It's just really unusual to hear some of my biggest "early adopter" friends filled with bile for AI. And well I'm right there with them. I'm irritated most by the dishonesty of the claims about what it can do. With "internet of things" the objection was not "you can't track your water bottle on the internet, it won't work the way you describe" it was more like "why would you want to do that?" and "your data will be sold to companies, you will be spied on"

Both proved to be correct.

The "internet of things" failed to deliver on it's most exciting promises mostly due to corporate resistance to interoperability. Alexa can't make a google calendar event, your light system is in a war with the system that controls the thermostat.

Every company aimed for market dominance, boxing out the others, and it has made everything harder to use, more buggy and worthless.

But it's probably for the best that seamless control did not materialize. This is protecting us from 'agentic' AI agents running around causing even bigger problems.

Alexa struggles to communicate with different brands of lights, and this is by design in this desperate hope that people would lock in and buy everything from one company. AI agents will face even worse issues since the concept of interoperability isn't even on the radar of these clowns. They think they can just power through it.

I guess my point is that people who don't understand the tremendous power of non-corporate cooperation and interoperability inspired by a higher calling than making money will never be able to build anything very powerful since they will always be too busy fighting each other.

The internet is powerful because of the ways it is standardized. And the same people excited by that power generally try to destroy this aspect of the internet. Because that vast power can't be controlled by one person.

@futurebird It's funny because I was just thinking about how so much of the Linux ecosystem was built by people just trying to make a thing that works and gets the job done and how I worried money getting too high of an importance can ruin that. I keep thinking of Mozilla in particular.

Ok, they weren't ever like that Linux equivalent by any means and were always a business essentially, but I just can't forget the way they started seeing dollar signs more and more and stopped making the browser their own users wanted and started focusing solely on how they could make money off of their users instead. The biggest reason anyone even used Firefox was to get away from Google and they went and became Google 2.0. It's madness and it hurts us all.

I guess money can't not corrupt?