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by joe_mamba 5mo ago
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- baxtr 5mo agoHow can you be sure Eric Schmidt is telling “the truth” and Wozniak is lying? What’s your rationale and on the basis for such a claim?
- itsalwaysgood 5mo agoThe economy
- lukecarr 5mo agoAnd famously, the economy never changes course. Something, something, stocks always go up.
- itsalwaysgood 5mo agoDo you think AI will go away and suddenly businesses will start hiring people back? Or that a competitive startup won't lean on AI to get ahead? Doesn't matter how much stock prices move up and down...AI is here to stay and no amount of booing changes our desires to compete. The world doesn't hold hands with anyone, there is no global consensus, no policy. I recall all the bemoaning when IT jobs started going overseas... businesses always go with the cheapest labor. The world is dog eat dog, and those that prepare for the future are better equipped to deal.
- watwut 5mo ago> Or that a competitive startup won't lean on AI to get ahead? Specifically, with the way both economy and politics is structured, everything will be about big corporations with centralized power. A competitive startup leaning on AI getting ahead will be either destroyed or bought. >The world doesn't hold hands with anyone, there is no global consensus, no policy. It is totally holding hands and helping out - to Schmidts, Trumps, Musks, Epsteins. Just not to poorer people. > Do you think AI will go away and suddenly businesses will start hiring people back? In fact, with well run economy that systematically prevents monopolies, yes it tends to hire people no matter what technological level. Currents state where few super powerful companies are able to push themselves into everything and create monopolies via dumping prices, even as they are not profitable and can count on their friends in administration to bail them out once if all goes pop is the ineffective economy.
- itsalwaysgood 5mo agoI agree with most of your points except the last one. Probably easier to ask a question than argue a point: How eager are you to use Government services? Businesses are only well-run if they make profit: hiring the cheapest labor to produce something people will actually spend money on. And the more frictionless that process, the more our economy advances it. AI fits in there very well. I also want to point out: startups are usually happy to be bought up by the bigger guys.
- ryandrake 5mo agoIt's a massive long shot pipe dream, but we might somehow end up with legislators who have backbones and actually represent the people, and they'll enact regulation to reign in the applications of AI, provide a safety net for the millions who will be affected by it, and/or at least find a way to spread the prosperity that comes from AI across the population rather than into the hands of the few. I'm not betting on it, but it theoretically could happen.
- itsalwaysgood 5mo agoI doubt it. There is so little care for monopoly or copyright because AI is a race, as much as it is a tool. And nobody wants to restrict the race. Policy may pass that limits the use of AI for the general public, but the 'whatever it takes' race to 'superintelligence' goes on.
- amanaplanacanal 5mo agoI get it, you think that LLMs are going to fulfill all the threats that it's proponents have been giving us. That's yet to be seen.
- itsalwaysgood 5mo agoIf you consider things like Mythos (I know it was partly hype), and cyber security using AI to find old vulnerabilities in open source tools, and others using that information to actively disrupt the economy (this is already happening).... And governments pushing quantum computing, presumably to be first to crack Internet security: it's easier to imagine some of those future threats.
- al_borland 5mo agoThe economy looked really good before the dotcom crash too. The crash didn’t make the internet go away, but it damped the hype and blind, unchecked optimism that was leading to some rather short-sighted decisions. Right now so many companies are trying to use AI just to use AI, rather than using it when and where it actually makes sense. This is the big thing that drives me, and I think many others, a bit crazy. I don’t expect a bubble pop to make us go back in time to 2022, but I expect it will put an end these the AI mandates, token maxing, and other foolish behavior.
- itsalwaysgood 5mo agoA lot of businesses depend on the Internet. AI will be the same in the future. Not sure what to say about the ups and downs of stock price, or hype cycles.
- skinfaxi 5mo ago> The crash didn’t make the internet go away, but it damped the hype and blind, unchecked optimism that was leading to some rather short-sighted decisions. The crash did not make the internet go away. I don't foresee a world where we will go back to the pre-AI times either. In the same way that post dotcom crash, you would be a fool to not have your business online, I think we will find similar things to be the case around AI. Even if the bubble bursts AI is here to stay and that will have major consequences for labor.
- itsalwaysgood 5mo agoThe irony of the dotcom crash is that a lot of 'dark fiber' service started rolling out decades later. Fiber that was laid during the dotcom era. There are lots of datacenters going up in similar fashion. I don't know if they'd have the same utility decades later (very unlikely), but it's interesting.
- joe_mamba 5mo agoEconomic, market and product results. Schmidt took Google to the moon financially, speareding projects like Chrome and Android that cemented Google as THE tech titan(couch monopoly cough), whereas Woz was a top HW engineer of his time, but Apple would have quickly failed if he was at the helm calling the shots, instead of Jobs. From which would you take advice, the successful entrepreneur/investor, or the nice hacker geek who was a one trick pony with the Apple computer but hasn't been in touch with the tech economy and jobs market for decades?
- LargeWu 5mo agoI want advice from the one questioning whether we should, not just whether we can.
- joe_mamba 5mo agoOK, and who's stopping you? Take your advice from whoever you want. History tends to shows the pragmatists wiping out the luddites out of the gene pool/business market, but you are free to make your choice the way you see fit, nobody is forcing you to follow anyone.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- jjulius 5mo agoWozniak, every time. Gigantic financial success at the expense of everything Google has negatively impacted isn't something I would be proud of. Everyone defines success differently, and Schmidt's "success" is, frankly, unappealing and gross to myself and, I'm sure, many others. There's a lot more to life and the world than the economy and massive financial gains. Focusing on "economic, market and product results" yet mentioning nothing about the impact to people and customers is how Zuckerberg sleeps at night, and that's ugly to me.
- crispyambulance 5mo ago> From which would you take advice, the successful entrepreneur/investor, or the nice hacker geek [?] The nice hacker geek? By the way, the Woz has a net-worth of 140MM, so he's more wealthy that the vast majority of "successful entrepreneur/investors", and also vastly more beloved than virtually all of them. In any case, that's a false dichotomy and actually the wrong question entirely.
- rowanG077 5mo agoTBH this is also how I feel. There is no way to put the AI genie back in the bottle. There will be sweeping changes in society because of it. Fighting against it is seems like a fools errand imo.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- jmathai 5mo agoTruth is the wrong word for a future outcome. But… Weren’t Schmidt’s comments on AI the harsh “truth” from the perspective of someone who directly benefits from the wealth extraction capabilities of AI? It’s not the only possible truth. And definitely not the one I’m rooting for personally. That’s what you are hearing from the audience of graduates who are probably quite fearful of their future and also prefer another possible truth.
- LargeWu 5mo agoNot only benefits from it, but the very one causing it to happen.
- BearOso 5mo ago> Weren’t Schmidt’s comments on AI the harsh “truth” from the perspective of someone who directly benefits from the wealth extraction capabilities of AI? There are no wealth extraction capabilities yet. It's a money pit. They're certainly hoping it'll surpass some breakpoint and become profitable by brute-forcing compute power, but that's very optimistic. The propaganda Schmidt is pushing envisions that future in hopes of raising current stock prices so they can afford the brute-forcing that's very unlikely to succeed. My prediction is that we'll keep the tools we've acquired, probably refined a bit, but the LLM path is eventually a dead-end. After this, if they still try to monetize, remote models will be extremely expensive.
- comfysocks 5mo agoYes, and potentially extracts the wealth at the cost of the new grad’s job prospects. Can you imagine a few decades earlier some former corporate executive giving a commencement speech at a US college extolling the virtues of offshoring, and how it will make his mega corp a lot of money?!
- blipvert 5mo agoThe college graduation version of the company owner speaking to an employee: “You see that Ferrari out there on the parking lot? If you work really, really hard this year and meet all of your targets, then next year I’ll be able to afford another one.”
- leonidasrup 5mo agoAs much as it costs Woz nothing to be AI sceptic, Erich Schmidt has to loose much if AI investments don't deliver. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/21/eric-schmidts-family-office-invests-ai-startups.html https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/21/eric-schmidts-family-office-...
- kolinko 5mo agoWhich, one might argue, shows he believes it. He's putting money where his mouth is.
- al_borland 5mo agoUp until the reality of the technology doesn’t align to the expectations and promises. That’s when true belief shifts to hype and lies in an effort to salvage the investment. I think that’s where we’re at now.
- naravara 5mo agoFor people like Schmidt I think the hype is a true belief. You can see it in his posture and tone while being booed by the entire crowd. I’ve only seen that kind of self-satisfied smugness from evangelical religious nuts right before they tell someone they clearly regard with disgust that they’ll “pray for them.” Their view of what AI promises is some kind of secular eschatological fantasy that’s only partly rooted in anything the technology or methods do.
- bko 5mo agoI agree Woz is a sweet lie how everyone is unique and a snowflake. But regarding "you can be anything you want to be if you just work hard and apply yourselves, the world is your oyster, etc", I think the problem is the work hard part. Plenty of people have the wrong dreams, like being an influencer, but how many actually work hard. Like spend 60 hours a week analyzing youtube videos to find the perfect thumbnail or spend time learning every aspect of production from design, lighting, pacing and everything in between. Probably not a lot. And chances are if you do spend the time (on even a vapid dream like being an influencer), you'd do pretty well and learn a very valuable set of skills. My experience is the bar is pretty low. It's hard enough to find someone that's competent in their field of expertise and is easy to work with. A lot of people are just missing the basics. They don't put in the work or are willing to take instruction.
- zamadatix 5mo agoA lot of people work extremely hard towards their dream to fail. Which is fine, but when you start out life being told if you just keep trying and it'll happen then it can quickly destroy the golden years of your career/life. This is often varying per goals too. Just because you love football does not mean you're going to be able to be a pro player just because you spent every hour on it. You're probably better off e joying football, doing enough to get a scholarship, and finding something else to build your life goals around. If you want to take yourself from where you are to the best chances at your dream, work as hard as you can towards it. But it's also more than fine if you don't want to take that risk, you can often have a perfectly good life without working yourself to death on the promise it'll make your dreams come true if you do.
- aerodexis 5mo ago[dead]
- Shalomboy 5mo agoEric Schmidt has no clearer a crystal ball than Woz has; to say one is telling the truth while the other is lying is not particularly objective of you.
- romaniv 5mo ago>Would you prefer the harsh unpopular truth of Erich Schmidt, or a sweet lie of Wozniak? What Erich Schmidt is doing is not about describing hard reality. He is trying to make a particular version of the future come true by painting it as inevitable. It's literally a propaganda technique.
- abirch 5mo ago"The future is already here—it’s just not very evenly distributed." AI has made my life so much easier. If I need to change non-standard lightbulbs (e.g., G9, MR11, A19), I'm taking a picture and asking my AI what kind are they. If I need to create the first pass of test scripts, I ask my AI. It's reduced technical debt and let me focus on the things I care about.
- oulipo2 5mo ago"AI has had a limited improvement over my life, so I'm happy fucking over the rest of the world by polluting water, using huge amounts of energy, and reinforcing class hierarchies, just so that I can change a lightbulb a bit easier" is peak tech-bro
- dingaling 5mo ago> It's reduced technical debt I think that's a misunderstanding of the phrase. AI may have reduced your immediate technical burden. However AI, if not carefully used, increases technical debt because it builds up a vast heap of code and business logic that nobody understands. The agent that created it forgets about it once it's out of its context window, the programmer that scripted it just knows it passed some tests. In two, five, ten years from now trying to maintain that vibe-coded slop will be a battle between various agents making conflicting changes and some poor human trying to get it into a shippable state.
- abirch 5mo agoYou are completely right that AI can be misused/abused. If done right it can fix things like code bases that were created by multiple people and groups each with their own conventions. Before I had to know which group did what to know the variables. Claude fixed that. There used to be pushback to have 100% test coverage. If you don't have that, then you can't merge. AI can write the tests but a programmer must own them.
- lr4444lr 5mo agoI can't upvote this enough. As has been attributed to the Roman stoic Seneca: “An enemy is a bad witness to your merits, but a good one to your defects.”
- butlike 5mo agoDoesn't that just mean that the merits will be unspoken and implied by what the enemy is saying as they speak to your deficits? If I'm short with a bad temper, then implicitly I'm NOT a bad enough public speaker, or that would have been mentioned top of mind.
- gyanchawdhary 5mo ago[dead]
- tmp10423288442 5mo ago> how famous FOSS devs of tools that Google use internally couldn't even get past the resume screen at Google to get an interview As a former Googler, Homebrew was not ever officially supported at Google, or even particularly recommended, particularly because you were not allowed to store source code on your laptop anyway. Homebrew was definitely not used in any production-critical workflow. It's more accurate to say that some Googlers used Homebrew (I myself used Macports and never encountered any additional friction). Homebrew at that time was also unsuited to anything like Google's scale, so it's no surprise the author didn't get any brownie points for it.
- kakacik 5mo agoYou should step out of SV bubble for a while, check how rest of humanity fares compared to our ultra comfy extremely well paid jobs and maybe be a bit more humble, not expecting whole world to roll exactly as per your expectations, whatever they are. To me, with my rather rich life experience, his words are generally true. There is some ceiling for each of us but its insanely higher than we ever achieve to reach. I've tested mine couple of times, and happy with the results. And of course, if given society doesn't work for you, move to a better place. High quality of life can be achieved without massive effort if one is smart about it and a bit disciplined.
- joe_mamba 5mo ago>You should step out of SV bubble for a while I live and work in Europe. We have internet here.
- lanyard-textile 5mo agoThe graduation speech is a spiritual ceremony. It is meant to be a loftier take of the world around you. It is prescriptive: A call to action to make the world a different place than it is today, armed with your discipline and knowledge. In lieu of this, Eric Schmidt walked on stage and gave an advertisement.
- HumblyTossed 5mo ago> ... unpopular truth... It is only a "truth" if we allow the oligarchs to make it a truth. This is capitalism run amuck. Late stage capitalism if you will. The serious question that keeps getting kicked aside, is when the majority have no jobs (or low wage jobs at best) and can't afford your freaking "tokens" and trinkets, what then? But nobody cares because that isn't what's happening this quarter.
- bell-cot 5mo agoHarsh Old Geezer Take: - You either ignored your history education, or (more likely) you are yet another victim of the systematic gutting of history education over the past half-ish century. (Which our society's "rich get richer" 0.01% are mostly responsible for, generally in the names of "replace with job skills" and serve-them-better ideologies.) Test: How many of the following huge changes do you think back-in-the-day young people were warned well in advance of, by the older folks - Crash of '29, Great Depression, WWII, Nuclear Cold War, Civil Rights Era Upheavals, Arab Oil Embargo, Inflation, ... ? - The "you can be anything you want..." line is obviously for (1) emotional encouragement and (2) younger children. Once you know (say) that the US has >300M people, but only 50 state governors - it's kinda obvious that it can't literally be true for even the children of the 0.01%. But if you're a well-intended parent/teacher/councilor without any special knowledge of the future, the "work hard and apply yourself" is still good general advice. Statistically, there have been very few situations where being an idle layabout turned out better, long-term. - At least in people who care about children, there is a very real cognitive bias toward keeping kids happy. Yes, that means working to making the world look better (to the kids) than what it actually seems to be. And telling them certain things about Santa Claus and such. Whether this bias is genetic, culturally transmitted, or both - natural selection seems to favor it. - Over the long term, societies vary greatly in how equitably their wealth is distributed...but large, externally-secure societies have a very strong bias toward the rich getting richer, and everyone else getting poorer. Basically that's because the most sociopathic and greedy folks keep doing whatever it takes to move up and "satisfy" their longings, vs. decent folks aren't motivated enough to keep fighting back hard. Though as things get worse and worse for the 99%, it gets tougher to keep the poor from rising up and overthrowing in their masters. Historically, the #1 strategy of the 0.01%, to keep themselves on top and the oppressed masses in their place, has been https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divide_and_conquer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divide_and_conquer. Which, sadly, still seems to be doing a "great" job today...
- joe_mamba 5mo ago>you are yet another victim of the systematic gutting of history education over the past half-ish century. Sure, maybe I am. Though, the history taught in school books is a warped, "history is written by the victors" take on how events actually unfolded back then, not an objective source of truth. So you being a product of an ungutted education(more like indoctrination) system doesn't really put you in a better light as you think it does, especially when you look at how boomers vote and how in touch(or otherwise) they are with current day reality. At least Gen-Z had access to alternative sources from all over the world thanks to the internet, for better and for worse, so they have diverging opinions on this topic, rather than only what the schools programed in their brains. >Test: How many of the following huge changes do you think back-in-the-day young people were warned well in advance of, by the older folks - Crash of '29, Great Depression, WWII, Nuclear Cold War, Civil Rights Era Upheavals, Arab Oil Embargo, Inflation, ... ? The question is how much you want to bet that humanity will repeat the same mistakes that led to those events? I bet 100%. >- The "you can be anything you want..." line is obviously for (1) emotional encouragement and (2) younger children. And what happens to people who've been groomed with that mindset since childhood? Do you think they suddenly flip a maturity switch and forget all that indoctrination when they turn 17/18 and get access to student loans? Your frontal lobe isn't fully developed till 25. If you want kids to make mature choices you need to hit them with mature harsh reality which nobody wants to do because we coddle kids till it's too late. >Yes, that means working to making the world look better (to the kids) than what it actually seems to be. Kids making the world look better, should be about keeping your environment clean and planting trees and such, not programming their minds with unreal platitudes that ignore the way current economy is set to work(against them). Because you're gonna create a lot of unhappy and disgruntled young adults that will want to see the world burn to the ground once they realize they've been duped their whole lives. >Historically, the #1 strategy of the 0.01%, to keep themselves on top and the oppressed masses in their place, has been https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divide_and_conquer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divide_and_conquer. Which, sadly, still seems to be doing a "great" job today. So then we should clap for people who ignore this known fact, and lie to kids that the world doesn't work like that, when we all know it does?
- mold_aid 5mo agoWould you prefer the harsh unpopular truth of Erich Schmidt, or a sweet (unintentional)lie of Wozniak? Not really a lie (unless you think the students are not intelligent?); regardless, usually you don't get "harsh truths" at these ceremonial, epideictic events. Though I guess funerals in the Schmidt family must be a lot of fun. "We begin with the airing of grievances. Then let's bury this piece of shit"
- compiler-guy 5mo agoEven if Schmidt was telling the truth, and Woz was lying, there is a time and a place for everything, and Graduation speeches are a time for celebrating the graduates, not telling them their lives will suck. Even if it is true. The job of a speaker at an event is to meet the goals of the event, in the spirit of the event. Schmidt didn't do that.