> This includes purely “defensive” patents, in industries where their competitors abuse intellectual property law to stifle competition.
My own company was pretty staunchly opposed to software patents until we got sued by patent trolls. We are now pretty aggressive about patenting things so that doesn't happen again. Software patents were never great, and bad actors have made things even worse.
But you can't use patents to protect yourself against a typical patent troll. A typical patent troll doesn't do anything except sue people so they are unlikely to infringe anybody else's patents.
You can patent the stuff that is essential to what you do as soon as you come up with it - before the troll can. Then the troll can't sue because they can't get the patent in the first place (or if they do, you can use yours to invalidate theirs).
The web was a hype-train, and then a bubble, too. It's not enough that a new technology is adopting the hype cycle, what matters is what's left of it afterwards
How many of us got their workflow disrupted by AI? It's been a while since I've googled a "how do I..." type thing, because of how much I appreciate Bing Copilot or Phind
Safe to say my life did not change with the arrival of Web3!
You're kidding, I assume? Or maybe you misread "workflow" to mean something like "work-life"?
For sure more than a single-digit percentage of people have tried a Q&A bot by now. Shoot, Windows just updated to insert Copilot into users' machines, with the icon right next to the Windows button. It can't not continue to grow. It's such an amazingly effective way to get information versus scouring through web pages.
Disrupted? As in destroyed so that you need to create a completely different one?
There are some reports of people hired to write low quality spam articles that fit this. There isn't much else.
There exist lots of people that claim some small gains, mostly because they use shitty tools that can't do what some tools could do 15 years ago (often the same tools). I'm afraid that's not enough to keep our current LLMs alive.
I think they mean 'disrupted' in a more benign, quotidian sense. Like, changed significantly. That said, perhaps you could clarify your comment about "shitty tools that can't do what some tools could do 15 years ago"? Like what? I'd preemptively argue that Google Search has changed for market reasons, not technical ones, but I'm curious to hear if you meant something else. Objectively speaking, chatbots from 15 years ago (or 2...) were just not at all coherent. You can criticize modern LLMs all day, but they're definitely coherent.
There's a bunch of crap and most of the AI bubble is low-value BS, and back when the Web was starting there was Pets.com.
Realistically how many people are currently employed "writing low quality spam articles"
That's not reality. That's just reddit crapping on strawmen because a lot of the visible results from AI is 1) Crap creative work and 2) Polluted search results/comment sections
These are red herrings
There's real people doing real productive things with AIs that do boring things right now.
The ability to search for things that are still fuzzy in my mind, ask open-ended questions and get an answer back, or find something when you can't come up with a good keyword
I've never had the google-fu that some other developers have so this was something that often required asking a peer before. Sometimes a forum or some Discord, even.
Now you just feed your garbage question to a large language model that swallowed the entirety of the internet and a few seconds later it's spitting back something useful.
It's the first time I have access to a robot that's on stand-by with surface level knowledge of everything.
I suspect people who don't find this extremely valuable in their day-to-day life are just not catching the moments when they could've used it -- while on the other side of the spectrum the value it removes from comment sections/image search results is impossible to ignore.
> How many of us got their workflow disrupted by AI? It's been a while since I've googled a "how do I..."
I did about an hour ago. AI answers run the gamut from boilerplate that's useful that still ends up needing tweaking to utterly making shit up that doesn't exist. I did a copilot search once that referred to an entire framework that it just made the fuck up, and you know it would've been great if it did exist, the framework would've suited my needs perfectly, it was just complicated by the fact that it didn't.
I'm off that train, I hate having my time wasted and until they can guarantee veracity in answers it's just a google search that's even less reliable than google, which is saying something lately.
OT but the "best" part of it is that the text-continuation foundations inherently encourage this exact behavior. People don't write "I don't know" very often, much less "wait a minute, I think I dreamed that, but it's too bad that doesn't exist".
> It's been a while since I've googled a "how do I..." type thing
Same, but you’re missing planet-sized elephant in the room here. This use-case has been technically solved for 20 years. What’s happened is that web search was ripe for consumer value extraction (aka enshittification). Have you ever seen a market more saturated with perverse incentives, from ad delivery, content farms, data mining, and of course the very search engine that prints money from it?
Now, if you wanna do an apples-apples comparison, imagine popups, consent forms, hidden influences from advertisers, recommendation engines, arbitrary lock-outs from community guidelines violations, ads while waiting for responses, JS bloat at recipe-website levels, and so on and so forth.
By all means, enjoy ChatGPT or whatever in its naked current form. But make no mistake that this is the honeymoon phase. Potential doesn’t govern the direction of new tech. Incentive does.
Just because your reddit or hn had non tiny amount of posts about blockchain or nft, then it does not mean that there was real and significant push towards those in real world
There is huge world outside your twitters and reddits
Well, my concern started to grow when two things happened:
- My sister who is not in a tech field asked me how blockchain worked since she had heard about it
- A server at a restaurant was describing that they help people buy their first bitcoin as a side hustle.
So while every example may not permeate out of the echo chambers, there are some that are reasonably widespread.
They talk about Bitcoin on financial news shows, which lends it a huge amount of credibility. It's like if Jim Cramer has opinions about last night's Powerball numbers.
As someone working at a very large bank. I strongly disagree.
The bank spun up a new business to experiment with blockchain technology and went hard at it for several years until they recently sidelined those projects...
In favour of AI
The amount of internal hype across all areas of the business (especially in the tech areas of the business) with regards to AI has been frankly stunning to witness.
A lot of people like drugs, you want small amounts shipped to you by strangers, you need crypto. I've never tried it. But I've seen people on both sides (selling+shipping and buying) do it with acceptable success rates.
This is the one and only "big real world market" (not financial products, not lower tx costs, not governance issues) that crypto currency solved. Quite ingenious.
Partially. Legally, they use both USD and Bitcoin; but it wasn't really adopted by the population [1] (it doesn't help that they've been using USD since ~2000, which is relatively stable by latam standards). It was also much more a political endeavour by their president to promote neoliberal ideas rather than anything to do with blockchains per se.
Sure, the push in the real world was from the usual crowd of vendors & consultants & upper management who make buzzwords a thing. Totally unrelated to people grifting on online fora.
We have bitcoin ATMs in rural WI and I personally know a number of people (my own parents included) that have lost a significant amount of money to the cryptocurrency grift.
This is a commonplace corollary to Gell-Man Amnesia/Knoll's Law[1] - in truth every single field/category in the universe has varying degrees of stupidity, it's just that you only reacts emotionally to the stupidity in the fields you have a personal attachment to.
I don't understand how anyone is shocked by businesses trying to integrate "the next big thing" into their offerings. Objectively, there are new things we can do with the recent advancements in AI. Experimentation is natural, even if those in charge are not intimately familiar with the technology. Some experiments will be useful and some less so.
How does seeing "generate image" on WordPress make you fume? Why would they implement the option to disable it? It's a perfectly sound idea. Instead of finding some stock image to use, allow users to generate one without leaving the platform. Regardless of any qualms with the technology itself and its implications, it now exists as a commercial offering. Businesses are going to try and use it to improve user experience and make more money.
There's a difference between identifying areas where a new technology (AI) can solve a problem in a better way, and just slapping "Now with AI!" on an existing product purely to chase investor dollars.
> I don't understand how anyone is shocked by businesses
I think its that normally biz leaders manage to seem reasonable (maybe they aren't), so they seem like level headed "we will explore this option" type of people. Often they don't really understand it because they have MBAs not degrees in fields.
Most people who work there would tell you the primary value they have at the company is that they hold the purse strings. Nothing else.
But now, possibly because they took a prompt from some AI, they exuberantly shout about how they "love AI" and you get that bad feeling when you see someone and you know they were taken in by a snake-oil salesman selling a pyramid scheme...
So the facade has dropped and everyone's just like "oh wow, I guess <level-headed company> is run by idiots"...
That’s possible, but it also seems likely that the HN crowd is used to existing in a space where a tiny fraction of good ideas succeed. Figuring that out requires an appropriately tuned sense of technology and the market, for which it is objectively reasonable to be skeptical of new things, especially when in a high point of the hype cycle. It’s also important to stay optimistic though…
Presumably there’s a middle ground between arguing for experimenting with new tech and somewhat disingenuously arguing that it’s the core of your business. The manner of delivery and applicability of the tech to a company’s products impact the credibility of the claim that AI is important to a business’s future.
The only thing better than to attach your startup tech to either AI or blockchain, is to attach to BOTH simultaneously, like the wave of AI blockchain tokens!
Thing is, ultimately, some of these technologies may yield useful innovations.
NFT's are the biggest load of speculative garbage to come down the pike in years but in terms of smart contracts (which may have some use) they're not total garbage.
AI is in the "Peak of Inflated Expectations" portion of the hype cycle but that doesn't mean it will never yield anything of value.
The Tech Industry isn't really unique in our chasing the latest shiny object behavior. Anyone recall when 3-D TV's were going to be the next big thing? The consumer electronics industry was practically salivating at selling us new TV's every couple of years.
Because it's not often apparent where useful innovations will come from. If we could predict in advance what will be useful and what won't, we would surely save a lot of money and effort but life isn't that easy.
I could deal with the hype cycles better if the industry had more solid foundations on the basic stuff like CRUD apps and websites. We're still pretty lousy at it.
It feels like a sinking ship but we all know it's not going anywhere because humanity now depends too much upon getting messages anywhere in the world on the order of seconds.
Maybe having a bunch of hype cycles is normal and we're meant to dig through the bullshit for gold. Kind of resembles prompting AI over and over until you get a good response. It would be nice if the industry admitted that instead of trying to pretend every hype cycle is a guaranteed existence-changer. It changes your mindset and mental fortitude if you know you're going to be dealing with bullshit instead of being lied to and finding it out once you've accepted the job.
Also, don't forget a trend that was apparently so bullshit that people don't even mention it next to blockchain: VR/AR.
Readit News
> This includes purely “defensive” patents, in industries where their competitors abuse intellectual property law to stifle competition.
My own company was pretty staunchly opposed to software patents until we got sued by patent trolls. We are now pretty aggressive about patenting things so that doesn't happen again. Software patents were never great, and bad actors have made things even worse.
How many of us got their workflow disrupted by AI? It's been a while since I've googled a "how do I..." type thing, because of how much I appreciate Bing Copilot or Phind
Safe to say my life did not change with the arrival of Web3!
Single digit percentage?
For sure more than a single-digit percentage of people have tried a Q&A bot by now. Shoot, Windows just updated to insert Copilot into users' machines, with the icon right next to the Windows button. It can't not continue to grow. It's such an amazingly effective way to get information versus scouring through web pages.
There are some reports of people hired to write low quality spam articles that fit this. There isn't much else.
There exist lots of people that claim some small gains, mostly because they use shitty tools that can't do what some tools could do 15 years ago (often the same tools). I'm afraid that's not enough to keep our current LLMs alive.
Deleted Comment
Realistically how many people are currently employed "writing low quality spam articles"
That's not reality. That's just reddit crapping on strawmen because a lot of the visible results from AI is 1) Crap creative work and 2) Polluted search results/comment sections
These are red herrings
There's real people doing real productive things with AIs that do boring things right now.
The ability to search for things that are still fuzzy in my mind, ask open-ended questions and get an answer back, or find something when you can't come up with a good keyword
I've never had the google-fu that some other developers have so this was something that often required asking a peer before. Sometimes a forum or some Discord, even.
Now you just feed your garbage question to a large language model that swallowed the entirety of the internet and a few seconds later it's spitting back something useful.
It's the first time I have access to a robot that's on stand-by with surface level knowledge of everything.
I suspect people who don't find this extremely valuable in their day-to-day life are just not catching the moments when they could've used it -- while on the other side of the spectrum the value it removes from comment sections/image search results is impossible to ignore.
I did about an hour ago. AI answers run the gamut from boilerplate that's useful that still ends up needing tweaking to utterly making shit up that doesn't exist. I did a copilot search once that referred to an entire framework that it just made the fuck up, and you know it would've been great if it did exist, the framework would've suited my needs perfectly, it was just complicated by the fact that it didn't.
I'm off that train, I hate having my time wasted and until they can guarantee veracity in answers it's just a google search that's even less reliable than google, which is saying something lately.
I've asked it pretty niche questions and I've never seen it make up anything, much less a whole framework
Plus it gives you its sources so I don't see how this could've happened. A whole framework?
Same, but you’re missing planet-sized elephant in the room here. This use-case has been technically solved for 20 years. What’s happened is that web search was ripe for consumer value extraction (aka enshittification). Have you ever seen a market more saturated with perverse incentives, from ad delivery, content farms, data mining, and of course the very search engine that prints money from it?
Now, if you wanna do an apples-apples comparison, imagine popups, consent forms, hidden influences from advertisers, recommendation engines, arbitrary lock-outs from community guidelines violations, ads while waiting for responses, JS bloat at recipe-website levels, and so on and so forth.
By all means, enjoy ChatGPT or whatever in its naked current form. But make no mistake that this is the honeymoon phase. Potential doesn’t govern the direction of new tech. Incentive does.
Deleted Comment
Just because your reddit or hn had non tiny amount of posts about blockchain or nft, then it does not mean that there was real and significant push towards those in real world
There is huge world outside your twitters and reddits
So while every example may not permeate out of the echo chambers, there are some that are reasonably widespread.
The amount of internal hype across all areas of the business (especially in the tech areas of the business) with regards to AI has been frankly stunning to witness.
This is the one and only "big real world market" (not financial products, not lower tx costs, not governance issues) that crypto currency solved. Quite ingenious.
Cryptocurrency is also useful for ransomware payments.
> EA’s CEO called generative AI the “very core of our business”
Yeah just little twitter and reddit things like WordPress and EA.
How many orders of magnitude of difference?
Edit: El Salvador not Al Salvador
Just like Facebook =/= HTTP
[1]: https://english.elpais.com/international/2023-09-02/two-year...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#Gell-Mann_amn...
How does seeing "generate image" on WordPress make you fume? Why would they implement the option to disable it? It's a perfectly sound idea. Instead of finding some stock image to use, allow users to generate one without leaving the platform. Regardless of any qualms with the technology itself and its implications, it now exists as a commercial offering. Businesses are going to try and use it to improve user experience and make more money.
I think its that normally biz leaders manage to seem reasonable (maybe they aren't), so they seem like level headed "we will explore this option" type of people. Often they don't really understand it because they have MBAs not degrees in fields.
Most people who work there would tell you the primary value they have at the company is that they hold the purse strings. Nothing else.
But now, possibly because they took a prompt from some AI, they exuberantly shout about how they "love AI" and you get that bad feeling when you see someone and you know they were taken in by a snake-oil salesman selling a pyramid scheme...
So the facade has dropped and everyone's just like "oh wow, I guess <level-headed company> is run by idiots"...
HN crowd is increasingly threatened by new technology.
Just because HN became bigger. But hackers are used to this, creating the new technology.
NFT's are the biggest load of speculative garbage to come down the pike in years but in terms of smart contracts (which may have some use) they're not total garbage.
AI is in the "Peak of Inflated Expectations" portion of the hype cycle but that doesn't mean it will never yield anything of value.
The Tech Industry isn't really unique in our chasing the latest shiny object behavior. Anyone recall when 3-D TV's were going to be the next big thing? The consumer electronics industry was practically salivating at selling us new TV's every couple of years.
Deleted Comment
Why not just focus on the useful innovations, then?
It feels like a sinking ship but we all know it's not going anywhere because humanity now depends too much upon getting messages anywhere in the world on the order of seconds.
Maybe having a bunch of hype cycles is normal and we're meant to dig through the bullshit for gold. Kind of resembles prompting AI over and over until you get a good response. It would be nice if the industry admitted that instead of trying to pretend every hype cycle is a guaranteed existence-changer. It changes your mindset and mental fortitude if you know you're going to be dealing with bullshit instead of being lied to and finding it out once you've accepted the job.
Also, don't forget a trend that was apparently so bullshit that people don't even mention it next to blockchain: VR/AR.
So if you think blockchain is bullshit, then VR/AR definitely is.