The California gold rush. This was an actual, legit thing where there were more people trying to score bigtime selling supplies to prospectors and miners than there were prospectors and miners trying to score bigtime with striking gold.
It’s not a local joke, I wish it was a joke, it’s a nugget of wisdom in tech world: when there is rush for gold, sell shovels.
The biggest example today is proliferation of LLM services. There are some uses, some success stories, but a lot of companies are selling services, use my tools bro, you’ll save so much money bro, you’ll vibe-code the next Uber bro…
A few years ago it was blockchains and NFTs. There is no proven use case but so many startups selling crypto wallets and NFT services to “help customers”.
San Francisco is still relevant I guess, for being home to Silicon Valley and tons of tech companies.
This phrase has been around for much longer than the tech sector has existed as an industry. Depending on how close you need the actual phrasing to be to the currently most common wording of the idiom, it goes as far back as the 1890s and has been common parlance in investing, manufacturing, and even the practice of divorce law for a century.
The California gold rush. This was an actual, legit thing where there were more people trying to score bigtime selling supplies to prospectors and miners than there were prospectors and miners trying to score bigtime with striking gold.
That was 200 years ago, though… Is it still some viral local joke?
It’s a metaphor being applied to AI companies. A major one in SF has ads literally saying “stop hiring humans.”
I didn’t get this, thank you for the explanation
It’s not a local joke, I wish it was a joke, it’s a nugget of wisdom in tech world: when there is rush for gold, sell shovels.
The biggest example today is proliferation of LLM services. There are some uses, some success stories, but a lot of companies are selling services, use my tools bro, you’ll save so much money bro, you’ll vibe-code the next Uber bro…
A few years ago it was blockchains and NFTs. There is no proven use case but so many startups selling crypto wallets and NFT services to “help customers”.
San Francisco is still relevant I guess, for being home to Silicon Valley and tons of tech companies.
This phrase has been around for much longer than the tech sector has existed as an industry. Depending on how close you need the actual phrasing to be to the currently most common wording of the idiom, it goes as far back as the 1890s and has been common parlance in investing, manufacturing, and even the practice of divorce law for a century.
It’s an astute observation. I don’t watch TV except for the playoffs and they have zero ads for AI, just for AI integration services.
Which playoffs?
penis fencing
Huh, thought that was more of a double elimination tournament.
quadruple elimination if you count the judge and viewer
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Including the headline of this post, you can’t manage to figure out the context?