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The old world of tech is dying and the new cannot be born
- gegtik 6mo agothank you
- metalman 6mo agothe only thing suffering here, is language. things, no matter how vigorously anthomorphisized, can niether die, or be born.
- krapp 6mo agoThings can die and be born. The usage of those terms in relation to non-living entities and absent a description of biological progeny and senescence has been commonplace in English for centuries. For instance, the "birth" of a new era, or the "death" of disco. You may find it easier to function in modern society without having such a strictly literal view of language. Idioms and metaphors do exist.
- wongarsu 6mo agoThis has to be trolling. You can't claim in one sentence that language is suffering, then in the next claim that only living beings can die or be born. How is abstract concepts suffering fine, but abstract concepts dying isn't?
- metalman 6mo agoA contradiction here and there is part of the discource of persuasion, but outrage is a good sign that a bunch who call themselves engineers are floundering mightly. The (white?) elephant in the room is very and most defintly bieng anthomophisized like nothing ever before, well not counting our species proclivity to deify almost anyTHING. One gazillion processing cores, check√ 53 contrillian zillawatts power, check√ 9 billion consumption units, check√ uptake, marginal~ bills, unpaid^
- kjs3 6mo agoCapital letters are apparently suffering a little.
- stalfosknight 6mo agoI really wonder how much time and effort people think they are saving by avoiding the Shift key.
- kjs3 6mo agoIt's not about saving time. It's a poseur thing.
- llbbdd 6mo agoIt's formal vs. informal register; both of you are doing a version of the classic "Can I go to the bathroom?" / "I don't know, can you?" bit
- kjs3 6mo agoNo it's not and no we're not. It's a trite, annoying, contrived affect. No true scottsman does it.
- llbbdd 6mo agoIt is. You understood what he said perfectly and chose to complain about a lack of formality for some reason; just like how you misspelled Scotsman lowercased and with two t's and I still understood what you said. It's also just how younger people have been communicating online for some time now, if that helps you inspect your belief that it's contrived or why you find it annoying.
- kjs3 6mo agoCondescending, pedantic and oblivious to the joke. Trifecta complete.
- ghostlyy 6mo ago[flagged]
- spinel 6mo ago[dead]
- an0malous 6mo agoI haven’t seen something on HN so well written and insightful in many, many years. Everyone here should read this.
- spinel 6mo ago[dead]
- ElectronCharge 6mo agoLOL! (And I haven't written that in a very long time...) The article is delusional. In particular, these claims: - The Iran war is over. - Iran has "won" the war. - The US has lost influence with Asian allies. - The petrodollar is over. - The US economy is weaker due to billionaires and the stock market. It's especially laughable given the recent diplomacy with China. I also predict a secular government is running Iran before the fall...
- treis 6mo agoI disagree that this is well written. It's a long and meandering where unchallengeable anecdotes build up to sweeping narrative that doesn't add up. Iran has gone from a peak of power and it's proxies pulled off the biggest attack against Israel in decades. Three years later most of the leadership involved is dead, their power is at a nadir, and Israel has re-established itself as the dominant power. That Iran isn't totally incapable of fighting back and hasn't capitulated isn't much of a feather in their cap. Technology wise the West has a string of victories. SpaceX, AI, Waymo, and Apple are leaps and bounds ahead of any Chinese competitors. Nothing has changed. The US honest to goodness lost a war 50 years ago and continued to dominate. Not to mention Iraq/Afghanistan. Iran being something less than a perfect and clean victory doesn't fundamentally change anything.
- CarVac 6mo agoWhat has changed is that the US's failure in Iran has directly impacted many of its former allies all at once, and the current administration clearly shows that it doesn't care about them at all. This lack of consideration will lead to significantly less favorable trading for all of the businesses you listed, regardless of their current prowess.
- vanuatu 6mo agoIt's hard for me to reconcile this piece with my personal experience as someone who works in AI and knows many others that do The demand for AI is currently overwhelming. As in, can't build data centers and GPUs melting overwhelming, companies growing 3x in a month while already at multi-billion revenues. The models get better and better, Chinese open source is falling further and further behind American companies. The productivity gains are, at this point, obvious. The best talent works (or wants to work) in America and get compensated obscene amounts, the most capital flows through America, this is still by far the best place to start a technology business in the world I think American technology was on the decline for the past few years before LLMs, but for the foreseeable future as long as American companies control the talent flywheel I think the new world of tech is going to be much more American than before.
- 48terry 6mo ago> The demand for AI is currently overwhelming [...] companies growing 3x in a month while "Yes, but have you considered number go up?"
- spinel 6mo ago[dead]
- vanuatu 6mo agoI think English is definitely a reason that I took for granted. To add to that from my experience: - The culture is, I think, the root of the flywheel. The entrepreneurship and competitive intensity is unlike anywhere else I've lived (not an American). It's okay to go bankrupt. It's okay to fail multiple times and burn millions in VC money, in fact it's encouraged! Take a break and raise another round and go again, VCs like second time founders. In my home country having one business go under is the worst thing imaginable. - The capital markets, even YC (one of the lower tier accelerators by now) gives you 500k for 7%, sometimes pre-revenue. That is an absurd proposition elsewhere - Surrounding yourself with top talent raises the ceiling for what you think is possible and accelerates your career really fast. It's inspiring for me to be around so many smart and successful people.
- ksymph 6mo ago> Regulation that’s defined entirely in terms of the technology it regulates, as opposed to in terms of the effects it has on society or imposing boundaries and limits on the technology itself, is a core component of the technopolistic political and legislative environment. Incredible article, a lot to unpack here, but I found this particular offhand tidbit interesting. It does seem like any attempt at tech industry regulation over the past decade or two (that isn't somewhat in the interests of big tech anyway, i.e. age verification and so on) has been either overly vague, or overly specific, leading to easy workarounds. It seems like a microcosm of a wider trend in regulation; the disconnect between intentions and results. On the rare occasions that consumer-friendly legislation does go through, there is no working mechanism for evaluating its effectiveness and refining the rules as quickly as big corporations can adapt to them. I like how the article frames this, of how the regulations are targeting the wrong thing, how they're defined by the problem rather than the desired end state. For more thoughts along these lines I'd highly recommend checking out Jennifer Pahlka's blog Eating Policy: https://www.eatingpolicy.com/ https://www.eatingpolicy.com/
- mrwh 6mo agoWorth reading, well written. We just finished watching a 90s Dennis Potter TV series, Lipstick on your Collar. Strange and mannered, and about in part the preparation for Suez at the end of empire, by an elderly leadership that hadn't realised that the British empire was already done (and at a time when the young were only interested in America, the new power). More stupidity than malice there. What we're getting today looks like both.
- tptacek 6mo agoA reminder that this author also believes Typescript to be a capitalist conspiracy from Microsoft.
- bflesch 6mo agoThe lack of proper integer types might as well be a conspiracy.
- rozap 6mo agoReminder that the article was good and there is a lot of truth in it. Also, never trust Microsoft.
- j_w 6mo agoCan you source this? I couldn't find anything from the author like this.
- severine 6mo agoMight be a very very uncharitable reference to this, for example: https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2021/the-oss-bubble-and-the-blogging-bubble/ https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2021/the-oss-bubble-and-the-...
- j_w 6mo agoI assume this quote in particular? > Typescript, Visual Studio Code, GitHub, npm, and so much more exist primarily because Microsoft executives believe this will lead to more business for Azure and other Microsoft offerings. I don't think its a conspiracy theory to think Microsoft releases their tools with the intention of people using their paid platforms/services. But the original person I replied to definitely thinks the author of the blog post is implying something insidious, which they don't seem to be.
- severine 6mo agoAgreed.
- ambicapter 6mo ago> Sitting in on a talk on autism diagnoses, one of a series of scientific talks, watching an animation they used as a diagnostic aid, hearing everybody around me laugh as if the shapes on the screen made sense, only then truly understanding myself, and feeling more alone than I have ever felt before or since. Anybody have any idea what diagnostic shapes he's talking about?
- ksymph 6mo agoSocial Shapes Test https://www.cmu.edu/corecompetencies/collaboration/resources-and-tools/social-shapes-test/index.html https://www.cmu.edu/corecompetencies/collaboration/resources... Web version here, if you want to see what it's like https://psytests.org/arc/ssten.html https://psytests.org/arc/ssten.html
- spacechild1 6mo agoI have never seen these before. Very interesting!
- jmyeet 6mo agoI like to quip that any sufficiently sized US company eventually becomes a bank, a landlord, a defense contractor or some combination thereof. Another way to put this, in the author's framing, is a tool of empire. We've seen how quickly and easily these large companies have fallen in line with the administration. The era of the tech company as an antiestablishment upstart is long over. I call the Hormuz crisis the biggest strategic blunder in US history and it's not even close. It's such a blunder it will probably be written about in history books as the end of the post-1945 era. It's not lost on people that the US would rather let the world burn than split with its attack dog in the region, even slightly. We're also seeing that, as the author notes, a tiny power can strategically defeat a military that over $1 trillion a year is spent on. The author rightly points out of the lawlessness of everything going on and the destruction of trust in financial markets. All of this is correct. But I don't think the auuthor really identifies the reasons for the push for AI. And that is, labor displacement and wage suppression. Or, to put it another way, further wealth concentration into the hands of the "oligarchs". I guess it's another version of "whatever our oligarchs want to steal this month, they get."
- bflesch 6mo ago> I call the Hormuz crisis the biggest strategic blunder in US history and it's not even close. This crisis created billions of arms sales which is a success for some, especially as it made the other scandal go away.
- originalvichy 6mo agoArms sales where? The non-US arms companies are the biggest winners, namely South Korea and European companies. The US not only threatened its allies, it also pulled ammunition from bases and order pipelines so European nations are picking up even more speed with de-risking from the US arms corporations.
- bflesch 6mo agoUS/IL need to replenish their stocks because they used way more missiles than expected. That's big business.
- stymaar 6mo agoThe whole Gramsci quote goes further than the part being quoted here: “il vecchio muore e il nuovo non può nascere: in questo interregno si verificano i fenomeni morbosi piú svariati”.
- DVRC 6mo agoAnd often he's misquoted with a similar one: "the old world is dying, and the new one is late to come. And in these shadows (chiaroscuri) the monsters are born". Anyway, it always surprises me how Gramsci seems to be more known and studied abroad than Sardinia and Italy.
- originalvichy 6mo agoNice read! Technology has politics, and it often serves to reproduce terrible modes of operation instead of something that could be described as "good progress" for humanity. The renewable energy landscape is the best example of a space that has had to fight against the old world's financial interests, even in the face of obvious monetary and technological supremacy. The software world unfortunately has followed adtech + social media companies' operational structures, and we lost decades of "good progress" to attention-funded software. I have a feeling this is why very few novel companies are springing up from this LLM shift: the relationship of a) lines of code b) solving problems to achieve progress c) getting paid for it has been decoupled for so long, because attention has been the main currency online. Unsurprisingly, the Chinese technology market leap is fueled by a focus towards the "physical" (raw materials, manufacturing) and it's no surprise that a highly educated population is beating many Western economies in the electronics market (from small gadgets all the way to cars and energy). It's not impossible to try catching up by educating our people to reorient money to industry that brings "good progress", instead of industry that brings virtual money in the form of stocks or tech that mainly serves vices and/or entertainment.
- akersten 6mo agoI think the new world cannot be born is larger than just AI. Even before llms we had a whole generation of people going through CS curriculum who call the Internet "wifi" and don't know what a file is. Even if LLMs disappeared tomorrow my faith that we'll ever have the same curious and brilliant minds in our field as yesteryear is fading. I hope I'm wrong.
- black_puppydog 6mo agoHey, welcome on my favorite soapbox! That many people don't know what a file is, is most probably down to the very explicit war of one company, namely Apple, on the very concept of a file. And I fully agree that it is a terrible idea that makes people completely forget that what they're handling is actually a computer that could be doing so much more than what Apple allows them to do.
- chroma_zone 6mo agoMicrosoft has done their part too. Try using a modern Office 365 program and see how many clicks it takes to get to an actual file browser.
- diego_moita 6mo ago> All that was needed was a tacit understanding that there were rules, that the US set those rules, and that those who followed the rules would benefit from the trade that came with being a part of the global hegemony. This as been so overwhelmingly obvious in 3rd world countries (viz. India's "non-alignment" foreign policy) but, still, Europe, Canada, Japan and Australia didn't fully get it: the concept of "rules based world order" is just a layer of makeup over "American Imperialism". Americans make rules the same way Tony Soprano made rules: strictly for self-advantage. We should be thankful to Trump to wipe out that makeup, finally. True, Mark Carney explained that in Davos. But I am not sure Canadians got it.
- m463 6mo ago> Instead of delivering services and software that unlocks value for their client industries, the software industry has spent the past decade or so trying to control their customers and their client industries. this is the sad part for me. I remember when computers did things FOR you. now you have to do this careful calculus where you balance what you get vs what you give up.
- scruple 6mo agoI remember being so confused in 2015, watching us go from on-prem to cloud. Truly, the shackles of AWS set us free.
- mahirsaid 6mo agoSomething i said multiple times on here, with a less refined paraphrasing, and less articulate wording. The perception that the good will have a everlasting run is none-sense and drawn from the foul thought of being invincible. I read a book a wile ago called ( power of agility, agility, ...) and it illustrates the importance of agility. The book depicts the implication of agility and how agility applies to one's self to large enterprises, the thinking behind it is that "Agility" can be applied to a wide range of scenarios. Interesting enough i finished the book at the book store before buying it ( it was like a little over 100 pages), however i still remember what i read from that book and it stuck with me. The part that stuck to me from the book the most is the importance of being prepared to be agile in tough situation. The importance in affirming change in a scenarios that might seem stagnate but hide the true damage or negative impact on self or organization. ill stop there about the book, but i think you get the point. The book was depicting the realities of both one's own life ups and downs, which includes a side comparison of a organizations reality. In many ways this isn't much different. The enabling aided by the government has increased many sectors of the US to not be agile or just toss the idea out the window " we don't need to be agile we'll just try to takeover this sector in Italy to increase revenue". Becoming comfortable with just creating alternatives to problems is not FIXING the problem that originates.
- musicale 6mo ago> It’s not because these companies are so fantastic or that their products are so amazing that countries would face local uprisings if they tried to keep them in check Local uprising seems like a bit of hyperbole (countries have successfully banned Apple, Google, etc.) but Apple (for example) has produced many category-defining products. Google Search and Gmail were also category-defining. NVIDIA developed CUDA and (perhaps more importantly) an entire GPU software ecosystem around it. Etc.