I started my IT career in 2011, I have enjoyed it, I have got to do a lot of interesting stuff and meet interesting people, I will treasure those memories forever.
But, starting with crypto turing general computing from being:
"Wow, this machine can run so many apps at the same time!" or "Holy shit, those graphics look epic!" or "Amazing, this computer has really sped up that annoying task!"
To being:
Yo! Look at how many numbers I can generate!
That brought down my enthusiasm severely, but hey, figuring out solutions to problems was still fun.
Then came AI/LLMs.
And with it, a mountain of slop.
Finding help about an issue has gone from googling and reading help articles written by something with an actual brain to mostly being rephrased manuals that only provide working answers to semi standard answers.
Add to that a general push to us AI in anything and everything, no matter how little relevance it holds for the task at hand.
I also remember how AI was sold to the us at first, we were promised to do away with boring paperwork, so we could get on with our actual job.
What did we get? An AI that takes the fun and creative parts, leaving the paperwork for the workers.
We got an AI that we need to expect to be stealing our work and data at every point, giving us shit work back, while being told that we should applaude it and be grateful for it.
And the worst thing, the worst thing is that people seem happy with it. I keep getting requests to buy another Copilot license or asking for another AI service to be added to our tenant, I am sick of it!
We got an AI that somehow has slithered onto the golden throne and can't be questioned.
I am not able to leave the tech market at this time, but I will focus on more tangible hobbies going forward.
This year, I have given myself a project, I will try to build a model railway in a suitcase. That will be a Z-scale tiny world in a suitcase.
I have never done anything remotely like it, but I feel like I need something physical to take my mind off tech.
Sorry for the rant, but I just came off of a high from realizing and putting words to my feelings.
We are not at the end of the road. We are not at the beginning of the end of the road. We are not at the end of the beginning.
I definitely get the impulse to doom. And I'm as prone to it as anyone. But when I look at crypto and AI, all I can see is the same analog fuck-ups made in prior generations. Beanie Babies and Labubus didn't ruin the stuffed animal industry. The Delorean and the Hummer didn't ruin the automotive industry. The Great Depression of 1932 didn't ruin the financial sector.
Plenty of things to be excited about in software and tech that lives entirely outside the cloistered hype-beast market. Raspberry Pis, 3D printers, 3nm chipsets built with ultraviolet lithography, solid state drives, lithium and sodium ion batteries with incredibly recharge rates, gorilla glass and carbon fiber, 5G+ radios, full voice recognition, self-piloting vehicles.
How is none of this thrilling? Hell, even just the advent of coding pipelines that can take a project from a funky coding idea to a deliverable feature in a few keystrokes is such a huge step forward in development. I can't hate the sales goons pushing junk when I'm so immersed in all the novel innovative applications of technology I've been watching bud itself up from the ground for the last 40 years.
Even LLMs on their face are such a novel application of graph theory. You can do so much cool stuff off a second hand laptop today. It's an exciting new frontier.