Ive doesn’t seem to have come from an especially privileged background (beyond the obvious good fortune of being a white guy in good health born in a developed English-speaking country in the post-war era etc.) Middle-class certainly, but not markedly upper-middle-class or a posh boy. Though I suppose I’m in danger of sounding like pg talking about the Collisons as if they were poor boys made good.

Relative to the sweatshop workers he relied on to avoid sewing his own shirts.

For the same reason we don’t need 9,000 operating systems, it’s trivial to copy-paste, we don’t need Ive, Altman. The main audience is Millennials and younger and they know how this all works. There’s no generating hype when it’s more of the same; our brains normalize and simply cannot find novelty in it.

SaaS competition was faked through cheap financing since every solution can be tuned for performance and features copy pasted. It’s software after all. We weren’t trying to be the first to save a bunch of stranded people. Just unicorn before the hype bubble for your business popped.

This forum doesn’t want to believe this because their identity is wrapped up in it. But I talk to people outside software, and very few feel they get real value out of all this technology. That ultimately it’s just been a big distraction from their lives.

“I hate programmers. They make everything so complicated.” Silicon Valley TV show is how people see software engineers. Asocial children.

They don’t doubt there’s value in medicine research and real stuff logistics using software but have a sense it’s just serving software company employees more so than humanity at this point.

And politics reflects public sentiment. Software workers do not have the same tax write off benefits as other classes of workers anymore. Along with end of ZIRP, these moves are due to a lot of discussed away from the public, global pushback to tech bros running the world.

This is a refreshing and real comment. Ask all your uber drivers two questions:

- do you use chatGPT and could you more or less explain what LLMs are?

- do you think AI is useful and would you buy a product because it has AI?

Enjoy the answers.

Why uber drivers only? They are certainly pretty high up the comfort ranks—there's an enormous distance from the uber driver just to the food delivery guy with an ebike.

(the latter isn't doing all too bad either compared to many others still alive)

Relative to cave men those sweatshop workers are so privileged they are basically gods. But that's a rather silly statement imo.

Relative to your actual value to humanity you are over privileged.

Bizarre incrementalism measure of progress, they’re people so they’re automatically peers.

Wank your economic political philosophy all you want. One of billions is one of billions; metrics don’t lie. I say we devalue a bunch of first world office workers whose knowledge work skills are replicated by machines. It’s just a few million relative to billions. A minority with too much privilege and reach into other’s lives for economic skills replicates by others and machines. Let’s have some grown up conversations these days shall we, twee America?

I honestly have no idea what you meant by any of that.

> This forum doesn’t want to believe this because their identity is wrapped up in it. But I talk to people outside software, and very few feel they get real value out of all this technology. That ultimately it’s just been a big distraction from their lives.

Re: LLMs--this has been my experience as well. People aren't thrilled with adopting something that has been sold to them as a replacement for intellectual labor either, and don't see the immediate benefit (outside of the programmer types that seem to often have an almost masochistic relationship with software that's only viable use case is 'replacing' their skillset).