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I'm OK being left behind, thanks!

· 40 comments · 450 words · Viewed ~70,519 times

Many years ago, someone tried to get me into cryptocurrencies. "They're the future of money!" they said. I replied saying that I'd rather wait until they were more useful, less volatile, easier to use, and utterly reliable.

"You don't want to get left behind, do you?" They countered.

That struck me as a bizarre sentiment. What is there to be left behind from? If BitCoin (or whatever) is going to liberate us all from economic drudgery, what's the point of "getting in early"? It'll still be there tomorrow and I can join the journey whenever it is sensible for me.

Part of the crypto grift was telling people to "Have Fun Staying Poor". That weaponisation of FOMO was an insidious way to get people to drop their scepticism.

I feel the same way about the current crop of AI tools. I've tried a bunch of them. Some are good. Most are a bit shit. Few are useful to me as they are now. I'm utterly content to wait until their hype has been realised. Why should I invest in learning the equivalent of WordStar for DOS when Google Docs is coming any-day-now?

If this tech is as amazing as you say it is, I'll be able to pick it up and become productive on a timescale of my choosing not yours.

I didn't use Git when it first came out. Once it was stable and jobs began demanding it, I picked it up. Might I be 7% more effective if I'd suffered through the early years? Maybe. But so what? I could just as easily have wasted my time learning something which never took off.

I wrote my MSc on The Metaverse. Learning to built VR stuff was fun, but a complete waste of time. There was precisely zero utility in having gotten in early.

Perhaps there are some things for which it is sensible to be on the cutting edge. I took part in a vaccine trial because I thought it might personally benefit me and, hopefully, humanity.

But I'm struggling to think of anyone who has earned anything more than bragging rights by being first. Some early investors made money - but an equal and opposite number lost money. For every HTML 2.0 you might have tried, you were just as likely to have got stuck in the dead-end of Flash.

There are a 16,000 new lives being born every hour. They're all starting with a fairly blank slate. Are you genuinely saying that they'll all be left behind because they didn't learn your technology in utero?

No. That's obviously nonsense.

It is 100% OK to wait and see if something is actually useful.

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40 thoughts on “I'm OK being left behind, thanks!”

  1. Totally agree. One does not need to BE an early adopter of everything. IF it were even possible, it would be stressful and ruinously expensive to try to adopt the latest bleeding edge version of everything. I think it's healthy and good, especially if your career is in tech, to have SOME area of exposure to the cutting edge of a field, because it interests you enough to reward in its own right, or to open doors professionally. In my 3D printing business I make do with IT infrastructure devices that could feature on an LTT video as 'retro', but are all absolutely FINE (and security patched up to date), but following a recent refresh we now field a lot of very good, modern desktop 3D printers, under a year old and capable of massively better quality than our older machines and with fewer vices - because the game had moved on. I also have truly bleeding edge tech, which can be deployed on a project by project basis, where some risk and experimentation is baked into the quote. Familiarity and standardisation have value. Inventing under an SLA is bad for one's sleep, which I increasingly value...

    Reply

    1. @Infrapink @blog
      In a similar situation, with a management team that wasn't big on objectives and once told me — in a meeting they called to give me a bollocking on the perceived problems with an important project — that "We don't have any preferred outcomes," my response was that we could waste time, energy and resources running round the jungle meeting dead ends, crocodiles and quicksand or we could wait for one of the many somebodies already thrashing about to find the way to where we want to go, assuming, of course, that we know where we're going.

      Reply | Reply to original comment on mastodonapp.uk

  4. @blog
    Right out of school, I got a job as a VR developer. Just under two years in, I had to leave. They could claim they were using VR to study and practice complex cases, but in reality, most of my work ended up as a novelty, shown post-surgery at talks or conferences.
    A few years later, I’m really glad I left. Some things are all hype and no substance and they never change, at least not for the better.

    Reply | Reply to original comment on mastodon.social

  8. I was an early adopter of the web, and I'll be honest, that was a huge boon to my career. Sometimes, timing is a genuine advantage.

    But as you point out, in a thousand other cases things just didn't work out. Or they worked out much more gradually and being the first didn't matter so much.

    Reply

  15. A lot of the cryptocoin early adopters (bitcoin era) were technically literate people who were also passionate about the potential of the technology, but I don't think those are the kind of people who would say you are getting "behind". People who use acronyms such as HFSP are those that don't care what they invest into as long as it can give them a short-term return. It's such a shame that the way it has evolved reassembles a money laundering scheme and benefits mostly those who are able to accumulate the biggest amount, which are, coincidentally, the people who can afford such investment in the first place.

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  16. @blog Here's some sustainable math:

    If an opposite doesn't have a minimum Phi/Pi root in a middle range; it's 'brief art'.

    Soft money/value has to have long-term rooting in middle Hard metrics, in order to avoid wild swings that lack the mitigating, stabilizing middle - especially when you consider the vast use of money in local~global value systems.

    See: Value Theory, Systems Theory, Set Theory

    Reply | Reply to original comment on c.im

  17. @blog I really dislike the mentality that crypto cemented in the minds of the general public, that if you are simply a FAN of a thing early that it will make you rich.

    I think this is a lot of what is behind the AI spam problem as people have had to come to terms with the fact that they do not in fact hold a claudecoin that will reward them for sitting on their ass. That claude sub is actually the reverse, where they are paying for the privilege of feeling like they are early.

    Reply | Reply to original comment on social.treehouse.systems

  19. If I'm not mistaken, please correct me if I'm wrong but technically there is no such thing as HTML 2.0. the specification flowed as followed: HTML 1.0. then HTML 1.1 and then it jumped to HTML 4.0. and then jumped to XHTML 4.4. and then jumped to HTML 5. Please don't sell, publish or spam my email. Thank you.

    Reply

  21. You are totally missing the point. the fomo regarding AI is that it's very unregulated and powerful right now and you can do a lot of things you won't be able to do in the future as it gets locked down, just like the internet did. it's the same with Bitcoin, the fomo is missing out on getting rich at this early stage, not it's day to day utility.

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  23. @blog the other part about this for me is... What am I getting left behind in? Partaking in what I'm fairly confident a functioning legal system would consider intellectual property theft? I'll wait until that is ironed out, thanks.

    This is a bit of a hyperbolic example, but my mind immediately goes to slavery. Slavery wasn't legal in England when the transatlantic slave trade started... And yet people were partaking in it with no consequences. That never made it good and the law did return.

    Reply | Reply to original comment on mstdn.social

  27. If useful/powerful AI exists, why would the owner share that service with others? If you own that AI, "every" company is a competitor. You sell competitors your distraction AI, while you take over every aspect of business your tool can manage.

    There is no reason to sell a "good" tool to someone, who you will be replacing. You sell them a "poor" tool, that informs you about what your "good" tool will need to do, to serve that market your way.

    If you are using that "poor" tool, it is all the sooner you will be replaceable or absorbed.

    Reply

  28. You’re right not to let FOMO make decisions for you. If something is truly useful, it will still be useful later, when it’s more stable and actually worth your time. There’s nothing wrong with waiting and only jumping in when it genuinely makes sense for you.

    Reply

  29. I spent $30 12 or so years ago and played around with cryptocurrencies a little bit, converting some BTC into a couple of other things, and then back. It didn't take me long to realize how easily someone with influence (money) could bend the whole system to his will. A few years later that BTC was worth a lot more, and I spent it on some legal Canadian marijuana. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Turns out I'm too old for that now and it made me paranoid.

    I've recently played around a little with LLMs. Since I refuse to use anything public (the idea of Google or one of these other companies filing my chat logs away for any purpose terrifies me a bit) I ran things locally. Due to some big wasteful spending in 2024, I can run decent sized models. I'm just not impressed. LLMs are SO good at being confidently wrong, it's almost scary. Reminds me of a guy I went to college with who was better suited in sales than programming, who once "explained" to me how something works, and sounded so convincing I lost three days doing it his way before starting over from scratch. Lesson learned. This is why I'll never "vibecode" anything.

    I do see the appeal in a way, and there are some definite uses I can see, but I also see how AI is turning people's brains into mush, and this upcoming generation is losing their ability to think critically in a way never before imagined. It's no wonder governments want to see AI adoption so bad.

    One big silver lining about this whole AI bubble, that ties back to cryptocurrency, is the blockchain idiots have been completely drowned out by the hype, and I haven't had to suffer ANY of them for over a year now. That makes me happy.

    Apologies for the late response but I just stumbled onto this blog today.

    Reply

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  4. I love this. 1) If it works as promised it'll be easy to learn, and 2) If the future is technofascism, extractionism, and destroying the earth, I'm okay with not being a part of it.

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