to me, ai seems likely to become a new user interface, just like gui did from cli.
abstract away a lot of the mechanics of working with data/information.
helpful, when literacy seems to be trending in a downward direction.
This time is different
121–130 of 400 posts
Re: This time is different
#122The post nicely lists a bunch of failed hyped tech:
> 3D TV, AMP, Augmented Reality, Beanie Babies, Blockchain, Cartoon Avatars, Curved TVs, Frogans, Hoverboards, iBeacons, Jetpacks, Metaverse, NFTs, Physical Web, Quantum Computing, Quibi, Small and Safe Nuclear Reactors, Smart Glasses, Stadia, WiMAX.
...conveniently doesn't list a bunch of hyped tech that hasn't failed:
> microchips, PCs, the internet, ecommerce, cloud, EVs, 5G
...and presents this as evidence that the current hyped tech (AI) will fail:
> Seems like you say that about every passing fancy - and they all end up being utterly underwhelming.
When the article needs to construct disingenious arguments, I'm not interested in its conclusion.
But wait! If you actually read to the end, there's a plot twist!
> The ideology of "winner takes all" is unsustainable and not supported by reality.
Who said anything about winner takes all? You just burned a "this time is different" straw man and then conclude that "winner takes all" is not realistic?
At this moment I'm wondering if the article was in fact written by a quantized 8B LLM. Surely people don't do such non-sequiturs and then expect to be taken seriously.
But of course not. This is not an argument. This is preaching to the choir.
Preach, brother, preach.
Re: This time is different
#123When I look at LLMs as an interface, I'm reminded of back when speech-to-text first became mainstream. So many promises about how this is the interface for how we'll talk to computers forevermore.
Here we are a few decades later, and we don't see business units using Word's built-in dictation feature to write documents, right? Funny how that tech seems to have barely improved in all that time. And, despite dictation being far faster than typing, it's not used all that often because.. the error rate is still too high for it to be useful, because errors in speech-to-text are fundamentally an unsolvable problem (you can only get so far with background noise filtering and accounting for accents etc).
I see the parallel in how LLM hallucinations are fundamentally an unsolvable component of transformers-based models, and I suspect LLM usage in 20 years will be around the level of speech-to-text today: ubiquitously in the background, you use it here and there to set a timer or talk to a device, but ultimately not useful for any serious work.
Re: This time is different
#124When I look at LLMs as an interface, I'm reminded of back when speech-to-text first became mainstream. So many promises about how this is the interface for how we'll talk to computers forevermore. Here we are a few decades later, and we don't see business units using Word's built-in dictation feature to write documents, right? Funny how that tech seems to have barely improved in all that time. And, despite dictation…
I'm curious about the statement that hallucinations are "fundamentally unsolvable". I don't think an AI agent has left a hallucination in my code - by which I mean a reference to something which doesn't exist at all - in many months. I have had great luck driving hallucinations to effectively 0% by using a language with static typechecking, telling LLMs to iterate on type errors until there are none left, and of course having a robust unit and e2e test suite. I mean, sure, I run into other problems -- it does make logic errors at some rate, but those I would hardly categorize the same as hallucinations.
Re: This time is different
#125The hype around AI is admittedly annoying - especially from the Wall St crowd who don't know how to pronounce 'Nvidia' correctly, and who haven't managed to internalize the fact that the chatbots they use hallucinate. It really is 'different' , though, in the same way the Internet was. It took about 20 years (ie: since The World ISP) for the Internet to work its way into every facet of life. And the dot com bubble po…
The only people underwhelmed by AI in February 2026 are people who have formed an identity around being AI skeptics over the last couple years and are struggling to shed it. I haven't met anyone who has seriously used the new models who isn't a at least a bit awed and disturbed.
You're likely to find more nuance in opposing views than your "underwhelmed by AI" generalisation could represent.
Re: This time is different
#126When I look at LLMs as an interface, I'm reminded of back when speech-to-text first became mainstream. So many promises about how this is the interface for how we'll talk to computers forevermore. Here we are a few decades later, and we don't see business units using Word's built-in dictation feature to write documents, right? Funny how that tech seems to have barely improved in all that time. And, despite dictation…
I think there is a second reason people still type, and it's relevant to LLMs. Typing forces you to slow down and choose your words. When you want to edit, you are already typing, so it doesn't break the flow. In short, it has a fit to the work that speech-to-text doesn't.
LLMs create a new workflow wherever they are employed. Even if capable, that is not always a more desirable/efficient experience.
Re: This time is different
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you are pushing 40k lines of code per day you are an idiot and should be fired.
yeah... maybe he is working alone or bootstrapping a brand new thing? Otherwise his entire team must collectively groan when a Slack message appears: "Got a new PR ready for review everybody!"
Do you actually think they're reviewing anything? It's vibe coded tests validating vibe coded impls and then pushed straight to production.
Re: This time is different
#128The hype around AI is admittedly annoying - especially from the Wall St crowd who don't know how to pronounce 'Nvidia' correctly, and who haven't managed to internalize the fact that the chatbots they use hallucinate. It really is 'different' , though, in the same way the Internet was. It took about 20 years (ie: since The World ISP) for the Internet to work its way into every facet of life. And the dot com bubble po…
The only people underwhelmed by AI in February 2026 are people who have formed an identity around being AI skeptics over the last couple years and are struggling to shed it. I haven't met anyone who has seriously used the new models who isn't a at least a bit awed and disturbed.
Not true. I'm a really heavy user of AI. And it's improved my productivity dramatically as a developer, but it doesn't work in every situation even in programming. I see it as an indispensible tool, but its not, right now, a tool that will replace me as a programmer or product manager or salesperson, or marketer. or (in my case) an owner and investor.
Will that happen in the future, maybe. but I don't have enough insight into how AI is evolving in the labs to make a judgement on that.
Re: This time is different
#129I’m doing enterprise coding tasks that used to take a month of whole team coordination from mockups to through development and testing in 3 days now. It’s all test driven development, codex 5.3 and a small team of two people who know how to hold it right orchestrating the agents. There’s no reason not to work this way. The sociotechnical engineering aspects of this change are fascinating and rewarding to solve.
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The 40k lines of code a day crows are amusing. In solving any problem solvable by code, there's a ratio of non-coding work to coding work, and codex et al all help immensely with the coding work but help less with the non-coding work.
Non-coding work is thinking about the system architecture, thinking about how data should flow, thinking about the problem to be solved, talking with people who will use it, discovering what their objectives are.
Producing 40k lines a code per day simply means you're not doing any of that work: the work that ensures you're building something worth building.
Which is why the result is massive, pointless things that don't do the things people actually need, because you've not taken any time to actually identify the problems worth solving or how to solve them.
It's a form of mania that recalls Kafka's The Burrow, where an underground creature builds and builds an endless series of catacombs without much purpose or coherence. When building becomes so easy when it was so hard -- and when it becomes more fun to build and watch codex's streams of diffs fly by, than to plan -- we forget the purpose of building, and building becomes its own purpose, which is why we usually so little actual productive impact on the world from the "40k lines of code a day" cohort.
Re: This time is different
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
"This time is different" has been correct for every major technological shift in history. Electricity was different. Antibiotics were different. Semiconductors were different. Gen AI reached 39% adoption in two years (internet took 5, PCs took 12). Enterprise spend went from $1.7B to $37B since 2023. Hyperscalers are spending $650B this year on AI infra and are supply-constrained, not demand-constrained. There is no…
There's another perspective you can see in the comparison with the dot com boom. The web is here to stay, but a lot of ideas from the beginning didn't work out and a lot of companies turned bankrupt.
The original concept of the web, hyperlinked documents originating from high-quality institutions, is pretty much dead. Now we have an application platform that happens to have adopted some similar protocols and is 99% slop