10 ms·

The hype is the product

213 points by lr0 1y ago

murdockq 1y ago
This is kind of obvious because the internal incentives for employees (who make lots of product decisions) are based on stock being more than half of staff compensation comes via RSUs.
johndhi 1y ago
I liked this analysis quite a bit. A few reactions: (1) I don't think a tech company having a monopoly is necessary for a tech company to stop caring about their customers and focus on hype instead. Plenty of public tech companies do this, just to chase stock price and investors. (2) It's weirdly the opposite mindset that Bezos talked about in that famous old video where he talks about "creating the best experience for the customer" is his business strategy. Interesting. I think ultimately companies may be misguided -- because, in fact, ChatGPT is succeeding because they created a better search experience. And hype bandwagoners may fail because, long-term, customers don't like their products. In other words, this is a bad strategy. (3) what's weird about AI -- and I guess all hype trains -- is how part of me feels like it's hype, but part of me also sees the value in investing in it and its potential. The hype train itself and the crazy amount of money being spent on it almost defacto means it IS important and WILL be important. It's like a market and consumer interest has been created by the hype machine itself.
- nottorp 1y ago
  > ChatGPT is succeeding because they created a better search experience Funny enough, no "AI" prophet is mentioning that, in spite of it being the most useful thing about LLMs. What I wonder is how long it will last. LLMs are being fed their own content by now, and someone will surely want to "monetize" it after the VC money starts to dry up a bit. At least two paths to entshittification.
  - api 1y ago
    "A junior intern who has memorized the Internet" is how one member of our team described it and it's still one of the best descriptions of these things I've heard. Sometimes I think these things are more like JPEGs for knowledge expressed as language. They're more AM (artificial memory) than AI (artificial intelligence). It's a blurry line though. They can clearly do things that involve reasoning, but it's arguably because that's latent in the training data. So a JPEG is an imperfect analogy since lossy image compressors can't do any reasoning about images.
    - nottorp 1y ago
      > They can clearly do things that involve reasoning No. > but it's arguably because that's latent in the training data. The internet is just bigger than what a single human can encounter. Plus a single human isn't likely to be able to afford to pay for all that training data the "AI" peddlers have pirated :)
      - peterlk 1y ago
        A dismissive “no” is not a helpful addition to this discussion. The truth is much more interesting and subtle than “no”. Directed stochastic processes that reach a correct conclusion of novel logic problems more often than chance means that something interesting is happening, and it’s sensible to call that process “reasoning”. Does it mean that we’ve reached AGI? No. Does it mean the process reflects exactly what humans do? No. But dismissing “reasoning” out of hand also dismisses genuinely interesting phenomena.
        LamaOfRuin 1y ago
        Only if you redefine "reasoning". This is something that the generative AI industry has succeeded in convincing many people of, but that doesn't mean everyone has to accede to that change. It's true that something interesting is happening. GP did not dispute that. That doesn't make it reasoning, and many people still believe that words should have meaning in order to discuss things intelligently. Language is ultimately a living thing and will inevitably change. This usually involves people fighting the change and no one know ahead of time which side will win.
- Snarwin 1y ago
  > ChatGPT is succeeding because they created a better search experience Or perhaps because Google created a worse search experience.
  - leptons 1y ago
    The only thing I find bad about Google search now is their "AI" summary, which is often just wrong. I can deal with ads in the search results, I expect them, and I have no doubt ads will be shown in ChatGPT search results too, because they are bleeding money. And ChatGPT is under no obligation to show you anything with any accuracy, which is what the underlying tech is based on - guessing. Thanks, I'll take my chances with actual search results.
    - sheiyei 1y ago
      I think AI evangelists avoid talking about search because AI is why every internet search engine sucks. I use DuckDuckGo and Startpage, and when trying to find answers to nontrivial questions I get ONLY AI spam sites as results. (Come up with 1500 semi-specific SEO-friendly articles vaguely relating to subject the theme of website N. Then repeat until N=100 And shortly enough, AI is not even going to help with searching – it will eat its own s*t and offer that as answers. Unless the AI giants find some >99.99% way to filter out their own toxic waste from the training data.
      - strange_quark 1y ago
        What you're saying is totally correct about AI slop polluting the web, but the reason they don't want to talk about it is because the second they frame "AI" as slightly better search, it invites all sorts of unfavorable financial comparisons. It also deflates the hype because now you're talking about a better version of a thing everyone is familiar with instead of some magical new buzzword like "agent" or "RAG" or whatever we're going to be talking about next year when agents don't work.
      - zahlman 1y ago
        There was a period I remember fondly when the SEO slop was still mostly human generated because AI couldn't quite do it yet, and I was getting much better results from DDG than from Google. Now it's all despair-inducing.
- jerf 1y ago
  "what's weird about AI -- and I guess all hype trains -- is how part of me feels like it's hype, but part of me also sees the value in investing in it and its potential." The DotCom bubble is an instructive historical example. Pretty much every wild promise made during the bubble has manifested, right down to delivering pet food. It's just that for the bubble to have been worthwhile, we would essentially have had the internet of 2015 or 2020 delivered in 2001. (And because people forget, it is not too far off to say that would be like trying to deliver the internet of 2020 on machines with specs comparable to a Nintendo Wii. I'm trying to pick a game console as a sort of touchpoint, and there probably isn't a perfect comparison, but based on the machines I had in 2000 the specs are roughly inline with a Wii, at least by the numbers. Though the Wii would have murdered my 2000-era laptop on graphics.) I don't know that the AI bubble will have a similar 20-year lag, but I also think it's out over its skis. What we have now is both extremely impressive, but also not justifying the valuations being poured into it in the here & now. There's no contradiction there. In fact if you look at history there's been all sorts of similar cases of promising technologies being grotesquely over-invested in, even though they were transformative and amazing. If you want to go back further in history, the railroad bubble also has some similarities to the Dot Com bubble. It's not that railroad wasn't in fact a completely transformative technology, it's just that the random hodgepodge of a hundred companies slapping random sizes and shapes of track in half-random places wasn't worth the valuations they were given. The promise took decades longer to manifest.
  - zahlman 1y ago
    > (And because people forget, it is not too far off to say that would be like trying to deliver the internet of 2020 on machines with specs comparable to a Nintendo Wii. I'm trying to pick a game console as a sort of touchpoint, and there probably isn't a perfect comparison, but based on the machines I had in 2000 the specs are roughly inline with a Wii, at least by the numbers. Though the Wii would have murdered my 2000-era laptop on graphics.) It depresses me to think how much of the 2020 Internet (or 2025 Internet) that is actually of value really ought to be able to run on hardware that old. Or so I imagine, anyway. I wonder if anyone's tried to benchmark simple CSS transitions and SVG rendering on ancient CPUs.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- zahlman 1y ago
  > It's weirdly the opposite mindset that Bezos talked about in that famous old video where he talks about "creating the best experience for the customer" is his business strategy. A big part of hype as a business strategy is to convince potential customers that you intend to create the best experience for them. And the simplest approach to that task is to say it outright. > in fact, ChatGPT is succeeding because they created a better search experience. Sure. But they don't market it like that, and a large fraction of people reporting success with ChatGPT don't seem to be characterizing their experiences that way. Even if you discount the people explicitly attempting to, well, chat with it.
- mattigames 1y ago
  "Created a better search experience" sure, just like eating human meat would create a better dinning experience because there is a lot of humans near you, at the end of the day what "AI" is doing is butchering a bunch of websites and giving you a blend, in the progress making you no longer required to enter those websites that needed you to do so to survive, because they are monetized by third party ads or some paid offering.
- jnpnj 1y ago
  And there's a part of me that kinda think "lots of money will mean some large scale investments in labs that might result in some rare findings". Even though the hype + investor chase feels very shallow to me too.
- z3ugma 1y ago
  Even if hype bandwagon fails in the long term it is still probably an optimal investment strategy which is IMO why we see so much enshittification. If there is 1 ChatGPT or Amazon- level product a decade, you are not likely to be an early investor in it. A reliable play is to invest in many companies, enshittify them, extract small rents reliably rather than betting the farm on a good product.
GuinansEyebrows 1y ago
"The spectacle is the inverted image of society in which relations between commodities have supplanted relations between people, in which 'passive identification with the spectacle supplants genuine activity'." [0] I read The Society of the Spectacle too young and it broke me forever :( [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Society_of_the_Spectacle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Society_of_the_Spectacle
h2zizzle 1y ago
Hype is the product, and what it's the product of is a wealth imbalance that forces capital into (and I apologize in advance for the ire this characterization is likely to cause) Stupid Boomer Things. That is, the way the oldest and wealthiest Americans want to live and/or what they think will make them the most money. Poor old people don't like this kind of change because it has historically come at their expense. Young people don't like this new tech because they recognize it (to varying degrees of correctness) as pulling up the ladder on entry-level positions, decimating the social and knowledge landscape (particularly the treacherous, abyssal seas that used to be the World Wide Web), amd drawing capital away from green tech and social investment and into climate change-exacerbating energy usage and construction. But they don't have the capital to dictate investment decisions, so no one cares. I don't think this changes without some sort of economic "catastrophe" that redistributes wealth fast enough that the current arbiters can't get their legs back under themselves in time to prevent it. That's why you keep seeing all of these weird and novel tactics to forestall even the hint of a recession, and why so many young people are practically begging for, say, a repeat of 2008. Edit: Also, I really like this site's layout on my phone. It feels fresh and performant.
- leptons 1y ago
  >Stupid Boomer Things Ageism is never a good look. There are smart and stupid people in every age group.
  - h2zizzle 1y ago
    Doesn't matter. If a system's purpose is what it does, a people's priorities are what they invest in, in aggregate. Boomers hold outsize wealth and have steered America's economic and political ship for most of the lives of the younger generations. So the current crop of Stupid Things are mostly Stupid Boomer Things (or else they wouldn't exist, as there would be no money or political will to sustain them). Refusing to take responsibility isn't a good look, either. So is derailing with respectability gripes. Let's solve the problem at hand.
    - leptons 1y ago
micromacrofoot 1y ago
I don't know if anyone's done research on this extensively, but we seem to be very much living in a "vibe" society all around? the market is more irrational than ever, outright lies can be enough to hype up millions in value, and conversely the specter of bad vibes can tank anything. Has it always been this way? or am I just slow on the uptake
- mlsu 1y ago
  I have noticed this as well, and yes it hasn't always been this way. My theory is that we are simply too wealthy. For the average rich person (the top 20-30%), the first $70,000 goes to real companies who sell real things for money. Past that and it all is just kinda funny money. In our society there are actually a ton of people making this kind of money, so there's just this huge chunk of money that isn't really tied to anything real. If you lose $100k on cryptocurrency, or you spend $800 on some metaverse thing, it's fine, you can still buy food. Of course this is also why people who don't make this kind of money are so baffled (and angry). Hearing that some no product company [1] was sold for billions of dollars feels insane when you're seriously considering the difference between a $5000 and a $6000 car. [1] (https://openai.com/sam-and-jony/ https://openai.com/sam-and-jony/)
  - gowld 1y ago
    > My theory is that we are simply too wealthy. Maybe 0.1% to 1% of us are, but the rest of us aren't.
    - micromacrofoot 1y ago
      I think it's more insidious than the top 1%, what % of americans buy some frivolous overpriced coffee or cookie regularly? viral beverages like prime? the absurdity of ordering mcdonalds via uber eats? income inequality is wild right now, but even lower classes are participating in some absurd sort of money grabs regularly... the top of the market, these billion dollar companies that have perfected this sort of private equity capitalism have optimized every day luxury that can bleed anyone dry... not just the rich... wework or wish go down the tubes and it's on to the next one, founders rocket off and some unlucky investors are stuck holding the bag every category of daily life now has some optimized extraction mechanism
gowld 1y ago
Did the author never watch Silicon Valley? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZFTaEenaHM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZFTaEenaHM Richard, listen-- No, you listen to me Jack. You promised me that you would never compromise the product, so do you feel like taking some action and backing me up on this because me and my product feel pretty compromised right now Richard, I don't think you understand what the product is. The product isn't the platform, and the product isn't your algorithm either, and it's not even the software. Do you know what Pied Piper's product is, Richard? Is--is it me? Oh God no no how could it possibly be you? You got fired! Pied Piper's product is its stock.
mrweasel 1y ago
We do need to start talking about the failure of capitalism. I'm not naive enough to think that we should turn to communism, but it's clear how we're taught capitalism is suppose to work and how it plays out in reality are two different things. Ideally capitalism would yield better product or services, for a lower price. That's no longer happening. We're getting shittier products and we're paying more. But somehow we convince ourselves that it's still good, because the stock market is going up, corporate profits are going up. If there was ever any doubt that the hype is the product, then please explain the Tesla stock, 100% hype driven, there is zero correlation between the stock price and how the company is actually doing.
- mlazos 1y ago
  It’s because capitalism assumes a free market with competition. If you allow monopolies to thrive, you will not get those benefits. It’s just that some of these types of markets have different dynamics due to their structure. E.g. natural monopolies where the barrier to entry is huge up front costs. Interestingly the AI startup ecosystem is raising enough money to surpass the barrier of needing a ton of data to train AI.
  - mrweasel 1y ago
    > It’s because capitalism assumes a free market with competition But even in the cases where we do have a free market, we're often seeing one company fiddle with quality, maybe drop the price a little, then the rest quickly follow and price goes right back up across the board.
  - zahlman 1y ago
    For centuries as capitalism developed from more primitive systems (like feudalism and mercantilism), goods and services that gain value from social network effects were well beyond anyone's imagination. The printing press survived the church's attempts at suppression, but nobody back then could have conceived of a service that automatically distributed copies of your books to your friends — much less one that could profit from knowing who your friends are, rather than from explicitly charging you for the service.
  - 1y ago
echo7394 1y ago
I just came to mention that I really enjoy the UI of this website. That is all.
- lr0 1y ago
  Me too. I miss a lot when the web used to look more like this.
marcellus23 1y ago
> There is more and more proof these tools are not as useful as they are hyped out to be. LLM-based coding tools seem to actually hurt programmers’ productivity. “Hallucinations” are not going away because the only thing these LLMs can do is “hallucinate”; they just sometimes (about 30% of the time, in fact) happen to generate some text that has some connection to reality. This hurts the article, I think. I don't disagree with his point about companies caring too much about stockholders. But this anti-LLM envangelism just comes across as ludditism.
- indoordin0saur 1y ago
  Yeah, author is definitely false here. I have 10+ years of professional experience backend programming and I've found VS Code copilot to be pretty helpful overall. It saves me a lot of time digging through documentation and writing out tedious little functions (e.g. converting dates from one format to another). I wouldn't use it to write anything lengthy but overall it has improved my productivity, though I could see how it might hurt junior engineers.
- fmbb 1y ago
  > This hurts the article, I think. I don't disagree with his point about companies caring too much about stockholders. But this anti-LLM envangelism just comes across as ludditism. Is there any research out there suggesting LLMs help programmers get stuff done? I can't say I follow the research closely but I have not seen any. Googling for [ai llm productivity research] and looking at the first page of results I can't find much interesting evidence. One report says users asked to create a basic web server in JS complete the task 55% faster using an LLM. One report measures "perceived productivity". Students given text writing tasks are faster. One report measures productivity as lines of code written. The rest seem to just be projecting theoretical productivity gains. Has anyone measured any improved productivity? I can see this report from METR that is actually measuring something: https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-os-dev-study/ https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o... > Core Result > > When developers are allowed to use AI tools, they take 19% longer to complete issues—a significant slowdown that goes against developer beliefs and expert forecasts. This gap between perception and reality is striking: developers expected AI to speed them up by 24%, and even after experiencing the slowdown, they still believed AI had sped them up by 20%. But surely someone must have also found results showing productivity gains. I assume I was just not looking hard enough. I am a happy Copilot Pro user since 2021, still.
alsefj 1y ago
LinkedIn just replaced its Jobs page with AI Slop. You can't do regular searches anymore, they've filtered and normalized all results, and they stopped labeling promoted content. (All searches now return the same number of results, many of which have little to do with your query) So now I'm deleting my LinkedIn account. Much of the internet is already dead.
ankit219 1y ago
The study where developers lost productivity due to using AI tools should always be mentioned with caveats. This comment by simonw for reference: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44522772 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44522772 1/ They tested on 16 experienced developers. 2/ They only used cursor. No mention of other tools at the time. Cursor is notoriously bad on bigger codebases, while even Windsurf (competition at the time) would have shown different results. 3/ They only allowed training for 30 mins on cursor. 4/ As simonw mentions, the ones who improved had some previous experience with cursor. 5/ Yet, the study is definitively mentioned as AI actively ruining productivity and none of the other factors.
pedalpete 1y ago
I think this is just a symbol of the current hype cycle. We are living in a strange time because there is a combination of fear and greed in the market. Yesterday I learned that market leverage (credit) is trending towards levels of the dot-com bust and great recession (https://en.macromicro.me/collections/34/us-stock-relative/89294/sp500-finra https://en.macromicro.me/collections/34/us-stock-relative/89...) When the tide goes out, the real swimmers remain and the tourists leave. I quite enjoy that time in tech specifically, though I'm sure other industries face similar in-and-out flows.
bagacrap 1y ago
I blame the tech industry less than I blame the financial industry. Meme stocks, after all, don't have much to do with technology, aside from telecommunications enabling mass coordination among retail actors. Bitcoin doesn't either, although it has the veneer of tech, given that when it was known only to a few engineers, its market cap was substantially zero. Tech companies are just reacting to market forces. The author invokes FB/Meta, but Zuck was blazing his own shitty trail with the metaverse until the market punished him beyond all reason (relative to the cash flow the ads business was still generating). He only jumped on the AI hype train when he was forced to. It's been a long time since fundamental analysis a la Warren Buffet was the core of prudent investing. But I think this is a result of human nature --- a large percent of people just like gambling, even if the expected value of their wagers is negative. I also get the anger that the author feels. As a tech worker, my professional life is dictated to me by the whims of the market. But the all the attention from financiers is also a result of the immense wealth the industry has attracted (or generated, based on your perspective), so it's hard to complain without self-consciousness. Like many here, I probably live online a bit too much, and I try to see the silver lining in enshitiffication as a force that encourages me to live more in the real world, with my family members, in the present.
totallykvothe 1y ago
That is the coolest website design I've seen in a long time. Absolutely love it. The article was good too.
- rossant 1y ago
  Yes, although the drop shadow on the entire text was a bit distracting.
thomassmith65 1y ago
Cathartic! Every point rings true. In the 90s the hip thing was to run a 'customer focused' business. Now the hip thing is to run a 'pigeon focused' business.

213 points by lr0 1y ago

This is kind of obvious because the internal incentives for employees (who make lots of product decisions) are based on stock being more than half of staff compensation comes via RSUs.

johndhi 1y ago

I liked this analysis quite a bit. A few reactions: (1) I don't think a tech company having a monopoly is necessary for a tech company to stop caring about their customers and focus on hype instead. Plenty of public tech companies do this, just to chase stock price and investors. (2) It's weirdly the opposite mindset that Bezos talked about in that famous old video where he talks about "creating the best experience for the customer" is his business strategy. Interesting. I think ultimately companies may be misguided -- because, in fact, ChatGPT is succeeding because they created a better search experience. And hype bandwagoners may fail because, long-term, customers don't like their products. In other words, this is a bad strategy. (3) what's weird about AI -- and I guess all hype trains -- is how part of me feels like it's hype, but part of me also sees the value in investing in it and its potential. The hype train itself and the crazy amount of money being spent on it almost defacto means it IS important and WILL be important. It's like a market and consumer interest has been created by the hype machine itself.

nottorp 1y ago
> ChatGPT is succeeding because they created a better search experience Funny enough, no "AI" prophet is mentioning that, in spite of it being the most useful thing about LLMs. What I wonder is how long it will last. LLMs are being fed their own content by now, and someone will surely want to "monetize" it after the VC money starts to dry up a bit. At least two paths to entshittification.
- api 1y ago
  "A junior intern who has memorized the Internet" is how one member of our team described it and it's still one of the best descriptions of these things I've heard. Sometimes I think these things are more like JPEGs for knowledge expressed as language. They're more AM (artificial memory) than AI (artificial intelligence). It's a blurry line though. They can clearly do things that involve reasoning, but it's arguably because that's latent in the training data. So a JPEG is an imperfect analogy since lossy image compressors can't do any reasoning about images.
  - nottorp 1y ago
    > They can clearly do things that involve reasoning No. > but it's arguably because that's latent in the training data. The internet is just bigger than what a single human can encounter. Plus a single human isn't likely to be able to afford to pay for all that training data the "AI" peddlers have pirated :)
    - peterlk 1y ago
      A dismissive “no” is not a helpful addition to this discussion. The truth is much more interesting and subtle than “no”. Directed stochastic processes that reach a correct conclusion of novel logic problems more often than chance means that something interesting is happening, and it’s sensible to call that process “reasoning”. Does it mean that we’ve reached AGI? No. Does it mean the process reflects exactly what humans do? No. But dismissing “reasoning” out of hand also dismisses genuinely interesting phenomena.
      - LamaOfRuin 1y ago
        Only if you redefine "reasoning". This is something that the generative AI industry has succeeded in convincing many people of, but that doesn't mean everyone has to accede to that change. It's true that something interesting is happening. GP did not dispute that. That doesn't make it reasoning, and many people still believe that words should have meaning in order to discuss things intelligently. Language is ultimately a living thing and will inevitably change. This usually involves people fighting the change and no one know ahead of time which side will win.
Snarwin 1y ago
> ChatGPT is succeeding because they created a better search experience Or perhaps because Google created a worse search experience.
- leptons 1y ago
  The only thing I find bad about Google search now is their "AI" summary, which is often just wrong. I can deal with ads in the search results, I expect them, and I have no doubt ads will be shown in ChatGPT search results too, because they are bleeding money. And ChatGPT is under no obligation to show you anything with any accuracy, which is what the underlying tech is based on - guessing. Thanks, I'll take my chances with actual search results.
  - sheiyei 1y ago
    I think AI evangelists avoid talking about search because AI is why every internet search engine sucks. I use DuckDuckGo and Startpage, and when trying to find answers to nontrivial questions I get ONLY AI spam sites as results. (Come up with 1500 semi-specific SEO-friendly articles vaguely relating to subject the theme of website N. Then repeat until N=100 And shortly enough, AI is not even going to help with searching – it will eat its own s*t and offer that as answers. Unless the AI giants find some >99.99% way to filter out their own toxic waste from the training data.
    - strange_quark 1y ago
      What you're saying is totally correct about AI slop polluting the web, but the reason they don't want to talk about it is because the second they frame "AI" as slightly better search, it invites all sorts of unfavorable financial comparisons. It also deflates the hype because now you're talking about a better version of a thing everyone is familiar with instead of some magical new buzzword like "agent" or "RAG" or whatever we're going to be talking about next year when agents don't work.
    - zahlman 1y ago
      There was a period I remember fondly when the SEO slop was still mostly human generated because AI couldn't quite do it yet, and I was getting much better results from DDG than from Google. Now it's all despair-inducing.
jerf 1y ago
"what's weird about AI -- and I guess all hype trains -- is how part of me feels like it's hype, but part of me also sees the value in investing in it and its potential." The DotCom bubble is an instructive historical example. Pretty much every wild promise made during the bubble has manifested, right down to delivering pet food. It's just that for the bubble to have been worthwhile, we would essentially have had the internet of 2015 or 2020 delivered in 2001. (And because people forget, it is not too far off to say that would be like trying to deliver the internet of 2020 on machines with specs comparable to a Nintendo Wii. I'm trying to pick a game console as a sort of touchpoint, and there probably isn't a perfect comparison, but based on the machines I had in 2000 the specs are roughly inline with a Wii, at least by the numbers. Though the Wii would have murdered my 2000-era laptop on graphics.) I don't know that the AI bubble will have a similar 20-year lag, but I also think it's out over its skis. What we have now is both extremely impressive, but also not justifying the valuations being poured into it in the here & now. There's no contradiction there. In fact if you look at history there's been all sorts of similar cases of promising technologies being grotesquely over-invested in, even though they were transformative and amazing. If you want to go back further in history, the railroad bubble also has some similarities to the Dot Com bubble. It's not that railroad wasn't in fact a completely transformative technology, it's just that the random hodgepodge of a hundred companies slapping random sizes and shapes of track in half-random places wasn't worth the valuations they were given. The promise took decades longer to manifest.
- zahlman 1y ago
  > (And because people forget, it is not too far off to say that would be like trying to deliver the internet of 2020 on machines with specs comparable to a Nintendo Wii. I'm trying to pick a game console as a sort of touchpoint, and there probably isn't a perfect comparison, but based on the machines I had in 2000 the specs are roughly inline with a Wii, at least by the numbers. Though the Wii would have murdered my 2000-era laptop on graphics.) It depresses me to think how much of the 2020 Internet (or 2025 Internet) that is actually of value really ought to be able to run on hardware that old. Or so I imagine, anyway. I wonder if anyone's tried to benchmark simple CSS transitions and SVG rendering on ancient CPUs.
deleted 1y ago
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zahlman 1y ago
> It's weirdly the opposite mindset that Bezos talked about in that famous old video where he talks about "creating the best experience for the customer" is his business strategy. A big part of hype as a business strategy is to convince potential customers that you intend to create the best experience for them. And the simplest approach to that task is to say it outright. > in fact, ChatGPT is succeeding because they created a better search experience. Sure. But they don't market it like that, and a large fraction of people reporting success with ChatGPT don't seem to be characterizing their experiences that way. Even if you discount the people explicitly attempting to, well, chat with it.
mattigames 1y ago
"Created a better search experience" sure, just like eating human meat would create a better dinning experience because there is a lot of humans near you, at the end of the day what "AI" is doing is butchering a bunch of websites and giving you a blend, in the progress making you no longer required to enter those websites that needed you to do so to survive, because they are monetized by third party ads or some paid offering.
jnpnj 1y ago
And there's a part of me that kinda think "lots of money will mean some large scale investments in labs that might result in some rare findings". Even though the hype + investor chase feels very shallow to me too.
z3ugma 1y ago
Even if hype bandwagon fails in the long term it is still probably an optimal investment strategy which is IMO why we see so much enshittification. If there is 1 ChatGPT or Amazon- level product a decade, you are not likely to be an early investor in it. A reliable play is to invest in many companies, enshittify them, extract small rents reliably rather than betting the farm on a good product.

GuinansEyebrows 1y ago

"The spectacle is the inverted image of society in which relations between commodities have supplanted relations between people, in which 'passive identification with the spectacle supplants genuine activity'." [0] I read The Society of the Spectacle too young and it broke me forever :( [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Society_of_the_Spectacle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Society_of_the_Spectacle

h2zizzle 1y ago

Hype is the product, and what it's the product of is a wealth imbalance that forces capital into (and I apologize in advance for the ire this characterization is likely to cause) Stupid Boomer Things. That is, the way the oldest and wealthiest Americans want to live and/or what they think will make them the most money. Poor old people don't like this kind of change because it has historically come at their expense. Young people don't like this new tech because they recognize it (to varying degrees of correctness) as pulling up the ladder on entry-level positions, decimating the social and knowledge landscape (particularly the treacherous, abyssal seas that used to be the World Wide Web), amd drawing capital away from green tech and social investment and into climate change-exacerbating energy usage and construction. But they don't have the capital to dictate investment decisions, so no one cares. I don't think this changes without some sort of economic "catastrophe" that redistributes wealth fast enough that the current arbiters can't get their legs back under themselves in time to prevent it. That's why you keep seeing all of these weird and novel tactics to forestall even the hint of a recession, and why so many young people are practically begging for, say, a repeat of 2008. Edit: Also, I really like this site's layout on my phone. It feels fresh and performant.

leptons 1y ago
>Stupid Boomer Things Ageism is never a good look. There are smart and stupid people in every age group.
- h2zizzle 1y ago
  Doesn't matter. If a system's purpose is what it does, a people's priorities are what they invest in, in aggregate. Boomers hold outsize wealth and have steered America's economic and political ship for most of the lives of the younger generations. So the current crop of Stupid Things are mostly Stupid Boomer Things (or else they wouldn't exist, as there would be no money or political will to sustain them). Refusing to take responsibility isn't a good look, either. So is derailing with respectability gripes. Let's solve the problem at hand.
  - leptons 1y ago

micromacrofoot 1y ago

I don't know if anyone's done research on this extensively, but we seem to be very much living in a "vibe" society all around? the market is more irrational than ever, outright lies can be enough to hype up millions in value, and conversely the specter of bad vibes can tank anything. Has it always been this way? or am I just slow on the uptake

mlsu 1y ago
I have noticed this as well, and yes it hasn't always been this way. My theory is that we are simply too wealthy. For the average rich person (the top 20-30%), the first $70,000 goes to real companies who sell real things for money. Past that and it all is just kinda funny money. In our society there are actually a ton of people making this kind of money, so there's just this huge chunk of money that isn't really tied to anything real. If you lose $100k on cryptocurrency, or you spend $800 on some metaverse thing, it's fine, you can still buy food. Of course this is also why people who don't make this kind of money are so baffled (and angry). Hearing that some no product company [1] was sold for billions of dollars feels insane when you're seriously considering the difference between a $5000 and a $6000 car. [1] (https://openai.com/sam-and-jony/ https://openai.com/sam-and-jony/)
- gowld 1y ago
  > My theory is that we are simply too wealthy. Maybe 0.1% to 1% of us are, but the rest of us aren't.
  - micromacrofoot 1y ago
    I think it's more insidious than the top 1%, what % of americans buy some frivolous overpriced coffee or cookie regularly? viral beverages like prime? the absurdity of ordering mcdonalds via uber eats? income inequality is wild right now, but even lower classes are participating in some absurd sort of money grabs regularly... the top of the market, these billion dollar companies that have perfected this sort of private equity capitalism have optimized every day luxury that can bleed anyone dry... not just the rich... wework or wish go down the tubes and it's on to the next one, founders rocket off and some unlucky investors are stuck holding the bag every category of daily life now has some optimized extraction mechanism

gowld 1y ago

Did the author never watch Silicon Valley? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZFTaEenaHM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZFTaEenaHM Richard, listen-- No, you listen to me Jack. You promised me that you would never compromise the product, so do you feel like taking some action and backing me up on this because me and my product feel pretty compromised right now Richard, I don't think you understand what the product is. The product isn't the platform, and the product isn't your algorithm either, and it's not even the software. Do you know what Pied Piper's product is, Richard? Is--is it me? Oh God no no how could it possibly be you? You got fired! Pied Piper's product is its stock.

mrweasel 1y ago

We do need to start talking about the failure of capitalism. I'm not naive enough to think that we should turn to communism, but it's clear how we're taught capitalism is suppose to work and how it plays out in reality are two different things. Ideally capitalism would yield better product or services, for a lower price. That's no longer happening. We're getting shittier products and we're paying more. But somehow we convince ourselves that it's still good, because the stock market is going up, corporate profits are going up. If there was ever any doubt that the hype is the product, then please explain the Tesla stock, 100% hype driven, there is zero correlation between the stock price and how the company is actually doing.

mlazos 1y ago
It’s because capitalism assumes a free market with competition. If you allow monopolies to thrive, you will not get those benefits. It’s just that some of these types of markets have different dynamics due to their structure. E.g. natural monopolies where the barrier to entry is huge up front costs. Interestingly the AI startup ecosystem is raising enough money to surpass the barrier of needing a ton of data to train AI.
- mrweasel 1y ago
  > It’s because capitalism assumes a free market with competition But even in the cases where we do have a free market, we're often seeing one company fiddle with quality, maybe drop the price a little, then the rest quickly follow and price goes right back up across the board.
- zahlman 1y ago
  For centuries as capitalism developed from more primitive systems (like feudalism and mercantilism), goods and services that gain value from social network effects were well beyond anyone's imagination. The printing press survived the church's attempts at suppression, but nobody back then could have conceived of a service that automatically distributed copies of your books to your friends — much less one that could profit from knowing who your friends are, rather than from explicitly charging you for the service.
- 1y ago

echo7394 1y ago

I just came to mention that I really enjoy the UI of this website. That is all.

lr0 1y ago
Me too. I miss a lot when the web used to look more like this.

marcellus23 1y ago

> There is more and more proof these tools are not as useful as they are hyped out to be. LLM-based coding tools seem to actually hurt programmers’ productivity. “Hallucinations” are not going away because the only thing these LLMs can do is “hallucinate”; they just sometimes (about 30% of the time, in fact) happen to generate some text that has some connection to reality. This hurts the article, I think. I don't disagree with his point about companies caring too much about stockholders. But this anti-LLM envangelism just comes across as ludditism.

indoordin0saur 1y ago
Yeah, author is definitely false here. I have 10+ years of professional experience backend programming and I've found VS Code copilot to be pretty helpful overall. It saves me a lot of time digging through documentation and writing out tedious little functions (e.g. converting dates from one format to another). I wouldn't use it to write anything lengthy but overall it has improved my productivity, though I could see how it might hurt junior engineers.
fmbb 1y ago
> This hurts the article, I think. I don't disagree with his point about companies caring too much about stockholders. But this anti-LLM envangelism just comes across as ludditism. Is there any research out there suggesting LLMs help programmers get stuff done? I can't say I follow the research closely but I have not seen any. Googling for [ai llm productivity research] and looking at the first page of results I can't find much interesting evidence. One report says users asked to create a basic web server in JS complete the task 55% faster using an LLM. One report measures "perceived productivity". Students given text writing tasks are faster. One report measures productivity as lines of code written. The rest seem to just be projecting theoretical productivity gains. Has anyone measured any improved productivity? I can see this report from METR that is actually measuring something: https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-os-dev-study/ https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o... > Core Result > > When developers are allowed to use AI tools, they take 19% longer to complete issues—a significant slowdown that goes against developer beliefs and expert forecasts. This gap between perception and reality is striking: developers expected AI to speed them up by 24%, and even after experiencing the slowdown, they still believed AI had sped them up by 20%. But surely someone must have also found results showing productivity gains. I assume I was just not looking hard enough. I am a happy Copilot Pro user since 2021, still.

alsefj 1y ago

LinkedIn just replaced its Jobs page with AI Slop. You can't do regular searches anymore, they've filtered and normalized all results, and they stopped labeling promoted content. (All searches now return the same number of results, many of which have little to do with your query) So now I'm deleting my LinkedIn account. Much of the internet is already dead.

ankit219 1y ago

The study where developers lost productivity due to using AI tools should always be mentioned with caveats. This comment by simonw for reference: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44522772 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44522772 1/ They tested on 16 experienced developers. 2/ They only used cursor. No mention of other tools at the time. Cursor is notoriously bad on bigger codebases, while even Windsurf (competition at the time) would have shown different results. 3/ They only allowed training for 30 mins on cursor. 4/ As simonw mentions, the ones who improved had some previous experience with cursor. 5/ Yet, the study is definitively mentioned as AI actively ruining productivity and none of the other factors.

pedalpete 1y ago

I think this is just a symbol of the current hype cycle. We are living in a strange time because there is a combination of fear and greed in the market. Yesterday I learned that market leverage (credit) is trending towards levels of the dot-com bust and great recession (https://en.macromicro.me/collections/34/us-stock-relative/89294/sp500-finra https://en.macromicro.me/collections/34/us-stock-relative/89...) When the tide goes out, the real swimmers remain and the tourists leave. I quite enjoy that time in tech specifically, though I'm sure other industries face similar in-and-out flows.

bagacrap 1y ago

I blame the tech industry less than I blame the financial industry. Meme stocks, after all, don't have much to do with technology, aside from telecommunications enabling mass coordination among retail actors. Bitcoin doesn't either, although it has the veneer of tech, given that when it was known only to a few engineers, its market cap was substantially zero. Tech companies are just reacting to market forces. The author invokes FB/Meta, but Zuck was blazing his own shitty trail with the metaverse until the market punished him beyond all reason (relative to the cash flow the ads business was still generating). He only jumped on the AI hype train when he was forced to. It's been a long time since fundamental analysis a la Warren Buffet was the core of prudent investing. But I think this is a result of human nature --- a large percent of people just like gambling, even if the expected value of their wagers is negative. I also get the anger that the author feels. As a tech worker, my professional life is dictated to me by the whims of the market. But the all the attention from financiers is also a result of the immense wealth the industry has attracted (or generated, based on your perspective), so it's hard to complain without self-consciousness. Like many here, I probably live online a bit too much, and I try to see the silver lining in enshitiffication as a force that encourages me to live more in the real world, with my family members, in the present.

totallykvothe 1y ago

That is the coolest website design I've seen in a long time. Absolutely love it. The article was good too.

rossant 1y ago
Yes, although the drop shadow on the entire text was a bit distracting.

thomassmith65 1y ago

Cathartic! Every point rings true. In the 90s the hip thing was to run a 'customer focused' business. Now the hip thing is to run a 'pigeon focused' business.