The Kids, Their AI, and My Lawn: A Rant
So, I’m reading this article, or trying to, on this infernal tablet they forced on me at the senior center. “OpenAI,” it says. “Full stack dream.” Sounds like another one of those things designed to make my life harder, probably. They’re talking about this startup wanting to “own and operate everything it needs to win in AI.” You know what I owned and operated? My Commodore 64. And it worked. Every. Single. Time. No cloud, no ‘stack,’ just a disk drive and a whole lot of BASIC. Simpler times, folks. Simpler times.
The “Dream” That’s a Nightmare
“Big Tech big leagues,” it proudly proclaims. What league are we even playing in anymore? It used to be you had a clear goal: make a computer that computes. Now it’s all about “AI,” which mostly seems to mean making a machine that can pretend to understand what you’re saying, then giving you the wrong answer anyway. I tried asking this ‘AI’ on my phone for the weather. It told me about a new line of designer dog collars. See what I mean? It’s all a big distraction from the fact that nobody can write a decent line of COBOL anymore. And don’t even get me started on these “neural networks.” I got a neural network in my brain, and it’s mostly telling me to yell at the neighbor’s kids to get off my lawn.
The “Money, Talent, and Luck” Conundrum
They say it’ll take a “mountain of money, talent, and luck.” Money, I get. Someone’s always chasing a dollar. Talent, sure, there were some bright kids back in the day, before they all started coding in JavaScript. But luck? You don’t build a reliable system on luck. You build it on careful planning, rigorous testing, and knowing when to use a punch card. This whole ‘AI’ thing feels like they’re just throwing spaghetti at the wall and calling it a gourmet meal. And who’s paying for this spaghetti? Probably me, through some hidden subscription fee I can’t figure out how to cancel on this touch screen.
My Prediction: More Problems, Fewer Solutions
This “full stack” nonsense just sounds like more points of failure to me. The more things you try to control, the more things can go wrong. Remember when we just had terminals connected to a mainframe? Simple, elegant, and if something went down, you knew exactly where to look. Now, it’s all distributed, decentralized, and if your cat steps on the router, your entire “stack” collapses. They talk about “catapulting into the big leagues,” but I’m betting it’s more likely to be a “financial ball of flames.” And then who’s going to fix it? Probably some fresh-faced kid who thinks ‘debugging’ means restarting their fancy phone. Give me a green screen and a solid command prompt any day. At least I knew where I stood. These days, I just feel lost in the digital ether, yelling at a cloud that won’t listen. Now, where’s my magnifying glass? I think I saw a fly on this screen.