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oliwary | 1 month ago

"Computers aren't the thing. They're the thing that gets you to the thing."

My favorite quote from the excellent show halt and catch fire. Maybe applicable to AI too?

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latexr|1 month ago

Something like that used to be Apple’s driving force under Steve Jobs (definitely no longer under Tim Cook).

https://youtube.com/watch?v=oeqPrUmVz-o&t=1m54s

> You’ve go to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. You can’t start with the technology and try to figure out where you’re going to try to sell it.

automatic6131|1 month ago

> You can’t start with the technology and try to figure out where you’re going to try to sell it.

If those LLM addicts could read, they'd be very upset!

direwolf20|1 month ago

That works when you are starting a new company from scratch to solve a problem. When you're established and your boffins discover a new thing, of course you find places to use it. It's the expression problem with business: when you add a new customer experience you intersect it with all existing technology, and when you add a new technology you intersect it with all existing customer experience.

NitpickLawyer|1 month ago

> You can’t start with the technology and try to figure out where you’re going to try to sell it.

The Internet begs to differ. AI is more akin to the Internet than to any Mac product. We're now in the stage of having a bunch of solutions looking for problems to solve. And this stage of AI is also very very close to the consumer. What took dedicated teams of specialised ML engineers to trial ~5-10 years ago, can be achieved by domain experts / plain users, today.

djmips|1 month ago

I feel like if Jobs was still alive at the dawn of AI he would definitely be doing a lot more than Apple has been - probably would have been an AI leader.

ericmcer|1 month ago

I am really looking forward to that idea catching up with AI. Right now AI is the thing and the products it enables are secondary.

Remember when our job was to hide the ugly techniques we had to use from end users?

BoredomIsFun|1 month ago

> excellent show "halt and catch fire".

I found it very caricature, too saturated with romance - which is untypical for tech environment, much like "big bang theory".

TacticalCoder|1 month ago

It's still very good I'd say. It shows the relation between big oil and tech: it began in Texas (with companies like Texas Instruments) then shifted to SV (btw first 3D demo I saw on a SGI, running in real time, was a 3D model of... An oil rig). As it spans many years, it shows the Commodore 64, the BBSes, time-sharing, the PC clone wars, the discovery of the Internet, the nascent VC industry etc.

Everything is period correct and then the clothes and cars too: it's all very well done.

Is there a bit too much romance? Maybe. But it's still worth a watch.

oliwary|1 month ago

IMO it really came into its own after the first season. S1 felt like mad men but with computers, whereas in the latter seasons it focused more on the characters - quite beautiful and sad at times.