It feels like every few months there’s a new tech “revolution” being hyped up as the future. Besides AI, what’s the most overhyped trend in tech right now? For me, it’s the constant buzz around the metaverse.

  • surfrock66
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    8 hours ago

    Cloud. Businesses went all in on cloud under this illusion of stable costs, but costs go up and contol/support have gone down, and I’m seeing businesses spin on-prem back up.

    • @[email protected]
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      52 hours ago

      1000% this. Without giving away too much information, I work(ed) for a cloud provider (not one of the big ones, there are a surprising number of smaller ones in the field you’ve probably never heard of before). I quit this week to take a position in local government with some quaint, on-prem setup.

      1. We were always understaffed for what we promised. Two guys per shift and if one of us took vacation; oops, lol. No extra coverage, just deal.
      2. Everyone was super smart but we didn’t have time to work the tickets. Between crashes, outages, maintenance, and horrendous tickets that took way too much work to dig into, there was just never enough time. If you had a serious problem that took lengthy troubleshooting, good luck!
      3. We over-promised on support we could provide, often taking tickets that were outside of infrastructure scope (guest OS shit, you broke your own server, what do you want me to do about it?) and working them anyway to please the customer or forwarding them directly to one of our vendors and chaining their support until they caught wise and often pushed back.
      4. AI is going to ruin Support. To be clear, there will always be support and escalation engineers who have to work real problems outside the scope of AI. However without naming names, there’s a big push (it’ll be everyone before too long, mark it) for FREE tier support to only chat with AI bots. If you need to talk to a real human being, you gotta start dishing out that enterprise cash.

      Mix all that together and then put the remaining pressure on the human aspect still holding things up and there’s a collapse coming. Once businesses get so big they’re no longer “obligated” to provide support, they’ll start charging you for it. This has always been a thing of course, anyone who’s worked enterprise agreements knows that. But in classic corpo values, they’re closing the gap. Pay more for support, get less in return. They’ll keep turning that dial until something breaks catastrophically, that’s capitalism baby.

    • @Tja
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      35 hours ago

      Disagree. People are terrible using the cloud, and often are doing lift and shift instead of modernizing.

      Incompetent users are the problem, not the cloud.

      • surfrock66
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        84 hours ago

        Completely disagree. This last March, Microsoft changed the storage limit per user on OneDrive for education from 1TB to 100GB, and users either had to delete a ton of files or pay for increased license/space. We ended up standing an on-prem file server back up shortly thereafter because we could not get our users and faculty to delete research data and could not afford to nearly double our cost expenditure. In my experience doing IT budget for years, cloud has meant that you cannot predict your yearly expenditures, Especially if you use your services that are funded in part by venture capital. Let’s say you start using some cool research presentation project and suddenly the economy dips and they lose funding, the cost goes way up. Life cycle management has gone completely out the toilets in my experience with cloud products.

        • @Tja
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          14 hours ago

          Well, if you did your budget planning with a loss leader that can happen. Did you get prices from AWS S3, Google Suite, Azure Blob storage, GCP, etc, or just blindly went back to what you knew?

          • surfrock66
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            33 hours ago

            We had been a university with office365 for several years, and the price change came well after the product comparison and decision was made. Once you are in an ecosystem like that the cost of changing is astronomical when you include migration labor, training, and loss of productivity during the transition. When you are a university with thousands of student, staff, and alumni accounts, and the office, mail, and authentication environments are integrated, it’s realistically functionally impossible to migrate.

            The student A1 licenses are 0 cost without upgrades, which is why it was chosen, but the storage change was a blindside. We had hundreds of accounts using over the 100GB of data (which was within TOS) and had tons of data in onedrive which had to be moved or we had to fork out per account. This was a bait and switch, plain and simple, and that is the issue with “cloud for everything” is you are at their mercy.

            • @Tja
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              131 minutes ago

              Didn’t the 0 cost sound any alarms? Y’all thought that was sustainable?

              • surfrock66
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                126 minutes ago

                I don’t understand your disbelief here, the 2 major players in online email and account mgmt (for education) are Google and Microsoft and both are 0 cost, but the bait and switch is the limit lowering mid cycle, not even on the academic calendar. Now that exchange on-prem is essentially dead and Google and MS control email via blacklist politics, it’s a captive market.

    • @[email protected]
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      38 hours ago

      Are militaries businesses in a wide sense?

      Thinking of those “permissions for Ukraine to strike” being discussed and the reasons Armenia couldn’t use Iskander missiles against Azerbaijan in 2020, and Azerbaijan apparently hasn’t used Lora missiles after 2020.

  • @[email protected]
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    78 hours ago

    Quantum computing? The hype isn’t so bad lately and I’m somewhat optimistic but it’s worth a mention.

    • shastaxc
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      22 hours ago

      I feel like it’s hyped just enough. It does have the potential to revolutionize computing but we have no practical applications for it at the current point in its development. There’s only so much you can hype something that can’t even act as a simple calculator better than a handheld calculator can.

  • @[email protected]
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    5014 hours ago

    Carbon capture tech.

    That one is still being promoted but in the end the CO2 is mainly used to get more oil out of wells.

  • @[email protected]
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    4116 hours ago

    I feel like both new cars and phones have been overhyped for a while now.

    Ai is simultaneously over and under hyped depending on context.

    • @[email protected]
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      15 hours ago

      I think the phone industry is trying very hard to look interesting but it’s been a while since anybody cared? Or is it really just me?

      • @[email protected]
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        1010 hours ago

        I feel the same. I think they got to a point where there’s nothing else left to improve, no interesting features to add.

        The only feature I am really looking forward to is the return of removable batteries.

        • @[email protected]
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          48 hours ago

          Answering from my Fairphone 3 & its brand new battery 😎

          The improvement on cameras is nice though, but I think it’s been nice enough for anyone for a while and people are just comparing color balance now.

          • @[email protected]
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            27 hours ago

            Unfortunately, Fairphone is not available in my country. I’d buy it in a heartbeat if it was :(

  • @[email protected]
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    11 hours ago

    Melbourne street fashion. Literally asian style pump flip flops with socks half way up your calves. 80s tracksuit baggies. Trying REALLY hard to look like they’re not trying. The city is loving it.

    Edit. Whoops, didn’t see TECH

  • @[email protected]
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    1515 hours ago

    Small modular reactors. You see these being proposed but so far they’re not being built.

  • @[email protected]
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    1114 hours ago

    Other than AI, it’s automation. It’s pretty good when it works but has the same overall intent as AI (in reducing the human labor force), just on a smaller level. At least automation isn’t consistently delivering inaccurate information.

    • TimeSquirrel
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      711 hours ago

      What sort of automation specifically are you referring to? I work in commercial building automation, which is basically tying various systems like fire/burg alarms, access control, energy/lighting management, intercoms, and everything else together using TCP/IP networking, RS-232/485, and dry-contact relay triggers everywhere. For instance, unlocking all doors and stopping elevator access when the fire alarm goes off. Or automatically disarming a burglar alarm and turning on the lights when the first person in the morning scans their badge. In that sense, it works great and has been working for decades.

      If you mean robots taking all our jobs, yeah that’s about 100 years out.

      • @Tja
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        15 hours ago

        Take a look at any factory floor and robots (machines) already have taken 80% of jobs.

        • shastaxc
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          22 hours ago

          That doesn’t sound overhyped. Sounds like it is effective

    • Vanth
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      813 hours ago

      I was at my company’s booth at a career fair earlier this week and it felt like every other student was looking for an internship in “machine learning”. When I asked follow up questions about what sort of experience they’d had or projects done or what they wanted to do with it in their career, crickets.

      To be fair, 2nd most popular was “CAD” which is also not a job.

  • @[email protected]
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    1015 hours ago

    Most things to do with Green Energy. Don’t get me wrong, I think solar panels or wind turbines are great. I just think that most of the reported figures are technically correct but chosen to give a misleadingly positive impression of the gains.

    Relevant smbc: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/capacity

    • @[email protected]
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      14 hours ago

      It wasn’t a very long initial question (only a few sentences), but you somehow missed the only qualifier to the whole thing, “…Besides AI,” within that short intro.

      • @[email protected]
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        18 hours ago

        It is kind of misleading to leave it out of the title and hide it in the middle of the post. “Besides AI” could’ve easily fit in the post title.

          • @[email protected]
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            159 seconds ago

            The post title was an entire thought in the form of a question. It invited people to come and share their opinions.

            Not to mention that in many clients, the title is presented first before the post body. So someone could come up with their answer after reading everything initially presented to them about this post.

            Also, skimming is a useful thing that people do, lol