It feels like every few months there’s a new tech “revolution” being hyped up as the future. Besides AI, what’s the most overhyped trend in tech right now? For me, it’s the constant buzz around the metaverse.
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Cloud. Businesses went all in on cloud under this illusion of stable costs, but costs go up and contol/support have gone down, and I’m seeing businesses spin on-prem back up.
Id go so far as to say SaaS in general. Small startups are paying $5000/month to send emails and we’ve come to the point where inboxes are monopolized and if you don’t pay up to a cloud provider your emails end up in spam.
Take this and repeat for everything. Monopolize, ratchet up the costs, profit.
1000% this. Without giving away too much information, I work(ed) for a cloud provider (not one of the big ones, there are a surprising number of smaller ones in the field you’ve probably never heard of before). I quit this week to take a position in local government with some quaint, on-prem setup.
- We were always understaffed for what we promised. Two guys per shift and if one of us took vacation; oops, lol. No extra coverage, just deal.
- Everyone was super smart but we didn’t have time to work the tickets. Between crashes, outages, maintenance, and horrendous tickets that took way too much work to dig into, there was just never enough time. If you had a serious problem that took lengthy troubleshooting, good luck!
- We over-promised on support we could provide, often taking tickets that were outside of infrastructure scope (guest OS shit, you broke your own server, what do you want me to do about it?) and working them anyway to please the customer or forwarding them directly to one of our vendors and chaining their support until they caught wise and often pushed back.
- AI is going to ruin Support. To be clear, there will always be support and escalation engineers who have to work real problems outside the scope of AI. However without naming names, there’s a big push (it’ll be everyone before too long, mark it) for FREE tier support to only chat with AI bots. If you need to talk to a real human being, you gotta start dishing out that enterprise cash.
Mix all that together and then put the remaining pressure on the human aspect still holding things up and there’s a collapse coming. Once businesses get so big they’re no longer “obligated” to provide support, they’ll start charging you for it. This has always been a thing of course, anyone who’s worked enterprise agreements knows that. But in classic corpo values, they’re closing the gap. Pay more for support, get less in return. They’ll keep turning that dial until something breaks catastrophically, that’s capitalism baby.
Basically you save money on tech/support because of scale.
So you triple and quadruple your sales and marketing spend to get more business.
In the end it just doesn’t work, except the smaller guys and a lot of them are just hanging on as the stacks get more complicated.
Aws and gcloud are thickening the stack and driving everyone else out of business.
And that’s why you go with the big guys (and pay a premium for it).
I work for a SaaS company that offers a cloud version as well as a software license. We only support the big 3 because everyone else is just keeping their systems up with chewing gum and duct tape, and it’s infuriatingly inconsistent. No way of offering a reasonable SLA or for our support guys to dig into an infra problem. And this includes relatively big players like Ali, Tencent, Yandex, DO or OVH.
In the end, 95% of customers pay less if they choose the cloud version, only if you have 24/7 steady load (and a high one) will it be cheaper to pay for infra, SREs, licenses and support.
spin on-prem back up.
“Repatriating”
Hybrid approach is not bad
I totally agree…the best solution for the specific problem. “Cloud” was the buzzword solution to every problem for a few years and it wasn’t great in a lot of cases. High I/O home grown apps to be used from a single campus don’t need to be in the cloud. Bulk archive storage doesn’t need to be in the cloud, things like lecture recordings from 10+ years.
Disagree. People are terrible using the cloud, and often are doing lift and shift instead of modernizing.
Incompetent users are the problem, not the cloud.
Completely disagree. This last March, Microsoft changed the storage limit per user on OneDrive for education from 1TB to 100GB, and users either had to delete a ton of files or pay for increased license/space. We ended up standing an on-prem file server back up shortly thereafter because we could not get our users and faculty to delete research data and could not afford to nearly double our cost expenditure. In my experience doing IT budget for years, cloud has meant that you cannot predict your yearly expenditures, Especially if you use your services that are funded in part by venture capital. Let’s say you start using some cool research presentation project and suddenly the economy dips and they lose funding, the cost goes way up. Life cycle management has gone completely out the toilets in my experience with cloud products.
Well, if you did your budget planning with a loss leader that can happen. Did you get prices from AWS S3, Google Suite, Azure Blob storage, GCP, etc, or just blindly went back to what you knew?
We had been a university with office365 for several years, and the price change came well after the product comparison and decision was made. Once you are in an ecosystem like that the cost of changing is astronomical when you include migration labor, training, and loss of productivity during the transition. When you are a university with thousands of student, staff, and alumni accounts, and the office, mail, and authentication environments are integrated, it’s realistically functionally impossible to migrate.
The student A1 licenses are 0 cost without upgrades, which is why it was chosen, but the storage change was a blindside. We had hundreds of accounts using over the 100GB of data (which was within TOS) and had tons of data in onedrive which had to be moved or we had to fork out per account. This was a bait and switch, plain and simple, and that is the issue with “cloud for everything” is you are at their mercy.
Didn’t the 0 cost sound any alarms? Y’all thought that was sustainable?
I don’t understand your disbelief here, the 2 major players in online email and account mgmt (for education) are Google and Microsoft and both are 0 cost, but the bait and switch is the limit lowering mid cycle, not even on the academic calendar. Now that exchange on-prem is essentially dead and Google and MS control email via blacklist politics, it’s a captive market.
How is it a captive market if the whole discussion started with an on-prem migration?
Disagree. People are terrible using the cloud
“Victim-shaming”
Are militaries businesses in a wide sense?
Thinking of those “permissions for Ukraine to strike” being discussed and the reasons Armenia couldn’t use Iskander missiles against Azerbaijan in 2020, and Azerbaijan apparently hasn’t used Lora missiles after 2020.
I feel like both new cars and phones have been overhyped for a while now.
Ai is simultaneously over and under hyped depending on context.
I think the phone industry is trying very hard to look interesting but it’s been a while since anybody cared? Or is it really just me?
It’s now just pure hype and keeping up with the Joneses.
I feel the same. I think they got to a point where there’s nothing else left to improve, no interesting features to add.
The only feature I am really looking forward to is the return of removable batteries.
Answering from my Fairphone 3 & its brand new battery 😎
The improvement on cameras is nice though, but I think it’s been nice enough for anyone for a while and people are just comparing color balance now.
Unfortunately, Fairphone is not available in my country. I’d buy it in a heartbeat if it was :(
It’s more jjust a lackof reporting. If Apple came out with something new people would lose their minds. But if some no name Chinese company does it, no one cares.
What kind of innovation do you have in mind?
Most things to do with Green Energy. Don’t get me wrong, I think solar panels or wind turbines are great. I just think that most of the reported figures are technically correct but chosen to give a misleadingly positive impression of the gains.
Relevant smbc: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/capacity
It’s a slow war but it is being won.
Arm on Laptops and Desktops
I’d disagree but first I want to hear your opinion on riscv
RiscV is a fundamentally different story then Arm, currently speaking RiscV is not there yet however I have more hope in the future of RiscV then Arm. Both hardware and software side RiscV is not ready however the idea of a fully open source computer still excites me. I understand however that I may be speaking more out of idealism and im certainly biased however I still hope that RiscV overtakes Arm.
Well arm cpu’s get you insane battery life (ie. Macbook M series or new snapdragons). The architecture has not settled in yet but it will take some time
You’re still paying an insane amount of money for something that can basically only do basic document editing and web browsing.
Considering these things can run heavy stuff even through emulation means the performance is there. The codes that these things run is just not optimized for the architecture yet. Once that’s done, I dont see a problem but yeah it’s early stages
If you run mostly Foss this isn’t even a problem, there’s almost always an arm build (prism launcher even has arm on windows support)
Wut? Aren’t apple’s cpus based on arm and are able to run modern games like bg3?
Theoretically but Apple is so hostile to gaming that generally they cant
Wtf is an “arm” in this context?
Your question is reasonable, most people are not aware of CPU architectures
Maaaybe replace the wtf with what next time you ask a question.
or no
The Arm architecture (Arm_64) which powers Apple and Snapdragon in comparison to AMD_64 (x86_64) which powers Intel and AMD (Intel created x86 and AMD created x86_64)
Small modular reactors. You see these being proposed but so far they’re not being built.
The two nuclear developmemts I’m watching closest are the test molten salt reactor in Oak Ridge, TN and just recently heard about a new permit to build one for Abilene Christian University in Texas.
There have been others building a prototype or research reactor, but the M in SMR also stands for mass-produced and nobody got even close to that.
Molten salt sounds like a terrible design for modular, the whole problem is if it loses power it freezes solid, you’d want a huge one with tons of backup imho.
I’d imagine a tiny pebble bed or traveling wave, something fairly inert and safe.
Edit: I guess that’s the point, give someone a reactor, if they screw it up it safely freezes dead. Problem solved.
Mobile apps. They have so much money and users and it still feels like there isn’t as many cool mobile apps as there are cool computer program.
Mobile apps often feel like a web browser with the URL bar.
It’s totally possible to make cool mobile apps, but most of the ones you see are just a big company porting their website.
I know but I expected there to be more cool apps and less shit ones. I’m disappointed by what mobiles have become.
Other than AI, it’s automation. It’s pretty good when it works but has the same overall intent as AI (in reducing the human labor force), just on a smaller level. At least automation isn’t consistently delivering inaccurate information.
What sort of automation specifically are you referring to? I work in commercial building automation, which is basically tying various systems like fire/burg alarms, access control, energy/lighting management, intercoms, and everything else together using TCP/IP networking, RS-232/485, and dry-contact relay triggers everywhere. For instance, unlocking all doors and stopping elevator access when the fire alarm goes off. Or automatically disarming a burglar alarm and turning on the lights when the first person in the morning scans their badge. In that sense, it works great and has been working for decades.
If you mean robots taking all our jobs, yeah that’s about 100 years out.
That’s super interesting. How do you get started at something like that? Or where would a newcomer start to learn more about it?
With me, I started applying at electronic security companies 20 years ago as a helper to pull cable and hang cameras, the simpler, more labor intensive stuff. They are always looking for people like that as the older folks like me go more into the head end set up and programming because our bodies hurt too much 😁. I learned 90% of what I know from on the job training, the rest I already had sort of a background in electronics because of my personal hobbies.
Take a look at any factory floor and robots (machines) already have taken 80% of jobs.
That doesn’t sound overhyped. Sounds like it is effective
I literally worked on a factory line in the summer of 2015 right next to the robot they built over the course of that summer to replace us. Felt like John Henry.
I was at my company’s booth at a career fair earlier this week and it felt like every other student was looking for an internship in “machine learning”. When I asked follow up questions about what sort of experience they’d had or projects done or what they wanted to do with it in their career, crickets.
To be fair, 2nd most popular was “CAD” which is also not a job.
“CAD” which is also not a job.
mechanical engineers: Record scratch
Do you just do CAD though? Our Mech Es do a lot in CAD but not solely. Even our drafters do a lot of things not in CAD. If anyone ever asked me what I do for work, “CAD” would not be my answer.
I categorize it as a tool, not a job. And personally, I would find a job that is, say, 75% or more CAD to be boring as hell.
Melbourne street fashion. Literally asian style pump flip flops with socks half way up your calves. 80s tracksuit baggies. Trying REALLY hard to look like they’re not trying. The city is loving it.
I’m going to need pics.
No worries. Still interesting!
Carbon capture tech.
That one is still being promoted but in the end the CO2 is mainly used to get more oil out of wells.
I hate this one. People who have been following carbon capture for years know who is doing it sincerely and who is using it for greenwashing. Of course oil companies who say they’re doing carbon capture are doing greenwashing, no one should be surprised about that. Companies like Climeworks are doing real CCS.
I’d rather grown more Hemp
Agreed. Future carbon capture capabilities are used to justify current emissions.
Oh yeah, definitely this. The economics will probably never allow it to be deployed at a scale where it will make any sort of difference.
Instead, it is used as an excuse to not take any action on climate change which is actually realistic, albeit hard.
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Electric cars and bigger vehicles. The electricity storage tech is just not there yet. However, I think it’s perfectly suitable for personal transportation like scooters and bikes.
My electric skateboard still blows my mind. It’s crazy how well it works as compared to gasoline skateboards.
For me, the sweet spot is in plug in hybrids, as long as you actually, you know, plug them in. You can cover all your daily commute and grocery getting 100% electric and then if you need to take a longer trip occasionally, you’re covered by the gasoline engine. We use like one tank of gas every 4 months on ours.
I don’t understand the appeal of foldable screen smart phones. Seems like nothing more than a gimmick to me.
We’ve reached the point where they can’t make phones any bigger unless you can fold them up.
Agreed though it seems nuts to pay more for a “feature” on your phone that will only cause it to wear out faster.
Anything hyped on Hacker News. Tech bros are only about their big payday. Very little of their shit improves the world and they disrupt industries and social structures without creating worthwhile replacements. They receive too much attention and have way too much access to capital which could be used more productively elsewhere. They are ruining my enjoyment of technology. I am very wary of services infringing my privacy, stealing my intellectual works, leaving me open to hackers, marketers and predatory business models, putting people out of work, promoting unfair employment practices, disconnecting people from their friends, family and community, promoting social division etc.
Both the love for Generative AI/LLM is overhyped, but so is the hate for it. They’re actually pretty good tools, they won’t save the world on their own in their current state.
Thank you! They get trashed on all occasions here in the fediverse and I get the animosity since every corp and their mother now wants to ride the hype train. But I’ve kinda changed my mind about AI since having been recommended two AI tools that actually cite sources for their answers (Elicit and Perplexity). They’re an absolute godsend for the literature search on my Bachelor’s Thesis
Here’s how I see it. Gen AI and LLMs are really good for things that I won’t pay money for. It’s undoubtedly impressive tech, but it really deserves to remain as a cool research project rather than an actual functional product.
Shit!
I came here to say AI, which I’m not allowed to.
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