They try so hard to do a polished presentation that everything is kinda fake and unauthentic. I don't understand how this attitude survived so many years.
It feels fake, because they speak in a way that sounds unnatural and overelaborate.
It is so long, with so many unnecessary sentences. And it feels like everything is said at least twice; First a generic statement about the new feature. Then a specific example, or a deeper explanation of what the first generic statement was. Then a demo. And then a conclusion to the future.
The old Steve Jobs keynotes focused on the most interesting things, but now it feels like they are afraid not to include everything. So everything gets diluted.
It would help a lot if they would stop saying the same lines:"And now...", "We cannot wait for you to try our new XXXX ... ", or "We could not be more excited to...", "We are excited to... ".
That is not how regular Americans speak. I think it's some weird American corporate speak that has metastasized in Apple keynote presentations. ꉂ(˵˃ ᗜ ˂˵)
It is, however, how a lot of Silicon Valley speak. Source: lived there for a couple of decades.
And to an outside ear, it does just come across as completely fake.
Jobs' "reality distortion field" was just the conviction in his voice as he spoke. There is no, none, nada, zero conviction in the way Apple deliver these missives. It reeks of corporate America and is therefore not trustworthy.
I'm also kind of surprised that no-one there has altered the format. There are a lot of smart people at Apple...
American or corporate? I'm surprised that corporate talk overseas isn't overly enthusiastic! As an American, most of the stream has sounded very 'California' mixed with corporate.
A lot of corporate speak is developed in the US and then companies all over the world spread it around. Often the adoption happens without deep understanding of the concept, and without adaptation to local realities. And thus it feels much more unnatural.
You can do that with and without fake discussions.
One of the main reasons that killed my desire to move to the US was the amount of fake questions during - on a paper - friendly discussions, when the point of those questions was just, and only just, visibility. An average American non corporate discussion is worse than a non-American corporate one. And that seems to be pretty global to me.
My brother and my sister-in-law watched “Somebody feeds Phil”, and we watched together the Sydney episode and after that some others, because I’d just announced that I’d move to Australia soon. That Sydney episode had quite normal discussions for us, Europeans. Of course, people had agenda, but they still reacted to what response they got. Even if things were cut, most times people seemed to react to something else from before. Then the next episode was from Las Vegas. And it had full with questions where nobody responded to the answers, nobody cared what the response was. And they kept those in the episode. There was a point when Phil asked the people in a line one-by-one what they work. And they basically just listed it, Phil had zero responses to any answers. Zero reactions from anybody. The point wasn’t to engage with the answers or the people. There was another case, when a girl talked about her shop. There wasn’t a single sentence which was organically connected to another. Phil and the girl had different agenda and they had to perform based on those, no matter what. And I was enough now there to say that that happens way more frequently than elsewhere. The next one was from Manila. And there were organic discussions again. I’ve never seen that clearly this phenomenon which bugs me. Of course, the usual scripting which happens with these shows, even helped to make this more announced. Probably, the people talking in that episode were way less interesting, but still as a visual to what annoys me is quite good.
Of course, I had good conversations also over there, and I had bad ones elsewhere in this sense. Heck, I did similar things before, but maybe this is the exact reason why I’m so sensitive to this, because it annoyed me greatly when I did it. But on average, it was the worse over the pond. Especially on the extremities. But even in day-to-day discussions. It was annoying that I have to peal down an additional layer with anybody to get real answers, which is not needed basically anywhere else.
It's not "fake" - it's cultural differences where what is intended to come across as polite by Americans[1] can be seen as insincere by people from elsewhere. On the flip side, Americans often view foreign behavior that's intended to be neutral as unfriendly, uncaring or cold.
1. e.g. lots of smiling, use of superlatives like "great"/"amazing" to describe mediocre items/effort/results
Execs are ‘super excited’ about everything. There is no dynamic range at all. They appear to have no opinions and no judgement because their opinion is always that everything is awesome. When the audience knows that stuff is either normal-level ok or actually fucked up, this message is insulting to receive.
Worse, it trains people downstream that shiny happy is the only valid comms. Hard to escalate a concern when you don’t know how to start the message with how super excited you are about it.
If everything is at a “10” in linguistic intensity (“Incredible”, “Legendary”, “GOAT”) then nothing is exceptional.
It’s the linguistic equivalent of a Dorito chip.
I’m American and this marketing/corporate speak drives me up the wall. I have a harder time respecting the judgement of people who thoughtlessly speak this way.
Ah yes British, the famously direct people who say things like "Maybe I haven’t explained this very well", "I’ll bear it in mind", or "How interesting!" which anyone unfamiliar with the culture would interpret to be the opposite of what was actually meant.
"I may be wrong", but perhaps 'Americans rarely sound authentic' to you simply because you're just more familiar with your own culture's idiosyncrasies?
Anyway, I love the Brits; no flame intended. I come in peace! :-)
As a Brit, at Apple, I once got dinged on a performance review because I apparently wasn't a team player - I was apparently always putting down people's projects in the group meetings.
"But, I've never done that. I'm pretty much always positive about things people present. I even said some of them weren't bad"
Yeah, high praise comes in subtle flavours if you're a Brit.
I think this “awesome”, “amazing”, “super exciting” phase came much later than the moon walking era. Remember it’s been over 50 years since humans walked on the moon. Much has changed.
See these old videos, where people talk in a straightforward way:
Speaking as a Brit, our national trait is generally too understate things. So even saying what you mean, directly, comes off as a bit immodest and hyping it up in sales pitches sounds shady.
Americans generally say what they mean a bit more, so I think their mid point is just different.
Speaking as a Brit, I couldn’t disagree more. I have no trouble understanding a wide variety of Europeans in a corporate environment, but sometimes struggle to even understand the basics of what Americans are trying to communicate, let alone the nuances of their position.
It’s like ‘American corporate’ is a totally different language that I don’t speak. The words sound the same, but that’s about it.
This is true for a lot of Americans too. God help me if I have to sit and listen to my CEO talk about anything and have to explain it to someone afterwards. It's just Buzzword Buzzword Agentic Buzzword Great Buzzword Exciting Buzzword Future Buzzword Growth Buzzword Great Great Great Exciting Exciting Exciting Buzzword.
As other comment suggested, the way I see it Americans are addicted to hyperbolas. Instead of "Thank you" it's "Thank you so much". So when you genuinely want to thank someone because that person went above and beyond (saved your life, avoided you a substantial hassle, etc.) then it's difficult to convey that.
Small talk is all lies. Almost all praise is fake. And it all drives me insane. I can fit in at work just fine, I can appear joyful and excited to come to work, I have 30 years of practice with it. But I avoid it whenever possible because it is all lies.
Americans appear to oversell everything because people get mad if you don’t.
“Why can’t you just be positive?!”
Because I’m not going to lie. I can’t fake praise, and I won’t even try. Being positive while lying is immediately obvious and it undermines the positive attitude that you’ve painted on. If anything, I take a negative message when I see someone faking a positive manner of speech.
> But "almost all praise is fake" and "small talk is all lies" feels like a pretty depressing place to end up?
No, not really. I just see it as a tool that normal people use to keep themselves happy. And that's not depressing, to me. It's kind of ... annoying that people are so fragile that they have to do that in order to have a "normal" day, but I can't fault anyone for doing things that make them happy. I wasn't given that opportunity; I was weird and if I didn't conform then I got in trouble. Yet normal people LOSE THEIR FLIPPING MINDS when asked to consider my behaviors normal and to consider my various physical movements as normal and tolerable. You have never seen such orchestrated and immediate pushback in your life, I promise. But I was forced to do what they refuse to do, which is to accommodate the other side. So, if anything, I'm angry about it all. Not depressed.
I don't need those platitudes to feel happy or normal, I need to be alone to feel happy, most of the time.
Praise given in private is usually legitimate. I value that. I feel that. Praise given in front of others (like ceremonies and ritual award reception stuff) are the fakest fake activity known to humanity. The ceremonies are for normal people. People like me can simply be privately told "well done" and given a piece of paper that they can look at, and maybe a raise, and that's enough. And maybe a mention during the ceremony that I will not be attending so that people know about it, if they're interested.
One thing about Jobs is that he was genuinely excited about much of the stuff he was showing, and even if you knew he was showing some useless BS (like coverflow, something I remember he absolutely loved), it made it interesting to watch. If today's presenters are in any way excited about what they're showing (or, more likely, talking about), that excitement has been polished away by all the takes they probably had to film.
They're not genuinely excited. Because there isn't much to be genuinely excited about. The "incredible new super-exciting developments" are usually "okay, I guess."
Once in a while you get something like the M series chips, but the rest is reliably mid - functional, maybe a few nice tweaks, probably some better-than-average design, but nothing revolutionary.
So all of the "We know you're gonna love it!" doesn't land, because it's literally scripted and rehearsed, not spontaneous.
Jobs was rehearsed and passionate, which was part of the appeal.
It's debatable if Cook has ever been genuinely excited about anything.
Cook is excited about shaving a few dollars off the BOM, a few days off fulfillment times, and adding a few basis points to the stock price. It has made him a great CEO for Wall St., Apple employees with equity, and a lot of retirement funds.
But I can't recall him ever using a computer. I cannot, in my mind's eye, conjure an image of him sitting in front of a Mac and using it, whereas fuzzy black and white images of Jobs' messy-like-mine home office with a Power Mac G5 shaped external hard drive on his desk next to a 30" Cinema Display are trivial to remember. Like, when was the last time we saw him organically using any of the products the company sells?
Maybe it's just because he doesn't have the rizz, so I've just never seen the pictures, but he just feels like a dude who never goes into the Settings app and tweaks anything.
They try to imitate Steve's diction and mannerisms, without replicating his ability to concisely focus on the few things he wanted to stick with the audience.
That parental controls presentation felt like the same 3 bullet points delivered 4 times over with the vibe of a group presentation where every team member had to present but there was only 1 slide of content between the bunch.
It's a well known fact that it is quite difficult for some parents to setup and use parental controls, I believe it was just to fully explain it to people that might not know much about how parental controls work.
It used to be a developer presentation. Now the main WWDC keynote is just another product-focused Apple event (since it might as well be one if the tech press is already flying out for it), and the more in-the-weeds developer talks are held on other days.
Apple presenters are coached on how to speak, how to stand/move, what to do with their hands, etc.
I can understand how it might seem culty, but it's in the service of clear communication to a global audience. Anyone who represents a company to important customers and/or the public goes through similar media training.
The comment is about how everyone in their videos does it. The over-use of it is the issue, like when you say a word too much and your brain stops understanding what it means.
> It feels fake, because they speak in a way that sounds unnatural and overelaborate.
I’ve been to a few official Apple Developer events. What I’ve noticed is that they all have the same presentation style, to the point that it feels almost cult-like.
I really miss, as a late 90's/early 2000's apple fan, seeing Steve come up and joke with the audience then just show off real products or features and why they're cool. They really sterilized this whole thing after he passed. It's as exciting as a Microsoft keynote now.
Just watch a normal presentation like Mac OS X 10.2 or 10.3, it's not iPhone level earth shattering but he made it fun.
I remember one where there were technical issues so Steve just started telling stories about the old days with Woz... impossible to imagine that from ANY tech company today
Not to spoil the magic but the plan B dialog was somewhat rehearsed too. Award for the best recovery lines goes to James Dempsey and the "I Love (NS)View" song. "I, uh, forgot to mention up front that this song is a beta version. It's feature complete, mind you, but I won't have the words memorized until October..."
Probably but even the fact that they're rehearsing time-filling stories is a more human trait than the pre-recorded months in advance videos that are usually shown today.
lol, I have a few other memories of Steve for when there were technical issues during the keynote. WiFi congestion and dead digital camera still pop up in my memory every now and then.
Someone with no money must survive with short term thinking: hunt and kill a wombat on the savanna or something. From there you work your way away from short term thinking; you might have enough to get through the week already, so the threat of starvation is more long term. Eventually with enough in the bank you have nearly no urgency; you could conceivably mishandle your bonds when they mature in twenty years or something. But with enough money, literally the only risk is short term thinking and immediacy. Bending over to pick up a penny is not going to even be considered.
If my ship ever really comes in and docks at the harbor I’m going to remember to keep my wallet full of cash, so I can stop and get that strawberry ice cream cone without worrying about the long term consequences, which are all I would have left.
Sure, but I think it’s also b/c the target audience for these keynotes has shifted. Given their immense market cap, now there’s an increased fiduciary responsibility to control how presentation lands, such as earnings reports, which comes at the expense of the fun.
It’s not money they started it during Covid and it stuck because presumably Cook likes the little movie making bits they had in it judging from other things like the Mother Earth skit he did.
Would be a welcome change it if the incoming CEO went back to live on stage imho
Also—and this sounds like a small thing but it's really not—when Steve said something like "we have some really exciting updates for you today," he really truly believed it. I just went back and re-watched his appearances on WSJ D1, D2 and D3, and he was actually psyched about every little iTunes update.
It's not just Apple, Microsoft but whole corporate world, and hell - even open source projects use same sterilized safe language of "we're so excited" in communication with users, customers. That's the actual reality distortion field.
The uncanny hands-but-not-fingers movements they all do really bothers me. Their hands flop around but stay completely limp. Like they're robots who heard that humans move their hands when talking but don't have any fine motor control.
Yeah, the biggest problem is really that they all have the same approach, so these specific details stick out more through repetition. They don't let their presenters speak in their own voice or in their own presentation style. It's ironic for the company that made that 1984 commercial. The attempt at using different speakers to add variety actually ends up doing the opposite because the similarities become even more evident when a dozen people all behave in the same way.
This has been a thing for all tech companies for years.
According to what I was told by some FANNG people (I've never worked for them myself) some employees were/are were sent to public speaking classes after being hired specifically to teach socially awkward programmers how to talk on stage, and this is what they teach them, weird hand movements and all.
People smiling while using Siri and holding their phones 2 meters away from their faces looks genuinely disturbing and fake. We are at that point where I hope their next stream will be AI generated so it looks more natural.
It seems very disturbing in the current environment somehow, like nothing bad ever happens in Apple world, when in reality many things are falling apart.
For example the part about cameras, where they seem to advertise them not as security products but as a lifestyle aid.
The rehearsed marketing is so strong that it comes across in a very perverse way.
Apple is as much an aspirational lifestyle company as they are anything else. That's been their marketing aim for quite a while. It's less about the tech and more of a message of "This is the person/lifestyle you can be if you buy our products"
Of course, but it’s interesting to see how they apply that marketing mold to security devices, by making up use-cases which nobody is buying them for. It contrasts with the crash detection and health stuff where realistic scenarios are shown.
Ok, maybe it’s not that interesting on reflection, and how are they even supposed to advertise it, with burglars?
are these even real people there? they look so perfectly orchestrated in every hand and body movement, void of any mistake but also soul. you really can't get further away of a real human connection than this.
I think Apple can't find their voice since Steve Jobs passed/stopped doing the presentations. Thats why it feels inauthentic. I imagine its also hard to really feel "best (iphone|ipad|macos|etc) yet" when they are debuting features that existed elsewhere for a while. Its just a massive disconnect from anyone but fans. The same could be said for innovative features, whats left to innovate on smart phones?
In some ways both things are like having to be the person coming on after an amazing presentation or comic or musical act. How do you follow it?
You have to remember that Steve spent months, stories say half a year, preparing for the keynote. Arguments would get so heated he’d fire people and bring them back the next day to continue.
Hate him or love him; he knew that was the single largest stage for Apple and put the effort into each one. The keynotes today are like Apple overall, a fantastic organization that is starting to drift toward.. fake.
I wonder how Steve would've felt about the nagware for new AI generated pictures in the "new" Keynote CrEaToR StUdIo app, considering that the app was basically tailor made specifically for his needs in those keynotes.
A great unacknowledged gag would be Craig losing an additional button on his blue shirt every time they cut away, so by the end it's full-Scarface unbuttoned down to his belt.
These events used to just be for developers and press but they've seemed to recognize that these events have become major marketing opportunities and will get clipped on social media ad nauseum so they started (over) polishing them
Oddly, the strange handheld look and constant reframing of the talking head shots are pulling me wildly out of focus and distracting me terribly. Wonder what drove the choice to do it.
Now they are showing their AI image generator. It looks about two generations behind, so it's essentially slopmaxxing. Really horrible and unauthentic looking. "Take a picture of your friend, then make a funny picture of her holding a cake." How about no?
The bits that are fine: removing distractions from photos, extensions to the edges, fixing color/exposure etc.
They communicate the products and product changes quickly, comprehensively and accurately. This was a change that happened at the beginning of COVID, but it turns out most people liked it so it stuck.
Many of us don't want to watch people fumble with presentation problems. We don't want the lead in, setup, filler banter, so on.
I'll take this sort of "you spend your time perfecting your presentation instead of wasting thousands/millions of people's time doing it live"
I like it I think it’s sort of cool to see the different environments around Apple Park and be able to hear from a lot of different employees without having to watch a parade over the stage
Seeing people whining and gnashing and bitching, in vein it should be observed, about this sort of nonsense is so uproarious and, quite honestly, pathetic.
Like the root post whining that it's too polished. Christ. Get a grip and go touch grass if this is the sort of pathetic nonsense someone actually takes the time to whine about.
It's actually funny how every single presentation like this always gets topped by profoundly boring people complaining about some aspect of the presentation: The people aren't standing right or moving the way you want. OMG look at his jacket. That joke wasn't funny. Etc. Christ.
Yes, most people just want the information, not some sort of organic, "all-natural" presentation.
I didn't feign to comment about presentation style until someone's complaint sat atop the entire thread. As always it gets sidetracked into meta and arrogantly held personal preferences. Could it be HN otherwise?
So I say I like it and why. To, in again classic HN style, to be met by someone declaring that no, nobody on the entire planet likes it.
Upset? LOL, no, I guarantee you nothing on this shakes fists at clouds site upsets me. Humours me? Sure.
Are you one of those people who make that mistake? Because nowhere is that inferred in my post.
I enjoy the presenters and the enthusiasm and nuance that they bring to the presentation. I do not need to see someone figure out how to switch a display or change a slide or fumble with wireless that is overwhelmed in a hall with a thousand wireless devices or... All of that is utterly unnecessary, so pre-recording it, doing all of the post production, reshooting so you don't trip people up on misreads / mispronunciations / fumbles / technical issues, etc, gets the human + the information without the ancillary bullshit.
It's actually funny because I don't stream Google or nvidia presentations for this same reason (I just wait for engadget or someone to just give the bullet list recap), and I suspect many/most of the people whining and gnashing about this one being "too produced" don't either. Somehow it always ends up being 80% in the weeds nonsense.
> We don't want the lead in, setup, filler banter, so on.
Wait...they still don't do that?
Every one of the dozen or so speaker changes during that presentation involved a snippet of some jaunty bland corpo-pop song and some swoopy animation. Filler banter? They had a flying fucking VW Bus!
I'll take some sweaty nerd walking out on stage to applause and tripping on their shoelaces over that every day (except the Bus bit that was actually pretty well made)
I think it is more that axing the audience feedback was convenient for them. In the old WWDC keynotes they had to get the audience to 'wow' and applaud. You could very quickly see a feature sink when Apple announced features where the audience went 'meh'.
Now they completely control the narrative.
But I have only rarely heard anyone who liking the new-style presentations. It all seems fake with the same woolly business talk (everything is an 'experience' now, 'app experiences', etc.).
I certainly long back for the days where anything could happen, Jobs would work to convince the audience and Bertrand Serlet would come on and troll Microsoft.
Currently streaming the presentation, but it has mostly gone to the background as it's so insanely boring.
Their audience are no longer the people in the room. The audience is the people watching the video or livestream which is great because that means you don't need thousands of dollars and an invite to go to WWDC.
>I think it is more that axing the audience feedback was convenient for them. In the old WWDC keynotes they had to get the audience to 'wow' and applaud.
I feel like I'm about to tell you there is no Santa or something, but did you really not know that Apple always stuffed audiences with Apple employees? Of the remainder it both through intentional and natural selection leaned towards sycophants. Did you really think the roaring response were organic feedback?
It was always controlled. Personally I'm happy to be done with the on-cue tumultuous cheering and whooping.
>But I have only rarely heard anyone who liking the new-style presentations
Well I have only rarely heard anyone who liked the slow, plodding old-style presentation. So...
But yes, HN is overwhelming filled with angry, shakes-fist-at-clouds "it ain't like the olden days!" sorts now. So if you really think this place represents the norm...
I was in the audience at WWDC 2019 and lemme tell you, there ain't no whoopin and hollering from the paid shills in the audience that could've been louder than the massive "oooooooof lol whut" let out by 1500 people when Ternus announced the Pro Display Stand would cost $999.
> Did you really think the roaring response were organic feedback?
It was always controlled. Personally I'm happy to be done with the on-cue tumultuous cheering and whooping.
While I agree with you, I think even the controlled audience mattered.
The audience, even if they were largely Apple employees + journalists, did not know what was gonna be revealed. And there weren’t literal cue cards.
So you would never see the audience boo, but there were several situations where the Apple presenters expected cheering but got polite clapping instead, or cheering which was very evidently just the sycophantic employees (or the team that worked on something).
When something was truly exciting, the cheering reflected that in a way it didn’t when the announcement wasn’t.
Two very different examples of this were the Snow Leopard reveal, where the excitement could be felt throughout the presentation, culminating with the $29 price, and the iPhone reveal with the 3 devices in 1 gimmick.
(Aside from clearly not an Apple employee, Jobs' way of taking the question is brilliant. Yes I know this was probably not the keynote, but it's a big, risky, filmed WWDC event.)
But yes, HN is overwhelming filled with angry, shakes-fist-at-clouds "it ain't like the olden days!" sorts now. So if you really think this place represents the norm...
Yes, let's resort to personal attacks. There are a lot of things that are better now. Apple Keynotes are not one of them.
You linked to a "fireside chat" with Steve Jobs, consultant, returning to a highly dysfunctional Apple. The video is almost 30 years ago.
If that's your evidence to rebut me, lol.
>Yes, let's resort to personal attacks
You took that as a personal attack? That is incredibly weird. It was a general observation about the sort of perspectives that top HN, but not in the general world, or even general technology. You don't have to believe it.
Like seriously, currently the top post to a discussion about Apple unveiling an array of software improvements is some guy whining and bitching about the presentation, whining that it isn't like the olden days.
In a time where people are increasingly disillusioned with the tech industry & billionaires the imagery Apple puts forward of a literally siloed utopian ultra wealthy landscape probably does rub people the wrong way, at least at a subconscious level.
In the past Apple has been pretty good at anticipating and responding to shifting cultural dynamics. I wonder if they'll recognize and adjust?
I'm not sure it actually rubs people the wrong way, given Apple's sales numbers. Apple positions themselves as an aspirational brand. Everything they do is on purpose to enforce that. When people are upset at reality most people look for an escape into something else, not dive further into whats actually happening.
The siloed utopian landscape is the point. Apple tries to sell a modern, clean lifestyle status symbol. They are selling products for the person you hope you become, not the person you are right now. "Buy an iPhone, and this is what your life could look like."
Same deal as fad diets and gym memberships, its the illusion of being able to buy your way into a lifestyle without doing the hard work. Apple is selling an identity.
I agree with that, but I don't think it's incompatible with my observation.
Apple has often in the past positioned itself as an aspirational product for those who aim to be tasteful, talented, beautiful and wealthy.
The risk of becoming too disconnected from reality is that the typical person may stop aspiring to the sort of rich-person reality Apple presents. Think of how many of the symbols of wealth of prior generations, like fine tableware, were rejected by younger generations.
There is a different way to look at this: that is, actually the Transformer is a minimal complication of what the based model is: in theory the neural network could be just a huge FFN, which is anyway the part of the Transformer that does the heavy lifting. But this would be impossibile to train both numerically and computationally, so the Transformer encodes enough priors for it to work: the causal attention, and the math tricks like the residuals and so forth. But the bottom line of all this is that the Transformer works because of the incredible semantical power of simple/huge FFNs.
You can go another step - a FFN can be simulated on a Turing machine, thus it just exemplifies the incredible semantical power of the Turing machine model of computation. (in fact you don't even need a Turing machine, since there is no looping in one forward pass).
In theory you can run a huge FFN on the tiniest Turing machine, in practice it's much better to run a Transformer on the latest NVIDIA hardware. Or as they say "quantity (performance) has a quality all its own"
I was about to post your last point / quote. Going multigpu is relatively not so though but once you go multi-node you have distributed storage/io/compute system which is highly non trivial. Add that the long training times now you have robustness/fault-tolerantness concerns with hardware failures and restarts. Today’s training systems are engineering marvels.
Well, it seems obvious (in hindsight) that attention is vital to actually do anything useful with all those matrices getting smashed together in increasingly unhinged ways in more and more layers.
Which is incidentally more or less the only thing I remember about Global Workspace Theory (attention facilitating consciousness in a way iirc).
I felt the same when I got Vegas and Sound Forge, but they never got released on any platform other than Windows, so eventually outgrew them. I totally understand what you mean; I use it, but also happy with Blender!
One really neat thing is that you get free major updates. I bought a Blackmagic camera back when resolve was version 14 I think, and today I still use the very same license with Resolve 21.
Not that I spent any extra money on the license compared to what the camera itself costed, but I also feel like the 0 money I spent was well spent :) Harder about the time commitment to move from something you know really well to something new, but the time I spent on that was very well worth it too.
Indeed this will likely happen in the future, but not today. I was experimeting with SSD streaming in DwarfStar for DeepSeek v4 PRO inference in 128GB systems (and Flash inference iwth 32/64). GPT 5.5 ran the whole night, I checked what it had accomplished regardless of all the hints I provided in the specification document. After reasoning on the problem I gave him the design fixes and the tokens/sec were 4x after 10 minutes. And this is true for every domain where the human babysitting the AI know a few things in that domain. However this is a moving target, and at the current rate, soon or later, indeed AIs will do much better than us in many domains.
I don't think this makes any sense. Companies with managers that think AI capabilities are superior will be replaced if they are wrong as the companies will perform very poorly.
Hello, efficient market fallacy. Markets are not actually efficient, and especially not instantaneously so. There are a million ways to observe various market inefficiencies[1], so it's childishly naive to assert that they are in fact perfectly efficient according to some ideological belief of yours without considering reality.
What I say has nothing to do with efficient market hypothesis. Here the question is simpler: in small companies where there are competitors, who does the wrong choices will be seriously hit since customers will star preferring less slop and more reliability, if AI is mis-used. And companies that instead of firing, hire the folks that are "ideas people" and can use AI efficiently, and now how to control the quality of the output, will deliver more and better. For bigger companies: AI is driving salaries at a more normal level (honestly we want a bit too high, in recent years, even for people with a very low level of knowledge, didn't we?) and to marginally reduce total spending and not deliver the timeline they have, and are used to observe for years, will be noticed. Also companies in the past had a dangerous tendency to over-hire. I don't think now they will invert the direction and over-fire. I have the feeling many managers will instead reason in terms: what is today the great programmer fit? The one with low level knowledge of each algorithm, or the one that has good ideas and understands product, quality, processes, other than programming? And they will try to mix AI and people in order to have an edge.
I think we're in partial agreement on some things. I agree that the software field overhired and overpaid people who should never have had jobs in software in the first place, and that a correction is/was overdue. I also generally agree that small companies cannot afford to produce garbage software, and if they make poor decisions about hiring or AI usage, they will die in the womb. But startups failing is not really what I think of when somebody says "companies will be replaced" or "your job security is contigent on what management thinks of AI capabilities". Those sentences both convoke images of already-successful enterprise companies, and already-successful enterprise companies are the ones that are most resistant to market forces. Indeed, we already see this in the real world, because most enterprise companies produce truly horrifyingly bad software, even before AI. The secret is that you need to produce good software to become successful, and then once successful, network effects take over and your company can become unbelievably inefficient and have little to no fear of being replaced. Tech is a ridiculously winner-take-all field, and it's very common for a single company to capture over 50% of their market, after which point they are effectively irreplaceable no matter how many bad decisions they make, at least for many years if not decades.
Actually workflow impact in the world of software can be observed in weeks/months at max. And token spending too, is a voice that they see at the high floors. Also, there was never a strong willing in IT companies to reduce cost of work force: it is done sometimes, but it is more common to see them over-hiring.
Simple example:
Who will renew the SSL cert?
Day 1: meh, no impact.
Day 2: meh, no impact.
Day 700: who the hell manages this and why are we making no revenue?
You might think that is laughable; what a pack of newbs!
But this stuff has already happened without even LLMs in the mix.
And even then, there's a reason for the motto "move fast and break things" even if Zuckerberg eventually moved away from it.
The hard question, one which everyone and everything who isn't a domain expert (so AI, juniors, and quite a lot of managers and politicians) suck at, is "which things are safe to break, and which things really do need quality?"
What happens when said management gets replaced by AI? That should happen rather soon, especially in a company where the functions to be managed are increasingly other applications of AI.
Note that this is not related to Black Forest Labs Flux, the image synthesis models builders, and is instead related to a PCB AI authoring product called Flux.ai.
A few years ago, the probability of such shit reaching the Hacker News home page was near zero, because regardless of the merits, here was not full of normies that could not understand when a behavior is unacceptable (I'm referring to the violence of the language of the issue). And now, here we are, surrounded by people that can't tell the most obvious things.
Opening an issue consisting only of some twitter clone screenshot with some "literally who" who found a bug called "Please Do Not Vibe Fuck Up This Software" ain't it. That's not a way to tell a maintainer that you disagree with the direction they're taking. This issue is entirely useless. A "fucked up vibe coded" bug report would have been better.
This nailed it. None of the bug reports even attempt to document the claimed "--compare-dest=" regression. I did ctrl-f and I didn't even see anyone mention "compare-dest" again? The people posting worthless AI rage comments could have asked Opus 4.8 to spin up rysnc 3.4.3 vs. 3.4.1, thoroughly document the regression and git bisect the commit that broke it and filed a 1000x more professional and useful bug report.
If you want society to value your human work more than AI work, try to avoid acting like a uniquely human bozo.
They're not mad about the bug, they're mad about the cause of the bug. This is like city council starts flinging stones with a trebuchet into streets, and you're expected to calmly file pothole reports instead of complaining about the trebuchet.
Bugs exist in human code too. The AI derangement crowd pounces on any small bug as evidence that AI is a trebuchet, and thinks that if only we didn't use AI there would never be any bugs (like five years ago when all software was perfect, was not being enshittified, and had 0 bugs).
The bugs were introduced because rsync had security issues(i.e. bugs) in it, presumably written into the code by humans.
It's really baffling to see so many people in this thread maintain the position that somehow software was clean and pristine until AI touched it with its evil.
Please try to at least put some sort of constructive argument forward, for example - I don't like AI because it might introduce more bugs than a careful human reviewer. Then we could discuss why a single maintainer is responsible for rsync and how they should handle the pressure of keeping it up to date - should they just stop making further changes, should they look for tools that might help them?
(By the way, if your position is that rsync was perfect before AI got its hands on it, you have a clear solution to all your problems - simply do not update to any newer versions)
Either way, move away from this absolutist nonsense that has no bearing to reality.
> It's really baffling to see so many people in this thread maintain the position that somehow software was clean and pristine until AI touched it with its evil.
Nobody maintains this position. Again, it's a strawman you made up, because it's easier to dismiss such "absolutist nonsense" than it is to just admit that these specific bugs were introduced as a direct result of careless AI usage.
If the developer is overwhelmed by the maintenance burden (they aren't, judging by how many AI commits they've been making to a large number of repositories), then that's an entirely different problem that deserves a good faith discussion, but delegating the work to AI is not the correct solution.
> By the way, if your position is that rsync was perfect before AI got its hands on it
Again, strawman, nobody said this either. In fact, quite the opposite - we want rsync to continue to be maintained by a human. If the current developer isn't interested in or capable of maintaining the project anymore, they should just say so instead of quietly letting AI take over, because then the likelihood of someone else stepping up to contribute would be much higher.
You could also say that about using dismissive language like “normies”.
Regarding it reaching the front page: is it possible that’s because others feel the same way about a software they might use daily for important work?
Trite as the gh issue is and surely this is thankless work, the bottom line and reality is that rsync is a cornerstone for a lot of sensitive pipelines.
"Trite as the gh issue is and surely this is thankless work, the bottom line and reality is that rsync is a cornerstone for a lot of sensitive pipelines".
I think you’re looking at it through rose-coloured glasses. Controversial issues like this which fall outside regular bug reporting have always been submitted and became popular on HN. And developers are capable of such language, we have a reputation for being rude and even used to have a poster boy for it. Blaming this on “normies” (itself typically a dismissive word) is ignoring the problem has always been there and our responsibility in it.
Describing the issue as “violent” is wild. Reading through a bit, it’s massive, it’s clear no one involved has the moral high ground here. The polite response is to close the issue if you believe it’s genuinely off topic.
Still not quite sure what you mean by obvious because to me “Stop. You know nothing. You have shipped 0 features by hand. No one has ever depended on your code.” Is much more violent than “please do not vibe fuckup this software”.
Similarly, a few years ago, I would've never expected "my magic code generation machine is doing all my work for me now, I don't even bother looking at what it does anymore!" to reach the Hacker News home page on a regular basis, either, yet here we are.
its not an article, its a github issue. There is no proof, someone posted a screenshot of another person on twitter complaining about a vague bug they experienced. It's certainly not clear the maintainer used an llm in the way described (how would you know unless they told you?). Its not even clear what issues there are specifically, or whether they were caused by ai usage.
Maybe I'm getting too skeptical. I have a feeling increasingly many of the comments on HN and the GitHub issue are just bots ragebaiting other people (incl. the maintainer)...
I'm not sure how to interpret your comment. It could be
- a response to my comment saying that I am "illiterate" and cannot differentiate LLM output vs actual human comments (in that case I'm not sure what you're adding to the discussion here beyond a personal attack)
- a general comment saying it's getting harder for people in a position similar to us (i.e. tech / tech-adjacent who interact a lot with others who write with LLM assistance or via LLMs) to differentiate human/AI output.
I'll assume good faith and you mean the second. In that case maybe you can explain the "fundamental problem" you're referring to?
It was a general comment. Sorry for being unclear. I'm very bothered by hearing this exact thing a lot lately.
It's something I'm racking my brains over, how some people can tell certain things and intentions apart and others cannot - and how that set is different for everyone, and how this "flaw" is currently causing a lot of trouble because we, collectively, are not very well practiced in detecting this kind of thing.
I don't think the internet is dead just yet, because I don't think anybody truly has the concrete intention to destroy all knowledge.
I'm generally an optimistic person and very trusting of others. I'd say I'm also a pretty good reader of intentions / listener based on people who are my friends / worked with me (anecdotal of course, take it how you will).
However, some of the comments in the GitHub issue... I can only assume the worst of intentions to ruin any/all motivation of the maintainer. Given we've seen social engineering and other attacks on other open source projects with increasing frequency, I can only assume that there are ulterior motives in such comments.
I cannot otherwise see how those comments would be constructive towards the maintainer or the other participants in the issue.
In this game, who wins - in the long term - is who has the best model: so far OpenAI is ahead, so in the long term this is what matters. However, for the same reason, if in the future open weight models will be very near the quality of frontier labs, Anthropic and OpenAI will be out of business very soon. The game they play only make sense if their SOTA models do things that other models can't do at a comparable level.
OpenAI and Anthropic have the know-how for building much larger models that will be a lot smarter and run on datacenter-scale compute. This is a natural 'moat' that will be inherently hard to replicate for on-prem compute or small neoclouds running open-weight/local AI. They can easily coexist with a robust local AI scene.
I have the same impression. Strange to see this being downvoted & it was after reading the comment that I read the username to find out its antirez!
Now, I think that with these companies IPO'ing and Nasdaq and other bending themseleves and their rules to cater to them (as in case of SpaceX), these companies are very close to an IPO.
So for the employees, they are probably gonna get good evaluations, atleast in the short term and perhaps they are having a problem which is worth having.
But as you have suggested, I feel like the whole thing might be flaky especially given open source models. I believe that OSS models are at worst close to literal SOTA ~6 months ago.
So OpenAI & Anthropic have to somehow always be on the edge to get better models to not lose this (imo) very small time grip that they have, all while losing billions of dollars and having to worry about profitability & so many other concerns in it of itself.
I don't think that there is any other thing inside CS or any industry where two pieces of software being almost comparable enough with not much moat around except a diff of 6 months best, is something on which trillions of dollars float around on. We don't know how things will pan out but if I have to guess, It might not be looking good for OAI, Anthropic over especially the longer horizon.
You can theoretically do most things AWS does most of the time, yet people pay premium for it and keep paying for it, even though alternatives are cheaper, simpler and more performant.
I'd bet you that after 20 years OpenAI and Anthropic would still be around and kicking.
You might have a subpar product (for the price) but the reputation and history is what makes people open their wallets.
> You can theoretically do most things AWS does most of the time, yet people pay premium for it and keep paying for it, even though alternatives are cheaper, simpler and more performant
It's going to be debated forever whether wiring your own open source tech has a lower development cost than the equivalent AWS bill. For me, that's too broad a statement, as I have seen it go both ways. What is true: There is only some knowledge overlap between maintaining an AWS stack and having your own Prometheus logged, ceph backed set of boxes.
That is not the case with LLMs. At least, not right now. They roughly work the same and are easy to pick up. They are about as straightforward of an interface as it gets, and using them in "advanced" ways could be summarized on an index card. They are relatively fungible.
I don't see a world where OpenAI runs on brand recognition alone. It needs to be more convenient to run than local LLMs. They've done that by buying so much of the worlds hardware that it becomes more expensive to run these things locally.
> I'd bet you that after 20 years OpenAI and Anthropic would still be around and kicking.
Depends. The bigger the bubble, the bigger the pop.
Only a few unicorns from the dot-com bust came out the other side (Amazon, Google, ... anyone else?), and that was a piddling affair compared to this one.
AI is not a product per se, it is a technology you can decline into a product, and the product has a lot less value than the technology itself. Who has the best LLM can copy any product idea and make it a lot better. Similarly if open weight LLMs are everywhere and powerful, open source products in the space of agents are too simple to replicate for people to pay big money to a few companies: not everything is alike, not every parallel makes sense. The pi agent is good as a replacement for Codex and Claude Code if you wire frontier models to it. And when products are complex and matter a lot, like complicated AI-powered design suites for instance, there is no reason why OpenAI / Anthropic will win this space instead of a random startup. So either a few companies retain frontier AI, or those companies will die.
About IRC / Slack: other than the fact IRC was abandoned, Slack is about control, not product. The product is terrible.
FTP / Dropbox: this comparison does not make sense.
I really want Europe to be part of the AI development and research. And I strongly cheered for Mistral. But they are accumulating too much technological delay. This needs to be fixed, otherwise it will turn into yet another proof we are not able to run large tech with good results. Basically any Chinese lab is doing much better. It's not Mistral that created I don't want to say DeepSeek, but MiMo 2.5, Minimax 2.7, and so forth. There are only weaker and/or larger and slower (no MoE) models. Not good.
When it comes to MoE, to me, I remember Mixtral model that showed the viability of MoE for the first time. I was impressed by their technical report. To be clear, MoE idea was already out there, if I am not mistaken. If they have pushed Mixtral model family further, who knows they might have achieved the reputation of what the current Qwen family has. A missed opportunity.
Compared to the UK Government which recently announced 10 million GBP for AI research, which will likely be scooped up by consultants. I think Europe is doing fine considering.
I think that while y'all were appreciated members and definitely had a lot to offer, you also had a lot of annoying carve-outs and kept stalling needed measures to federalize and strengthen the EU more so we can be a proper superpower in our own right.
Maybe it's good you left for now, maybe we can finally get these things done. And once that's accomplished and enough of the gammon has died off, you can always rejoin :-)
Jumping in and most people in Germany wouldnt see UK as an American trojan hourse. I dont think anti American countries like France and Danemark have a problem with UK being in the EU per se.
I can see most people want that UK wouldnt just get special treatment any more.
Europe shot itself in the dick with this hastily implemented at the height of mass hysteria bullshit and now no sane company will build anything there. an AI startup in the US or China can be a boy and his computer. in Europe, the boy needs a dozen lawyers.
Mistral's sinking into irrelevancy despite the head start they had, the very promising early models they released, and the funding they receive, might very well be the consequence of trying to comply with all that crap.
You don't compete with anthrophopic from the basement. For that you need either a shit loads of money, or a government which are not afraid of getting very very involved.
There is a lot of Europeans working on AI, it's just that a lot of them work for American companies. Because of money.
Possibly yes but let me remember you that France, Italy Germany were against the AI act, so here something very odd is happening, that the EU funding nations are getting marginalized by the countries they welcomed on key topics for our future, and I believe corruption could be a big part of what is happening, both internal to those three countries and at an even more alarming rate in other countries.
EU big nations getting marginalized: haha. The only reason there’s no US-like tariff on Chinese cars is because Germany was too scared it would lose its access to Chinese market.
It's not a matter of importance, but that bad actors as they tried to do in Italy, corrupting EU parliament, may be doing the same with counties are have less visibility. A weak EU is not also in the best interest of countries that wanted the AI act, and surely not in the interest of their citizens, but there could be pressures.
I understand your point, I just object to the language and dividing the EU into more and less important blocks. If a voting mechanism is broken, that's where the issue is.
Who put a nepo-baby lawyer in charge of the big €95bn AI fund? EU bureaucrats living the 6-figure high life with chauffeurs and private jets in a bubble completely isolated from reality.
I hate the fake European foreign-backed right-wing parties but they didn't cause the current situation.
But I'm afraid it might be too late as the cancer spread and did too much damage. Insane regulations, no energy, looming demographic/pension crisis, tax hell, and collapsing industries.
Way more important than this act are the police raids. Someone used your SaaS to send phishing (see today's front page HN)? They'll just take all your servers away. Goodbye business. Unless they think the general public would riot, so established companies are okay. You can't build a castle on a foundation of quicksand.
The gist of it is very simple - depending on the risk of what you're doing with AI, you have to document why it did what it did, and be able to explain it; or you can't use it at all. So if you're using AI for mass surveillance, you can't; if you're using it for treating loan applications you need to be able to explain why it approved/denied; if it's a customer service chatbot, do whatever, nobody cares.
Not only is burden of the legislation fairly low (and a lot of it hasn't come into force yet), it is extremely reasonable. No, sorry, we don't want a UnitedHealthcare using a broken algorithm on purpose to deny as much care as possible and hiding behind computer says no.
Well , there isn’t also the opposite take from TechCrunch where they say: Why Paris may be the most important AI city outside Silicon Valley. [0]
While the EU loves its regulation, I still feel it’s too early to write it down in the AI race. It will not replace Anthropic or OpenAI any time soon, but even Google and Meta fail to do that.
If AI continue to grow and expand, there is enough space for many more unicorns.
The problem is that statement is a bit too open to interpretation. Ever had Claude piss you off by being stupid and talking in circles? Sounds like manipulation of human behavior!
No reasonable person would find a system's annoying behavior on its own manipulative. It could, however, be considered manipulative if it was made that way on purpose.
This is by far the best definition of AI slop I ever read, and the blog post itself is the contrary of AI slop: a short post where each word matters. The creation of an output that is at the same time large and lacks fundamental motivation/understanding is what creates AI slop, not the use of AI itself. This distinction allows us to have a mental model to don't blame AI itself but its continuous misuses. This also creates a formal model to understand why continuous AI steering during AI-assisted coding is so important. The sum of all the prompts provided, if they form a cohesive view of the software intent, constitutes the seed and specification that can generate good, useful code. Try to put together instead the sum of all the short prompts that prey the AI to retry "it does not work, retry", and see what you obtian.
I agree. I have gotten frustrated by a lot of recent anti-AI rhetoric, not necessarily because I entirely disagree with the premise but because it is too generic in its form. It has started to sound to me like the people who complain about "chemicals" in their food and water.
The real complaints are about specific aspects of AI and its use, and this essay does a really good job of articulating one of them. It is something we can actually discuss and address.
> The sum of all the prompts provided, if they form a cohesive view of the software intent, constitutes the seed and specification that can generate good, useful code. Try to put together instead the sum of all the short prompts that prey the AI to retry "it does not work, retry", and see what you obtian.
What are you driving at with this statement? I think there is value in both types of prompts so I'm unclear.
The tl;dr is pretty similar. Intent and care are the functional variables. A human can produce slop without AI and they can produce art with AI. AI just enables slop at an industrial scale.
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