AI Is a Boring Technology
I’m looking forward to the day when the word AI in a headline reads the way electric does now. The word survives in a few places where it still distinguishes one thing from another, and everywhere else it fell away, because announcing that something runs on electricity stopped telling anyone anything. While out walking our dog this morning, I found myself turning the comparison into a question.
- ▪I’m looking forward to the day when the word AI in a headline reads the way electric does now.
- ▪The word survives in a few places where it still distinguishes one thing from another, and everywhere else it fell away, because announcing that something runs on electricity stopped telling anyone anything.
- ▪While out walking our dog this morning, I found myself turning the comparison into a question.
Hacker News (AI / LLM) files mainly under ai. We currently carry 6,154 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Chrbutler |
| Canonical URL | https://www.chrbutler.com/ai-is-a-boring-technology |
| Publication time | Wed, 23 Sep 2026 16:33:13 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-23T16:44:30.580Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-23T16:44:30.580Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | None |
| Cluster logic | Not yet clustered, or no peer story found in the clustering window. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
I’m looking forward to the day when the word AI in a headline reads the way electric does now. Electric toothbrush. Electric kettle. The word survives in a few places where it still distinguishes one thing from another, and everywhere else it fell away, because announcing that something runs on electricity stopped telling anyone anything. While out walking our dog this morning, I found myself turning the comparison into a question. Is electricity as interesting as what you can make under a lamp at night? Is the internet as interesting as what you can send over it to someone? And then the one I actually care about: is AI as interesting as what it helps you do? I don’t think it is, and I mean that as a compliment. AI is a boring technology.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Chrbutler.
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