I still like the computer itself. Breaking something, poking at it, fixing it, and then it suddenly works. The hard part now is liking the industry around it.
Agreed. There have been many times where I've felt that working with computers isn't fun and I question my career choices. But then I tinker with computers on my own time and I realize that it's not that computers aren't fun, the industry around them is just demoralizing.
> The hard part now is liking the industry around it.
This is exactly how I feel. I fell in love with computing for the same reasons I fell in love with physics and engineering. I love making things. I love the puzzles. I love digging down to understand things. And on top of that, it always ends up being useful. And then I can share my work with others and they get utility out of it too?! What an incredible and fulfilling job/hobby!
But now, the industry really kills that passion. I don't believe we're solving real problems, but mostly just solving made up problems that get us money. We've become incredibly dismissive of fixing things and using thought terminating cliques like "I only care that it works"[0] or "don't let perfection be the enemy of good enough"[1]. When finding bugs we end up arguing if it is "valuable"[2] rather than if it actually helps people. I can't tell you how many meetings I've been in discussing if we should fix the problem that were a magnitude more time, per person, than it takes to fix the problem. We've become allergic to deep understanding. We abhor expertise[4]! I thought this was supposed to be a community of nerds? I came to the STEM side because my family was all "business monkeys" and I didn't want any part of that constant BS. There was a real "revenge of the nerds", but the MBAs did strike back.
We're incredibly penny-wise and pound-foolish. We love our sayings, but hate understanding. All to keep that velocity up, but forgot that velocity has direction.
What happened to the time where we could make money AND make meaningful products that make peoples' lives better? (I know, rose colored glasses) That's the real dream, right? That's what we want *an economy* doing, right? Not this bullshit metric hacking. Not this maximizer with complete disregard for the things we're intending to maximize[5]. And for some reason we still look for "passion" in people when hiring, only to beat it out of them when they get hired. And how have we gotten to a point where someone's resume that has "VR + Crypto + AI" is read as impressive rather than the hype chasing giant red flag that it is?
I don't think this is just about computing. It's a bigger cultural phenomena. But without a doubt our field became perverted by whatever this infection is. There's a reason so many are burnt out. The disease creates a negative feedback loop too. We get burnt out, end up just going with the bullshit (tired of fighting), which only creates more bullshit. The feedback has been going on for quite some time now.
I don't know how we push back, but I know I'm not the only one frustrated, and I know if we don't figure out how to make changes soon then we shouldn't be surprised if change happens in an unpredictable and chaotic manner. That steam can only build for so long.
[0] Everyone does you asshole! What we disagree on is if it actually "works"![0.5]
[0.5] https://x.com/mitchellh/status/2066657032938442833
[1] Perfection doesn't exist! Only an idiot thinks there's perfect code. What we disagree on is what is actually "good enough"!
[2] $$$$ not "does this make the product[3] better"
[3] God fuck... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZFTaEenaHM ----> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NeJ3Kg6OUo
[4] https://x.com/yacinemtb/status/1836415592162554121
[4.5] Yes, this is the same guy who said QM and Fluid Dynamics are all easy, "its all einops" (I can, with 100% confidence, tell you that it is not. There's entire subfields of mathematics being lost here that are critical to both these subjects. You can't even get through Griffith's with just Linear Algebra and that's barely scratching the surface of QM!) https://x.com/yacinemtb/status/1836428078999851515
[5] A metric is never perfectly aligned with what we intend to measure https://9gag.com/gag/aQ9GEZ7
When I mentor new developers, I frequently caution them (with caveats about my experience being only one) against going to work for tech companied. My favorite jobs have all been at companies that were not selling software in some way, but needed a software developer or 5 on staff to do what they needed to do. Industrial manufacturing and adult education were my particular industries where I found this path and the only reason I'm not in them anymore is because I don't have the flexibility to move around anymore, so need to make the best of the DoD consulting shit sandwich I'm in now.
I love computers too, but it doesn't resonate with me when people call AI "snake oil." The comparison suggests that the thing doesn't do what it's marketed to do. AI does more or less what it's marketed to do, sometimes badly.
I still write code by hand. But LLMs have been a legitimately useful tool when I've wanted to dig into a new field like computer graphics, theoretical physics, or numerical analysis. Or even just asking the LLM to write a piece of code and learning from its output. I think it makes me a better programmer because I can bootstrap the knowledge needed for a new project much faster and spend more time programming.
> The comparison suggests that the thing doesn't do what it's marketed to do
In my opinion you should interpret the usage of "AI" here to mean "the entire business/management/financial/bubble ecosystem surrounding LLMs". The snake oil is much more how LLMs are being weaponized and utilized rather than a specific technical assessment (although that often is an issue too)
I think then the AI-hype should be disregarded as snake-oil, not the tech itself. I know it sounds pretentious, but I need to say that words do matter.
My prediction is that it will go the same way as the dot com bubble. The hypesters and fraudsters will eventually collide with objective reality, but the technology will persist and society at large will benefit from the infrastructure and the increased access to knowledge.
Assuming that we recover from the damage being done now. As one example, a friend of mine has remarked that large corporations will benefit from the current AI-induced reality of no one being able to afford their own hardware, and keep prices that way to enforce a renters model on computers.
That's my fear, and unfortunately I think its likely to happen. I feel like we will settle down a little bit, but into a new higher "normal" baseline that still largely makes it unaffordable for most.
There's also still the risk of the creation of a new economic underclass, if both a) hardware remains too expensive for local inference and b) subscription or pay-per-token based inference also remains expensive or increases in price, then individuals will largely be locked out of the benefits that having access to AI could bring, leaving it purely in the hands of larger companies. People will only get to use and experience these tools through their employer, for the benefit of their employer.
>large corporations will benefit from the current AI-induced reality of no one being able to afford their own hardware, and keep prices that way to enforce a renters model on computers.
Depends how long the RAM correction takes. It is interesting how RAM prices have stifled the creation of cheap laptops capable of running big models. But at the same time, this seems like a second order effect and not the intention.
> As one example, a friend of mine has remarked that large corporations will benefit from the current AI-induced reality of no one being able to afford their own hardware, and keep prices that way to enforce a renters model on computers.
Choose one:
- You spend 30 hours writing a program to manage data for your hobby. You write it on your personal computer.
- You spend one hour generating a program to manage data for your hobby. You have to lease an H200 behind an API to do it.
A wonderful service known as the web has connected people who choose A with others who choose A and of course with a great many who don’t need to make a choice and benefit from the work of others.
I mourn a world in which few will choose A, because for many to choose B seems to lock us all, tragedy of the commons style, into a worse world.
> I swear the anti-AI crowd would all be picking to die if you each had a choice between immortality and living to 85.
It really depends on the cost of immortality. At the very least, it would have a psychological impact that some people may feel is undesirable.
> None of you is writing punch card programs.
> None of you are building vaccum tube logic.
Perhaps none of us, but some people certainly do. We are intellectual creatures. Some of us do things out of pure curiosity. Can we create multinational corporations out of it? Almost certainly not. Can we create businesses out of it? People do so all of the time. There is a market for produce from small farms, hand crafts, heck, even vintage computing.
> None of the things we build today are going to last. Your programs will be meaningless in a hundred years. Probably closer to ten years.
Try telling that to people who are trying to retire legacy systems. Sure, most of them have been modernized. Perhaps they have even been modernized to the point where none of the original code exists. Yet the core ideas still exist since it turns out to be incredibly hard to discard things.
The old ways of writing software will continue, even if they are nowhere near as popular. Call that irrational if you want. I call it human.
> AI is better at this than you. You just won't admit it. And it's going to get 10,000x better than you in just a short while.
It's just not though. Plagiarizing some shit it stole off github does not make it intelligent.
Edit: just because it's amusing, here's something I'm literally running into right now with Opus 4.8 on "Max" settings being dumb. I asked it to add some C++ code to an existing C++ project for Unreal Engine. It did half the work, then balked, because "it doesn't have a way to compile C++". I just had to tell it "yes, actually, you just need to run the fricking extremely-standard-already-generated-build-script." If I had a novel build system it'd be one thing, but it already knows I'm working on an Unreal Engine project and that the build is completely standard and it still couldn't piece together that it could just run the compiler.
I would not employ a C++ developer that could not figure out how to invoke the compiler.
> society at large will benefit from the infrastructure
Data centers as infrastructure are very different from DSL rollout though. Much, much more expensive to maintain, with a much much shorter timespan.
If the bubble pops and data centers get shut down because there’s no one to pay the bills, there won’t be much left 5-10 years later in terms of infrastructure.
LLMs remind me of being a kid again being in wonder of all the possible things that could be done with a computer that haven't been figured out yet. The internet was relatively new and everyone had their own ideas of what that would enable. Fast forward to a few years ago and it was easy to believe that a lot of the low-hanging fruit of things an individual could do with the internet, apps, 3d graphics, etc, had been decently picked over and that things were stabilizing. Now I have no idea again what computing will look like in 5 years and it's exciting.
Nestlé can give us our daily allowance of baby formula and [AI corporation winner] can give us our daily allowance of free compute. These years will bring interesting times!
The fats in Chinese Water Snakes are rich in omega 3s and do have genuine benefits to consumption. The problem with snake oil wasn't that it was useless. The problem was with hucksters selling it as a cure-all for everything from cancer to syphilis. The metaphor is pretty apt IMO.
Exactly what I was thinking. It's not that snake oil sales people sold totally useless stuff, its just that the stuff they sold did not deliver the value that was promised. Another example that is still going on today. There is a community of people that swear the ingesting silver prevents all kinds of things, even so far as a cure for cancer. It's snake oil, but it doesn't mean it doesn't have any medicinal purposes. Silver does have anti-microbial properties and can be used topically to manage infections.
the problem, ironically, is that hucksters were selling other oils as "snake oil" when they didn't have the same omega 3s. the bad reputation was due to fake snake oil.
The snake oil is how the people at the top scream "in x years we won't need programmers" and end up proving themselves wrong time and time again. It's a real technology and it can do a lot, but it's being sold like snake oil while we're still figuring out what it's actually useful for and how to leverage it properly.
Snake oil implies that it does nothing, not that it doesn't do everything it's boosters claim it does. Snake oils were medicines sold as cure-alls with no active ingredients.
I wonder what the better pithy phrase would be then for "thing that is obviously useful, but is being hyped beyond it's (current) ability by those with a vested interest in doing so"
> "in x years we won't need programmers" and end up proving themselves wrong time and time again
This is how it looks in your head, maybe. But in reality since Sonnet 3.5 - when the whole "no need programmers" started - no "years" have passed. Sonnet 3.5 came out on June 20, 2024. We are still 5 days away from the lowest possible "years". So even if you quoted them literally, they could not have possibly proved themselves wrong yet even once, let alone "time and time again".
I would say the claim that AI is going to replace most white collar work a very snake-oily term. The technology behind it however is very compelling and interesting.
I don't know enough about most white collar work to make any predictions. But I know a lot about software development and information technology because I've been a professional since 1995. The claims being made about AI's impact on that profession do not seem at all snake-oily to me.
It makes perfect sense to me. Type in a prompt like “how can I make the cheese on my pizza stringier” and maybe it’ll tell you to use different cheeses, but maybe it’ll tell you to add glue.
If you don’t like the answer, don’t worry, they’re building more data centers in poor neighborhoods so you can keep submitting the prompt until you get a better one.
I trust that you can use your reading comprehension skills to understand that by referring to a famous example of LLMs producing garbage, I’m simply using it to illustrate the phenomenon at large, rather than to suggest that I am still struggling to find glue-free ways to make my pizza stringier.
If you still need help breaking down what I meant in the previous post, feel free to ask. Sentences can be tricky.
Right, that's what you already said. What I don't understand is the "slot machine" analogy you're making. In what sense is AI a "slot machine"? Are you talking about the stocks of AI companies?
I just reversed engineered large parts of my 2011 car odb comms. Was able to hook a stm32 board to the car communication and have full control over a lot of stuff so that I can build my own instrument cluster from a lcd screen. It literally took me one evening to get the first proof of concept working. I never touched stm32 stuff before.
This right here. People simp for LLM companies as if their experience of using the out-of-pocket top-of-the-line "team of PhD's" paid models will be what is deployed when trying to contact your bank, insurance, etc. No,... once tech companies stop playing the "no/some revenue until we own the world" VC game, we'll all be stuck trying to talk to GlueSnifferGPT when reporting an emergency.
> The comparison suggests that the thing doesn't do what it's marketed to do.
Because it doesn't.
What AI is being sold as is incredibly different than what it actually does. I love AI. I spent years in grad school researching it because I loved it so much (it was never about the money to me). But what it is and what it can do is so different from what it is being sold as.
Snake Oil is an apt comparison because it is being sold as a cure-all. Medical problems? AI. Financial problems? AI. Scientific research? AI. <Insert problem>: AI... It isn't that ML[0] can't help with these problems (it can!), it is that "AI" is being sold as a solution to these problems. As if humans will be obsolete in 6months[1].
LLMs are a fantastic example. We (lossy) compressed the entire internet and build a human language interface into it. That's some real Sci-Fi shit right there. That's an incredible achievement with a lot of utility! But how is it sold? If you call it what it is people will act like you're diminishing its status. We've exaggerated the accomplishments so far out of proportion that we can't even recognize big of an advancement that these machines actually were. LLMs were a huge step forward, but even a giant is small when you compare it to a titan.
So yeah, I do think it is being sold as Snake Oil. And that's been my fear for quite some time (you can dig up my history if you're that passionate). But that's also what we've done with every major tech recently. Hell, even cryptocurrency has real value. The thing that killed it was all the hype built around it when the tech was just in its infancy. Do we really want to do the same thing to AI? It certainly has more utility to it than cryptocurrencies. But it doesn't matter how good the actual product is if people are sold on something else. What matters is how the actual product matches to peoples' expectations. There is such a thing as "overselling", and we're certainly doing that as a community. I know it is an exciting field and there's lots of exciting technology, but we can't promise the moon if we can't deliver.
[0] It wasn't long ago that "AI" was a red flag and "ML" was seen as less likely to be bullshit.
[1] I'm still waiting on my self-driving car...
It was a red flag because artificial intelligence doesn’t exist, and anyone claiming to use it or work on it is either lying or delusional in thinking they could accomplish it.
Nowadays people just say “AI” when they mean “LLM,” which is an unrelated thing entirely, but people want people who use it.
Isn't coding solved and we should all be out of a job by now according to Dario? Or what about AI 2027 -- we're only 6 months away! Time to build a bunker!! LLMs themselves aren't snake oil, they're just a useful technology, but all the marketing around them is FUD mixed with hype mixed with the most irritating people on the planet (the ones that aren't bots at least).
> I love computers too, but it doesn't resonate with me when people call AI "snake oil." The comparison suggests that the thing doesn't do what it's marketed to do.
Well yeah, because it doesn't. AI is being claimed to be a magical genius intelligence which will solve everything forever, but in reality LLMs are still idiots you can't trust to not screw up without a tight leash. They can't even do the one thing they are supposed to be good at (programming) well, despite all the effort which has been focused on trying to make them good at it. They don't remotely do what they are marketed to do, not even close!
This is less an anti-AI post and more a post against the greed of the industry:
> But things feel different now. I can relate to what Chris Person said when he expressed his frustrations about how these slick conmen are using the technology I adore as tools for exploitation and disempowerment. The Internet, built by idealists on a foundation of openness and community, has become a mire of dark patterns and gardens with ever thicker walls, desperate to keep people within an ecosystem where their attention is the prized commodity. I’ve witnessed a nerdy space full of nerds be invaded by marketers, callous capitalists, and “brogrammers”—exaggerating the worst, most toxic, aspects of geek culture in their pursuit of money and power. I’ve poured hundreds of hours of work into open source projects only to have it all be scraped into a plagiarism machine and then aggressively sold back to me. It feels that the hope I had for the future technology could give us, the naïve and starry-eyed fantasies I fostered in my youth, has been eroded when faced with a reality where the thing I love can make a lot of money for people who don’t care for any of it.
You can simultaneously believe that AI is really cool and also that also a lot of companies are degrading the internet, society, and private ownership at large.
Takes me back to the time where I would pickup any books that taught anything about computers/programming. I was too young to understand any of it, but the fact that there's this knowledge to be unlocked, that would then let me do new things with this white boxy device on my table top - was truly addictive.
I can't say the feeling remains because most new stuff that I learn now is not runnable on my machine now. Tech has gone back to the days when owning hardware that's capable of running the latest has become a costly affair.
I love the computer too. Never more than while writing 6502 assembler for a decades-defunct home computer for literally no purpose at all.
Meanwhile, the economy needs software to be written and I need employment, and I'm lucky enough to have a job that hews somewhat close to my interests, whether that be learning the latest JS framework or to prompt Claude. It's all pretty decent and better than chiselling coal out of a pit for 10 hours a day.
> Nearly two decades after that first introduction, a therapist would speculate that my interest in computers could stem from how it was a rare point of stability in a life where I ended up leaving my home and my friends every few years.
> Computers used to have unlimited promise and potential.
Imo 90s sci-fi had a lot of this techno optimism, even if the settings were often dystopian. Cyberpunk was pretty wild and who knows a lot of that could still come to pass.
At some point, we were the owners of the machine. More importantly, this was normal. We could do whatever we wanted, and the corporations just had to accept it. World changing technology. Limitless potential.
Now it's the opposite. The computers belong to the corporations. They're just generously allowing us to use them, and only in ways that they profit off of. Computers, arguably humanity's most important invention, reduced to interactive television, a mere vehicle for corporate advertsing and surveillance capitalism.
It's truly disgusting. Makes me sad like nothing else.
Computers started as massively costly, corporation / government only mainframes, that much is clear. They've been productivity machines from the get go, they've been machines made for war.
What computers "are" has been ebbing and flowing decade after decade. They've been repurposed to something that they initially weren't. It was originally niche, and not at all the norm.
Then, there was a brief period when counter culture was pop culture. That was reflected in everything in the 90's, from music to computers.
I think the author doesn't realize how gatekeepy this sentiment is; that they earned their love of "the computer", that it was formative to them, that they put all this uncomfortable effort into learning how to program, and thus (subtextually) they should have a say in how other people use "the computer".
What gate is being kept by a guy writing an article about something they are passionate about? This is such a "hackernews type comment" and it's so weird. If someone reads this article about a dude who talks about how growing up with computers formed his personality and how he was into computers before they were cool and decides "welp, guess I can't do computers now", they probably weren't going to get very far with computers regardless.
There's no gate being kept here. It's just someone talking about something they are passionate about and then expressing their opinion about current technology. They're not stopping anyone from also loving the computer. If anything, I could see someone reading this and being MORE excited to get into computing.
You know what? Gate keeping can be a good thing. Some gates exist for a good reason. I think "are you actually interested in doing this?" is a very reasonable gate. I'm not saying all coding needs to be a passion project, obviously, but I think it's very hard to be good at a thing if you don't care about it. Software continues to get worse and worse, and software developers know less and less about the machines they're working with, and I don't think those things are unrelated.
You know what's a good gate? employement. Like great comedians of old who could make actually funny jokes, lets pull up the ladder like dave chappel and cut the kids out. I want a job and i want to stay employed in IT. I don't know what's coming but the best interest for myself is to reduce the amount of technical people and increase my rarity.
Long time fans of a thing are allowed to be upset when assholes come in a drastically change it, whether it be Star Wars, your sports team, or programming.
the ones who created the community and drove the direction of the thing. I agree, it is only natural to be angry/confused/frustrated when there is a large and quick influx of new people who are pulling the community into many different directions at once. Especially when those new members don't have the understanding of why certain decisions were made. Especially when new members are highly confident and dismissive of old members. The people that are upset are trying to protect their community, the thing that they have grown to love. I don't think it is that anyone wants to keep new people out, but the concern is of losing the thing that they already have and love. A fast influx of new members does take that away.
I definitely think we should be welcoming to new members in any community, but I also think new members should recognize that they're coming into an established space. Not everyone is exactly equal. Not all gatekeeping is bad. Or rather, maybe it is better that we have people that help newbies get involved.
I'm not saying the protection can't get toxic. It definitely can. I was part of the Arch forums awhile ago when there was the push to kill the noob guide (I was pro-noob guide and was a frequent editor). We lost that battle, but hey, it was likely part of the reason we got a bunch more Arch forks like Endeavour and Cachy.
I always want more people to enjoy the things I love. It's great to share and life is so much better with friends. But it is also only natural to get emotional when you're losing that part of your life too. One big problem with big communities is that they become anonymous. Take HN for example. There's a handful of users I recognize, but it is for the most part effectively anonymous. And we're relatively small. The thing I miss the most is small communities, since that's where you get to know people. I think from a broader perspective we've done a great job at destroying those. There's got to be a better balance than what we have now.
I think a better analogy should be: should you take a job writing a Star Wars movie if you're not a fan of Star Wars? (or sub in: Star Trek, or Dr. Who, or any other recent nerd property that's been kind of ruined by people who don't understand the source material screwing it up by thinking they know better than the fans). In that context at least, the proof is in the pudding: Star Wars is a mess because it's been written by people that mostly don't care about Star Wars, same with Star Trek. I think coding is kind of like that. People that don't care are going to make a mediocre-to-bad product.
I think we do get to have a say when a large amount of the way people use computers has basically just turned into companies trying to get people addicted to their social media platforms so they can sell them ads.
People with impure motives are running the show now, and they're the number one reason why technology sucks now. Everything is dumbed down, enshittified, growth hacked, attention grabbing, surveillance capitalism, information brokerage, advertising. It was never about the computers, it was always about money. The computers are not only unloved, they are actively being hidden from the user. The computer does not matter, only the "user experience" matters. Users are not meant to use computers anymore, they are meant to interact with the scripted flows created by corporations, and nothing more. Computers are the enemy in this world, they are too powerful, leave them unchecked and they can wipe out the business models of corporations.
I definitely think someone who genuinely loves computers should have a say in how computers are used. That's the exact sort of person I'd elect as a regulator or lawmaker. There is no substitute for giving a shit. Someone who cares about computers more than money wouldn't have let things degenerate to this point.
Even if it is gatekeeping, what does it matter? It's not a problem. Computers are world changing technology, and they don't deserve to be reduced to vehicles for corporate advertising. They could be more, and should be more. And if gatekeeping is necessary, then so be it.
> I think the author [believes that] they earned their love of "the computer" ... thus (subtextually) they should have a say in how other people use "the computer".
N... no? The guy's pretty clearly anti "attention economy bullshit", anti plagiarism-machine, and of the opinion that it is a very good thing that it is easier than it was when he was young for people to learn to love 'the computer'.
From the end of the "The Smell of Ink on Cheap Paper" section:
> It would be easy to say that it’s just nostalgia that makes me lament what was lost in the transition to the Internet, and it’s not like print was spared the rot of capitalism that has made online geek spaces into ad-ridden, engagement-maximising cesspools. But I am glad that I was able to do my initial discovery in a world devoid of pop-ups, auto-playing ads, click-bait, and incessant pleas to “like and subscribe”. ...
From the final section, entitled "A Life Well Lived?":
> I can relate to what Chris Person said when he expressed his frustrations about how these slick conmen are using the technology I adore as tools for exploitation and disempowerment. The Internet, built by idealists on a foundation of openness and community, has become a mire of dark patterns and gardens with ever thicker walls, desperate to keep people within an ecosystem where their attention is the prized commodity. I’ve witnessed a nerdy space full of nerds be invaded by marketers, callous capitalists, and “brogrammers”—exaggerating the worst, most toxic, aspects of geek culture in their pursuit of money and power. I’ve poured hundreds of hours of work into open source projects only to have it all be scraped into a plagiarism machine and then aggressively sold back to me. It feels that the hope I had for the future technology could give us, the naïve and starry-eyed fantasies I fostered in my youth, has been eroded when faced with a reality where the thing I love can make a lot of money for people who don’t care for any of it.
> Then again, it’s not all bad. We’ve come a long way from the time when computers were seen as expensive and exclusive tools, and the unwelcoming domain of elitist men. Programming—with the empowerment that it brings—is more accessible than ever and there seems to be a strong cultural shift in the techie spaces away from centralised services and onto federated, self-hosted, and in many other ways more free alternatives. The Internet seems to becoming more and more locked down, but us weirdos will just stay in our weird corners and will find means to circumvent any restrictions put on us. My affection towards technology made me an ostracised outsider when I was younger, then it condescendingly made me into a “rockstar”, and now it’s looking like my peers are ushering in the end of civilised society. So I’m ready to go back into being just some strange guy with strange interests, doing silly things people don’t understand and don’t care to.
Perhaps Sir should go back and re-read the article without looking for hidden meaning?
Mr. Enger echos a lot of thoughts that I (and a lot of people on these forums) seem to have. We can still make an attempt to remake what we love, with personal websites and self-hosting. However modern architecture kills even that with DDoS attacks and IP blacklists on everything. It is no wonder that people are starting to promote alternate protocols like Gemini (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48297467) that explicitly make it impossible for many of the evils of the World Wide Web to be repeated.
For me, in the early 80s, this was all about state. Reliably keeping a state, well defined, numbers or strings, bytes preferably, and being able to act upon them.
Only later I learned that this, ehat I was missing in the analog world back then, was what made up the core of a turing machine.
So this beauty is still the same for me. Just the sheer amount of state that is available and provided by others make the concept much less powerful than back in the day.
Now AI brings that back a bit, by finding the right items that you can keep and iterate on. But we tend to let AI also do rhe iteration and that introduces that non-deterministic character that the computer had overcome.
So, no wonder, that I, and quite a few others, at the moment, still mostly use AI for finding and typing code to describe the structures for the machine, but keep trying to define the iterations ourselves, guaranteeing clear insight and access to the state we are trying to work with.
Everything else is more like working with an assistant back then (or today), extending your actionable potential instean of your mind. And depending on how you see the world or what the tasl at hand might be, you might prefer one over the other, control over action, insight and perspective over tinkering with the matter to push it somehow in the right direction or implementing a known process.
But that state thing, still priceless, timeless. The right augmentation to our fuzzy brains and better than paper, since, who thought, we can express the algorithms in the same way.
So, I guess I will always see this beauty, even in a simple flip-flop, coin, switch and any array thereof, and anything that can be controlled by that binary configuration.
This post resonates with me. I remember in Kindergarten getting my very first life experience with computing tech: grounding myself by touching the bottom screws of a Apple IIe. I've loved them in nearly the same way as OP.
I get the way he feels. I remember how special this stuff used to be because of how niche it was. It does feel a bit like the normies co-opted it but that is my personal and selfish view.
There's a spirit in the machine, and if you are quiet enough, and patient enough, and willing to let yourself believe, you can even heart it talk to you, long into the night.
Nothing will take that away. I have plenty of evidence for it, too.
I think those of us who truly love the mechanism will not only survive the AI wave but will surf that motherfucker because WE KNOW, AT A VERY DEEP LEVEL, THE THING FROM WHENCE IT CAME.
(and honestly, I’ve been waiting for something like this to help filter out all the fucking posers diluting my market value)
One of the main reasons I fell in love with computers was determinism. I always felt weird seeing people get upset and curse at the C++ compiler. In my mind, the “computer” will always give you the same output for the same input. Therefore, you must be doing something wrong if you’re fighting the compiler. The answer to your problems is in the source code.
This is something LLMs took away from me. I can’t just look at the source code and figure out why a prompt didn’t produce the expected outcome. I have to go with my gut feeling, and with the little I know about LLMs.
On the other hand, LLMs have enabled me to code prototypes that I would have only dreamed about a few years ago.
Do you want your own fancy terminal emulator? Done. A couple of weekends’ worth of work.
How about your own Linux windowing system, running Firefox and a terminal? Done. A couple more weekends.
You always hated KiCad routing, but never had time to go through the code and change it to meet your requirements? No worries. A day’s work.
Of course, none of this is production quality, but it gets you started very fast. And I’m sure you can turn it into a solid, production-quality product in much less time than it would take without using an LLM.
I think the author simply grew up. It's easy to ignore all of the business stuff and just have fun when you are kid. Nothing is stopping the author from generating all sorts of crazy stuff with AI if he wants to live on the bleeding edge of technology.
Generating things and going through the process of learning how it works and making it from scratch are very, very different. The feeling each leaves you with are also very different. If the only thing you care about is output, then yea maybe generating a bunch of stuff feels great, but if you care about the process, learning, and discovery, just prompting an llm doesn't feel great.
Most programmers do not care about how platforms work. How many kid web developers do you think actively read Chromium's source code? It's already plenty stimulating staying at a higher level, letting abstractions hide implementation details.
I remember when I was around 10 and we got out first PC - Compaq Presario - that we shared among us 4 siblings. And I was instantly hooked to. And then about a year later, we got internet connected and the first website we visited was Pokemon.
I remember at my high school, the computer room in the library was fitted out with the new colored iMacs. I was shocked! How could a computer look like this. You had to register to use it each day during lunch breaks because so many people wanted to use them.
I remember the first time I came across an Apple magazine, and it was showing screenshots of the new OS X. The Aqua interface got me hooked. I'd read, and re-read, every page, drooling over the screenshots. It wasn't until ~10 years later I got my first Mac and I was obsessed with it!
My first computer was a pentium II. After one year learning about computing in my school lab and friends’ computers, it was amazing to have something to tinker with. And it and its successors brought me plenty of delight over the year. First discovering Linux (with Linux Mint and Gnome 2 as I couldn’t install Debian), learning assembly and C, learning Blender, learning how windows internals worked,… It has been a tool that has shaped my life. And yes, the current trend of presenting it as a mere source of entertainment and a very small sets of features is sickening.
But this day, I dabble with OpenBSD and Linux (Alpine) and it’s a bit of fresh air. There’s some convenience lost, but you get the freedom of computing back.
I still like the computer itself. Breaking something, poking at it, fixing it, and then it suddenly works. The hard part now is liking the industry around it.
Agreed. There have been many times where I've felt that working with computers isn't fun and I question my career choices. But then I tinker with computers on my own time and I realize that it's not that computers aren't fun, the industry around them is just demoralizing.
The machine is still fun.
It's the five layers of product growth between you and the machine that get tiring.
check the ping time between your nodes, whatever they are, in the same datacenter. I bet it will be at least 10-20ms. 15 years ago it was 0.1-0.2 ms.
Given that I get ~1 ms between basement and upstairs, going through three switches, this is indeed a sad state of affairs.
still 150 micros here. why would this go up?
Software defined networking adding latency. 10ms within a datacenter is crazy though.
> The hard part now is liking the industry around it
This has always been the hardest part, its just the past few years its gotten exponentially more difficult.
But now, the industry really kills that passion. I don't believe we're solving real problems, but mostly just solving made up problems that get us money. We've become incredibly dismissive of fixing things and using thought terminating cliques like "I only care that it works"[0] or "don't let perfection be the enemy of good enough"[1]. When finding bugs we end up arguing if it is "valuable"[2] rather than if it actually helps people. I can't tell you how many meetings I've been in discussing if we should fix the problem that were a magnitude more time, per person, than it takes to fix the problem. We've become allergic to deep understanding. We abhor expertise[4]! I thought this was supposed to be a community of nerds? I came to the STEM side because my family was all "business monkeys" and I didn't want any part of that constant BS. There was a real "revenge of the nerds", but the MBAs did strike back.
We're incredibly penny-wise and pound-foolish. We love our sayings, but hate understanding. All to keep that velocity up, but forgot that velocity has direction.
What happened to the time where we could make money AND make meaningful products that make peoples' lives better? (I know, rose colored glasses) That's the real dream, right? That's what we want *an economy* doing, right? Not this bullshit metric hacking. Not this maximizer with complete disregard for the things we're intending to maximize[5]. And for some reason we still look for "passion" in people when hiring, only to beat it out of them when they get hired. And how have we gotten to a point where someone's resume that has "VR + Crypto + AI" is read as impressive rather than the hype chasing giant red flag that it is?
I don't think this is just about computing. It's a bigger cultural phenomena. But without a doubt our field became perverted by whatever this infection is. There's a reason so many are burnt out. The disease creates a negative feedback loop too. We get burnt out, end up just going with the bullshit (tired of fighting), which only creates more bullshit. The feedback has been going on for quite some time now.
I don't know how we push back, but I know I'm not the only one frustrated, and I know if we don't figure out how to make changes soon then we shouldn't be surprised if change happens in an unpredictable and chaotic manner. That steam can only build for so long.
When I mentor new developers, I frequently caution them (with caveats about my experience being only one) against going to work for tech companied. My favorite jobs have all been at companies that were not selling software in some way, but needed a software developer or 5 on staff to do what they needed to do. Industrial manufacturing and adult education were my particular industries where I found this path and the only reason I'm not in them anymore is because I don't have the flexibility to move around anymore, so need to make the best of the DoD consulting shit sandwich I'm in now.
I love computers too, but it doesn't resonate with me when people call AI "snake oil." The comparison suggests that the thing doesn't do what it's marketed to do. AI does more or less what it's marketed to do, sometimes badly.
I still write code by hand. But LLMs have been a legitimately useful tool when I've wanted to dig into a new field like computer graphics, theoretical physics, or numerical analysis. Or even just asking the LLM to write a piece of code and learning from its output. I think it makes me a better programmer because I can bootstrap the knowledge needed for a new project much faster and spend more time programming.
> The comparison suggests that the thing doesn't do what it's marketed to do
In my opinion you should interpret the usage of "AI" here to mean "the entire business/management/financial/bubble ecosystem surrounding LLMs". The snake oil is much more how LLMs are being weaponized and utilized rather than a specific technical assessment (although that often is an issue too)
I think then the AI-hype should be disregarded as snake-oil, not the tech itself. I know it sounds pretentious, but I need to say that words do matter.
My prediction is that it will go the same way as the dot com bubble. The hypesters and fraudsters will eventually collide with objective reality, but the technology will persist and society at large will benefit from the infrastructure and the increased access to knowledge.
Assuming that we recover from the damage being done now. As one example, a friend of mine has remarked that large corporations will benefit from the current AI-induced reality of no one being able to afford their own hardware, and keep prices that way to enforce a renters model on computers.
That's my fear, and unfortunately I think its likely to happen. I feel like we will settle down a little bit, but into a new higher "normal" baseline that still largely makes it unaffordable for most.
There's also still the risk of the creation of a new economic underclass, if both a) hardware remains too expensive for local inference and b) subscription or pay-per-token based inference also remains expensive or increases in price, then individuals will largely be locked out of the benefits that having access to AI could bring, leaving it purely in the hands of larger companies. People will only get to use and experience these tools through their employer, for the benefit of their employer.
> People will only get to use and experience these tools through their employer
Like in the era of mainframes, before the personal computer was a thing. I wonder if universities will play the same role, though.
>large corporations will benefit from the current AI-induced reality of no one being able to afford their own hardware, and keep prices that way to enforce a renters model on computers.
Depends how long the RAM correction takes. It is interesting how RAM prices have stifled the creation of cheap laptops capable of running big models. But at the same time, this seems like a second order effect and not the intention.
It’s a demand spike.
> As one example, a friend of mine has remarked that large corporations will benefit from the current AI-induced reality of no one being able to afford their own hardware, and keep prices that way to enforce a renters model on computers.
Choose one:
- You spend 30 hours writing a program to manage data for your hobby. You write it on your personal computer.
- You spend one hour generating a program to manage data for your hobby. You have to lease an H200 behind an API to do it.
Which one will you choose?
I know which one I'm choosing.
I choose A.
I know that many others choose A as well.
A wonderful service known as the web has connected people who choose A with others who choose A and of course with a great many who don’t need to make a choice and benefit from the work of others.
I mourn a world in which few will choose A, because for many to choose B seems to lock us all, tragedy of the commons style, into a worse world.
I don't have time for that.
I swear the anti-AI crowd would all be picking to die if you each had a choice between immortality and living to 85.
This all feels so damned performative. These are irrational decisions.
AI is better at this than you. You just won't admit it. And it's going to get 10,000x better than you in just a short while.
Programming computers is a fad. It's an anachronistic relic.
None of you is writing punch card programs.
None of you are building vaccum tube logic.
None of the things we build today are going to last. Your programs will be meaningless in a hundred years. Probably closer to ten years.
Programs and code and programming languages are as ephemeral as social media.
Get over it. It's not that important.
This is so needlessly combative and performative, which is especially hilarious as you claim the others are the ones being so.
> AI is better at this than you. You just won't admit it. And it's going to get 10,000x better than you in just a short while.
Where is the 10x (not even 10,000x) revenue? No companies other than those selling the AI itself are seeing it.
> I swear the anti-AI crowd would all be picking to die if you each had a choice between immortality and living to 85.
It really depends on the cost of immortality. At the very least, it would have a psychological impact that some people may feel is undesirable.
> None of you is writing punch card programs.
> None of you are building vaccum tube logic.
Perhaps none of us, but some people certainly do. We are intellectual creatures. Some of us do things out of pure curiosity. Can we create multinational corporations out of it? Almost certainly not. Can we create businesses out of it? People do so all of the time. There is a market for produce from small farms, hand crafts, heck, even vintage computing.
> None of the things we build today are going to last. Your programs will be meaningless in a hundred years. Probably closer to ten years.
Try telling that to people who are trying to retire legacy systems. Sure, most of them have been modernized. Perhaps they have even been modernized to the point where none of the original code exists. Yet the core ideas still exist since it turns out to be incredibly hard to discard things.
The old ways of writing software will continue, even if they are nowhere near as popular. Call that irrational if you want. I call it human.
> None of the things we build today are going to last.
Exactly, so why do you care how some people build things? It's not that important.
> AI is better at this than you. You just won't admit it.
No, you're just really, really shit at programming. You just won't admit it.
(AI, in general, is only impressive when you have no clue about the subject domain.)
> This all feels so damned performative. These are irrational decisions.
Oh, it was meant to be rhetorical. Because everyone thinks like you?
> AI is better at this than you.
Maybe so, but I am better at this when I engage with AI in a controlled manner.
What if they just like writing code?
> AI is better at this than you. You just won't admit it. And it's going to get 10,000x better than you in just a short while.
It's just not though. Plagiarizing some shit it stole off github does not make it intelligent.
Edit: just because it's amusing, here's something I'm literally running into right now with Opus 4.8 on "Max" settings being dumb. I asked it to add some C++ code to an existing C++ project for Unreal Engine. It did half the work, then balked, because "it doesn't have a way to compile C++". I just had to tell it "yes, actually, you just need to run the fricking extremely-standard-already-generated-build-script." If I had a novel build system it'd be one thing, but it already knows I'm working on an Unreal Engine project and that the build is completely standard and it still couldn't piece together that it could just run the compiler.
I would not employ a C++ developer that could not figure out how to invoke the compiler.
> Get over it. It's not that important.
I don't think you understand what code is. What it does is far less important than how it does it.
Software is bureaucracy and always has been. The discipline is just finally maturing into this role like so many other careers have.
Of course, you can use Option B to write the program, and then run it on your own machine...
Option A is fun, whereas option B is miserable. Option A is also cheaper. It's a pretty clear win for option A here.
> society at large will benefit from the infrastructure
Data centers as infrastructure are very different from DSL rollout though. Much, much more expensive to maintain, with a much much shorter timespan.
If the bubble pops and data centers get shut down because there’s no one to pay the bills, there won’t be much left 5-10 years later in terms of infrastructure.
Maybe we could repurpose old processors to power toaster ovens.
I mean, a 125kW server stuffed into 5U will definitely work nicely for toast.
The same thing happened around PCs, gaming, the Internet, the web, and cryptocurrency. It's a hit driven industry that loves hype.
LLMs remind me of being a kid again being in wonder of all the possible things that could be done with a computer that haven't been figured out yet. The internet was relatively new and everyone had their own ideas of what that would enable. Fast forward to a few years ago and it was easy to believe that a lot of the low-hanging fruit of things an individual could do with the internet, apps, 3d graphics, etc, had been decently picked over and that things were stabilizing. Now I have no idea again what computing will look like in 5 years and it's exciting.
I have a pretty good idea of what computing will look like in 5 years and it's pretty depressing.
You have convinced yourself of having a pretty good idea, not to be confused with having anything close to a crystal ball's view.
Nestlé can give us our daily allowance of baby formula and [AI corporation winner] can give us our daily allowance of free compute. These years will bring interesting times!
The fats in Chinese Water Snakes are rich in omega 3s and do have genuine benefits to consumption. The problem with snake oil wasn't that it was useless. The problem was with hucksters selling it as a cure-all for everything from cancer to syphilis. The metaphor is pretty apt IMO.
Yes, I got that Google summary too. But "snake oil" patent medicine didn't contain snake oil.
"Snake oil" refers to something sold as a medicament that has no beneficial effect.
Exactly what I was thinking. It's not that snake oil sales people sold totally useless stuff, its just that the stuff they sold did not deliver the value that was promised. Another example that is still going on today. There is a community of people that swear the ingesting silver prevents all kinds of things, even so far as a cure for cancer. It's snake oil, but it doesn't mean it doesn't have any medicinal purposes. Silver does have anti-microbial properties and can be used topically to manage infections.
the problem, ironically, is that hucksters were selling other oils as "snake oil" when they didn't have the same omega 3s. the bad reputation was due to fake snake oil.
The snake oil is how the people at the top scream "in x years we won't need programmers" and end up proving themselves wrong time and time again. It's a real technology and it can do a lot, but it's being sold like snake oil while we're still figuring out what it's actually useful for and how to leverage it properly.
Snake oil implies that it does nothing, not that it doesn't do everything it's boosters claim it does. Snake oils were medicines sold as cure-alls with no active ingredients.
I wonder what the better pithy phrase would be then for "thing that is obviously useful, but is being hyped beyond it's (current) ability by those with a vested interest in doing so"
You could reasonably call it "overhyped". People will disagree with you, but that's fine; you won't be making a falsifiable claim.
That seems pretty par for the course for every major advancement in technology. So maybe just “capitalism”?
It’s hard for me to think of any piece of new tech that hasn’t been over hyped by the people selling it.
For sure. I'd argue this cycle is operating at a different scale though
> "in x years we won't need programmers" and end up proving themselves wrong time and time again
This is how it looks in your head, maybe. But in reality since Sonnet 3.5 - when the whole "no need programmers" started - no "years" have passed. Sonnet 3.5 came out on June 20, 2024. We are still 5 days away from the lowest possible "years". So even if you quoted them literally, they could not have possibly proved themselves wrong yet even once, let alone "time and time again".
It was just an example of the type of shit they say to sell it, and then walk back from.
https://fortune.com/2026/05/26/sam-altman-dario-amodei-walki...
The moronic "no need programmers" hype cycle happens every 15 years. We've all been here many times before.
I would say the claim that AI is going to replace most white collar work a very snake-oily term. The technology behind it however is very compelling and interesting.
I don't know enough about most white collar work to make any predictions. But I know a lot about software development and information technology because I've been a professional since 1995. The claims being made about AI's impact on that profession do not seem at all snake-oily to me.
> I love computers too, but it doesn't resonate with me when people call AI "snake oil."
Not to worry, a fool and his money will soon be parted.
I think the main problem is that there is no definition for "AI".
And from your use case, I don't see any difference between that and a search engine.
> I think it makes me a better programmer because I can bootstrap the knowledge needed for a new project much faster
faster != better
For me, the painful banging my head against the wall to figure something out is usually the most rewarding sort of learning experience.
And we’re back to the pitch.
AI is snake oil. It sells you a slot machine in the guise of a colleague.
Oh, not using it right? Not the right model? Insert coin to continue.
Snake oil, total snake oil.
This doesn't even make sense. Maybe if you fleshed it out?
It makes perfect sense to me. Type in a prompt like “how can I make the cheese on my pizza stringier” and maybe it’ll tell you to use different cheeses, but maybe it’ll tell you to add glue.
If you don’t like the answer, don’t worry, they’re building more data centers in poor neighborhoods so you can keep submitting the prompt until you get a better one.
What year is it, that you're getting frontier model responses saying to put glue in your pizza?
I trust that you can use your reading comprehension skills to understand that by referring to a famous example of LLMs producing garbage, I’m simply using it to illustrate the phenomenon at large, rather than to suggest that I am still struggling to find glue-free ways to make my pizza stringier.
If you still need help breaking down what I meant in the previous post, feel free to ask. Sentences can be tricky.
On a related note, just because Gemini doesn’t tell you to put glue in your pizza anymore, by no means implies that this particular problem is solved: https://www.404media.co/it-is-trivially-easy-to-use-reddit-t...
Snake oil is something not medicine sold as medicine.
AI is something not a colleague (a slot machine), sold as a colleague.
Right, that's what you already said. What I don't understand is the "slot machine" analogy you're making. In what sense is AI a "slot machine"? Are you talking about the stocks of AI companies?
Variable intermittent reward. Pull the lever, get something nice or something bad. I've had far too much bad today and I'm furious.
I just reversed engineered large parts of my 2011 car odb comms. Was able to hook a stm32 board to the car communication and have full control over a lot of stuff so that I can build my own instrument cluster from a lcd screen. It literally took me one evening to get the first proof of concept working. I never touched stm32 stuff before.
Good for you, son. I've just spent the whole f*king day screaming at an agent on a deadline.
This right here. People simp for LLM companies as if their experience of using the out-of-pocket top-of-the-line "team of PhD's" paid models will be what is deployed when trying to contact your bank, insurance, etc. No,... once tech companies stop playing the "no/some revenue until we own the world" VC game, we'll all be stuck trying to talk to GlueSnifferGPT when reporting an emergency.
What AI is being sold as is incredibly different than what it actually does. I love AI. I spent years in grad school researching it because I loved it so much (it was never about the money to me). But what it is and what it can do is so different from what it is being sold as.
Snake Oil is an apt comparison because it is being sold as a cure-all. Medical problems? AI. Financial problems? AI. Scientific research? AI. <Insert problem>: AI... It isn't that ML[0] can't help with these problems (it can!), it is that "AI" is being sold as a solution to these problems. As if humans will be obsolete in 6months[1].
LLMs are a fantastic example. We (lossy) compressed the entire internet and build a human language interface into it. That's some real Sci-Fi shit right there. That's an incredible achievement with a lot of utility! But how is it sold? If you call it what it is people will act like you're diminishing its status. We've exaggerated the accomplishments so far out of proportion that we can't even recognize big of an advancement that these machines actually were. LLMs were a huge step forward, but even a giant is small when you compare it to a titan.
So yeah, I do think it is being sold as Snake Oil. And that's been my fear for quite some time (you can dig up my history if you're that passionate). But that's also what we've done with every major tech recently. Hell, even cryptocurrency has real value. The thing that killed it was all the hype built around it when the tech was just in its infancy. Do we really want to do the same thing to AI? It certainly has more utility to it than cryptocurrencies. But it doesn't matter how good the actual product is if people are sold on something else. What matters is how the actual product matches to peoples' expectations. There is such a thing as "overselling", and we're certainly doing that as a community. I know it is an exciting field and there's lots of exciting technology, but we can't promise the moon if we can't deliver.
And why was AI seen as a red flag?
It was a red flag because artificial intelligence doesn’t exist, and anyone claiming to use it or work on it is either lying or delusional in thinking they could accomplish it.
Nowadays people just say “AI” when they mean “LLM,” which is an unrelated thing entirely, but people want people who use it.
We don't need the caveat that it's sometimes useful on every post about the problems of AI.
Isn't coding solved and we should all be out of a job by now according to Dario? Or what about AI 2027 -- we're only 6 months away! Time to build a bunker!! LLMs themselves aren't snake oil, they're just a useful technology, but all the marketing around them is FUD mixed with hype mixed with the most irritating people on the planet (the ones that aren't bots at least).
> Isn't coding solved and we should all be out of a job by now according to Dario?
You sound like you have a quote in mind.
> I love computers too, but it doesn't resonate with me when people call AI "snake oil." The comparison suggests that the thing doesn't do what it's marketed to do.
Well yeah, because it doesn't. AI is being claimed to be a magical genius intelligence which will solve everything forever, but in reality LLMs are still idiots you can't trust to not screw up without a tight leash. They can't even do the one thing they are supposed to be good at (programming) well, despite all the effort which has been focused on trying to make them good at it. They don't remotely do what they are marketed to do, not even close!
This is less an anti-AI post and more a post against the greed of the industry:
> But things feel different now. I can relate to what Chris Person said when he expressed his frustrations about how these slick conmen are using the technology I adore as tools for exploitation and disempowerment. The Internet, built by idealists on a foundation of openness and community, has become a mire of dark patterns and gardens with ever thicker walls, desperate to keep people within an ecosystem where their attention is the prized commodity. I’ve witnessed a nerdy space full of nerds be invaded by marketers, callous capitalists, and “brogrammers”—exaggerating the worst, most toxic, aspects of geek culture in their pursuit of money and power. I’ve poured hundreds of hours of work into open source projects only to have it all be scraped into a plagiarism machine and then aggressively sold back to me. It feels that the hope I had for the future technology could give us, the naïve and starry-eyed fantasies I fostered in my youth, has been eroded when faced with a reality where the thing I love can make a lot of money for people who don’t care for any of it.
You can simultaneously believe that AI is really cool and also that also a lot of companies are degrading the internet, society, and private ownership at large.
Takes me back to the time where I would pickup any books that taught anything about computers/programming. I was too young to understand any of it, but the fact that there's this knowledge to be unlocked, that would then let me do new things with this white boxy device on my table top - was truly addictive.
I can't say the feeling remains because most new stuff that I learn now is not runnable on my machine now. Tech has gone back to the days when owning hardware that's capable of running the latest has become a costly affair.
I love the computer too. Never more than while writing 6502 assembler for a decades-defunct home computer for literally no purpose at all.
Meanwhile, the economy needs software to be written and I need employment, and I'm lucky enough to have a job that hews somewhat close to my interests, whether that be learning the latest JS framework or to prompt Claude. It's all pretty decent and better than chiselling coal out of a pit for 10 hours a day.
> Nearly two decades after that first introduction, a therapist would speculate that my interest in computers could stem from how it was a rare point of stability in a life where I ended up leaving my home and my friends every few years.
This line hits really close to home. :-/
Computers used to have unlimited promise and potential.
then at some point, the balance started tipping.
Things I specifically remember:
- half life required you to register online to install your single-player game from CD
- turbotax would only install on one computer.
- software started rooting around on your system and uploading the findings
- the iphone didn't let you install your own software
- microsoft. enough said.
The personal computer is empowering, the thing client connecting to a mainframe isn't.
AI local rigs feel like the pc did in 1980.
> Computers used to have unlimited promise and potential.
Imo 90s sci-fi had a lot of this techno optimism, even if the settings were often dystopian. Cyberpunk was pretty wild and who knows a lot of that could still come to pass.
At some point, we were the owners of the machine. More importantly, this was normal. We could do whatever we wanted, and the corporations just had to accept it. World changing technology. Limitless potential.
Now it's the opposite. The computers belong to the corporations. They're just generously allowing us to use them, and only in ways that they profit off of. Computers, arguably humanity's most important invention, reduced to interactive television, a mere vehicle for corporate advertsing and surveillance capitalism.
It's truly disgusting. Makes me sad like nothing else.
Computers started as massively costly, corporation / government only mainframes, that much is clear. They've been productivity machines from the get go, they've been machines made for war.
What computers "are" has been ebbing and flowing decade after decade. They've been repurposed to something that they initially weren't. It was originally niche, and not at all the norm.
Then, there was a brief period when counter culture was pop culture. That was reflected in everything in the 90's, from music to computers.
I think the author doesn't realize how gatekeepy this sentiment is; that they earned their love of "the computer", that it was formative to them, that they put all this uncomfortable effort into learning how to program, and thus (subtextually) they should have a say in how other people use "the computer".
What gate is being kept by a guy writing an article about something they are passionate about? This is such a "hackernews type comment" and it's so weird. If someone reads this article about a dude who talks about how growing up with computers formed his personality and how he was into computers before they were cool and decides "welp, guess I can't do computers now", they probably weren't going to get very far with computers regardless.
There's no gate being kept here. It's just someone talking about something they are passionate about and then expressing their opinion about current technology. They're not stopping anyone from also loving the computer. If anything, I could see someone reading this and being MORE excited to get into computing.
You know what? Gate keeping can be a good thing. Some gates exist for a good reason. I think "are you actually interested in doing this?" is a very reasonable gate. I'm not saying all coding needs to be a passion project, obviously, but I think it's very hard to be good at a thing if you don't care about it. Software continues to get worse and worse, and software developers know less and less about the machines they're working with, and I don't think those things are unrelated.
You know what's a good gate? employement. Like great comedians of old who could make actually funny jokes, lets pull up the ladder like dave chappel and cut the kids out. I want a job and i want to stay employed in IT. I don't know what's coming but the best interest for myself is to reduce the amount of technical people and increase my rarity.
Old Dave Chappelle is not nearly as funny as Young Dave Chappelle, but survives because of momentum.
Long time fans of a thing are allowed to be upset when assholes come in a drastically change it, whether it be Star Wars, your sports team, or programming.
Arguably its worse. Star Wars fans can still watch the stuff they like without being weird smelly nerds on the internet about the bits they dont like.
You cant really have 90's computing again very easily. Its not as simple as putting a DVD on play. It was a zeitgeist, a vibe.
I definitely think we should be welcoming to new members in any community, but I also think new members should recognize that they're coming into an established space. Not everyone is exactly equal. Not all gatekeeping is bad. Or rather, maybe it is better that we have people that help newbies get involved.
I'm not saying the protection can't get toxic. It definitely can. I was part of the Arch forums awhile ago when there was the push to kill the noob guide (I was pro-noob guide and was a frequent editor). We lost that battle, but hey, it was likely part of the reason we got a bunch more Arch forks like Endeavour and Cachy.
I always want more people to enjoy the things I love. It's great to share and life is so much better with friends. But it is also only natural to get emotional when you're losing that part of your life too. One big problem with big communities is that they become anonymous. Take HN for example. There's a handful of users I recognize, but it is for the most part effectively anonymous. And we're relatively small. The thing I miss the most is small communities, since that's where you get to know people. I think from a broader perspective we've done a great job at destroying those. There's got to be a better balance than what we have now.
As long as we're clear that the sentiment here is analogous to people being protective of Star Wars, like you said, I'm good.
I think a better analogy should be: should you take a job writing a Star Wars movie if you're not a fan of Star Wars? (or sub in: Star Trek, or Dr. Who, or any other recent nerd property that's been kind of ruined by people who don't understand the source material screwing it up by thinking they know better than the fans). In that context at least, the proof is in the pudding: Star Wars is a mess because it's been written by people that mostly don't care about Star Wars, same with Star Trek. I think coding is kind of like that. People that don't care are going to make a mediocre-to-bad product.
JJ Abrams, Rian Johnson, Dave Filoni, Jon Favreau: all big Star Wars fans.
Tony Gilroy is not!
I think we do get to have a say when a large amount of the way people use computers has basically just turned into companies trying to get people addicted to their social media platforms so they can sell them ads.
Where does the author claim that they should “have a say in how other people use the computer”?
Can't say I disagree with the author.
People with impure motives are running the show now, and they're the number one reason why technology sucks now. Everything is dumbed down, enshittified, growth hacked, attention grabbing, surveillance capitalism, information brokerage, advertising. It was never about the computers, it was always about money. The computers are not only unloved, they are actively being hidden from the user. The computer does not matter, only the "user experience" matters. Users are not meant to use computers anymore, they are meant to interact with the scripted flows created by corporations, and nothing more. Computers are the enemy in this world, they are too powerful, leave them unchecked and they can wipe out the business models of corporations.
I definitely think someone who genuinely loves computers should have a say in how computers are used. That's the exact sort of person I'd elect as a regulator or lawmaker. There is no substitute for giving a shit. Someone who cares about computers more than money wouldn't have let things degenerate to this point.
Even if it is gatekeeping, what does it matter? It's not a problem. Computers are world changing technology, and they don't deserve to be reduced to vehicles for corporate advertising. They could be more, and should be more. And if gatekeeping is necessary, then so be it.
Especially seeing how fucked the styling is on mobile. Can't read it because the text is white on white.
If someone's gonna gatekeep, their shit needs to smell like roses.
Gatekeeping is good, we need more of it in the llm age lest we be overridden with slop.
> I think the author [believes that] they earned their love of "the computer" ... thus (subtextually) they should have a say in how other people use "the computer".
N... no? The guy's pretty clearly anti "attention economy bullshit", anti plagiarism-machine, and of the opinion that it is a very good thing that it is easier than it was when he was young for people to learn to love 'the computer'.
From the end of the "The Smell of Ink on Cheap Paper" section:
> It would be easy to say that it’s just nostalgia that makes me lament what was lost in the transition to the Internet, and it’s not like print was spared the rot of capitalism that has made online geek spaces into ad-ridden, engagement-maximising cesspools. But I am glad that I was able to do my initial discovery in a world devoid of pop-ups, auto-playing ads, click-bait, and incessant pleas to “like and subscribe”. ...
From the final section, entitled "A Life Well Lived?":
> I can relate to what Chris Person said when he expressed his frustrations about how these slick conmen are using the technology I adore as tools for exploitation and disempowerment. The Internet, built by idealists on a foundation of openness and community, has become a mire of dark patterns and gardens with ever thicker walls, desperate to keep people within an ecosystem where their attention is the prized commodity. I’ve witnessed a nerdy space full of nerds be invaded by marketers, callous capitalists, and “brogrammers”—exaggerating the worst, most toxic, aspects of geek culture in their pursuit of money and power. I’ve poured hundreds of hours of work into open source projects only to have it all be scraped into a plagiarism machine and then aggressively sold back to me. It feels that the hope I had for the future technology could give us, the naïve and starry-eyed fantasies I fostered in my youth, has been eroded when faced with a reality where the thing I love can make a lot of money for people who don’t care for any of it.
> Then again, it’s not all bad. We’ve come a long way from the time when computers were seen as expensive and exclusive tools, and the unwelcoming domain of elitist men. Programming—with the empowerment that it brings—is more accessible than ever and there seems to be a strong cultural shift in the techie spaces away from centralised services and onto federated, self-hosted, and in many other ways more free alternatives. The Internet seems to becoming more and more locked down, but us weirdos will just stay in our weird corners and will find means to circumvent any restrictions put on us. My affection towards technology made me an ostracised outsider when I was younger, then it condescendingly made me into a “rockstar”, and now it’s looking like my peers are ushering in the end of civilised society. So I’m ready to go back into being just some strange guy with strange interests, doing silly things people don’t understand and don’t care to.
Perhaps Sir should go back and re-read the article without looking for hidden meaning?
Mr. Enger echos a lot of thoughts that I (and a lot of people on these forums) seem to have. We can still make an attempt to remake what we love, with personal websites and self-hosting. However modern architecture kills even that with DDoS attacks and IP blacklists on everything. It is no wonder that people are starting to promote alternate protocols like Gemini (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48297467) that explicitly make it impossible for many of the evils of the World Wide Web to be repeated.
Working at FAANG made me stop liking computers. As soon as I left, it all came back.
For me, in the early 80s, this was all about state. Reliably keeping a state, well defined, numbers or strings, bytes preferably, and being able to act upon them.
Only later I learned that this, ehat I was missing in the analog world back then, was what made up the core of a turing machine.
So this beauty is still the same for me. Just the sheer amount of state that is available and provided by others make the concept much less powerful than back in the day.
Now AI brings that back a bit, by finding the right items that you can keep and iterate on. But we tend to let AI also do rhe iteration and that introduces that non-deterministic character that the computer had overcome.
So, no wonder, that I, and quite a few others, at the moment, still mostly use AI for finding and typing code to describe the structures for the machine, but keep trying to define the iterations ourselves, guaranteeing clear insight and access to the state we are trying to work with.
Everything else is more like working with an assistant back then (or today), extending your actionable potential instean of your mind. And depending on how you see the world or what the tasl at hand might be, you might prefer one over the other, control over action, insight and perspective over tinkering with the matter to push it somehow in the right direction or implementing a known process.
But that state thing, still priceless, timeless. The right augmentation to our fuzzy brains and better than paper, since, who thought, we can express the algorithms in the same way.
So, I guess I will always see this beauty, even in a simple flip-flop, coin, switch and any array thereof, and anything that can be controlled by that binary configuration.
I love the fact that if you speak German and English, it's possible to understand a lot of Dutch text.
I also love the Computer AND the Internet, allowing me to interact with and experience the world like this.
If you're referring to the mag covers, they're Norwegian in fact. (Bokmål or Nynorsk, you ask? Idk)
Yeah, so Norwegian it is :)
Except the one on the right is in Swedish.
To me, all seems like a bunch of words I can recognize surrounded with stuff I mostly can't recognize but can sort of work out from the context.
This post resonates with me. I remember in Kindergarten getting my very first life experience with computing tech: grounding myself by touching the bottom screws of a Apple IIe. I've loved them in nearly the same way as OP.
I get the way he feels. I remember how special this stuff used to be because of how niche it was. It does feel a bit like the normies co-opted it but that is my personal and selfish view.
I make computer go beep-boop. I love computer.
There's a spirit in the machine, and if you are quiet enough, and patient enough, and willing to let yourself believe, you can even heart it talk to you, long into the night.
I, too, love the computer.
Nothing will take that away. I have plenty of evidence for it, too.
I think those of us who truly love the mechanism will not only survive the AI wave but will surf that motherfucker because WE KNOW, AT A VERY DEEP LEVEL, THE THING FROM WHENCE IT CAME.
(and honestly, I’ve been waiting for something like this to help filter out all the fucking posers diluting my market value)
One of the main reasons I fell in love with computers was determinism. I always felt weird seeing people get upset and curse at the C++ compiler. In my mind, the “computer” will always give you the same output for the same input. Therefore, you must be doing something wrong if you’re fighting the compiler. The answer to your problems is in the source code.
This is something LLMs took away from me. I can’t just look at the source code and figure out why a prompt didn’t produce the expected outcome. I have to go with my gut feeling, and with the little I know about LLMs.
On the other hand, LLMs have enabled me to code prototypes that I would have only dreamed about a few years ago.
Do you want your own fancy terminal emulator? Done. A couple of weekends’ worth of work.
How about your own Linux windowing system, running Firefox and a terminal? Done. A couple more weekends.
You always hated KiCad routing, but never had time to go through the code and change it to meet your requirements? No worries. A day’s work.
Of course, none of this is production quality, but it gets you started very fast. And I’m sure you can turn it into a solid, production-quality product in much less time than it would take without using an LLM.
I think the author simply grew up. It's easy to ignore all of the business stuff and just have fun when you are kid. Nothing is stopping the author from generating all sorts of crazy stuff with AI if he wants to live on the bleeding edge of technology.
Generating things and going through the process of learning how it works and making it from scratch are very, very different. The feeling each leaves you with are also very different. If the only thing you care about is output, then yea maybe generating a bunch of stuff feels great, but if you care about the process, learning, and discovery, just prompting an llm doesn't feel great.
Most programmers do not care about how platforms work. How many kid web developers do you think actively read Chromium's source code? It's already plenty stimulating staying at a higher level, letting abstractions hide implementation details.
I love the computer, too.
I remember when I was around 10 and we got out first PC - Compaq Presario - that we shared among us 4 siblings. And I was instantly hooked to. And then about a year later, we got internet connected and the first website we visited was Pokemon.
I remember at my high school, the computer room in the library was fitted out with the new colored iMacs. I was shocked! How could a computer look like this. You had to register to use it each day during lunch breaks because so many people wanted to use them.
I remember the first time I came across an Apple magazine, and it was showing screenshots of the new OS X. The Aqua interface got me hooked. I'd read, and re-read, every page, drooling over the screenshots. It wasn't until ~10 years later I got my first Mac and I was obsessed with it!
My first computer was a pentium II. After one year learning about computing in my school lab and friends’ computers, it was amazing to have something to tinker with. And it and its successors brought me plenty of delight over the year. First discovering Linux (with Linux Mint and Gnome 2 as I couldn’t install Debian), learning assembly and C, learning Blender, learning how windows internals worked,… It has been a tool that has shaped my life. And yes, the current trend of presenting it as a mere source of entertainment and a very small sets of features is sickening.
But this day, I dabble with OpenBSD and Linux (Alpine) and it’s a bit of fresh air. There’s some convenience lost, but you get the freedom of computing back.