Post
The Hype is the Product
https://rys.io/en/180.html
For large tech companies the products or services they offer don't really matter all that much anymore, it seems.
Whatever the company is ostensibly selling just needs to be barely good enough to keep people from escaping the lock-in.
Because their real audience are not the customers or people using these services – their real audience are the stockholders.
And the real product is the hype itself.
🧵
With clear goal of building monopolies with borrowed money. Greed eating its own tail.
The profit - if ever came - is curved out from the living flesh of clients and competitors with predatory practices that shouldn't be possible in the healthy market in the first place.
Great title. "Hype is the product" is a new “If you’re not paying for the product, then you are the product" to me.
The AI Tulip Bulb Bubble will burst at some point.
Hype-as-the-product is the other side of the enshittification coin. Both are enabled by lock-in.
The same barriers to switching service providers that enable them to enshittify their services in order to extract more value from people using them also mean that even if a provider has a slightly better service, people won't switch to it.
The service would need to be so much better as to justify going through the hell if migrating from one provider to the other.
🧵
But the line must go up.
How to make line go up if competing on quality of service is effectively dead?
Well, line goes up when investors want to pay more for company stock.
Instead of making better products or services to get more customers, and thus in turn be seen as a better investment, it's way easier to just… target investors with marketing hype directly.
This doesn't always work (remember the Metaverse?), but when it does, it works brilliantly!
🧵
We know "AI" is harmful. We know "AI" does not actually improve productivity for software engineers. We know introducing "AI" to Facebook made it even more of a hell-hole than it already was. We even know that people – actual paying customers – are turned off by "AI" crammed into products and services.
(links in the blogpost)
But none of that matters. as long as investors believe in the hype. And boy, do they!
So the bubble grows.
The line goes up.
The system works.
🧵/end
I have never been to Engineering school (I did science) so I am not a "software engineer ". I am a computer programmer, for three decades.
I guess that must be why LLMs have vastly increased my productivity. ( If you care I can enumerate the details)
This is a "steam engine" moment, and scams abound, as do the grifters Liars and thieves
Does not change that nothing will ever be the same
I am going to go ahead and guess: no. So here it is:
https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/11/ai_code_tools_slow_down/
> "After completing the study, developers estimate that allowing AI reduced completion time by 20 percent," the study says. "Surprisingly, we find that allowing AI actually increases completion time by 19 percent — AI tooling slowed developers down."
But I am sure you specifically are the exception. If only this study involved you!
I am an early adopter, and I have wrestled with what they are good fir, and not good for.
They are very good in well known areas, doing drudge work. E.g. sorting the syntax of Javascript They are hopeless in corner cases. If your are embedding Rust without the stdlib then they will be no help
I have used half a dozen languages professionally in the last five years, so syntax gets muddled in my head (substring, sorting, etcetera)
...
> Does not change that nothing will ever be the same
Yeah, I've heard that one about cryptocurrencies and the Metaverse. And probably a bunch of other stuff that I can't even remember anymore, that's how irrelevant it turned out to be.
But I'm glad you're enjoying the ride!
Thw whole retirement system of the US depends on the stock market. As far as I understand the numbers, almost 1/3 of the US-Stock assets are invested in Nvidia or the big 7, who are invested into AI and Nvidia.
The US system right NOW urgently depends on the AI bubble. A burst could probably be a bigger issuae than the bust in 2008. If this bubble bursts, capitalism is dead.
My assumption is that the whole wolrd is split into 3 regions (Asia, Europe, USA), playing the game „who will not crash first“. The country which crashes first will go down. All others will use the crahsed country as a bad example to introduce a new economic system.
@cyberlyra oooh, this is very relevant to my Internets! Thank you! And congratulations!
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