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A classic quote: “I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: 1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal an

• zikduruqe 3y ago
  All I know, is that I have been in technology my whole career. 99.999% of everything I have built, designed, launched and implemented is no longer in existence. With retirement on the horizon, I cannot wait to close my laptop lid and never touch it again unless it is an absolute necessity.
  • vidarh 3y ago
    For my part I hope to retire early so I can spend more of my time building and implementing the things I enjoy... I'm not criticizing your desire - it's just that for me, the learning and exploration and building is the fun part. As long as it's still either useful for me, or I have the memories, it doesn't matter if it's still used by others, though that can be fun too. I couldn't imagine having made this my career otherwise.
    • zikduruqe 3y ago
      I remember a time without internet and without cellphones. I have helped build those things from scratch, all the way until where we are today. I have great memories and have made a living from it. But, it is not satisfying to the soul. I just want to get to a time where I am not glued to the internet and do not carry a cellphone. The absolute freedom it brings to me is something that a lot of people are not familiar with today. I don't want to get into too many details, but a side gig I have, when I bring people out into the field, I take their phones from them. And to watch the withdrawal that they have from the lack of dopamine hits is just sad.
      • nightski 3y ago
        That's fine as a personal anecdote, and to be honest you sound burned out. But making absolute statements like "it is not satisfying to the soul" does not help your argument at all. Happy to provide my anecdote. In my 40s and I still live to build/create.
        • zikduruqe 3y ago
          > But making absolute statements like "it is not satisfying to the soul" does not help your argument at all. It is my soul. If it is not satisfied, who are you to tell me different? We all have to chop wood, carry water.
          • ziddoap 3y ago
            They are taking issue with you writing: >it is not satisfying to _the_ soul. Instead of writing: >it is not satisfying to _my_ soul. The first could be interpreted as you speaking generally (i.e. you think no ones soul can be satisfied by building tech or whatever), the second makes it clear that you are talking about specifically your soul not being satisfied.
        • UncleOxidant 3y ago
          It's zikduruqe's soul not yours. In my 40s I would have said the same as you. In my 60s it's starting to feel meaningless. People are in different stages of life.
          • nasmorn 3y ago
            Shit I am in my 40s and it is already pretty meaningless
      • vidarh 3y ago
        It satisfies my soul. I accept that does not yours. I have no problem putting it aside; I enjoy e.g. going for walks and sitting down to meditate. But even then, if anything, I'm likely to come out of it bursting with new ideas for code I want to write or things I want to explore, and I hope that feeling never goes away.
    • ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
      Same here. I'm getting ready to explore ML applications on Apple systems, but first, I need to finally get around to learning SwiftUI as a shipping app system (I have only been playing with it, so far. Doing ship work is an order of magnitude more than the simple apps that are featured in "Learn SwiftUI" courses). I'll probably do that, switching over to using SwiftUI for all of my test harnesses. My test harnesses tend to be fairly robust systems. So far, it looks like I may not be using it to actually ship stuff, for a while. Auto Layout is a huge pain, but it is very, very powerful. I can basically do anything I want, in UI, with it. SwiftUI seems to make using default Apple UI ridiculously easy, but the jury is out, as to how far off the beaten path I can go. BTW: I have been "retired," since 2017. I wanted to keep working, but no one wanted me, so I set up a small company to buy my toys, and kept coding. I also love learning new stuff.
      • ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
        Ugh. Just slammed into a wall. SwiftUI is very bad at working with maps, and they still have a long way to go. Since most of the stuff I'm doing, these days, is highly location-dependent, I can't compromise. I have been reading about people hitting these types of walls for a couple of years, and thought that Apple has worked around it. I suspect that the issue is with trying to use UIKit stuff inside of SwiftUI, and I was trying to avoid UIViewRepresentable (because it's a kludge). Back to UIKit. This stinks. :(
    • dkasper 3y ago
      I feel similar, but keep going another 10 years and we might lose the desire for that type of fun too, not to mention the “building” part might look radically different and not be “fun” anymore. Or maybe it will be more fun, but point is things change.
      • vidarh 3y ago
        The building looks how we want it, though. A large part of my building has been replacing things because I don't like how it works. E.g. a few years ago I switched to my own text editor. Now I'm running my own text editor in my own terminal, using "my" (in this case a port from C to Ruby; the C version was not mine) font renderer, running under my own window manager, using my own file manager and my own desktop switcher... And while some of the above had reasons, I am itching to rewrite more of my stack, and mostly for fun or out of curiosity than any need. Things looking radically different is more likely to affect my enjoyment of it as a job than in general, though, because for my side projects I can build things as I please, using the tools I want (and mostly have written myself), and can ignore everything I don't like. I absolutely agree things change, but I've been doing this for 42 years now, and so far it doesn't feel any different, so I'm going to guess I'll stick to this for some time still.
  • AlwaysRock 3y ago
    Why? Most things are ephemeral.
    • 93po 3y ago
      It’s probably because it’s representative of how the work was never productive or beneficial to begin with. It was some dumb idea resulting from a poor decision maker trying to compete in a dumb capitalist system.
  • proamdev123 3y ago
    So you’re planning on getting an Apple Vision Pro?! :-)
  • smugglerFlynn 3y ago
    So what interesting and exciting things are you up to nowadays?
    • zikduruqe 3y ago
      In my main career? Doing a complete lift and shift from on-prem to the cloud. Over 100,000 containerized apps, across 5000+ instances. That's one thing. Side gig? Still do consulting for various entertainment companies on a particular subject.
  • glonq 3y ago
    If you had built COBOL systems for banks and gov't in the 1980's, your work would still be alive and kicking today ;)
  • robenkleene 3y ago
    I see this sentiment in tech all the time and I don't understand it. With DAWs and NLEs I have the equivalent of 100s of thousands of dollars of equipment from just 20 years ago. 3D DCC applications like Blender/Houdini allow new forms of creation without a clear physical equivalent. Software is magic and I plan to do creative things with it until the day I die. It's incredibly sad how badly most programmers especially feel about tech. If I'll editorialize for a moment, it seems to most programmers actually hate software. Something about programming just makes people hate software.
    • squigz 3y ago
      I don't believe it's programming itself, but rather programming as a career. And honestly, can you blame any software engineer that gets jaded after a while? :P
      • robenkleene 3y ago
        Fair, I suppose I strawmanned a bit on the comment I was replying to. Being jaded on programming as a career programmer certainly makes sense. I guess I was responding to the part about "closing the laptop forever", which I took to mean closing it off to all the other amazing things you can do with a computer today. But in context, they probably mean just stopping programming. But it still drives me crazy that god forbid a programmer would actually do something as low as open an Adobe product and actually make something that someone that's not another programmer could actually enjoy. Appreciate the creative good our industry has accomplished for godsake.
    • graemep 3y ago
      I think it is because a lot of programmers are fascinated by tech and had high expectations of what it would do - the internet in particular. It was expected to be empowering, democratizing, censorship resistant, decentralising. The reality is disillusioning.
      • robenkleene 3y ago
        I think it is empowering and democratizing, but agreed it's not censorship resistant and decentralized. I'd argue the latter two conflict with the first two. Making something decentralized makes it inherently harder to use (less empowering), making it censorship resistant runs counter to companies interests and companies fund everything (less democratized, i.e., harder to make a living).
  • UncleOxidant 3y ago
    > I have been in technology my whole career. 99.999% of everything I have built, designed, launched and implemented is no longer in existence. 60-something here. I know exactly how you feel. I can't point at anything I've worked on in the last 30+ years that's still in use. It's very demotivating. When you first get into tech it's all shiny and new and exciting. But nothing lasts.
    • zoklet-enjoyer 3y ago
      I don't understand how this is demotivating. Most work output for most jobs is temporary. How many people make permanent objects for a living? I never have and that's fine.
      • deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
    • jimbokun 3y ago
      It's not a new problem: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46565/ozymandias https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46565/ozymandias
      • UncleOxidant 3y ago
        Ecclesiastes 1 is also very relevant here: “Meaningless! Meaningless!” says the Teacher. “Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless.” What do people gain from all their labors at which they toil under the sun? Generations come and generations go, but the earth remains forever. The sun rises and the sun sets, and hurries back to where it rises. The wind blows to the south and turns to the north; round and round it goes, ever returning on its course. All streams flow into the sea, yet the sea is never full. To the place the streams come from, there they return again. All things are wearisome, more than one can say. The eye never has enough of seeing, nor the ear its fill of hearing. What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. Is there anything of which one can say, “Look! This is something new”? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time. No one remembers the former generations, and even those yet to come will not be remembered by those who follow them. What a heavy burden God has laid on mankind! I have seen all the things that are done under the sun; all of them are meaningless, a chasing after the wind.
  • tasuki 3y ago
    Side projects don't have to suffer the same fate. You can maintain them as long as you like.
• zvmaz 3y ago
  None of which the author of the blog post says, implied, or can be implied from.
• shombaboor 3y ago
  AI for coding / syntax / learning tool, drug discovery etc. makes perfect sense to me as an old person. AI for art is a soulless parlor trick stealing from past creative innovators.
• mikestew 3y ago
  A classic quote, but too bad it doesn’t address anything the author wrote, and is simply used dismissively.
  • dsjoerg 3y ago
    It comes close. The author doesn't want to learn the math and study the thing. Why? By implication, because they're over 35 and don't want to learn new stuff anymore.
    • vcg3rd 3y ago
      The author posed it as a question. It's not about want as much as able. No matter how much I wanted (at 58) to understand the inner working of a LLM, it's beyond me, just like becoming a fighter pilot. However, even though I don't program, nothing in his list prior to AI is beyond me yet, if I wanted to learn it. I am happy being a 25 years Linux power user who climbed the Emacs learning curve to use org-mode and then gradually added email,rss, irc, web, and gopher modalities to it.
    • renonce 3y ago
      It's possible for me to learn enough math to download a huggingface model and start from tokenizing my prompt and convert them to token embeddings and add position embeddings and go through 32 layers of softmax+mlp with layernorm and write out the equation that would compute each intermediate floating number until it tells me the probabilities of each output token so I can sample a token and continue the sentence autoregressively. Computing any one of these 100 billion 16-bit floating point multiplications? I can either compute them in decimal or check out the IEEE754 fp16 format and compute in binary manually, or maybe draw a circuit with AND and NOT gates if given enough time. These are the low level operations. From a higher level mathematical standpoint? I can prove to you analytically how a SGD optimizer on a convex surface will converge to the global minimum at an exponential rate, starting from either set theory or dependent type theory and the construction of real numbers from sets of rational numbers. None of these tell me how and why LLM works.
    • khokhol 3y ago
• coldtea 3y ago
  This, for comedic generality, is presenting the three cases as if all change is neutral, and it's just our approach to it that is problematic. We could also present them as if the person is wrong in all cases: (1) We tend to accept whatever is already there when we grow up, even though it might be the worst crap and detrimental to ourselves or even society. (2) We tend to adopt whether "new and revolutionary" appears when we're younger and starting our careers, without often questioning whether it's actually because of marketing hype and whatever it is a regression over what existed. (3) We tend to dislike new technology when we're older, even though it might be great and improve things.
  • TeMPOraL 3y ago
    Good point on (2). Somewhen past turning 30 I realized just how many things I bought into when I was 20-ish turned out to be purely marketing bullshit. I was happier then, though. And definitely less cynical. Ignorance is bliss, I guess, though my heart doesn't accept that, so I'm doomed to be forever whiny.
• tw04 3y ago
  Social Media was invented long before I was 35. I could get a job in it but I don't want to. It isn't exciting or revolutionary and is destroying the fabric of society. So there's that. I'd imagine after seeing what Social media has done to us, a lot of people are fearful AI will take us far more down that path than the path to salvation the people trumpeting AI claim it will. I honestly see a lot of parallels between what early social media supposedly would bring to the world, and where we ended up.
  • ctoth 3y ago
    The problem with social media isn't the media. It's the social. It isn't the technology that broke. It's the people. Not all technologies go to shit. Only those we give to the eternal Septemberists
    • tw04 3y ago
      Respectfully: that's an absolute copout. Facebook determines what's on your feed, not you. Twitter drove news agencies to try to fit stories into 140 characters because it got clicks and eyeballs. Youtube's engagement algorithms drive impressionable youth down rabbit holes of alt-right nonsense. EVERYTHING about social media is designed to keep you addicted to it. The fact that human nature can be exploited isn't the human's fault, it's the corporation doing the exploiting... I've seen absolutely nothing coming from the AI sector other than handwavy "we need to be responsible" excuses. Meanwhile we've got deepfakes of Taylor Swift and Joe Biden that Grandma Marge can't tell from the real thing and absolutely nothing can or will be done about it.
    • chongli 3y ago
      It isn't the technology that broke. It's the people. I respectfully disagree. People haven’t changed in ten thousand years. It’s technology and culture that have changed. Many changes in culture have been amazing, wonderful breakthroughs (such as human rights). Similarly for technology (green revolution, modern medicine, electricity). Social media though? That’s a technology that has found its niche exploiting human psychology for profit. It’s on the same dark branch as advertising and “big lie” propaganda/fascism. We were much better off before it!
• 1970-01-01 3y ago
  EVs, Falcon rockets, and the mRNA vax were out after 2 and didn't cause 3. Of course, this is just my opinion. I realize a lot of people somehow find ways to hate all of those technologies.
• logicprog 3y ago
  I'm 22 and I'm willing to lead the Butlerian Jihad against these stupid artificial unintelligence things (/hj) so there are always exceptions!
• DanHulton 3y ago
  I kinda hate this quote because, while funny, I find it is misused and abused more than it has ever been used correctly. The quote is about our _reactions_ to technologies, but it is constantly used to dismiss _actual concerns_ about technologies. It doesn't engage with the content of the discussion, but instead dresses up "lol, OP is old" in the clothing of a brilliant writer. Then, if you're lucky enough to have the conversation continue at all, the discussion tends to become about ageism instead of the original concerns.
  • Uehreka 3y ago
    Yeah, it’s a highly effective thought-terminating cliche.
  • overvale 3y ago
    Yeah but isn't the quote's point (made comedically, with hyperbole) that it can be hard to separate our emotional reactions from things to actually be concerned about? I thought that's the whole idea, to make you laugh and think about which side of the line the new thing falls on.
• ffsm8 3y ago
  I'd wholeheartedly agree with that statement in the context it was made in, but surely everyone would admit that most of our technological improvements since he's made that quote in the early 2000s have objectively worsed our societies overall, no? Social media has made conspiracy theories into somthing akin to a virus, and every year more people start to subscribe to them. Even if the theories have been throughly debunked, they're still gaining a larger audience with every year. While I'd pretty much never be willing to give up my phone at this point, anyone with a critical mind will have to admit that our helpful distraction device has very real impact on the well being of the society at large. And not in a good way -- at the very least if you're looking at the society as a whole. Discourse keeps getting more polarizing and what went for "populism" pre 2000 is pretty much table stakes for what goes for a discussion, currently. Really, he made that statement in the time when people were talking about how "the internet will improve [everything]". In early 2000s, nobody i heard of realized how the internet would actually influence us as a society
• Nevermark 3y ago
  This time it is different. At some point every pattern breaks, or at least changes. The black box aspect is a direct result of AI being a learning technology. A higher order technology. It learns to do things we have not explicitly taught it, or might not even know how to do ourselves. We will eventually find better ways to analyze and interpret how models work. Why a model produced a specific answer to a given prompt. But the models will keep getting more powerful too. Today they help coders over the speed bumps of unfamiliar language syntax, or esoteric library conventions. In a few years they will be actively helping researchers with basic problems. I.e. the hurdles for getting to the front of AI as a field as a technology contributor, and the resources needed, are going to get steeper. Of course there will be many people who do, but it won't be in the same way that most technically savvy people have had many years to learn programming languages, apply them, and even contribute to them, without language's progressing out from under them. (Except for C++ of course! /h) EDIT: It is worth distinguishing between AI like GPT, as in very flexible and powerful models that will be used across disciplines by all kinds of people regardless of technical chops, vs. the overlapping AI algorithms (partly subset, partly different) applied to smaller learning tasks, which has been a commonplace tool for many years and will continue to have its place.
• throwaway_8765 3y ago
  I was born in 1999 and couldn't agree less. I barely remember a time before smartphones were popular, and now I despise them. Both the social aspects that have built up around them and much of the software technology itself. The fact that "Sideloading" is even a term seems absurd to me. And I plead that some day the current AI trends will be over, and we'll still have at least a few people left making good literary and visual art. Sure ChatGPT can make you a nice internal memo, but that's because they were already being used to say little and convey nothing. I'm in exactly the right stage of my life to take advantage of generative AI, but I want nothing to do with it, and somehow an entire industry with millions of people working in it can only focus on one thing at a time.
• khokhol 3y ago
  Sheer brilliance, like everything else Adams says. But ultimately a pat argument. Why? Because it is simply isn't so. The "old world" contains plenty of stupid inefficiencies and annoyances -- we've just rightfully forgotten about them. Everything from tape-based answering machines, to all those tattered paper maps bursting out of your glove compartment (itself an anachronism as few people wear gloves these day), etc. Survivorship bias, as another commenter mentioned. There's a grain of truth in what he's saying, but not enough to carry the day. This is why, after all his books were placed in the humor section of your local bookstore (back when people still read physical books, and knew what a bookstore was).