Mastodawn

Glyph Mar 14, 2024

LB: if you are a founder of an actually useful business that uses "AI" technology in some defensible way, you should be glad that everyone viscerally hates it so much in public. the sooner we can get out of this "AI" hype cycle, the sooner your investors will stop demanding that you slather "AI" branding all over everything, the sooner you can talk about what your product specifically does and what value it provides and stop blathering about "AI" vaguely.

Glyph Mar 14, 2024

It's an implementation detail. You don't talk about your other implementation details like this. Imagine if every consumer app started their pitch decks with screenshots of github actions yaml. "we are democratizing github actions" / "imagine where the future of github actions will take us" / "society will be forever changed by our hosted testing environment"

if your product is a customer service PBX why would anyone give a shit whether you're using linear algebra or not. talk about results.

I think this is why GenAI sounds so much like a cryptocurrency scam to a lay audience. When Microsoft launched the Xbox they didn't spend hours talking about the wafer lithography they used for the GPU, they told you about video games. The iPhone announcement talked about listening to music and using a web browser, not the relative merits of capacitive and resistive touchscreens. But Blockchain and GenAI hype both have this obsession with minor details that really should not be user-visible.

Glyph Mar 14, 2024

Good "tech" marketing does not market "tech", it demonstrates a solution to a problem a human being is having.

bsky: @daniloc.xyz Mar 14, 2024

@glyph I was just re-watching the intro to the iBook and Airport, which is such a seminal moment in consumer electronics history to me

Jobs is MOSTLY concerned with the subjective experience of the thing. He gets into the technical details only sparingly and only to provide evidence of the unique power and value of the device (IO, CPU/GPU, wireless bandwidth at 11mbit unheard of at the time)

But mostly it’s about how much you’ll love using it

https://youtube.com/watch?v=3iTNWZF2m3o

Macworld NY 1999 - iBook & AirPort Introduction

YouTube

Glyph Mar 14, 2024

@danilo sometimes apple goes a _little_ too hard on this (I grind my teeth every time I see a very obviously fabricated graph that says "2.4 times faster!" with no labels on anything) but the only reason people want stats in the first place is to contextualize a bottleneck that they're facing.

bsky: @daniloc.xyz Mar 14, 2024

@glyph oh for real, at this point every one of these events, even Apple’s, are the most degenerate versions of the original magic

It’s hard to replicate the magic of a world that existed before the knee of the miniaturization and price-performance curve

A truly unique moment in history

Glyph Mar 14, 2024

the devices we have now are objectively vastly superior to the things being announced then, I was honestly kind of annoyed about the original iPhone and 3GS because there were other devices that did more of what I was interested in at the time, whereas the 15 pro is extraterrestrial technology dropped to earth…

but the individual release increments are so small now that the sort of bold world-changing rhetoric they got used to using really doesn't line up any more

bsky: @daniloc.xyz Mar 14, 2024

@glyph what’s more, Jobs completely demolished and rebuilt the arena in which all these devices must compete

There are still flaccid, uninspired devices aplenty, but the baseline humanism of technology design has been dragged permanently upward from where it sat in 1998

The Bondi Blue iMac haunts the dreams of every tech culture maker forever

Twobiscuits🚴‍♂️

@danilo @glyph the green one is still haunting a cubic metre or so of our living room, in its box

Florian Weber Mar 14, 2024

@glyph @josh this should be the case even outside of “tech” 😒

Twobiscuits🚴‍♂️

@glyph so much this!

Omg it's rare to agree with a toot so strongly and then find the thread just gets better as you go back up it! 👏🙏

Hugo Slabbert ⚠️Mar 18, 2024

@glyph I think that's the gist or the crux of it:
Over indexing on the underlying tech rather than what problems you are aiming to solve is generally very closely correlated to solutions in search of problems, and I think we all have a strong learned reaction to that phenomenon.

Evan Light Mar 14, 2024

@glyph And then, today, Figure 0 and OpenAI demonstrate a robot communicating with a human and performing tasks with relative dexterity in response to, but not directed by, a human.

If not for the GPT-esque pauses between input and response, this would completely blow my mind. As it is, I'm still astonished at the robot's (LLM's?) ability to portray an understanding of contexts.

Glyph Mar 14, 2024

@elight as an MIT media lab project this would be incredibly impressive. as a company, it's a tech demo for … what? a robot that can very slowly move objects around in an incredibly sterile lab environment, in response to verbal commands? Is this a cost-effective response to an actual problem? You are clearly meant to *infer* that this robot could autonomously do a factory or sanitation job, but that is not what we are actually being shown.

Evan Light Mar 14, 2024

@glyph Indeed. I am maintaining some healthy skepticism as well. There is a lot that they didn't show us.

Glyph Mar 14, 2024

@elight I can't find it now but I remember a thread, I think on Twitter, by a roboticist getting annoyed about these types of demos. The entire rant was *just* about all the ways that dust can destroy expensive servos and how field maintenance is a nightmare, how it is even disruptive to manufacturing robots that perform a fixed repetitive task in a heavily controlled environment; from their description, autonomous robots that interact with the public are many years off _just_ from that problem

Glyph Mar 14, 2024

@elight and they finished with something like "and that is problem 1 of 47 that is not shown in these videos" (pretty sure it was in response to Boston Dynamics)

Martin Hamilton Mar 18, 2024

@glyph I advise startups on business planning and securing funding, and have found it useful to mentally substitute "a database" for "the blockchain" in their pitches. Now remind me again about the user need this addresses...

FeralRobots Mar 18, 2024

@glyph that having been said, there are some technical details with both that get discounted or glossed over. E.g. energy use, theft, confabulation, the fact that both industries were fundamentally lying about what their products do....