All of the current AI attention is undeserved
Brian Porter
2026-03-04
Consider this a cross post from #bad-attitude I guess.
I think the thing that bugs me the most about this current AI hype cycle is that it SOOOO doesn’t deserve the breath wasted on it. That’s true of every hype cycle, but I’ve found that even among the most sensible engineers it’s majority “AI” right now. It doesn’t matter whether it’s, “another example of how AI sucks,” it’s still winning the mindshare race. I’m even doing it right now with this post! 🤦♂️
Our attention is limited. And there’s so much other cool stuff happening out there that deserves our collective attention way more than the slop generators that have a forgone conclusion already written in stone.
For example:
This is a fully functional System 7 computer, faster than any of the day even in emulation, from a computer with a footprint the size of three Starburst candies lined up. So we could talk about how we’ve completely squandered Moore’s Law with endless additional abstraction layers that pretty much each add an exponential hit to performance.
It used to be (hardware > dos > app). Now it’s (hardware > trusted computing > efi firmware > bootloader > drivers > os > app sandbox > browser/electron > js sandbox > react runtime > app). And I’m probably missing a few layers in there.
I have to question exactly how much “developer comfort” is worth in all of this. Same for security even. Is it really easier to prevent supply chain attacks having a couple dozen attack vectors instead of what— three?
Or if you want to come at this from a wildly opposite perspective, why is the Slack mobile app (literally designed to send primarily text-based messages) over 400mb?
Slack iOS app size is 434.2MB in Feb 2026
It’s a rhetorical question of course— the size is a manifestation of all those abstraction layers.
By comparison, an app I’ve had on my phone since literally iOS 3 (that also is designed to “send text”) and hasn’t been updated in FOURTEEN YEARS, still works perfectly today, and clocks in at a meaty 1.4mb. 😅
Big Words iOS app size is 1.4MB in Feb 2026
Big Words iOS app last meaningfully updated in 2012