Billboards often seem to say more about the rich and powerful in a city than the actual messages. In Los Angeles there are often large expenditures for billboards promoting new movies. It is a “movie town” and the powerful would be remiss if they did not see a large photo of their multimillion dollar project along the Interstate. In San Francisco for the last few years it has all been about Artificial Intelligence or AI. Instead of billboards advertising shampoo, beer or whiskey, travel destinations or even the latest iPhones, the landscape is littered with signs for AI. It seems that almost a hundred percent of the billboards in San Francisco are AI companies. This surely tells us something about the deep pockets of the venture capital in the Bay Area that they can outbid General Mills, Coca Cola, United Airlines and Ford Motor Company for this advertising space.
In the past, billboards would have some sort of meaning to the average person on the street. Look at this great phone. Those Doritos do look pretty tasty. I really do need to use Yahoo as my search engine. But now, most of these billboards have absolutely no meaning to the average person on the street. Perhaps most are meant to build a brand or name with the hopes of getting into the subconscious of the general populous. But often the language of these billboards is programming lingo and surely is a foreign language to most. Targeted advertising? Probably not for the tech workers looking at their phones, making their way to Menlo Park on the Google buses.
So what does Prompt it. Then push it. actually mean?
In source control like git, you have a repository of code. Here you can see the changes that have been made over time. It makes ir so you do not lose any work and when there are bugs you can figure out what went wrong and perhaps revert to a previous version.
A command-line prompt would be something like:
The “commit -m” is the “prompt” where “-m” stands for “message.” There are all kinds of prompts. It is 2026 and even though there are IDE (Integrated Development Environments) software to make things easier, programmers still use command-line prompts, like the early years of COBAL and UNIX programming.
And then to make sure none of your code gets lost somewhere, you “push” it up to the repository, often called server, now “the cloud.”
What is funny about the billboard that says “Prompt it. Then push it” is that in a different decade someone who was priced-out of the neighborhood might have replied “No buddy, do not Prompt it. Then push it. How about just shove it… and you know where!”
“No buddy, do not Prompt it. Then push it. How about just shove it… and you know where!”
That’s the joke in this rant.
Often there are hands on a keyboard or sometimes even hands with religious connotations in the sky looking a bit like a Leonardo Da Vinci’s Creation of Adam painting. Another word that is used all the time is Agents.
Modern computer culture and an excess of hubris seem to be a constant theme. Trust us. We will solve all your woes.
Now there is a “TOKEN FACTORY.” I am not sure what that is but I hope they have a union. Maybe ask your nephew?
Not sure what these two mean but I suspect that the customer service jobs in the Philippines, India and Texas may be getting some layoffs in the near future. Unlike the movie The Graduate where Ben gets advised by Mr. Robinson about the one word, plastics, the new word seems to be agents.
All the images above are just some of the billboards that I documented along the 101 interstate highway in San Francisco. There surely are more. One billboard actually got tagged. Not sure what that means about their “backend” but that was very “frontend.” Some things do stay the same.
