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Comment by ToucanLoucan

7 months ago

I genuinely don't understand why anyone is still on this train. I have not in my lifetime seen a tech work SO GODDAMN HARD to convince everyone of how important it is while having so little to actually offer. You didn't need to convince people that email, web pages, network storage, cloud storage, cloud backups, dozens of service startups and companies, whole categories of software were good ideas: they just were. They provided value, immediately, to people who needed them, however large or small that group might be.

AI meanwhile is being put into everything even though the things it's actually good at seem to be a vanishing minority of tasks, but Christ on a cracker will OpenAI not shut the fuck up about how revolutionary their chatbots are.

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ToucanLoucan

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recursive  7 months ago

> I have not in my lifetime seen a tech work SO GODDAMN HARD to convince everyone of how important it is while having so little to actually offer

Remember crypto-currencies? Remember IoT?

  • ToucanLoucan  7 months ago

    I mean IoT at least means I can remotely close my damn garage door when my wife forgets in the morning, that is not without value. But crypto I absolutely put in the same bucket.

ben_w  7 months ago

Then you have a very different experience to me.

In the case of your examples:

I've literally just had an acquaintance accidentally delete prod with only 3 month old backups, because their customer didn't recognise the value. Despite ad campaigns and service providers.

I remember the dot com bubble bursting, when email and websites were not seen as all that important. Despite so many AOL free trial CDs that we used them to keep birds off the vegetable patch.

I myself see no real benefit from cloud storage, despite it being regularly advertised to me by my operating system.

Conversely:

I have seen huge drives — far larger than what AI companies have ever tried — to promote everything blockchain… including Sam Altman's own WorldCoin.

I've seen plenty of GenAI images in the wild on product boxes in physical stores. Someone got value from that, even when the images aren't particularly good.

I derive instant value from LLMs even back when it was the DaVinci model which really was "autocomplete on steroids" and not a chatbot.