So as was typical with my end of year posts that I used to make on my previous blog, this is an end of year post. All of my end of year posts are basically rants regarding the state of the world and the state of tech more specifically. This time around I am going to focus primarily on tech as there is only so much shit my brain can suffer through at once. So how was 2024 in tech? In a word: terrible. Let’s dig into that.
So why was tech terrible in 2024? Well a large part of this judgement revolves around the industry’s full fledged unquestioned embrace of AI bullshit tech. A lot of this to do with the fact that the big money investors tugging on the puppet strings of a lot of tech startups have essentially run out of practical ideas. Once the startups succeeded in getting the word out, the big tech companies decided that they all had to play catch up. Some of them bought into the ecosystem by investing in the startups, some of them built their own and some of them just piggy-backed on other people’s work.
So why does this matter? Well as I’ve discussed previously, AI is a scam. It cannot learn, it cannot understand and it cannot reason thus the “Intelligence” part of AI is bullshit marketing fluff. Anybody who tells you otherwise, is either card carrying member of the cult that has formed around this tech or they are an outright grifter. Because of this it’s deeply depressing and distressing to see how many people in tech have wholeheartedly embraced this bullshit tech. Where I work now, people are slobbing the knob of a terrible AI coding assistant which I definitively proved was built upon the stolen non-licensed work of other developers. Not a one of them gave a single shit when faced with this undeniable truth.
Even companies that in the past have been more reserved when it comes to embracing more fad based techs such as Apple has gone whole hog on jumping into this particular dumpster fire. They actually released a brand new set of iPhones and iPads along with the associated OSes which basically were created solely to offer their users access to various AI features and slapped the uninspired brand of “Apple Intelligence” on it all. Months later, the full set of tools has yet to be rolled out despite the fact its the only thing their commercials even talk about. Even so, the current tools that Apple rolled out universally suck. They are so bad, not even tech YouTubers are able to spin it in a positive manner.
But look, this rant isn’t just about AI. AI is basically the current symptom of tech’s biggest problem. That problem of course is that the tech industry is no longer committed to creating solutions to problems actually experienced by end users. Instead they are now committed to inventing new problems so that they can sell the solutions they created for those problems. The first time I took note of this trend in Tech was back in 2012 when Microsoft released Windows 8. It didn’t offer the user anything beyond confusion and a terrible user interface. There was no win for the users in that product. Instead the purpose of Windows 8 was to solve Microsoft’s problem that was birthed from Apple essentially inventing a brand new line of devices with a brand new form of UI (smartphones / tablets with touch based UIs) and they had nothing that was capable of competing in this arena.
Windows 8 of course was supposed to solve that problem for Microsoft and as we all know it failed miserably. Since then Microsoft has basically ceded the tablet and the phone arenas to everybody else because despite a number of subsequent attempts, they were never even able to come close to getting it right. Frankly this is a good thing as the less Windows / Microsoft software people have in their lives, the better off they are.
Since then, this has gone from being the go-to tactic for a few tech companies facing a dire future to becoming the front line tactic. My guess is that the collective thought process here has circled the wagons around the idea that if everybody is peddling useless bullshit, then eventually the consumers will have to buy into it, right?
Wrong. We don’t. There are alternatives. Sadly Big Tech isn’t looking to offer you those alternatives. They are in the business of building out platforms end ecosystems and using every tactic imaginable to goad their target market into wading into these quicksand traps of theirs. And guess what? It works. My employer for instances is in so deep with Amazon tech on AWS that I don’t know where their head ends and Amazon’s ass begins. I can’t imagine being in my right mind and actually okaying building out a platform that depends entirely on the platform of one of the richest companies on the planet. God forbid one day they decide to raise prices across the board in an effort to placate their shareholders. I wonder what our shareholders would say about that? Of course even thinking in those terms means taking pause and giving thought to something past the current fiscal year or quarter as it requires a functioning long term outlook. We in tech have collectively lost that.
But it doesn’t end there. Software is getting worse. Way worse. There are the obvious examples like Windows which of course has been and continues to grow into an ever more fierce dumpster fire, but that’s just the low hanging fruit. It’s rare to actually find Windows fanboys nowadays because even the most ardent of fans know that Microsoft is screwing the pooch at this point. Application software has gotten worse. Don’t believe me? Use Excel on a modern machine and then fire up Excel on an emulated PC running Windows NT. Excel on the old and slow machine will launch almost instantly and feel very responsive whereas modern Excel is basically just yet another mechanism that Microsoft uses to sell you on cloud bullshit. I can’t even just save a file to a local directory, instead I have to navigate away from all the OneDrive shit to save my file to a network share.
But hey, I’m not just picking on Microsoft here. Video games have gone to shit too and I can’t totally blame that on Microsoft. Game requirements continue to grow while graphic fidelity is only mildly better (side note: why does anybody give two fucks about RTX still? It’s functionally useless) but games themselves haven’t gotten anymore fun or interesting. In fact game publishers have gone out of their way to begin denying the public access to their back catalogues because the real overriding problem in gaming is the lack of creativity. Everything is basically a sequel, remake or homage to something else with the exception of a handful of indie games here and there. But if the target audience can’t play any of the old stuff and isn’t aware of it, then publishers can still pretend that they are creative powerhouses.
So it goes.
PC hardware is becoming a joke. Everybody is ratcheting up the power draw on their hardware. Arguably this isn’t entirely bad because baseline hardware is actually getting more efficient in terms of performance per watt, but in order to keep meeting the unrealistic performance expectations of consumers (note: these expectations are the fault of the tech industry as they are the ones setting them) they pull out every stop they can to give people reasons to buy this years iterative rehash of the same old thing which generally results in a net increase in terms of power draw. New Nvidia GPUs loom on the near horizon and I can’t help but to wonder if this is the generation in which Nvidia’s top line flag ship card will become capable of requiring an entire kilowatt of power on it’s own. Lord help us.
Meanwhile, all of the tech companies are bending over backwards to market how green and eco-friendly they and their products are. Apple tells us they are carbon neutral despite the fact they are spending an immense amount of money trying to goad all of their customers into buying fresh new hardware each and every year. Not to mention the fact they are now providing integration with ChatGPT in the latest versions of iOS and iPadOS which as we all know is a monstrosity in terms of its impact on climate. AI is the absolute antithesis of efficient and responsible computing yet all of these companies are still content to tell this lie with a straight face. Oh and despite how green they are, they all suddenly seem interested in acquiring access to nuclear power. Coincidence? I think not.
On a more personal level, they are talking about promoting me at work. They want me to become more of a leader which leads me to believe that they are considering promoting me to whatever the next level engineering position is. I’ll take it just for the money as I have no intention of doing this for that much longer, which of course I have been totally up front with my manager about. I know that when it comes to designing software in this modern tech bizzarro land though that I am uniquely unqualified. I don’t believe in the Cloud. I don’t believe in AI. I even think React / Redux is a steaming pile of garbage and I desperately wish we could back to more sane frontend javascript frameworks like Angular and Vue2.
But alas those days are gone forever, so I’ll probably just end up taking the money and running at some point. The fact that I’m unqualified for the new position I suspect they are going to offer is disturbing. However my horror is lessened by the fact that I am just as unqualified to hold my current position and I seem to be doing alright so far. So fuck it. Why not?
The best news I can offer here is that none of this big picture shit is sustainable. AI is surely going to collapse in on itself much like the previous fads of Crypto and NFTs did. It’s only a matter of time. Investors will get tired of financing this kind of stupidity because its costing them a lot of money and providing virtually no real return on investment. In a year or two the industry will begin to pivot into its next grift and I guess things being as they are, you can look forward to me ranting about it here.
So yeah 2025 is not looking good. Will 2026, 2027 or 2028 be better? I don’t know. I sure hope so though. Because I need to eke out just over four more years in this industry and its already gotten hard to do it with a straight face.
In an effort to end on an optimistic note, let me just say that it’s not all bad though. We still have good tech out there. There are marvelous pieces of software still being created like Zed (ignoring the AI part of it as on its own its quickly becoming an outstanding editor) and there are still awesome pieces of efficient low cost hardware being produced like the Raspberry Pi 500 (ignoring the haters who are largely pissed that this $90 computer doesn’t have an NVME slot). We are still capable of creating wondrous and phenomenal things.
It warms my heart to no end to see these things and to share them with you. Go in peace and have a wonderful holiday and forthcoming 2025!