“I could create a better, safer world for myself and everyone else, building genuine goodwill from my fellow human beings… nah. I’ll just triple-down on the alienation and paranoia.”

It’s not the Linux part that made them throw you back, it’s the part when you started talking about systemd.

“Phone goes in the locker before bed, Johnny.”

The former is important, but attracts little attention from the tech & mainstream press, is not heavily marketed by major corporations to other corporations and the general public, and makes VCs fall asleep. Whereas the latter gets ALL the coverage, marketing, and gives VCs big fat boners. My comment expresses my bewilderment at this state of affairs (hence the “for some reason?”). You want to white-knight machine learning, expert systems and pattern recognition? Call VentureBeat, Andressen-Horowitz, PitchBook, and TechCrunch. And while you’re at it, tell them to stop vaporizing genAI slop.

A machine learning suite that spends hour after hour screening trillions of potentially medically useful molecules = kind of interesting.

A subscription to a chatbot that writes buggy code that has to be meticulously combed over before you dare put it into production, and might wind up appearing in Google search results = awful, but it’s what’s selling for some reason?

“Use our AI!”

“Hmm… I don’t know.”

“If you use AI you can fire all your employees 🤞 .”

“GIMMEE! GIMMEE! I’LL PAY ANY PRICE! I HATE EMPLOYEES SOO MUCH!”