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I'm cautious about picking winners and losers specifically. I remember back in the day all of the search engines: AltaVista, Ask Jeeves, Yahoo, Lycos, Web Crawl

I'm cautious about picking winners and losers specifically. I remember back in the day all of the search engines: AltaVista, Ask Jeeves, Yahoo, Lycos, Web Crawler, Excite, etc. When Google popped up it was clearly superior to all of them and completely changed the landscape. In fact, there are few Internet companies from the early 2000s that made it up until now intact. The same may end up true for this crop of AI. But anyone who was alive during that time and working should ask themselves: would your career have been better or worse if you started getting familiar with Web Technologies in the early 2000s. What if you saw the impending dot com crash and you decided that the entire Internet was not going to live up to the hype? I don't have a crystal ball but my gut is telling me that 20+ years from now we'll see any short-term market correction around AI as a blip.

randomdata 3y ago
> would your career have been better or worse if you started getting familiar with Web Technologies in the early 2000s. Worse. The only time there was any real money to be made with web technologies was prior to 2000. Plain old boring RPC, serving interesting data to lowly web developers, is where the money has been made since.
- zoogeny 3y ago
  Ok, to be fair I should have specified Internet Technologies rather than Web Technologies. And of course there are exceptions to all cases. But I would wager many people are like me, having made a comfortable income on the back of tcp/ip, dns, bgp, http, html, javascript et al. and it is hard for me to think of very many jobs in the TC range of FAANG companies where familiarity with those technologies is not a requirement. My point wasn't: you should have been a web developer in 2000. It was: in early 2000s the Internet was the most important advancement in tech and you should have been learning all about it. I am arguing that the same holds for the recent surge in AI technology.

randomdata 3y ago

> would your career have been better or worse if you started getting familiar with Web Technologies in the early 2000s. Worse. The only time there was any real money to be made with web technologies was prior to 2000. Plain old boring RPC, serving interesting data to lowly web developers, is where the money has been made since.

zoogeny 3y ago
Ok, to be fair I should have specified Internet Technologies rather than Web Technologies. And of course there are exceptions to all cases. But I would wager many people are like me, having made a comfortable income on the back of tcp/ip, dns, bgp, http, html, javascript et al. and it is hard for me to think of very many jobs in the TC range of FAANG companies where familiarity with those technologies is not a requirement. My point wasn't: you should have been a web developer in 2000. It was: in early 2000s the Internet was the most important advancement in tech and you should have been learning all about it. I am arguing that the same holds for the recent surge in AI technology.