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Web3, AI, metaverse... all the post-weirding tech booms are just... weird. They are intrinsically harder to grok than previous generations. There's no good way to ELI5 any of them.
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Technically, all this is beyond the ability of the average teen on the hacking side, unlike previous generations where you could get into the engineering side with basic high school skills and knowledge. You either need to be a prodigy or older, like ~22
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Replying to @vgr
I wonder if it's easier for teenagers to grok? if they don't have any significant pre-existing models
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While impressive, this side is more like being good at twitter on web2 and building geocities pages on web1. It's geeky early adopter user skill rather that may or may not lead on to skill on the other side of the fence. Necessary but not sufficient.
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Replying to @visakanv and @vgr
Much easier. I wouldn’t understand half as much as I do if it weren’t for the fact that I’ve got kiddos who are into gaming. There’s an entire generation of creators growing up with Roblox, Minecraft, and other sandbox dev environments. It’s gonna be wild.
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Ie, it's not just age. The tech is itself more complex. There's just a lot more to understand before you get to a usable level of working knowledge, either as a user or a builder.
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Random aside... I think people give kids too much credit. There's certain advantages to being 14 that make certain things go much faster, but it's not some sort of state of divinely innocent supergenius for all. Most are just some early version of their future mediocre selves.
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Yeah yeah holy war school is a prison that destroys kids blah blah soap box... ...but don't let criticisms of schooling fool you into thinking everybody would be a genius if it weren't for school ruining their beautiful little minds It's the same spread of idiots every cohort
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Anyhow... all this stuff needs like an order of magnitude better toolchains and conceptual simplification before us mediocrities of any age grok it well enough to create gdp on it
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Sorry but this is a cope. Facebook and twitter are "cultural" too and I immersed and got good at them, but I'm not fooling myself that I get how to build complex web platforms because I speak emoji-english pidgin reasonably fluently
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Replying to @vgr
The best way to intuit is to engage, immerse and participate. It is harder to grok for long-term tech people because it's not just technological in nature which is their strength. It's cultural. An essay explaining the mechanics will never quite capture it
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Replying to
tldr -- this wave of tech is just more complex.This will have implications... A good metric would be something like: ratio of web browser users to home page builders in 1999 vs. Ratio of people running full bitcoin nodes vs. simply holding a bit of crypto in coinbase
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Or for ML: ratio of people who run PyTorch inference on datasets vs. people who use an app with "AI" in it that does something like age your face Or for metaverse, ratio of people who can make a 3d model of even like a cube, vs. people who play a game in 3d.
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I bet you, the ratio of people with a minimal entry level of producer skill to people with consumer skill is way off for this generation of tech compared to previous So asymmetry between high and low leverage ends of the tech is higher
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Not least because you even need more powerful compute to run any of it. Most consumer laptops would choke on most of the "producer" side skills I listed. And knowing how to run it on GPUs on the cloud is far harder than ftping a .html file to geocities
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Interesting btw, that all these new technologies need GPUs/tensor computing at a fairly powerful scale as a pre-condition of participation on the producer side... it's no longer cheap either
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People pointing me to various learning resources— To be clear I don’t think it’s just me not having figured it out. I don’t think anyone has. It’s like the web circa 1994. Nobody had yet put the pieces together in a workable tech+box configuration.
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It’s mainly crypto people protesting 😂 AI and metaverse people seem more comfortable with not having it all figured out yet. All 3 are at the late experimental stage. Cusp of arrival but IMO not there yet.
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I have non-trivial stakes in 2 of the 3 (web3 and AI) and trying to develop one in the third (metaverse). The one I was personally most interested in a few years ago (IoT —> AVs —> robotics) is the runt of this litter. I first flagged the set in 2017
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Reason I mention stakes, which I rarely do, is that true believers are exhausting. They think anything short of 100% enthusiastic belief is techlash-grade commie hostility. If upside scenarios don’t pan out I’ll lose more than most. That’s cause to be more rigorous, not less.
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This is partly why I tend to actively work on the quietest active fronts, and stay largely passively invested on the more frenzied ones. Right now the quietest active front is robotics. There’s a ton of interesting things happening but fortunately no crazed true believer crowd.
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In a way robotics doesn’t belong in this cohort. It’s the equivalent of mobile for web1/2. Once web3, metaverse, and AI get to a point of development, the iPhone of robots will become possible. In the meantime, enjoy Boston dynamics dancing robots and early IoT/internet-of-shit.
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The cost and performance on batteries, motors, sensors (esp vision), hydraulics is almost there. What’s missing is robot-social-media (web3), better brains (low-cost ML hardware), and environment (metaverse… robots will live in suitable VR+AR simultaneously)
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Btw I think “metaverse” is here to stay, much as kids might ridicule it as boomerverse. The terminology of AR/VR/XR/MR was floundering because the device level is the wrong level for visioning. Metaverse is “smartphone” grade cringe, not “info superhighway” grade cringe.
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I suspect it will come together in the way streaming did, not as a frontier but in a way where incumbents ally with high-value back-catalog owners to create properties. Linden labs approach relied too much on created content. Extending movie and gaming universes will be easier.
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I think metaverse narrowly viewed as a Facebook idea is vaporware, likely with some cynical calculations attached, but industry wide (include Microsoft, Nvidia, Disney, gaming studios) there’s a there there. I’d point to Pokémon Go as the genesis event.
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The biggest difference between this tech wave and the last few is the radically darker societal context. On a scale of -10 to 10 of broader pessimism to optimism: PC: 4 Web: 8 Mobile+cloud: 6 Web3+AI+Metaverse: -4 Covid+climate+culture war+inequality = nasty global environment
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It’s the “into darkness” tech wave. A dark age tech wave. Part grimdark part hopepunk. Pity “dark tech” already has a different conflicting meaning. Need a good name that’s not “4th industrial revolution” or “second digital revolution” Gaiatech? Cavetech? Doomtech? Hopetech?
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