alt Hacker NewsI've sort of lost some respect for ed that I had early on in the hype cycle - he's still right about some things, but I can see him slowly and subtly retreating from his strong position, held even a few months ago, that these things will never ever be useful for anything and it's all a scam because they don't actually do anything at all except burn money. He would say it like 8 times a monologue. I remember one podcast maybe ~6 months ago he brought a developer skeptic on, and was trying to get him to say it wasn't actually useful for coding, and the dev was like "maybe not as advertised, but I definitely use it and it is useful to me" and he pivoted off the topic very quickly.
It seems he realizes he was wrong about that and has pivoted slowly to, "well, maybe they work sometimes, but the cost isn't justified." Which is a reasonable question! I just find his style of never admitting when he is wrong off putting and the way he presents things as absolute fact, when he's guessing like the rest of us. He was right about a lot, wrong about a lot, it's okay to admit that, I don't think his fan base would care.
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I’m remember when CrowdStrike caused that huge outage, he basically blamed Windows / Microsoft for it. I kind of stopped taking him seriously after that. I more-or-less agree with his point of view, but he seems more interested in selling outrage rather than journalism.
This is exactly how I feel about him too. I also find his "number big" approach to writing ("check out my 18,000 word blog about something I'm learning about in real time") off-putting, so I've completely stopped engaging with it.
We need better critics of the industry.
The economics is spending a few hundred bucks on software for an IC you're already paying over ten grand a month in order to make them more productive. How are supposedly smart industry experts not seeing this obvious fact? Are these guys actually experts?
Weird, especially since a lot of us have similar opinions. Was he saying that from the start and since shifted focus to it or is it completely new? The conversation about cost isn't exactly a new one.
That's essentially how you become an online pundit. The internet rewards provocative takes. If you have a tendency to doubt yourself and revise your views, then (a) your views become less provocative and thus less likely to translate into click-worthy headlines; (b) you end up biting your tongue or saying "I don't know" often enough that is becomes impossible to keep up with the requisite weekly publication schedule.
Which is to say, it's easy to scapegoat this guy, but I think his approach is not any different from other "opinion piece" bloggers that we all tend to reshare.