The original article linked here was one of the best reads I've had in a while. As a data scientist myself, I'm sick of all business decisions revolving around cramming LLMs and Generative AI into every nook and cranny imaginable. It appears to me that most people have forgotten Occam's razor and want to use LLMs just because everyone else is using them and the world is spellbound by this technology.
Everybody had to have a website
Everybody had to have a mobile app
Everybody had to be the “Uber for x”
Everybody had to be on the blockchain
Everybody has to be using AI everywhere
But what now? I can’t think of another thing and that doesn’t bode well for the next decade in the stock market. Feeling very small cap value and gold again like 2000-2010. Nothing could be healthier for the markets and my sanity.
Oh man. I had already enjoyed the original article, but having someone go and commission a voice actor to read it is brilliant, no matter how much the viewpoint may cut against the grain of the current hype cycle.
(I also think it would be awesome in Morgan Freeman's voice, with a bit of tired weariness and wrath...)
Maybe because it's critical of the AI and the whole SV culture. Maybe because of the f-bomb. Or maybe because it's a dupe of a dupe of a dupe: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=piledrive
It's not an exact dupe, but the main part of the content is too similar. You can send an email to dang so he can take a look and give an official opinion hn@ycombinator.com
Has the crypto bubble popped? I definitely see less hype and tech folks talking about it. But coinbase is up 40% this year and BTC is also up. I don't get what's propping it up.
As tech, it turns out to be as boring and low-utility as most folks not caught up in it expected. The interest bubble, from the tech side, seems mercifully to have popped.
As virtual-pogs and a tool for crime, it does seem to have staying power.
I think the greatest driver of liquidity in crypto is actually capital flight from countries with restrictive capital controls like China and Russia. So a tool for crime according to those nations but not a criminal use as far as most people would understand the term.
I've worked quite a bit in crypto but keep it on the low in HN as I end up with very unfavorable responses (the general sentiment can be seen in the comments here). However, I will point out from my experience that this is true and not purely anecdotal.
In particular, my most recent project was geared towards using crypto to finance innovation in particularly hard-to-finance countries (i.e., where interest rates are basically predatory). It's proved a huge success and still continues to this day.
At this point that movement of capital in and out of Russia is both a real world crime and an ethical "crime" regardless of what people with libertarian ideological bent think.
NFTs are somehow still going, though as always it's hard to gauge genuine interest when there's so much astroturfing and wash trading going on. Predictably a lot of them are now using AI to mass produce the artwork, NFTs were never genuinely about appreciating the artwork so growing the art in a Petri dish is on-brand I suppose.
Yeah I got interested in Solana this year. The tech is cool, I did the tutes and want to make a small project but I literally can't think of something useful to build.
I'm in the middle of making a site where people can pay me 10¢ via Solana, which is to say micropayments are now possible. Then I just need to convince 10 million people to do that.
Everyone is talking about Retrieval Augmented Generation, but most companies don't actually have any internal documentation worth retrieving. Fix. Your. Shit.
I was expecting this to be dictated by an AI voice... But this sounds pretty human to me, and if it actually is an AI, I would consider it a decent rebuke of the original article.
