the LEDs with excellent efficiency. The board would shrink to 1/4 the size, use 80% less components, have a less intense RF signature, etc. In this particular case, he actually laughed at me and said something like "Are you crazy? Everyone knows linear drive of LEDs is the most inefficient thing you can do". Of course, this is precisely the kind of thing a book-smart engineer who just copies circuits from datasheets would say. Not only is this not true, it is ridiculously easy math to show how you can build efficient LED drivers in the analog domain with just a few components (hint: control the power supply voltage with an efficient switched-mode regulator set to a precise voltage based on the LED string Vf range). Once again, this design was implemented. It caused untold problems in the context of the greater project, all of which required mitigation in some form. I don't know what it is. When I was a 20-something engineer I was eager to listen to and work with the older engineers. I learned more this way than I can possibly describe. Not just about engineering, about life.

msarrel 4y ago

Startups are pop culture cults.

sanitycheck 4y ago

I think there's some rationality. Let's say as a company you need money. Money comes from investors and/or customers. Customers or (especially) investors may want you to make "modern" software using "modern" technology. Developers (especially the young talented ones you can afford) are also attracted to modern tech for rational ($£€) reasons. So you can ignore that, and miss out on money and talent and thus maybe success. Or you can take the easier route and do what everyone else is doing.

mempko 4y ago
I mean, it's turtles all the way down isn't it. I would just call that second hand irrationality. Why? Because investors chasing shiny new things because they are new is also irrational.

q845712 4y ago

I expected the example at the end to be kubernetes, but instead it's layoffs. I think the article works almost equally as well if you swap in k8s, blockchain, or a few other buzzy buzzwords, which is kind of a testament to the truthiness of the argument.

SpicyLemonZest 4y ago
Everyone I've ever met with experience deploying to heterogeneous environments wholeheartedly endorses Kubernetes.
- WFHRenaissance 4y ago
  If you use a managed version of k8s like AKS/EKS - it's a literal no-brainer for running containerized workloads.

genericacct 4y ago

"$bigcompany uses it so we must use it as well" is modern-day cargo cult programming and i've seen it in lots of places.

ajmurmann 4y ago
It's also wishful thinking. Your problem isn't scaling to a hundred million users, your problem is finding simple product/market fit!

kerblang 4y ago

Well I think the author got one thing right: > The “Pop” in “Pop Culture” stands for “popularity”. If it’s popular then it must be right. And that's social media simplified. The internet is filled with pop-seeking garbage because pop was the best metric anyone could fathom. Even now the AI's are struggling to reach for a better version of "right". But more to the author's point, yes, modern tech startups and their funders are absolutely obsessed with being trendy, even moreso than an 80's teenager (a lot of the big players were 80's teenagers, btw).

entropicdrifter 4y ago
Kind of a nitpick, but AIs mostly don't get to choose what's "right". I mean they're trained with a particular goal in mind already, so either their training data or whatever metric their self-training is set to optimize defines "right" for them in advance. It's not AIs that are struggling to find a better version of "right", it's people building AIs.
dcow 4y ago
It’s true. People believe you can raise money on having a trendy feeling product idea with very little merit… and sadly they are right. It baffles me.

retrocryptid 4y ago

If tech companies are pop cultures, then HN is Teen Beat.

082349872349872 4y ago
I'm looking at https://tigerbeat.com https://tigerbeat.com now and wishing I had the 'shop skills to do a HN front page. Buzz are stories, Crush is "Tell HN", and Polls are "Ask HN"; the mapping practically writes itself... [Edit: and Beauty are the automatic YC front page spots?]
- 082349872349872 4y ago
  🆃 𝐓𝐢𝐠𝐞𝐫 𝐁𝐞𝐚𝐭 buzz | music | beauty | style | crush 1. ▲ Everything we know about 'Outer Banks' Season 2 2. ▲ Ask TB: Which New Song Off 'Sour' is Your Favorite? 3. ▲ Pick a Yearbook Superlative and We'll Tell You... (Style transfer in the other direction was a bit easier)

marban 4y ago

Tech is a 24/7 popularity contest where everybody can have their 15 minutes of fame. Enjoy the ride.

renewiltord 4y ago

> There are two kinds of fools. One says, "This is old, therefore it is good"; the other says, "This is new, therefore it is better" The former is a little Lindy. The latter is ready for paradigm shifts. Ideal is if you don't choose based on age. But I'll say something contrary: neither of these things matter in technology. The layoffs are good for the firms that 2xed in the pandemic. The kubernetes is survivable or beneficial.

mjw1007 4y ago

I think some programmers need to hear the advice "don't assume that newer is necessarily better", and others need to hear "don't dismiss new things as being created by a cascade of attention-deficit teenagers". Maybe the author of this article is meeting more of the first kind, but it's dangerous to issue advice that amounts to "wherever you are on this balance, move further East".

zackmorris 4y ago

A better way to state this is that the problems we're facing today are due to the whims of capital owners and management, not labor. We could have a system where companies don't do layoffs, and workers sit on 50% of board seats, and democracy in the workplace is standard. I wonder how many majority shareholders truly want the billions of dollars in stock that comes with that, knowing that their wealth deprives countless thousands/millions of people of their opportunity. Would they be ok with a different kind of corporate structure? Something like a cooperative where management and the CEO are elected by workers, and difference in pay doesn't exceed perhaps 10:1?

gerbilly 4y ago

This article echoes a few of my most unpopular opinions. * The current generation could not invent the internet. They don't have the attention span or the culture for it. * People who spurn well thought out technologies like SQL or relational databases, are doomed to re-invent them, badly.

kortilla 4y ago
> The current generation could not invent the internet. They don't have the attention span or the culture for it. You vastly underestimate how much thought went into the internet. Look at: - TCP delayed acks + Nagle’s algorithm - IPv4 address size (Vincent said 32-bits was roughly as likely as 24 or 48). - the 7 layer OSI - class-based (A, B, C, …) routing - most of the options in IPv4 headers The Internet was as much hacks and a playground as other layers of the stack are today. The good stuff is still in use but there is a vast graveyard of bad ideas that didn’t pan out because they were security nightmares, couldn’t scale, etc. The same applies to core protocols like BGP. BGP hijacking is still possible today.
- betaby 4y ago
  > BGP hijacking is still possible today. .. in the same sense as http hijacking is possible today, i.e. without httpS. For BGP we have RPKI ROA for a quite a while, and ASPA is coming.
  - kortilla 4y ago
    RPKI ROA is trivially by-passable with a path modification attack. It only helps stopping hijackings of really well connected networks. And sadly it’s still not required. > and ASPA is coming Yeah, but it’s not here and requires verification at each AS append, which means we’re a good 5 years before it’s really enforceable on arbitrary prefixes across transit networks.
- LarryMullins 4y ago
  > > Old thing was hard, too hard for this generation > You're vastly underestimating how hard the old thing was Sounds like you're agreeing with him, if anything. Where is gerbilly's 'underestimation'?

hot_gril 4y ago

This article has a broad title but focuses on layoffs. I've seen the theory thrown around that it's a form of big tech collusion: They can't collude openly, but if one huge player makes a move like layoffs, it sends a signal to the others. Pandemic and work-from-home gave employees a lot more bargaining power, with the ability to get competing job offers without leaving their desks, so companies want to take that back. I don't see enough evidence to call it, but I wouldn't put it past them, given how several big players including AAPL and GOOG were caught and fined for making no-cold-call agreements several years ago. And it does seem like the tech scene has been less competitive lately on the consumer side.

vehemenz 4y ago

I regularly wonder how much of the "tooling" in modern development stems from not knowing or making an attempt to understand what GNU applications from 30+ years ago offer out of the box.