I Love the Computer

  > Long time fans of a thing are

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.

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 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

  > 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. : 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...

I mean, a 125kW server stuffed into 5U will definitely work nicely for toast.