> every single new product category in tech always, no exceptions, insists on learning nothing from history,

I've worked in a bunch of industries and places over the years, and this is not just a tech thing. Like, there's a reason that saving a day in the library with a week in the lab is a pretty famous saying.

Yeah, I feel that.

The ageism in tech probably has something to do with it.

When I see some of these brobdingnagian disasters, I always wonder if there were any adults in the room, when the idea was greenlighted.

> Because AI is a new product category in tech, and every single new product category in tech always, no exceptions, insists on learning nothing from history, and so the dumb shit is repeated until they learn their own lessons.

I'm only half a decade behind you, and I agree. Sad to see really, these are people who work really hard, but I think they are too focused on the algos and nobody is hiring experienced back-end and application builders.

s/in tech//

Every time something new comes along, people go "we are the new hotness, all those pesky lessons those old guys have learned over the last 200-or-so years don't apply to us." It applies to tech. It applies to crypto. It applies to political revolutions. Every time, it ends the same way (with the political revolutions inevitably being a lot more deadly).

Physics dont apply to newborn gods.

> and every single new product category in tech always, no exceptions, insists on learning nothing from history

I dunno. Maybe what they learned is that SaaS products have a familiar flow. They push as many restrictions as they can get away with to protect their moat until they do something that causes noticeable dip in subscriptions. Then they issue a disingenuous mea culpa and find another way to protect their walled garden.

Now users on the other hand. Might they be the ones who haven't learned from being jerked around in exactly the same way by SaaS providers for the past 20+ years?

What's the chance that it is market motivated? That the companies most likely to succeed are those willing to break the rules (this isn't to say that breaking the rules makes one likely to succeed, you have to break the right rules and not the wrong ones, and that distinction is often times unknown til after the fact).

This might mean that the companies that we see explode in popularity are those whose cultures are already biased in ways that don't consider negative outcomes, as the companies that did consider them already excluded themselves from exploding in the market (they might still be entirely successful startups, but at a vastly smaller scale of success).

I am a little over 50 and I have also seen the same pattern play out. It's incredible.

Lots of things were the Hot New Things That Will Change Everything, like VLIW processors, transputers before that, no doubt others. Perceptrons! Oh wait they can't do XOR functions, well how about Neural Networks? Too complex! Tell you what then, Fuzzy Logic, it'll power everything from washing machines to self-driving cars! Now we're at LLMs that are just neural network-powered Eliza bots that pirate everything like you did the week you first discovered Torrentleech.

Some things have stuck around, like OOP and RISC processors. Others like Quantum Computing are - like Iran's nuclear weapons program - just weeks away from blowing away everything we know, for the past 40 years or so.

Everything runs on relational databases on thumping great Unix boxes and that's unlikely to ever change.