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▲Silicon Valley has forgotten what normal people want (self.__VINEXT_RSC_CHUNKS__=self.__VINEXT_RSC_CHUNKS__||[];self.__VINEXT_RSC_CHUNKS__.push("2:I[\"aadde9aaef29\",[],\"default\",1]\n3:I[\"6e873226e03b\",[],\"Children\",1]\n5:I[\"bc2946a341c8\",[],\"LayoutSegmentProvider\",1]\n6:I[\"6e873226e03b\",[],\"Slot\",1]\n7:I[\"3506b3d116f7\",[],\"ErrorBoundary\",1]\n8:I[\"a9bbde40cf2d\",[],\"default\",1]\n9:I[\"3506b3d116f7\",[],\"NotFoundBoundary\",1]\na:\"$Sreact.suspense\"\n:HL[\"/assets/index-BLEkI_5r.css\",\"style\"]\n")target="_blank">theverge.com)
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VR/AR is because new tech allows us to do something... that we haven't figured out yet. It's not driven by visions of the future but by hardware advances.
The metaverse was an old idea that Zuckerberg hyped because Facebook became un-cool. It was meant to keep the company relevant and let it change the name away from Facebook.
NFTs was an attempt to copy moneys move to the digital world like bitcoin. Whether idealistic or crass opportunism is debatable, but broken tech ideas are nothing new.
But they were quickly disillusioned. The space instantly filled with crap art sold by scammers. Developers, of course, knew that would happen, but artists don't always have that same instinct for the way the worst possible use of a technology will overwhelm all others.
NFTs never provided a single thing that a normal paper contract couldn't.
They provided neither enhanced practical protections vs copying nor any enhanced intellectual property legal protections.
Any artists who thought NFTs accomplished anything at all other than a brief wave of hype were misinformed.
For most items, we aren't struggling to track ownership - We're struggling to enforce it.
I worked at a blockchain startup back in the day and despite the PTSD of working with insane people, I appreciate the concept of the blockchain. I've yet to see any mainstream value in it. Sure bitcoin is worth a lot but it's not because of the inherent value of blockchain finance, it's because there's too much money out there and everybody loves a fat bubble asset.
However, the bulk of people I'd say actually have more time than they do money. So there was a bit of an effort to turn LLMs and generative AI into attention economy, it's not cost effective yet and there's a big push against it from content creators who are more than willing to make content for free so long as they are given a space to host it.
I like that the LLMs make it easier for me to do programming, but I also felt like what I was doing before was... fine. I kind of get a feeling that people in the tech space think there's always going to be new innovative software that's sort of "not yet discovered" and so this productivity gain that LLMs bring is going to bring an era of unbridled creativity. And I definitely think we're going to be seeing more and better video-games and more and better software. But also, I'm afraid that the utility we as people get from software might be reaching a plateau and instead we are just trying to re-invent the wheel over and over with marginal improvements.
Ultimately, what does an AGI world would even look like? For me, I would like to spend more time with my friends whom I feel I've lost to the productivity machine.
To be honest, the most fun people I interact with on a daily basis are laid-back people, a lot of them in temporary unemployment or in whatever jobs gets them by, and that's kind of the promise of AGI but at the same time... it might not be that hard to achieve such a world with the kind of productivity we can already muster and have chosen not to. So I'm a little bit skeptical in the promise of time that AGI supposedly will bring.
I love this quote. It really resonates. I can't think of a major technology product invented in the last, say 5 years, that actually served to fulfill a need that I had. I haven't really been excited about a computer or phone or Cloud-Thinggy for at least a decade. It's just been years of "Look! Slightly better camera and emojis!" and "Slower applications that do less but look so minimal!" and of course "Now with AI!" Plus a dozens of new web sites and streaming services that I'll just never use because I don't understand why I would. Silicon Valley is just "Here's some social media and a bunch of thin laptops. Get used to it."
This is like saying that the iPhone wasn't a big deal because we already had palm pilots and blackberries.
I think we’re all just trying to come up with cool things and show it to people to see if they want it.
I don't want to have to commute to work by driving, but I do anyway, because there's no public transit to my work.
I don't want to have to use Gmail for my work email, but that's what work wants me to use, so I use it.
Some number of people are using ChatGPT just because somebody said, "You need to know how to use AI to stay competitive."
I'm not saying I agree or disagree with the sentiment, but I firmly believe both sentences can be true at the same time.
I've become so tired of AI and hearing about it that I've started using ublock origin custom filters to nuke it on sites I frequent (including HN).
I don't know if it'll live up to the hype but if it does I'll hear about it other ways til then they are solving a problem I don't have or care about and doing it my destroying things I do care about so I'm just going to ignore them.
There's real points scattered throughout the article, to be sure. It's a problem that AI slop is polluting the commons. But, like, this:
> How is it that all these wunderkinds trying to build the next product to take over the world haven’t thought about this? I think the answer is simple. They do not have much in common with normal people, and haven’t thought much about what normal people’s lives are like, or what normal people value. What they have been doing instead is getting high on their own supply — listening to VC podcasts, freaking themselves out about whether they’ll be able to keep up with AI agents, and otherwise getting increasingly more detached from reality.
is not a paragraph written by someone who feels that techies or their interests are worthy of respect.
I think the funny thing is how many supposed "tech" people are nothing but business/investment people with a high risk/high reward mindsets. They are not the nerds. The tech is just a contemporary set piece for their visions of revenue and capital gains.
In another era, they'd be dreaming about selling movie tickets, or controlling shipping routes. Not because they care about film making, or transport, but simply because they salivate over the captive market.
Because of the gestalt merger of tech, consumerism, media, and advertising, I think there is a VC mindset that know thinks they can just define the Next Thing and inform the public of their next craving.
These people think they have Big Ideas and to them it isn't really different whether they hire creatives to make art, manufacturing nerds to make semiconductors, software nerds to make SaaS, or biochemists to make pharmaceuticals. It's all inscrutable mundane details to them and their magical thinking. After a career observing such things, I've come to see abstraction as something that can cross from virtue into malignancy.
I think the AI dream is driving some of this type towards madness. As someone in another sub-thread observed, It resonates strongly with the way they engage with the world, with delegation of things you don't really understand. But it also promises a kind of pure capitalist scaling where their revenue dreams can be untethered from labor constraints. The current scramble is the attempt to pivot every business dream into one that uses this new set piece.
From my understanding 'Strange things most people don't care about' may fail (and indeed, probably will fail) but they have also been major lottery tickets in the past. When you have enough money to throw around 'buying every lotto ticket' has a record of paying off better as a strategy than taking a 'rational' approach of only investing in those which you have strong fundamentals in. It takes a stupid amount of money to diversify in such fields so it isn't for everyone of course. Tech just has the best record for it so far with highly scaleable businesses.
They just care about the returns. If instead of what we know as 'tech' the big field was, say, genetic engineering or for the sake of absurdity - literal magic. If it somehow scaled better they would throw their money at that.
> a certain kind of tech enthusiast, particularly the ones who are most interested in startups and entrepreneurship.
I don't want to overindex on the one anecdote, because I recognize this is a pretty hostile interpretation, and I could just as easily read it as playful ribbing if the rest of the article were consistent with that perspective. It's kinda not, though.
That hasn’t been the stereotype for Silicon Valley in a long time. There was a whole HBO comedy show about a small group of nerds in a town where every other character is a variation of “made a bunch of money overnight and then declared themselves God”