TechTakes

An article written for people who do not exist. People who will listen to this article who are in the overlap with people who need to hear it.

With so many parts of tech operating like a mixture of religion and fandom this would be the atheistic answer. (This is my diametric opposite of a sneer.)

It’s so frustrating to see how egregious the future tense has become in all the talking about these products. Also the anticipation of a killer app is never going to sound not desperate.

This causes me to reflect on contrasting currents in tech culture. I remember growing up with the Apple/Mac rumor culture around the time Steve Jobs came back, and how people had conditioned themselves to get hyped for any little tiny leak about upcoming products. A culture which obviously persists now, albeit in streamlined, advertiser-friendly blog spaces. By contrast, MacWeek magazine had a columnist calling himself Mac the Knife who claimed to have clandestine rendezvous with shady trenchcoat-clad characters in the back alleys of Cupertino... And somehow the new product reveals were almost always somewhat less whelming than the rumormill had built them up to be. Part of the Jobs idolatry that still dominates Silicon Valley is the clear strategy among empty-suit grifters like Altman that such hype is vital but Apple didn't do enough with it; that you should always be marketing what's around the corner rather than keeping it hidden away under lock, key, and NDA.

Contrast this with open-source culture, warts and all. What's in the repository is the basis of what comes next. You think superintelligence is imminent? OK, where's the code stubs that will serve as the foundation? Make a pull request for your mega-brain's medulla, let's review it. It's also a big reason why the current round of AI doesn't fit with open-source culture, no matter how many people are trying to force it. It is inherently an obfuscatory technology. Not just due to the sheer size of the data sets and weights involved, but also through the weird non-deterministic practice of configuring software through natural-language prompts. GIGO at scale, but you can keep the hype going by promising a lower percentage of garbage in the future.

I’m sick of things being hyped on potential too.

VR is an example. (Michael Abrash predictions anyone?) Unfinished games are an example. (Multiplayer Cyberpunk 2077 anyone?)

"Sure massively wasteful 'AI' systems could somehow solve the climate crisis but they probably most definitely absolutely won’t" so they probably absolutely won't lol. Half the time it works every time...

That thumbnail looks like a motif from the Ringu video.