4 ms·

These statements were true of the Internet too. Until it wasn't. It'll be a slow burn and then one day you turn around and notice it's everywhere. Even post do

by Bjartr 1y ago

These statements were true of the Internet too. Until it wasn't. It'll be a slow burn and then one day you turn around and notice it's everywhere. Even post dotcom bust there was still this generally shared understanding that you probably shouldn't meet people you met on the Internet and you shouldn't get in strangers cars. Today we use the Internet for the purpose of summoning strangers to us for the purpose of getting in their cars, and it's completely banal to do so. These shifts take time and in the early-adopter stage the applications look half-baked, or solutions looking for a problem. That's because most of them are. The few that aren't will accrete over time until there's a solid base.

asadotzler 1y ago
That was not my experience. I was meeting web chat friends IRL in 1995 and none of us were the least bit afraid. IRC and the web were everything SnapChat is today and not considered any stranger than AOL IM from 5 years before that which were hardly different from the BBSes that came before the subscription services. So, lots of people were meeting online in 1995. 5 years later couples who met on the internet were all over the place. When I moved to Silicon Valley in 2000, "I met my wife online" was hardly even a conversation starter. (I did meet my wife at The State of Insanity web chat boards in 1995.) Also, from 1998-2008, the world invested precisely what it's now invested in the last decade of LLM AIs and was already adding over a trillion dollars annually to the global economy. AI, with that same spending over about the same amount of time, is still an economic black hole and no one has any answers that would satisfy anyone other than VC about how it's all going to pay for itself. The internet, and particularly email, IM and the web, were going strong in the 90s and by the mid-2000s were absolutely dominant. This re-writing of history to suggest that AI deserves more runway to burn more hundreds of billions on things that will have no staying power like the trillion dollars in internet build out between '98-'08. These things don't take time. The whole broadband internet took about a decade and about as much money as AI has gotten in this latest bubble. At least when the dot com bubble burst, we had infrastructure with staying power and real societal value, unlike AI which will leave us with next to nothing when its bubble pops.
- bandrami 1y ago
  This is what I keep coming back to. If this is actually supercharging e.g. software developers, why aren't we absolutely awash in better software?
  - nathanappere 1y ago
    Because most software doesn’t need to be good, but just hit the “kind of does the job well enough” line. It improves velocity for this usecase.
    - bandrami 1y ago
      OK, but if this 12Xes devs why isn't there 12 times the crappy software there was 5 years ago? I'm not seeing a massive increase in the amount of available software. Shouldn't there be dozens of new word processors? Hundreds of new MIDI sequencers? Thousands of text editors? If this is actually making software easier to make where is the software?
      - nathanappere 1y ago
        It assumes there is a need for that software. It's not because I can ship the nth clone of flappy bird in minutes that I will?
        bandrami 1y ago
        I mean, people released a billion clones of flappy bird before AI so I don't see why they would stop? The dominant mobile game genre seems to be "line up three of the same thing and get a prize which will make you want to buy a better prize in our online store"; I don't see a flood of new entrants to this space. Do LLMs just not work for mobile development? What about native? Why is the only thing I'm actually seeing produced increasingly byzantine tooling for AI itself?
saltcured 1y ago
From your "even post dotcom bust..." I wonder if you are too young to know the time before that? It wasn't always that way. In my college days before the dotcom boom really took off, people could meet in real life after first contact on USENET, which I'd say was the social media of the time. You are referencing a later period where regular folks were piling onto the internet and giving each other advice. And maybe that advice was geared towards novices and/or children, coming from other novices, and steeped in a lot of urban legend fears of the unknown. Even the academic types started to embrace these ideas, lending credence to the idea that their magical garden was now turning into hunting grounds. But, imagine yourself in the early 90s, mapping your way (on paper, of course) to a trailer home in Silicon Valley or a secluded dirt road in the Santa Cruz mountains. You've never been there before, and your goal is to meet people you've never only seen as text on a screen. You assume they are real people but, technically, it could be all sock puppets. I did those things! It wasn't a horror movie. Instead it lead to light socializing and drinking.
globnomulous 1y ago
> These statements were true of the Internet too. Until it wasn't. It'll be a slow burn and then one day you turn around and notice it's everywhere. Maybe. What I remember is that the niche parts of the Internet remained niche. Everybody seemed excited about email, kids were excited about instant messaging, etc, and fundamentally that never changed; people have continued to use the Internet for communication. And the dotcom boom was a massive, stupid frenzy fueled by investors who had no idea what they were doing or what they were buying, and just wanted to make sure they didn't miss the next Microsoft, but the bubble was grounded in the accurate prediction that the web would become an essential part of business and an enormous money maker. Does all of this sound right? Please correct me if I'm wrong. I find myself in the unexpected, uncomfortable position of wildly contradicting and undermining what I thought I understood: that people are terrible at predicting the future of technology. Broadly speaking, in the 80s and 90s, the outlines of the future of technology was obvious and unmistakable: computers would become faster and more connected; that they'd take over or supplement a widening range of tasks and parts of our lives. But it also can be hard to remember the way you understood the world in the past, or the way things were, because your understanding of the present overwrites it. Remember when VR was going to be huge? Remember when 3d chat was going to be the next big thing? Remember when TV was going to be hugely important in the classroom? Remember when social media was going to make our lives better? People are making predictions regarding AI (or "AI") -- that it will do Everything Everywhere Very Soon, that it will lead to a 10x increase in worker output -- that strike me as absolutely, obviously wrong, even risible.
- danaris 1y ago
  > I find myself in the unexpected, uncomfortable position of wildly contradicting and undermining what I thought I understood: that people are terrible at predicting the future of technology. By and large, I think you're still right. But by the late '90s and early 2000s, the internet wasn't "the future of technology". It was already the present of technology. Anyone paying attention could already see by 1994 or 1995 that the Internet was a) a big deal, and b) growing massively. The key at that point was not figuring out that the technology was going to be huge; it was figuring out which companies using that technology would be huge—ie, predicting with more granularity the future of the technology that was the World Wide Web. And investors failed at that. Hard. That's what caused the dot-com bust.

by Bjartr 1y ago

asadotzler 1y ago

That was not my experience. I was meeting web chat friends IRL in 1995 and none of us were the least bit afraid. IRC and the web were everything SnapChat is today and not considered any stranger than AOL IM from 5 years before that which were hardly different from the BBSes that came before the subscription services. So, lots of people were meeting online in 1995. 5 years later couples who met on the internet were all over the place. When I moved to Silicon Valley in 2000, "I met my wife online" was hardly even a conversation starter. (I did meet my wife at The State of Insanity web chat boards in 1995.) Also, from 1998-2008, the world invested precisely what it's now invested in the last decade of LLM AIs and was already adding over a trillion dollars annually to the global economy. AI, with that same spending over about the same amount of time, is still an economic black hole and no one has any answers that would satisfy anyone other than VC about how it's all going to pay for itself. The internet, and particularly email, IM and the web, were going strong in the 90s and by the mid-2000s were absolutely dominant. This re-writing of history to suggest that AI deserves more runway to burn more hundreds of billions on things that will have no staying power like the trillion dollars in internet build out between '98-'08. These things don't take time. The whole broadband internet took about a decade and about as much money as AI has gotten in this latest bubble. At least when the dot com bubble burst, we had infrastructure with staying power and real societal value, unlike AI which will leave us with next to nothing when its bubble pops.

bandrami 1y ago
This is what I keep coming back to. If this is actually supercharging e.g. software developers, why aren't we absolutely awash in better software?
- nathanappere 1y ago
  Because most software doesn’t need to be good, but just hit the “kind of does the job well enough” line. It improves velocity for this usecase.
  - bandrami 1y ago
    OK, but if this 12Xes devs why isn't there 12 times the crappy software there was 5 years ago? I'm not seeing a massive increase in the amount of available software. Shouldn't there be dozens of new word processors? Hundreds of new MIDI sequencers? Thousands of text editors? If this is actually making software easier to make where is the software?
    - nathanappere 1y ago
      It assumes there is a need for that software. It's not because I can ship the nth clone of flappy bird in minutes that I will?
      - bandrami 1y ago
        I mean, people released a billion clones of flappy bird before AI so I don't see why they would stop? The dominant mobile game genre seems to be "line up three of the same thing and get a prize which will make you want to buy a better prize in our online store"; I don't see a flood of new entrants to this space. Do LLMs just not work for mobile development? What about native? Why is the only thing I'm actually seeing produced increasingly byzantine tooling for AI itself?

saltcured 1y ago

From your "even post dotcom bust..." I wonder if you are too young to know the time before that? It wasn't always that way. In my college days before the dotcom boom really took off, people could meet in real life after first contact on USENET, which I'd say was the social media of the time. You are referencing a later period where regular folks were piling onto the internet and giving each other advice. And maybe that advice was geared towards novices and/or children, coming from other novices, and steeped in a lot of urban legend fears of the unknown. Even the academic types started to embrace these ideas, lending credence to the idea that their magical garden was now turning into hunting grounds. But, imagine yourself in the early 90s, mapping your way (on paper, of course) to a trailer home in Silicon Valley or a secluded dirt road in the Santa Cruz mountains. You've never been there before, and your goal is to meet people you've never only seen as text on a screen. You assume they are real people but, technically, it could be all sock puppets. I did those things! It wasn't a horror movie. Instead it lead to light socializing and drinking.

globnomulous 1y ago

> These statements were true of the Internet too. Until it wasn't. It'll be a slow burn and then one day you turn around and notice it's everywhere. Maybe. What I remember is that the niche parts of the Internet remained niche. Everybody seemed excited about email, kids were excited about instant messaging, etc, and fundamentally that never changed; people have continued to use the Internet for communication. And the dotcom boom was a massive, stupid frenzy fueled by investors who had no idea what they were doing or what they were buying, and just wanted to make sure they didn't miss the next Microsoft, but the bubble was grounded in the accurate prediction that the web would become an essential part of business and an enormous money maker. Does all of this sound right? Please correct me if I'm wrong. I find myself in the unexpected, uncomfortable position of wildly contradicting and undermining what I thought I understood: that people are terrible at predicting the future of technology. Broadly speaking, in the 80s and 90s, the outlines of the future of technology was obvious and unmistakable: computers would become faster and more connected; that they'd take over or supplement a widening range of tasks and parts of our lives. But it also can be hard to remember the way you understood the world in the past, or the way things were, because your understanding of the present overwrites it. Remember when VR was going to be huge? Remember when 3d chat was going to be the next big thing? Remember when TV was going to be hugely important in the classroom? Remember when social media was going to make our lives better? People are making predictions regarding AI (or "AI") -- that it will do Everything Everywhere Very Soon, that it will lead to a 10x increase in worker output -- that strike me as absolutely, obviously wrong, even risible.

danaris 1y ago
> I find myself in the unexpected, uncomfortable position of wildly contradicting and undermining what I thought I understood: that people are terrible at predicting the future of technology. By and large, I think you're still right. But by the late '90s and early 2000s, the internet wasn't "the future of technology". It was already the present of technology. Anyone paying attention could already see by 1994 or 1995 that the Internet was a) a big deal, and b) growing massively. The key at that point was not figuring out that the technology was going to be huge; it was figuring out which companies using that technology would be huge—ie, predicting with more granularity the future of the technology that was the World Wide Web. And investors failed at that. Hard. That's what caused the dot-com bust.