Let's Put AI In Everything

The tech billionaire claims they don't use Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) much anymore, while a deep learning pioneer questions how real-time image processing could work without them. Meanwhile, the punchline suggests former Twitter employees are manually doing what AI should be automating—literally drawing circles around objects by hand! It's the classic "we've replaced sophisticated technology with underpaid humans" move that every veteran engineer has seen at least once. Some VP somewhere is definitely calling this "an innovative hybrid approach" while the poor souls circle road signs in MS Paint for 8 hours a day.

Sure, AI can build your app in 5 minutes instead of 5 hours, but have fun debugging that spaghetti junction of code! The left shows a nice, simple railway track—straightforward code built without AI. Clean, predictable, gets you from A to B. The right? That's your AI-generated "masterpiece"—a chaotic mess of intersecting tracks going in seventeen different directions at once. Your app might be built faster, but good luck figuring out which track leads where when everything crashes. It's like asking a hyperactive octopus to organize your closet. Speed isn't everything when you're spending the next month untangling what your AI "helper" thought was a brilliant solution!

When you spend years building an AI model only to have someone ctrl+c, ctrl+v your entire codebase. Welcome to the cutting-edge world of AI, where the most innovative technology is... *checks notes*... copying your competitor's homework and hoping the teacher doesn't notice. Silicon Valley's billion-dollar secret: sometimes the best R&D strategy is just "Download & Rebrand." DeepSeek apparently took "deep learning" to mean "deeply learning OpenAI's proprietary code."

Ah, the classic bell curve of AI anxiety. The folks at the low end of the IQ spectrum are blissfully confident they can't be replaced because they don't understand what's coming. The geniuses at the high end know they're safe because they're the ones building the AI overlords. Meanwhile, the rest of us in the middle—just smart enough to understand the threat but not brilliant enough to be irreplaceable—are sweating bullets. This is basically the tech industry's version of "ignorance is bliss" meets "knowledge is power," with the vast majority of us stuck in purgatory. Twenty years in this field and I'm still not sure if I should be learning to code better or learning to make coffee for the robots.

The tech industry in a single image. Massive crowds fighting to post LinkedIn updates about how they're "leveraging agentic AI solutions" while VCs throw money at anyone who mentions the buzzword. Meanwhile, a handful of folks actually discuss job displacement risks, and even fewer build anything useful. And that lonely stick figure trying to generate actual value? That's the junior dev who just wanted to automate their unit tests but got pulled into an "AI transformation initiative." The hype-to-value ratio remains gloriously consistent across every tech wave I've survived since the dot-com bubble.

Ah yes, the classic "medicine bottle labeled as ChatGPT" with a terrified new programmer staring at it. Remember when we had to actually learn how to code? Now junior devs just ask ChatGPT "write me a React component that fetches data and handles errors" and boom—instant senior developer! Back in my day, we debugged with print statements and cried ourselves to sleep reading documentation. The future is here, and it's making all those hours I spent memorizing syntax feel like a complete waste of time.