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by pdpi 552 days ago
I find that businesses that bill themselves as ${TOOL}-users instead of ${PROBLEM}-solvers are, as a general rule, problematic. I couldn't possibly care any less whether a product is built on AI or a clever switch statement or a bazillion little gnomes doing the work by hand. I care that it solves a problem.

AI does need to die. Not so much because LLMs are bad, but rather because, like "big data" and "blockchain" and many other buzzwordy tools before it, it is a solution looking for a problem.
2 comments
7thaccount 552 days ago
The AI hype is annoying in my field as well. AI can have its uses, but we already figured out where to use it in my field ages ago. That doesn't stop people from hyping nothing though.
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CobrastanJorji 552 days ago
Yes. If your business solves a real customer problem and uses "blockchain" to do it, that's great, but you should describe yourself as a tool to solve the problem. If you mention blockchain on the homepage of your product at all, it should be treated with suspicious. It's a sign that you're speaking to investors and fools and not to savvy customers.

One exception: personal projects. "This is an NES emulator that is built in Rust, and it uses Rust because I wanted to learn Rust" is a perfectly good description of a project (but not a business).

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pdpi 552 days ago
> This is an NES emulator that is built in Rust, and it uses Rust because I wanted to learn Rust

Arguably, in this scenario, learning rust is the "business need" and the NES emulator is the tool :)

But yeah, exactly. A blockchain is, technically, just a content-addressable linked list. A Merkle tree is the same, as a tree. Git's core data structure is a DAG version of this. These things are useful. Yet nobody calls Git "blockchain technology", because what we all care about is Git's value as a version control tool.

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