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16 points

A lot of people still don’t, from what I can gather from some of the comments on “AI” topics. Especially the ones that skew the other way with its “AI” hysteria is often an invite from people who know fuck all about how the tech works. “Nudifier” or otherwise generative images or explicit chats with bots that portray real or underage people being the most common topics that attract emotionally loaded but highly uninformed demands and outrage. Frankly, the whole “AI” topic in the media is so massively overblown on both fronts, but I guess it is good for traffic and nuance is dead anyway.

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9 points

Indeed, although every one of us who have seen a tech hype train once or twice expected nothing less.

PDAs? Quantum computing. Touch screens. Siri. Cortana. Micropayments. Apps. Synergy of desktop and mobile.

From the outset this went from “hey that’s kind of neat” to quite possibly toppling some giants of tech in a flash. Now all we have to do is wait for the boards to give huge payouts to the pinheads that drove this shitwagon in here and we can get back to doing cool things without some imaginary fantasy stapled on to it at the explicit instruction of marketing and channel sales.

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15 points
*

Xml also used to be a tech hype for a bit.

And i still remember how media outlets hyped up second life, forgot about it and a few months later discovered it again and more hype started. It was fun.

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18 points

and then spent the entire Metaverse hype pretending Second Life didn’t exist

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13 points

Oh man, XML is such a funny hype. What if we took S-expressions and made them less human readable, harder to parse programmatically and with multiple ways to do the same thing! Do I encode something an an element with the key as a tag and the value as the content, or do I make it an attribute of a tag? Just look at the schema, which is yet more XML! Include this magic URL at the top of your document. Want to query something from the document? Here you go! No, that’s not a base64-encoded private key nor a transcript of someone’s editing session in vim, that’s an XPath.

JSON has its issues but at least it’s only the worst of some worlds. Want to make JSON unparsable anyway, for a laugh? Try YAML, the serialization format recommended by four out of five Nordic countries!

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11 points

this reminds me of some of the more cursed things I know from that hype era

(see this for some others)

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8 points

Yes! Exactly. Good example.

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7 points

Xml also used to be a tech hype for a bit.

Wha… What?

I’m trying to imagine a news anchor hyping about XM-fucking-L and I’m drawing a complete blank, is this a zen riddle

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6 points

Touch screens?

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7 points

Yeah a huge thing at one point. Anyone use a laptop with a tochscreen?

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6 points

Aren’t touch screens literally everywhere? What was the hype?

It’s always so baffling to me to learn about those things because I was way too young to actually experience any of the “hype” around most of those technologies. Touch screens are cool and they penetrated society so much there are at my grocery shop, what the fuck were they supposed to do if that’s not living up to the hype?

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