The Valley Bubble Breaks
quirksmode.org
quirksmode.org
> The Valley doesn’t understand how fed up normal people are with AI. This is the first time ever a technological advance is so cordially disliked, and the Valley is not equipped to detect that. It has no experience with being disliked by normal people.
Cannot state how off-putting this was as someone participating in this team activity. The talks I appreciated the most were the ones where people didn't have slides at all and talked off the cuff.
I think the early automobile had a huge share of haters as well?
My line of work: I deal with enterprise SaaS companies and I can see first hand that engineers are very slow moving with AI, very cautious, and still believe they need to review small PRs.
As is the case with many humans when equipped with "AI".
Before, at a certain FANG you definitely know, you had management making presentations they very obviously had never seen before, made by people who weren't at product meetings and so were extremely shallow about any project and had basic facts wrong ... and of course management can't answer questions about the slides.
I 100% get the complaint. But what does it have to do with AI?
In this team? Pre-AI, maybe 10% of the slides would be questionable. Post-AI? 90% of the slides were just "meh", broken animations (they never previewed it), and "uh, let me read that slide".
We're all managers now. So everyone can be that lazy.
Oh, mercy. Do not read your slide deck to me. I can read it faster than you can read it out loud. While I'm doing that, say something that isn't on the slide.
Thankfully, I got some good pointers and coaching from having worked at Apple and having done a number of WWDC (World Wide Developer Conference) talks.
I usually put almost no prose-type text on my presentations. Figures, captions for figures, equations, variable definitions, small code snippets, those are ok.
The only time I’d put prose on there is if it is a “main idea,” then I’ll do the thing where I read it word-for-word from the slide. But that’s got to be used sparingly enough that it sticks out as a weird moment that the audience is supposed to remember.
If one does this, it should be because the slide is a list of short bullet-point talking-points, and the speaker is going through them one by one explaining them in more detail.
> I usually put almost no prose-type text on my presentations. Figures, captions for figures, equations, variable definitions, small code snippets, those are ok.
This is honestly the type of stuff I always found most helpful in a slide-deck presentation. Information that enhances what the speaker is saying.
But yeah sometimes when I just need to deliver some asset to a customer I use AI to create it and lightly edit it, the result is ok but it's not great.
I share the disdain for AI built presentations, especially Claude has a signature look that is so tiring. I remember this phase when Office 2016 (?) came out and featured this "smart" diagram editor that let you create these cringe arrows, flowcharts etc. with bullet points, some people really got hooked on that and used it everywhere, the result was as cringeworthy as the AI presentations are. Eventually people lost interest and things got back to normal. AI might be different though.
That said I also generate presentation decks for my products with Claude using an HTML based workflow with proper print CSS using Weasyprint, where I use my own corporate identity and design practices from the web, the result looks really professional and pleasing (to me), customers also like it a lot. It doesn't really look like AI either as it's just good HTML and CSS with a print stylesheet. So there are ways of using it to make things better, but it also brings out the lazy side of people that don't care so much.
As someone whose job heavily involves giving presentations and writing documents / spreadsheets, I am under tremendous pressure now to simply "output more stuff." AI has increased the amount of "stuff" co-workers are spewing out, and that's apparently what's being measured. I don't know if any of this "stuff" is being read, but my management seems only interested in volume of bits. So, slop it is.
Occasionally, I'm sure this stuff is getting read by a real human, and I apologize in advance if it's you. But incentives are unfortunately totally aligned towards producing mountains of slop.
> ...my management seems only interested in volume of bits
Whenever I hear this come up, my first question is "how are you matching that to revenue?" and you can see gears churning...
But now that one no longer needs to actually perform the mechanical deck building, how about spending that gained efficiency on ensuring quality of the output? Play it back at least once. Use that time savings to prep to deliver a killer talk.
That is - you can do more & have faster iteration loops, but you can basically burn all the gains on stupid stuff no one needs.
If your org likes to scramble, and/or your management has ADHD.. then LLM slop cannons pointed at things like dashboards, status reports and decks is extremely exciting. People are throwing together materials about content they don't understand for people who aren't going to read it. But the motion feels incredible.
Or few truly have the discipline to do that, but they got a lot of it "for free," because of the effort they had to put into making the slide deck.
I'm more and more of the opinion that friction isn't bad, and mindlessly reducing it has actually been bad for us. What we should have are "friction engineers," that carefully design things we need to do to be difficult in precise ways that force us to do other things we benefit from but don't have the discipline to consistently choose.
Is seeing that much AI crap being thrown at their product lineup actually appealing to anyone?
Just one person’s experience, but it wasn’t a positive one.
The confusion is this doesn't diminish the utility of AI as a tool by people that do care one bit. It only affects the people whose work is indistinguishable from low effort AI nonsense, while the others will get ever more conspicuously "authentic".
It read the slide notes for the at the end of each "slide". He was asked to give the presentation himself and couldn't do it.
Do not, under any circumstances ever ask a question other than "gee golly sir, you sure are smart, how do I grow up to be like you".
I occasionally hang out with normal (non-tech) people. They're either agnostic to it or they love it. None hates it, unless they have some reason to think they're going to lose their job.
HN is that one place where I routinely hear negative sentiments about LLMs.
I tried suggesting to one group who hated it that they could go to a nearby "PauseAI" protest, the reaction was mostly "Bah, they only want to pause it, not to end it!"
These topics attract different people, but same people can hold the two views that aren't necessarily in conflict - I am forced to use LLMs at work, and within the industry there is no alternative. I also derive a lot of benefit using it for personal projects. I would also be very wary of monetizing any of these personal projects due to being completely blind as to how/where the code used to train the models came from.. and I am surprised how slow the legal system has been to address this issue, it's the wild west at the moment.
Everyone got the "use this or we will kill you" speech from management, while finding its actual usefulness (they aren't coders and weren't using it for code!) to be questionable vs the hype.
Further a lot of people got the "you better AI-max or-else" ultimatums in Q1 only to get the "you idiots why are you using so much AI this costs money" by Q2/Q3 whiplash.
(Honest question - I don't talk to them so I don't know).
https://blog.karliner.net/posts/chatgpt-and-the-velcro-test/
admittedly a bit old now, but...
Even if someone wants to deny this counts as "innovation", it sure isn't copying.
LLMs do not do math well and most of their calculations are quite false.
Copilot can’t even count to 20.
Also many of my calculations in my life have been quite false as well. I like to remember the problems I did solve. Instead of focusing on the few I couldn't solve.
Apropos failing at calculating, I have a relevant anecdote that I can't help but wanting to share. A few years ago (2020) I got inadvertently handed a math problem I had to solve, and failed spectacularly at. I suck at math, had no one around me that didn't also suck, and the problem wasn't Googlable. The issue was creating a staff rotation for medical interns in a rural hospital, in an exceptional 6 month period where the previous symmetrical split of four interns to medicine and four to surgery was disrupted by an extra intern. Interns were on call for both departments on nightshifts and weekends, and since they all needed the same amount of total "on call" hours during a 6 month period, same amount of regular hours, and there were a number of legal and logistical constraints to how working hours could be distributed, the asymmetry turned out to be a real headache. Previously, getting the responsibility for setting up the next rotation was a coveted power amongst medical interns, as it just involved copy pasting new names into a rotational plan established decades ago by some forgotten elder, where you could abuse your privilege to slot yourself into the juiciest holiday periods. So no one realized they were handing over a logic bomb that would overload the atrophied math circuits of some poor schmuck fresh out of med school (me). Anyways I spent days Googling, setting up excel formulas, calling more mathematically qualified friends (who also failed), before finally giving up and spending 20 hours manually setting up a deeply flawed plan that ended up pissing numerous people off.
The other day, just for fun, I dug up my old emails with the original excel sheets and handed the problem over to Opus 5.5. It ran a quick python script that solved the problem in literally 3 seconds, and then seemingly just for fun ran a python solver that nuked my CPU for 10 minutes to find the proven optimal staff rotation. Then it sent me a winkyface emoji after pointing out the funny coincidence that me and my buddy (who was on the email chain) just happened to get Christmas and New years off.
It's a brave new world.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/08/science/mathematicians-re... https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-03389-1 https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=10169
Would the ai improve exponentially or would it decay towards some base line?
I think you can say that they “create” if it’s the former and “reproduce” if it’s the latter.
Right now it appears to be approximating hyperbolic (super-exponential) growth, reaching infinite growth in finite time, which is literally what a singularity is. Like most people, I don't consider singularities to be real things, and therefore something will stop this at some point.
I have absolutely no clue if "some point" will be "today" or "it found one weird trick to reach the Landauer limit, Bremermann's limit, and also the Bekenstein bound, while also becoming even more sample efficient than the smartest human."
It does beg the question, though: what is creativity?
So much of many ostensibly "critical" thinkers were deluded by axiomatic prognostications that AI would never be able to pass some certain threshold of capability, and then move the goalposts on what AI will "never" be able to do once those thresholds are surpassed.
How can the author of this blog so confidently claim that a currently existing invention could never have been invented by AI in a counterfactual universe? Such a claim is fundamentally unfalsifiable, but is the bread and butter of the larger industry of "AI capabilities denialism" which acts as a salve against anxiety over AI's genuine capabilities. However living in a false reality eventually catches up with you.
We're starting to approach four digits of LLM-made mathematical papers, cybersecurity being almost entirely taken over by AI redteaming, initial forays into physics, biotech and pretty much every field... and we're going to use some dude prompting GPT-4 about Velcro to form the basis of an opinion? Even back then, using the word "never" was intellectually questionable at best.
The mantra of AI not innovating is getting pretty tired at this point. It's simply wrong as a matter of fact. If the goalpost has shifted so much that solving millenium prize problems is not "innovating", then the goal is no longer on the same continent.
Yes. For many days after the DeepSeek R1/V3 release in Jan/Feb 2025.
It has changed programming radically, already. Not sure how much he thinks US-based doomsayers think it will change.
> AI can copy, it cannot innovate.
Is this falsifiable? Is there an example of an AI output that the author would agree verified that the AI innovated, if he or she saw it?
This tech is a certified failure and needs to be regulated out of existence (or pigeonholed into very specific niche use cases). The election confirms this.
AI was a mistake.
This seems a bit out of touch. The metamorphosis of programming is already done.
Doing any kind of manual programming in November 2026 is a luxury that most tech workers don't have. Delivery rate has gone up and for any chace to keep up, you have to generate your code. The differentiator now is how you ensure the quality and alignment.
But the days of typing code are over. It's done. Programming is now a hobby, a luxury, a sport, but no longer a job.
I get the impression we're also not quite there on technical capabilities, given all the complaints about the functionality/performance (or lack thereof) of the vibe-coded version of the Adobe suite.
One of the big issues with silicon valley (or how I see it) is the lack of ability to look out side and ask why something is the way it is, before trying to slap technology on it.
The smell of money which distorts people's reality to carry on doing something that looks and sounds like a disaster, is too strong.
We're talking about adults here, let's not infantilize and remove agency from them. It's not reasonable to treat as an accident the repeated disruption of regulated industries with the "old laws don't apply because I added computers" playbook. Bad behavior absolutely demands repentance and punishment. To say otherwise is a massive moral hazard that guarantees more harm, failing to counter the "smell of money" with reasonable caution.
> smell of money
Seems like an obvious causal pathway to me.
I think the issue is, that a lot of people in silicon valley are sheltered teenagers. Thinking back to my time in a FAANG, the thing that constantly surprised me is how naive a lot of people were. A lack of understanding of American politics, poor attention span and a general lack of grounding in the local community.
A large part of the harm that arose from the FAANGs is down to people genuinely not being able to step back and go "oh yeah, bad people might..."
Then, on top of that you have people in positions of power who actively exploit this naivety to get their own way.
I really must stress that I am not asking or implying that its not their fault. But we have to tackle the sausage factory of stupid that is being fed to silicon valley, mostly on a lie that their startup will make them rich.
But sure, let's talk about Humanity.
WILL change it? This guy is under a self-inflicted rock.
Lot of contributors to this.
Macroeconomics are bad, high-ish inflation and hard job switching market.
Meanwhile everyone's bosses telling them to use AI or they will fire you, AI lab heads bragging/threatening the replacement of all knowledge work in next 18 months (unless AI kills us all which they also scaremonger about).
So use it until it replaces or kills you. Good luck staying poor because the IPO is coming after all the insiders 10000x their investment and the bag left for retail investors in the public market is physically impossible to 10x or 100x in most of our lifetimes (again if AI doesn't kill us and/or make us so poor we won't own stocks anyway).
So yeah, lots not to like!
They did start having that experience in the last 6 or 7 years, give or take (I'd say even earlier than that, 2015-2016-ish), but the money those techies were bringing home was too good so they didn't care, case in point many (most?) of the users on this forum (and its very founder).
But at this point it looks like these tech people are about to cause a multi-trillion dollar economic implosion that would make September-October 2008 look like a gentle summer-storm in comparison, so curious what the near future will bring to them in terms of public perception. I've said it before, the jocks were right to make fun of the nerds and to keep them under their heels, look what happened when the nerds were let loose.
Also curious what will happen to this very forum after the upcoming implosion. Will the money still be there to keep this SV-propaganda machine running? Food for thought.
You may be right that AI needs it's linux moment, if that is to mean that it is quietly running in the background and nobody actually knows anything about it, the world is just magically better for them.
That isn't the future that is currently being sold though, and I don't see AI going in that direction.
I mean, crypto and NFTs ought to have given them a taste of it. But then perhaps it did, and they are now inured to it, because it's a lot of the same guys, including Sam Altman.
The post talks about today, about the bubble bursting now with AI. And it's so clear why, there is so much absolutely no effort shit shovelling nonsense happening, such a continued expectation that those titans up above keep dictating down.
But too: the bubble of tech being a force for progress, for unchaining humanity? That burst a while ago.
Cambridge Analytica scandal really distinguished, remains a a clear point on what was nebulously known & felt. It crystalized the realization of how and by whom our data, what we were being used for. CA indicated what the cloud really meant.
And until recently little news has been good news. It's been almost all more of the same. A never ending year after year series of press conferences where companies get up and say how they can intermediate their lives if you let their product in to do its thing.
And AI, more many people, will be yet more control technology. More things that mechanize humans, soulless systems that leach off our energies and steer us, order us to do things. That allow some of the controlling class to not have to deal with us even more than ever. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_Franklin#Holistic_and_p...
But too: this is the first time humanity at large, in my view, stands any chance against that which was already deeply in progress. We don't have to accept the world as it is anymore. We couldn't even see the world, were rebuffed from the technological systems all around us. And DMCA violation that it may be, no one cares. Our moral spiritual saintly right to see the world is triumphing over the systems of technological control, as we reverse engineer tvs, video game consoles, flock cameras. We aren't stuck accepting the swill the corporate world produces and streams downhill at us. As a work technology, as a means to be Franklin's holstic in our capability, we have plumbed the matrixes and happened upon a universality of means and understanding that finally swings wide the doors of tech, that makes it possible for those of will to reclaim a spot, from a world that has forced its anti-will upon us for decades. What any of us can do is unimaginably bigger than two years ago, giving us access to the world around us, taking everything electronic out of the lockbox and stealing the electron back from titans.
I could not be more excited. And no, I don't think silicon valley is right now in a position to establish itself as a strong part of this, even as openai and anthropic swell, even as they are crucial. It's a back to the garage moment in the world, the nerds working fervently quietly to help give humanity back the world that is its, in my view, a birthright. If our human liberty, our culture of science and peer ship and understanding and permission.
> for the record I think it's wonderful that non-programmers can now build software, and furthermore I think programmers should be ashamed that this is what it took to make computing accessible
https://bsky.app/profile/garrison.corporate.fm/post/3mzlijew...
It's unclear what role the titans can make for themselves in this new world, those few who have like Saturn devoured all their children thereby obstructing innovation and change and competition. Their glamor is not there, and it's unclear what they would become if they decided to stop hording the electron from mankind. But perhaps they can grow up. Perhaps they can wisen up. Perhaps they can find a way to still be relevant and useful and helpful to the small little souls of humanity, us meek, that are about to inherit their earth.
AI has a lot of people who hate it, but it is neither wholly unpopular nor useless. ChatGPT has over 1.2 billions WAUs. There are millions of people who spend hours watching AI generated media. Demand for AI is universal in white-collar professions, as it automates a large portion of previously human-bottlenecked work. Pretty much every email I get now I assume comes from an API key, as the task of copywriting was abandoned readily once chatbots could do it for us faster and better.
Sure AI has a notable unpopularity among a certain subset of erudite, well-educated near-elite liberal types, but this is far from the global majority who are driving demand for the AI boom.