Live data from Hacker News

This time is different

shkspr.mobi

221–230 of 400 posts

Re: This time is different

#221

When 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…

The completely different way people are experiencing AI is fascinating. In my world AI is already far more influential than text to speech. People on here act like we don’t know if AI will be useful. And I’m sitting over here puzzled because of how fucking useful it is. Very strange.

> People on here act like we don’t know if AI will be useful. And I’m sitting over here puzzled because of how fucking useful it is.

Yes, it's very strange to read AI threads here because the general tone is so different than, say, at the company I work at, where hundreds of engineers are given enormous monthly token budgets and are being pushed to have the LLMs write as much code as possible. They're not forced to, and no one is reprimanded for not adopting Claude Code or Codex or Cursor. But there's been a strong tonal shift in technology leadership in the last month that basically implies that this is how it is going to be done in the future whether one likes it or not.

As for me, I've been writing all of my code via Claude for a while now, and I don't think I will ever go back to working in an editor writing code the way I did for most of my career. Nor do I want to.

Re: This time is different

#222
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are pushing 40k lines of code per day you are an idiot and should be fired.

I agree with your point that the original claim is unlikely to be true (and would be extremely foolish behavior even if it were true). I don't think it's good to flame people though, even if they did say something unreasonable.

Taking the high road doesn't work with this type of individual. Sometimes you need to call a spade a spade (or, more likely, call a bot a bot).

Re: This time is different

#223
post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're not seeing the hallucinations, I'd assert you're either not using it enough, or (more likely) you don't have enough knowledge in the subject matter to notice when it's hallucinating.

I'm not interested in getting into some argument about who has "more knowledge in the subject matter". I'm genuinely curious: do you think Opus 4.6 hallucinates just as much as GPT-3.5?

Yes. I see it hallucinate method names for 3rd party libraries constantly.

It’s useful, but when users here say they’re vibe coding 98% of their work, I have to think they’re not working on anything complex.

Re: This time is different

#224
If you believe marketing hype, then that's exactly what it is... Hype.

If you speak to industry professionals and retain a healthy scepticism, you don't have to look far to find people that absolutely do not believe the marketing.

Quite frankly I like that advances in say quantum computing are publically announced. The hype around what that means for society and our view of the universe is probably where you want to put on that reserved scepticism hat.

Similarly smart glasses were and are a thing, but society is rightly apprehensive about the impact, so the hype has dropped off.

Re: This time is different

#225
post #90

Earlier 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…

> Gen AI reached 39% adoption in two years (internet took 5, PCs took 12) You're comparing a service that mostly costs a free account registration and is harder to avoid than to use, with devices that cost thousands of dollars in the early days.

That is a fair point. You could look at enterprise adoption though, also very high, and not cheap at all.

Re: This time is different

#226

To my mind at least, it is different. I lean heavily on AI for both admin and coding tasks. I just filled out a multipage form to determine my alimony payments in Germany. Gemini was an absolute godsend, helping answer questions in, translate to English, draft explanations, emails requesting time extensions to the Jugendamt case worker. This is super scary stuff for an ADHDer like me. I have an idea for a programming…

My empirical experience is that people with ADHD are more vulnerable to get addicted to LLMs due to the feeling of instant gratification. But when PRs take ages and 3 different people are reviewing, you are just making prompting a group effort. If you think meetings are a time waste multiplier you should watch LLM PRs.

For that reason, and my own experience with AI users being unaware of how bad of a job the LLM is doing (I've had to confront multiple people about their code quality suddenly dropping), if someone says they can rely on LLM I've learned to not trust them.

When I was younger if I had an idea for a project I would spend time thinking of a cool project name, creating a git repo, and designing an UI for my surely badass project. All easy stuff that gave me the feeling of progress. Then I would immediately lose interest when I realized the actual project idea was harder than that, and quit. This is the vibe I get from LLM use.

I pray you do not become the next HN user to be screwed over by over-trusting LLM when you have it fill out legal documents for you.

Re: This time is different

#227

> 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. Agreed, these things all failed to live up to the hype. But these didn't: Electricity, cheap computing, calculators, photography, the internet, the steam engine, the pri…

Yes, and despite every single one of these world-changing inventions, people in rich countries still go to work every day, even though UBI is generally not a thing. People claim AI will eliminate large numbers of jobs. Maybe it will, just like the tractor did. But new jobs are created. I would never have guessed that “influencer” would be a thing! This current “AI will destroy all the jobs and make most people useles…

But what if new jobs aren't created? I don't think it's an absolute given that because new jobs came after the invention of the loom and the tractor that there will always be new jobs. What if AI if a totally different beast altogether?

Re: This time is different

#228

> 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. Agreed, these things all failed to live up to the hype. But these didn't: Electricity, cheap computing, calculators, photography, the internet, the steam engine, the pri…

Yes, and despite every single one of these world-changing inventions, people in rich countries still go to work every day, even though UBI is generally not a thing. People claim AI will eliminate large numbers of jobs. Maybe it will, just like the tractor did. But new jobs are created. I would never have guessed that “influencer” would be a thing! This current “AI will destroy all the jobs and make most people useles…

This argument is the one that shook me, I’m curious if you think there’s any merit to it:

Humans have essentially three traits we can use to create value: we can do stuff in the physical world through strength and dexterity, and we can use our brains to do creative, knowledge, or otherwise “intelligent” work.

(Note by “dexterity” I mean “things that humans are better at than physical robots because of our shape and nervous system, like walking around complex surfaces and squeezing into tight spaces and assembling things”)

The Industrial Revolution, the one of coal and steam and eventually hydraulics, destroyed the jobs where humans were creating value through their strength. Approximately no one is hired today because they can swing a hammer harder than the next guy. Every job you can get in the first world today is fundamentally you creating value with your dexterity or intelligence.

I think AI is coming for the intelligence jobs. It’s just getting too good too quickly.

Indirectly, I think it’s also coming for dexterity jobs through the very rapid advances in robotics that appear to be partly fueled by AI models.

So… what’s left?

Re: This time is different

#229
post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OP here! Thanks for replying. To take, for example, calculators. I can't find any evidence of a massive influx of hyperbolic articles talking about how the calculator will change everything. With bikes, there were plenty of articles decrying how women would get "bicycle face" but very little in terms of endless coverage about them being miracle technology. People adopted bikes and calculators and electricity because…

You have gotta stop cherrypicking. The massive influx of hyperbolic articles about how electricity will change everything started in the 19th century. It became a common theme in fiction (including classics like Frankenstein ) and became an enormous media hype war, which historians call the War of the Currents. Yes, electricity was useful. And it had hyperbolic articles talking about how transformative it would be. L…

You can find similar hype articles about the Palm Pilot, then all the neighsayers who said most people wouldn't want and had no need for computer in their pocket. And yet here we are.

Re: This time is different

#230
I love how people run to shout "this time is different, eh?" in an ironic tone while ignoring that a lot of times, yes, it was different.

Covid was different -- people dismissed it initially saying it was going to be like the 2009 Swine flu or the seasonal chicken flu we see on media.

The iPhone was different -- many columnists said it was just a fancier PDA and that Palm already had the market.

The 2008 crisis was different -- the signs of a housing bubble were present but were dismissed. The derivatives made it different and it imploded.

There are times when things are actually different and you should be able to identify them. AI is one of them.

I don't even need to elaborate much, as a programmer it's clear how this a game-changer. We are moving past the era when programs were just predictable if/else chains with regex to a world where you can accept non-deterministic, never-before seen inputs and have them to be interpreted accurately. Just like the Internet added another "dimension" to computer applications, AI is now adding another "dimension" previously unreachable.*

* Just as you could make a big local LAN before the Internet, it's obvious that we had past incarnations of the current technology that gave some taste of that dimension, but did not fully "unlock" it.

This time, it's truly different.

Post reply on HN