5 ms·

This post has an unnecessarily aggressive style but has some very good points about the technology hype cycle we're in. Companies are desperate to use "AI" for

by habosa 2y ago

This post has an unnecessarily aggressive style but has some very good points about the technology hype cycle we're in. Companies are desperate to use "AI" for the sake of using it, and that's likely not a good thing. I remember ~6 years ago wondering if I was going to be able to remain relevant as a software engineer if I didn't learn about neural networks and get good with TensorFlow. Everyone seemed to be trying to learn this skill at the same time and every app was jamming in some ML-powered feature. I'm glad I skipped that hype train, turns out only a minority of programmers really need to do that stuff and the rest of us can keep on doing what we were doing before. In the same way, I think LLMs are massively powerful but also not something we all need to jump into so breathlessly.

johnnyanmac 2y ago
I empathize with it, but ultimately it's fruitless. This happens with every big tech hype. They very much want people to keep talking about it. It's part of the marketing, and tech puts a lotta money into marketing. But that's all it is, hype. It'll die down like web3, Big Data, cloud, mobile, etc. It'll probably help out some tooling but it's not taking our jobs for decades (it will inevitably cost some jobs from executives who don't know better and ignore their talent, though. The truly sad part).
- zer00eyz 2y ago
  Go back further: At a point in time the database was a bleeding edge technology. Ingres (Postgres)... (the ofspring of Stonebreaker), Oracle, ... Db2? MSSQL? (Heavily used but not common)... So many failed DB's along the way, people keep trying to make "new ones" and they seem to fade off. When was the last time you heard someone starting a new project with Mongo, or Hadoop? Postgres and Maria are the go to for a reason.
  - threatofrain 2y ago
    Mongo is still very big, including for greenfield.
    - xwolfi 2y ago
      It's tiny compared to 10 years ago when it was all the rage and DBs were dead...
      - threatofrain 2y ago
        https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&geo=US&q=%2Fm%2F05z_r2n,%2Fm%2F05ynw,%2Fm%2F04y3k&hl=en https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...
  - daemonologist 2y ago
    There's a team at my company that chose Mongo for a new data transform project about a year ago. They didn't create a schema for their output (haven't to this day) and I'm convinced they chose it purely because they could just not handle any edge cases and hope nobody would notice until it was already deployed, which is what happened. For example maybe one in a thousand of the records are just error messages - like they were calling an API and got rate limited or a 404 or whatever and just took that response and shoved it into the collection with everything else.
    - ikari_pl 2y ago
      still, I would have out that mess in jsonb in Postgres :D
    - zer00eyz 2y ago
      I... Well dev/null is an option... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs It's all just history repeating.
      - emmelaich 2y ago
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzLT6_TQmq8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzLT6_TQmq8
  - patrickhogan1 2y ago
    Postgres is awesome and part of its charm is the extensibility it offers enabling the adoption of innovative features introduced by competing DB's. Postgres adopted a lot of mongos features when it released the JSON data type and support for path expressions
- roenxi 2y ago
  > It'll die down like web3, Big Data, cloud, mobile, etc At least half of those the promise was realised though - mobile is substantially bigger than the market for computers and cloud turned out to be pretty amazing. AWS is not necessarily cost effective but it is everywhere and turned out to be a massive deal. Big Data and AI are largely overlapping, so that is still to play. Only web3 hasn't had a big win - assuming web3 means a serious online use case for crypto. "Die down" in this context means that the hype will come, go and then turn out to be mostly correct 10 years later. That was largely what happened in the first internet boom - everyone could see where it was going, the first wave of enthusiasm was just early. I don't think any technology exists right now that will take my job, but I doubt that job will exist in 20 years because it looks like AI will be doing it. There are a lot of hardware generations still to land.
  - moose_man 2y ago
    "The proportion of global companies planning to increase spending on AI over the next 12 months has slipped to 63% from 93% a year earlier, according to a recent survey of 2,500 business leaders by software company Lucidworks Inc. Meanwhile, just 5% of companies in the US are using AI, according to the Census Bureau." https://archive.ph/h6QW7#selection-2069.305-2077.1 https://archive.ph/h6QW7#selection-2069.305-2077.1 https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-06-20/google-says-ai-is-magic-businesses-are-finding-out-it-isn-t https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-06-20/google...
    - roenxi 2y ago
      To a first approximation, I expect companies to spend nothing on AI and get put out of business if they are in a sector where AI does well. Over the medium-long term the disruption looks so intense that it'll be cheaper to rebuild processes from the ground up than graft AI onto existing businesses.
      - rsynnott 2y ago
        Which sectors are these?
  - 2y ago
benreesman 2y ago
[flagged]
- JohnMakin 2y ago
  “Is your issue with my tone or what I am saying? Because I will only apologize for the former”
- benreesman 2y ago
  [flagged]
nutrie 2y ago
I’ve been doing just fine ignoring AI altogether and focusing on my thing. I only have one life. Fridman had a guy on his podcast a while ago, I don’t remember his name, but he studies human languages, and the way he put it was the best summary of the actual capabilities I’ve heard so far. Very refreshing.
- blast 2y ago
  Who was that?
  - selcuka 2y ago
    Could it be Edward Gibson [1]? > I work on all aspects of human language: the words, the structures, across lots of languages. I mostly works [sic] with behavioral data: what people say, and how they perform in simple experiments. (I find it ironic to see a grammatical error in his bio. Probably because of a mass find/replace from "He" to "I" but still...) [1] http://tedlab.mit.edu/ted.html http://tedlab.mit.edu/ted.html
  - nutrie 2y ago
    I think #426
zer00eyz 2y ago
> This post has an unnecessarily aggressive style Im not sure its "unnecessary". He is, very clearly venting into an open mic. He starts with his bonfides (a Masters, he's built the tools not just been an API user). He adds more through out the article (talking about peers). His rants are backed by "anecdotes"... I can smell the "consulting" business oozing off them. He cant really lay it out, just speak in generalities... And where he can his concrete examples and data are on point. I dont know when angry became socially unacceptable in any form. But he is just that. He might have a right to be. You might have the right to be as well in light of the NONSENSE our industry is experiencing. Maybe its time to let the AI hate flow though you...
- advael 2y ago
  As someone who spent an inordinate amount of time trying very hard to be less angry despite having a lot of good reasons to be, a chunk of which overlap with this piece, I get a lot of dismissal from people who seem to think any expression of any negative emotion, especially anger, deeply discredits a person on its own. It's so pervasive that I find even addressing it to be refreshing, so thank you
  - zer00eyz 2y ago
    Thanks I will get down voted to oblivion for it. Cause getting angry at a problem and spending 2 days coding to completely replace a long standing issue isnt something that happens... People need to be less precious. You cant be happy all the time. In fact you probably should not be (life without contrast is boring). A little anger about the indignities and bullshit in the world is a good thing. As long as you're still rational and receptive, it can be an effective tool for communicating a point.
    - advael 2y ago
      Or just communicating the emotion! I think aligning on an emotional layer of perception is important for shaking people out of automated behaviors when it's necessary to, and I dislike this cultural shift toward punishing doing any of that from the standpoint of its mechanism design implications almost as much as I hate it on vibes
AceJohnny2 2y ago
I take it as humorous hyperbole, in the style of McSweeney's, like It’s Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfuckers https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/its-decorative-gourd-season-motherfuckers https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/its-decorative-gourd-sea...
- ludicity 2y ago
  Author here. I spent Thursday evening with my vocal teacher, where we mostly giggled because I couldn't hit the F required to start Billy Joel's "Movin' Out". So yes, it was most decidedly humorous hyperbole, and it has been taken this way by like, everyone that's not on Hackernews. Genuinely astonished that it isn't as obvious to other people as it was to you, but something I learned quickly is that you simply can't control how your words are perceived, and it isn't possible to waterproof sufficient long-form content. To be honest, this is kind of nice, because my girlfriend recently told me that I'm "extremely unthreatening" because of all the improv theater, fencing, music, reading, and writing. Now I know at least a few people on the internet are threatened by me. I'm a loose cannon, on the verge of totally unrestrained violence. I'm two steps removed from a dinosaur, and if someone looks at me funny, who KNOWS what'll happen.
  - AceJohnny2 2y ago
    Improv theater and fencing, you say? Have you, perchance, ever been involved in an Insult Sword Fight
- throwaway2037 2y ago
  I agree. A bunch of his other posts have similar style. I like it. It is witty, mixed in with serious technical subjects!
freeopinion 2y ago
In the last few years I have come to think of AI as transformative in the same way as relational databases. Yes, right now there's a lot of fad noise around AI. That will fade. And not everyone in IT will be swimming in AI. Just like not everyone today is neck deep in databases. But databases are still pretty fundamental to a lot of occupations. Front-end web devs might not write SQL all day, but they probably won't get very far without some comprehension. I see AI/ML becoming something as common. Maybe you need to know some outline of what gradient descent is. Maybe you just need some understanding of prompt engineering. But a reasonable grasp of the priciples is still going to be useful to a lot of people after all the hype moves to other topics.
yosito 2y ago
Honestly, I couldn't get past the violent language. Why do we give people who speak like this any respect. It's completely inappropriate.
- elktown 2y ago
  I'm curious to know if you avoid movies/TV-shows in a similar manner?
openmajestic 2y ago
I agree that the world isn't changing tomorrow like so much of the hype makes it out to be. I think I disagree that engineers can skip this hype train. I think it's like the internet - it will be utterly fundamental to the future of software, but it will take a decade plus for it to be truly integrated everywhere. But I think many companies will be utterly replaced if they don't adapt to the LLM world. Engineers likewise. Worth noting that I don't think you need to train the models or even touch the PyTorch level, but you do need to understand how LLMs work and learn how (if?) they can be applied to what you work on. There are big swaths of technology that are becoming obsolete with generative AI (most obviously/immediately in the visual creation and editing space) and IMO AI is going to continue to eat more and more domains over time.

by habosa 2y ago

johnnyanmac 2y ago

I empathize with it, but ultimately it's fruitless. This happens with every big tech hype. They very much want people to keep talking about it. It's part of the marketing, and tech puts a lotta money into marketing. But that's all it is, hype. It'll die down like web3, Big Data, cloud, mobile, etc. It'll probably help out some tooling but it's not taking our jobs for decades (it will inevitably cost some jobs from executives who don't know better and ignore their talent, though. The truly sad part).

zer00eyz 2y ago
Go back further: At a point in time the database was a bleeding edge technology. Ingres (Postgres)... (the ofspring of Stonebreaker), Oracle, ... Db2? MSSQL? (Heavily used but not common)... So many failed DB's along the way, people keep trying to make "new ones" and they seem to fade off. When was the last time you heard someone starting a new project with Mongo, or Hadoop? Postgres and Maria are the go to for a reason.
- threatofrain 2y ago
  Mongo is still very big, including for greenfield.
  - xwolfi 2y ago
    It's tiny compared to 10 years ago when it was all the rage and DBs were dead...
    - threatofrain 2y ago
      https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&geo=US&q=%2Fm%2F05z_r2n,%2Fm%2F05ynw,%2Fm%2F04y3k&hl=en https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...
- daemonologist 2y ago
  There's a team at my company that chose Mongo for a new data transform project about a year ago. They didn't create a schema for their output (haven't to this day) and I'm convinced they chose it purely because they could just not handle any edge cases and hope nobody would notice until it was already deployed, which is what happened. For example maybe one in a thousand of the records are just error messages - like they were calling an API and got rate limited or a 404 or whatever and just took that response and shoved it into the collection with everything else.
  - ikari_pl 2y ago
    still, I would have out that mess in jsonb in Postgres :D
  - zer00eyz 2y ago
    I... Well dev/null is an option... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs It's all just history repeating.
    - emmelaich 2y ago
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzLT6_TQmq8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzLT6_TQmq8
- patrickhogan1 2y ago
  Postgres is awesome and part of its charm is the extensibility it offers enabling the adoption of innovative features introduced by competing DB's. Postgres adopted a lot of mongos features when it released the JSON data type and support for path expressions
roenxi 2y ago
> It'll die down like web3, Big Data, cloud, mobile, etc At least half of those the promise was realised though - mobile is substantially bigger than the market for computers and cloud turned out to be pretty amazing. AWS is not necessarily cost effective but it is everywhere and turned out to be a massive deal. Big Data and AI are largely overlapping, so that is still to play. Only web3 hasn't had a big win - assuming web3 means a serious online use case for crypto. "Die down" in this context means that the hype will come, go and then turn out to be mostly correct 10 years later. That was largely what happened in the first internet boom - everyone could see where it was going, the first wave of enthusiasm was just early. I don't think any technology exists right now that will take my job, but I doubt that job will exist in 20 years because it looks like AI will be doing it. There are a lot of hardware generations still to land.
- moose_man 2y ago
  "The proportion of global companies planning to increase spending on AI over the next 12 months has slipped to 63% from 93% a year earlier, according to a recent survey of 2,500 business leaders by software company Lucidworks Inc. Meanwhile, just 5% of companies in the US are using AI, according to the Census Bureau." https://archive.ph/h6QW7#selection-2069.305-2077.1 https://archive.ph/h6QW7#selection-2069.305-2077.1 https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-06-20/google-says-ai-is-magic-businesses-are-finding-out-it-isn-t https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-06-20/google...
  - roenxi 2y ago
    To a first approximation, I expect companies to spend nothing on AI and get put out of business if they are in a sector where AI does well. Over the medium-long term the disruption looks so intense that it'll be cheaper to rebuild processes from the ground up than graft AI onto existing businesses.
    - rsynnott 2y ago
      Which sectors are these?
- 2y ago

benreesman 2y ago

[flagged]

JohnMakin 2y ago
“Is your issue with my tone or what I am saying? Because I will only apologize for the former”
benreesman 2y ago
[flagged]

nutrie 2y ago

I’ve been doing just fine ignoring AI altogether and focusing on my thing. I only have one life. Fridman had a guy on his podcast a while ago, I don’t remember his name, but he studies human languages, and the way he put it was the best summary of the actual capabilities I’ve heard so far. Very refreshing.

blast 2y ago
Who was that?
- selcuka 2y ago
  Could it be Edward Gibson [1]? > I work on all aspects of human language: the words, the structures, across lots of languages. I mostly works [sic] with behavioral data: what people say, and how they perform in simple experiments. (I find it ironic to see a grammatical error in his bio. Probably because of a mass find/replace from "He" to "I" but still...) [1] http://tedlab.mit.edu/ted.html http://tedlab.mit.edu/ted.html
- nutrie 2y ago
  I think #426

zer00eyz 2y ago

> This post has an unnecessarily aggressive style Im not sure its "unnecessary". He is, very clearly venting into an open mic. He starts with his bonfides (a Masters, he's built the tools not just been an API user). He adds more through out the article (talking about peers). His rants are backed by "anecdotes"... I can smell the "consulting" business oozing off them. He cant really lay it out, just speak in generalities... And where he can his concrete examples and data are on point. I dont know when angry became socially unacceptable in any form. But he is just that. He might have a right to be. You might have the right to be as well in light of the NONSENSE our industry is experiencing. Maybe its time to let the AI hate flow though you...

advael 2y ago
As someone who spent an inordinate amount of time trying very hard to be less angry despite having a lot of good reasons to be, a chunk of which overlap with this piece, I get a lot of dismissal from people who seem to think any expression of any negative emotion, especially anger, deeply discredits a person on its own. It's so pervasive that I find even addressing it to be refreshing, so thank you
- zer00eyz 2y ago
  Thanks I will get down voted to oblivion for it. Cause getting angry at a problem and spending 2 days coding to completely replace a long standing issue isnt something that happens... People need to be less precious. You cant be happy all the time. In fact you probably should not be (life without contrast is boring). A little anger about the indignities and bullshit in the world is a good thing. As long as you're still rational and receptive, it can be an effective tool for communicating a point.
  - advael 2y ago
    Or just communicating the emotion! I think aligning on an emotional layer of perception is important for shaking people out of automated behaviors when it's necessary to, and I dislike this cultural shift toward punishing doing any of that from the standpoint of its mechanism design implications almost as much as I hate it on vibes

AceJohnny2 2y ago

I take it as humorous hyperbole, in the style of McSweeney's, like It’s Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfuckers https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/its-decorative-gourd-season-motherfuckers https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/its-decorative-gourd-sea...

ludicity 2y ago
Author here. I spent Thursday evening with my vocal teacher, where we mostly giggled because I couldn't hit the F required to start Billy Joel's "Movin' Out". So yes, it was most decidedly humorous hyperbole, and it has been taken this way by like, everyone that's not on Hackernews. Genuinely astonished that it isn't as obvious to other people as it was to you, but something I learned quickly is that you simply can't control how your words are perceived, and it isn't possible to waterproof sufficient long-form content. To be honest, this is kind of nice, because my girlfriend recently told me that I'm "extremely unthreatening" because of all the improv theater, fencing, music, reading, and writing. Now I know at least a few people on the internet are threatened by me. I'm a loose cannon, on the verge of totally unrestrained violence. I'm two steps removed from a dinosaur, and if someone looks at me funny, who KNOWS what'll happen.
- AceJohnny2 2y ago
  Improv theater and fencing, you say? Have you, perchance, ever been involved in an Insult Sword Fight
throwaway2037 2y ago
I agree. A bunch of his other posts have similar style. I like it. It is witty, mixed in with serious technical subjects!

freeopinion 2y ago

In the last few years I have come to think of AI as transformative in the same way as relational databases. Yes, right now there's a lot of fad noise around AI. That will fade. And not everyone in IT will be swimming in AI. Just like not everyone today is neck deep in databases. But databases are still pretty fundamental to a lot of occupations. Front-end web devs might not write SQL all day, but they probably won't get very far without some comprehension. I see AI/ML becoming something as common. Maybe you need to know some outline of what gradient descent is. Maybe you just need some understanding of prompt engineering. But a reasonable grasp of the priciples is still going to be useful to a lot of people after all the hype moves to other topics.

yosito 2y ago

Honestly, I couldn't get past the violent language. Why do we give people who speak like this any respect. It's completely inappropriate.

elktown 2y ago
I'm curious to know if you avoid movies/TV-shows in a similar manner?

openmajestic 2y ago

I agree that the world isn't changing tomorrow like so much of the hype makes it out to be. I think I disagree that engineers can skip this hype train. I think it's like the internet - it will be utterly fundamental to the future of software, but it will take a decade plus for it to be truly integrated everywhere. But I think many companies will be utterly replaced if they don't adapt to the LLM world. Engineers likewise. Worth noting that I don't think you need to train the models or even touch the PyTorch level, but you do need to understand how LLMs work and learn how (if?) they can be applied to what you work on. There are big swaths of technology that are becoming obsolete with generative AI (most obviously/immediately in the visual creation and editing space) and IMO AI is going to continue to eat more and more domains over time.