> I suspect this is how we wound up with NFTs, the metaverse, and the clunky VR/AR headsets.
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.
NFTs had no valid reasons to exist, other than to provide money laundering opportunities and to con rubes out of their cash. There's plenty to not like about crypto and at the top of that list is NFTs.
> Within recent memory, people who made software and hardware understood their job was to serve their customer. It was to identify a need, and then fill it. But at some point following the financial crisis, would-be entrepreneurs got it into their heads that their job was to invent the future, and consumers’ job was to go along with that invented future.
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."
People in Silicon Valley have more money than they have time. So solutions that are framed as "time savers" or "productivity enhancers" really resonate with them.
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.
Great comment. I'd add that millionaire tech executives are largely the ones dreaming up these LLM products, and their level of interaction with "ordinary people" is probably nil. They have personal assistants doing all that stuff. Do you think Zucc shops for his own groceries or Musk buys his own Khakis? No way, their entire interaction with the real world is through assistants, so it's no wonder that their product vision is limited to "something just like my assistant: obedient, energetic, positive intern who agrees with and executes my every word".
its not just in tech. There are lots of products and services designed for the "cash rich time poor" because that is what the people in charge understand.
I'm not sure that Silicon Valley cares even a little what normal people want even if they ever understood it. It gets in the way of their business plans.
LLMs are something nobody wants but still ChatGPT is used by 10% of the world's population as active users? How can both the sentences 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.
I'm finding it really hard to escape the impression that the author just thinks Silicon Valley is full of nerds and wants to stuff them in lockers. I'm far from an Elon Musk fanboy these days, but how can you be so incurious that you watch a video of him explaining the practical obstacles to robotic hands, and retort that this is "101-level stuff" because other people in other fields also know hands are complex?
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.
From your opening sentence, I really expected you to go in a different direction...
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.
I'm sure she thinks she's not talking about all tech people, but she began the article with an anecdote about an acquaintance of hers, describing how it was "mortifying" to listen to him talk about his ideas and directly contrasting him with a "regular human" (who of course would be familiar with Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure).
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.
> I suspect this is how we wound up with NFTs, the metaverse, and the clunky VR/AR headsets.
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.
NFTs had no valid reasons to exist, other than to provide money laundering opportunities and to con rubes out of their cash. There's plenty to not like about crypto and at the top of that list is NFTs.
Non-fungible Tokens by themselves did nothing wrong
> Within recent memory, people who made software and hardware understood their job was to serve their customer. It was to identify a need, and then fill it. But at some point following the financial crisis, would-be entrepreneurs got it into their heads that their job was to invent the future, and consumers’ job was to go along with that invented future.
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."
I don't know about that, Steam deck launched in 22 and its pretty cool
People in Silicon Valley have more money than they have time. So solutions that are framed as "time savers" or "productivity enhancers" really resonate with them.
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.
Great comment. I'd add that millionaire tech executives are largely the ones dreaming up these LLM products, and their level of interaction with "ordinary people" is probably nil. They have personal assistants doing all that stuff. Do you think Zucc shops for his own groceries or Musk buys his own Khakis? No way, their entire interaction with the real world is through assistants, so it's no wonder that their product vision is limited to "something just like my assistant: obedient, energetic, positive intern who agrees with and executes my every word".
its not just in tech. There are lots of products and services designed for the "cash rich time poor" because that is what the people in charge understand.
I'm not sure that Silicon Valley cares even a little what normal people want even if they ever understood it. It gets in the way of their business plans.
LLMs are something nobody wants but still ChatGPT is used by 10% of the world's population as active users? How can both the sentences be true at the same time?
https://web.archive.org/web/20260427024735/https://www.theve...
That's a really well written article.
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.
How are you using UBO to do that?
The crudest way possible (via custom filters) - when that stops working I'll likely just do a browser plugin.
It makes HN more like what I appreciated about HN in the first place by removing (what to me) is noise and increasing the signal.I'm finding it really hard to escape the impression that the author just thinks Silicon Valley is full of nerds and wants to stuff them in lockers. I'm far from an Elon Musk fanboy these days, but how can you be so incurious that you watch a video of him explaining the practical obstacles to robotic hands, and retort that this is "101-level stuff" because other people in other fields also know hands are complex?
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.
From your opening sentence, I really expected you to go in a different direction...
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.
He's not talking about all tech people here. He's talking about a narrow subset:
> a certain kind of tech enthusiast, particularly the ones who are most interested in startups and entrepreneurship.
I'm sure she thinks she's not talking about all tech people, but she began the article with an anecdote about an acquaintance of hers, describing how it was "mortifying" to listen to him talk about his ideas and directly contrasting him with a "regular human" (who of course would be familiar with Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure).
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.
I assume that acquaintance was in the narrow subset of techies that she's talking about.