Author makes good points but suffers from “i am genius and you are an idiot” syndrome which makes it seem mostly the ranting of an asshole vs a coherent article about the state of AI.
I've recently read through many of the author's articles and also through his LinkedIn content, and came to the opposite conclusion. The intentional "In-Your-Face-Trolling" style is intended as a cover for "Impostor Syndrome in Overdrive", which lots of us suffer. Yet he was able to fool so many! Just check the "Compliments" section on his website :)
I made the following comment about him in a conversation with a coworker:
"
The guy who authored the article is mad. Certifiably mad. Just spewing around pure unadulterated truth. (LinkedIn link goes here)
What does it tell about me (or anybody) who so far hadn't found anything in his writings to disagree about?
"
Krazam (search YouTube) is the other example of largely the same. But because it is visual it is a bit more obvious.
Author sounds like a young person who feels like he's a god among men just for the fact that he's implemented the algortihms and understands the math and engineering behind the libraries most DS's just pip install.
Which is weird coming from a generation of devs, where actually doing this work yourself was the norm.
As for DS, from what little I've experienced from the field, he sounds right. Most people come in without a mathematically rigorous education, they talk fancy, but what they end up doing is pulling in dependencies from a pre-written library and using those without understanding the theory behind them.
They also ignore the fact that 99% of the value in data science is created by taking good data, understanding the domain, in which case fancy algorithms are unnecessary. And the acquisition of said things needs good data engineering, not data science.
But more often than not, the credit and prestige goes to folks who pull in fancy ML algorithms and run extensive experiments and build massive ML pipelines, feeding in truckloads of tangentially relevant data.
I almost laughed out loud when he said he started working as a data scientist in 2019. Five years is not a very long time. And he claims he already had identified the entire field as full of fraud in the first two years of that!
I agree with a lot of the article's points, but the author took a serious credibility hit with me after asserting that two years of from-scratch experience is enough time to evaluate an entire subfield of computer science.
You start quite condescending but then basically acknowledge what the author is saying. Most DS's, even "from your generation" probably don't write their own tools. I bet you are even guilty of this too. No need to do some implicit grandstanding.
I think he's polarizing because he's right about the industry and everybody on both sides knows it. Many people in the industry are just selling snake oil. There's also a ton of idiots such as the people who misconfigure cloud software to waste half a million dollars of company money. A truth teller comes off as an a-hole to people who don't want particular truths to be told.
> A truth teller comes off as an a-hole to people who don't want particular truths to be told
If someone is repeatedly threatening physical violence, as the author of this post is, that also tends to come off as an a-hole to some people even if the threats are not genuine.
I agree the author of this post is saying accurate things, and that will piss people off, too.
So we have two completely separate ways in which someone might think the author is an a-hole. They aren't all trying to hide some truth, like you imply.
I have read only a few sentences, so it can't be the hard truths that give off this vibe. Saying you are one of the greats based on things someone inexperienced would list underlined by the very short time in the industry comes off as arogant.
>Many people in the industry are just selling snake oil
We have always been selling snake oil - its just the inexperienced and those who have never shipped anything of any value to the world that feel that the snake oil is where the buck stops - but those of us who have shipped tons of snake oil know that eventually that oil congeals and becomes an essential substance in the grinding wheels of industry.
Which this wanker (Disclaimer: Australian, can use it if I wanna, since I know a lot about snakes, too..) seems to not have fully understood yet, as there is a great deal of evidence to support the fact that their experience is mostly academic, and hasn't actually resulted in anything being shipped.
Academics seem too often to forget that software is a service industry and in such a context, snakes and oil are very definitely par for the course.
Nobody cares if you implemented the important bits all by yourself - what are your USERS doing with it? Oh, you don't have actual users? Then please STFU and let the snake wranglers get on with it ..
I don't disagree entirely, but there is a pretty strong hint of the self-aware dry humour typical of Australians. I think he believes what he's saying, but they're probably not taking themselves that seriously or literally.
I am talking about people, not politics. Unless you think individual Australians, are well known for their personal authoritarianism?
I don't find myself conducting much authoritarianism but admittedly I do keep a pretty tight grip on the movements of my budgies. It's for their own good you see.
Especially since most "data scientists" turn spreadsheets into reports for the C suite, I'd argue that his entire role fits into the same arguments he makes against AI. Like he says, unless you're doing things on the cutting edge, I don't think most businesses have seen positive outcomes from employing data "scientists" or "engineers". They just take people's excel spreadsheets and make them prettier, taking approximately one quarter to implement each into Power BI.
Also being 5 years into his career thinking he actually groks how it all works is adorable. I get the impression he has the idea that work is supposed to be a rewarding passion project rather than getting shit done for your boss. Give me all the cushy bullshit AI projects please. I can play with the toys for 6 months and come back with whatever and it will be perfectly acceptable. Either "this is great, super helpful for the company" or "welp, the tech isn't there yet, but at least we tried". That's called riding the gravy train.
which is a weird thing, since I think in fields where most people can be assumed to be smart, there's usually not that much differentiation in cognitive ability.
Just for reference, if we take IQ as a proxy measure for intelligence, an average group of people (say, a high school class, a council meeting), the worst 10% will have an IQ of <80 with the best 10% will have an IQ of >120.
That's the difference of 40 points, and its a common enough scenario for most people to get a feel of what it's like.
In contrast, lets say you have a room of professionals, who have been screened to be in the top 10% of the population (not a huge stretch) as a cutoff. In this scenario, you'd need 100k people in this hypothetical room to get a similarly large IQ gap.
While I think the author might be a sharp guy, and probably studied his field deeper than most, to say there's an insurmountable chasm between him and the rest of his readers might be a bit of a stretch.
But hey, if you want to sell your unique genius as your upscale consulting brand, I guess this is how you market yourself.
I don't think that is the goal of this blog. I think he is bragging a bit because he is afraid people will ask: "Who is this nobody that talks about AI as if he knows anything about it?"
He is trying to qualify himself to give this opinion. He uses a hyperbolic style.
I for one like it. But I like style and care less about the background of people to be honest. I think a good analysis is a good analysis regardless of who makes it.
It seems like “I am genius and you are an idiot syndrome" and "ranting of an asshole" are on opposite ends of the spectrum, and directly in opposition to each other.
The very sort of hypemongers and grifters the author complains about often hide unsustainable claims behind complicated language and opaque terminology, with the intent of portraying themselves as experts and making clear-headed criticism seem uneducated or uninformed in comparison.
The author here is making a deliberate choice to use a ranty tone to cut through that sort of bullshit, and in doing so, successfully expressed his frustration with the pervasive level of hype in AI discussions.
When I see people getting hyped up about AI, I just roll my eyes and move on. But now, quite a few people in the anti-AI camp are getting more hyped up than its promoters, jumping at the throats of anyone who dares mention the term. The recent harassment campaign from Mastodon folks toward the iTerm2 dev was a particularly disturbing one.
I personally would stay far far away from either of these two camps.
I feel his frustration with the grifters, the kool aid drinkers and makers.
For me the writing felt authentic and entertaining. Emotionally charged but rightfully so. It is incredibly disturbing to see people lying with a straight face and getting insane investments.
> It seems like most of the comment thread failed to pick up on this.
At that point, is it a problem of most of the comment thread, or the way it was written?
I may say something that comes across really snarky to my coworker. Just because I didn't mean it to be snarky does not mean that it won't be interpreted that way.
Also, I have a feeling a lot of the comment thread are fluent in both English and online culture. This doesn't come across as a good-faith argument.
It's like I say something that comes across as snarky, my coworker confronts me about it, and I say "oh don't worry about it, if you came from low-context culture you would understand." It's very demeaning. Not to mention unsympathetic.
There's so much about this guy's work that just flies over most peoples' heads, but that's fine by me. Most people don't get it, regardless of what _it_ is.
This is the only blog that I actively look forward to reading.
> The post's humor is a style which won't make sense if you're not fluent in both English and online culture.
Oh, please. That's like saying that only native speakers with a university degree can understand a 6 year old's fart jokes.
The humor in this article is juvenile shock-jocking. It starts from the trashy clickbait headline, and is never elevated past that. There's no particular sophistication needed to understand it. It's just not particularly funny or insightful; it's just taking some rote complaints about AI and the hype cycle, and threatening to kill people in various graphic ways. Hilarious.
> but suffers from “i am genius and you are an idiot” syndrome
But he's still nowhere near as unhinged as the rabid AI bullshittery shitting up the airwaves for the past year
Not a lot of room for nuance when the subject matter is this polluted. Typical HN convention of preferring nuance to outright dismissal is bad at filtering BS
aakresearch|1 year ago
I made the following comment about him in a conversation with a coworker: " The guy who authored the article is mad. Certifiably mad. Just spewing around pure unadulterated truth. (LinkedIn link goes here) What does it tell about me (or anybody) who so far hadn't found anything in his writings to disagree about? "
Krazam (search YouTube) is the other example of largely the same. But because it is visual it is a bit more obvious.
TeMPOraL|1 year ago
It tells they're too excited by the delivery and aren't thinking about the merit of what's being said.
Same mistake people made with all those "tells it as it is" vloggers and pundits.
camillomiller|1 year ago
torginus|1 year ago
Which is weird coming from a generation of devs, where actually doing this work yourself was the norm.
As for DS, from what little I've experienced from the field, he sounds right. Most people come in without a mathematically rigorous education, they talk fancy, but what they end up doing is pulling in dependencies from a pre-written library and using those without understanding the theory behind them.
They also ignore the fact that 99% of the value in data science is created by taking good data, understanding the domain, in which case fancy algorithms are unnecessary. And the acquisition of said things needs good data engineering, not data science.
But more often than not, the credit and prestige goes to folks who pull in fancy ML algorithms and run extensive experiments and build massive ML pipelines, feeding in truckloads of tangentially relevant data.
kelnos|1 year ago
I almost laughed out loud when he said he started working as a data scientist in 2019. Five years is not a very long time. And he claims he already had identified the entire field as full of fraud in the first two years of that!
I agree with a lot of the article's points, but the author took a serious credibility hit with me after asserting that two years of from-scratch experience is enough time to evaluate an entire subfield of computer science.
pineaux|1 year ago
camillomiller|1 year ago
bdw5204|1 year ago
margalabargala|1 year ago
If someone is repeatedly threatening physical violence, as the author of this post is, that also tends to come off as an a-hole to some people even if the threats are not genuine.
I agree the author of this post is saying accurate things, and that will piss people off, too.
So we have two completely separate ways in which someone might think the author is an a-hole. They aren't all trying to hide some truth, like you imply.
rplnt|1 year ago
boffinAudio|1 year ago
We have always been selling snake oil - its just the inexperienced and those who have never shipped anything of any value to the world that feel that the snake oil is where the buck stops - but those of us who have shipped tons of snake oil know that eventually that oil congeals and becomes an essential substance in the grinding wheels of industry.
Which this wanker (Disclaimer: Australian, can use it if I wanna, since I know a lot about snakes, too..) seems to not have fully understood yet, as there is a great deal of evidence to support the fact that their experience is mostly academic, and hasn't actually resulted in anything being shipped.
Academics seem too often to forget that software is a service industry and in such a context, snakes and oil are very definitely par for the course.
Nobody cares if you implemented the important bits all by yourself - what are your USERS doing with it? Oh, you don't have actual users? Then please STFU and let the snake wranglers get on with it ..
ppeetteerr|1 year ago
intended|1 year ago
Its getting into the art/performance category of code blogs.
charles_f|1 year ago
ehnto|1 year ago
ehnto|1 year ago
I don't find myself conducting much authoritarianism but admittedly I do keep a pretty tight grip on the movements of my budgies. It's for their own good you see.
boffinAudio|1 year ago
The word you should have used is authoritarianism, which this writer has, alas, in spades.
Your users are more important than your sense of self worth, in this industry.
Nobody ships ego. We ship working software: to users who find it valuable.
bongodongobob|1 year ago
Also being 5 years into his career thinking he actually groks how it all works is adorable. I get the impression he has the idea that work is supposed to be a rewarding passion project rather than getting shit done for your boss. Give me all the cushy bullshit AI projects please. I can play with the toys for 6 months and come back with whatever and it will be perfectly acceptable. Either "this is great, super helpful for the company" or "welp, the tech isn't there yet, but at least we tried". That's called riding the gravy train.
torginus|1 year ago
which is a weird thing, since I think in fields where most people can be assumed to be smart, there's usually not that much differentiation in cognitive ability.
Just for reference, if we take IQ as a proxy measure for intelligence, an average group of people (say, a high school class, a council meeting), the worst 10% will have an IQ of <80 with the best 10% will have an IQ of >120.
That's the difference of 40 points, and its a common enough scenario for most people to get a feel of what it's like.
In contrast, lets say you have a room of professionals, who have been screened to be in the top 10% of the population (not a huge stretch) as a cutoff. In this scenario, you'd need 100k people in this hypothetical room to get a similarly large IQ gap.
While I think the author might be a sharp guy, and probably studied his field deeper than most, to say there's an insurmountable chasm between him and the rest of his readers might be a bit of a stretch.
But hey, if you want to sell your unique genius as your upscale consulting brand, I guess this is how you market yourself.
pineaux|1 year ago
CyberDildonics|1 year ago
Very true. A thread about it here is a hat on a hat.
Gormo|1 year ago
The very sort of hypemongers and grifters the author complains about often hide unsustainable claims behind complicated language and opaque terminology, with the intent of portraying themselves as experts and making clear-headed criticism seem uneducated or uninformed in comparison.
The author here is making a deliberate choice to use a ranty tone to cut through that sort of bullshit, and in doing so, successfully expressed his frustration with the pervasive level of hype in AI discussions.
soraminazuki|1 year ago
I personally would stay far far away from either of these two camps.
andrei_says_|1 year ago
For me the writing felt authentic and entertaining. Emotionally charged but rightfully so. It is incredibly disturbing to see people lying with a straight face and getting insane investments.
pushfoo|1 year ago
1. "ludic" means playful[1].
2. The blog's tagline implies this is satire:
> "Wow, if I was the leader of this person's company I would immediately terminate them." [2]
It seems like most of the comment thread failed to pick up on this.
That's understandable. The post's humor is a style which won't make sense if you're not fluent in both English and online culture.
Even if you understand the style, you also might not like it.
1. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ludic
2. https://ludic.mataroa.blog/
JasonSage|1 year ago
At that point, is it a problem of most of the comment thread, or the way it was written?
I may say something that comes across really snarky to my coworker. Just because I didn't mean it to be snarky does not mean that it won't be interpreted that way.
Also, I have a feeling a lot of the comment thread are fluent in both English and online culture. This doesn't come across as a good-faith argument.
It's like I say something that comes across as snarky, my coworker confronts me about it, and I say "oh don't worry about it, if you came from low-context culture you would understand." It's very demeaning. Not to mention unsympathetic.
busterarm|1 year ago
This is the only blog that I actively look forward to reading.
aakresearch|1 year ago
I am not fluent in either and I'm in love with his style and substance!
jsnell|1 year ago
Oh, please. That's like saying that only native speakers with a university degree can understand a 6 year old's fart jokes.
The humor in this article is juvenile shock-jocking. It starts from the trashy clickbait headline, and is never elevated past that. There's no particular sophistication needed to understand it. It's just not particularly funny or insightful; it's just taking some rote complaints about AI and the hype cycle, and threatening to kill people in various graphic ways. Hilarious.
matrix87|1 year ago
But he's still nowhere near as unhinged as the rabid AI bullshittery shitting up the airwaves for the past year
Not a lot of room for nuance when the subject matter is this polluted. Typical HN convention of preferring nuance to outright dismissal is bad at filtering BS
throwaway984393|1 year ago
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