I find such argument weak. We can say the same thing about a book, like "Once The Art of Computer Program is finally published, it usually remains stagnant in terms of having its knowledge updated, thus disincentivizing people to learn new algorithms".
AI is stifling new tech adoption?
231–240 of 442 posts
Re: AI is stifling new tech adoption?
#232Re: AI is stifling new tech adoption?
#233Pathologists as a specialty has been grousing about this for several years, at least since 2021 when the College of American Pathologists established the AI Committee. As a trivial example: any trained model deployed will necessarily be behind any new classification of tumors. This makes it harder to push the science and clinical diagnosis of cancer forward. The entire music community has been complaining about how o…
> The entire music community has been complaining about how old music gets more recommendations on streaming platforms, necessarily making it harder for new music to break out. Why does music continually entrench the older stuff (will we ever stop playing classic rock bands) whereas video streaming platforms like Netflix and YouTube try to hide/get rid of the old stuff?
AI doesn't work for the user. It couldn't care less if the user is happy or not. AI is designed first and foremost to make more money for the company. Its metrics are increased engagement and time on site, more sales, sales with better margins. Consequently, the user often has no choice or control over what the AI recommends for them. The AI is recommending what makes more sense for the company, so the user input is unnecessary.
Think of AI not as your assistant, but as a salesman.
One interesting consequence of this situation I found was that Youtube published a video "explaining" to creators why their videos don't have reach in the algorithm, where they essentially said a bunch of nothing. They throw some data at the AI, and the AI figures it out. Most importantly, they disclosed that one of the key metrics driving their algorithm is "happiness" or "satisfaction" partially gathered through surveys, which (although they didn't explicitly say this) isn't a metric that they provide creators with, thus it's possible for Youtube to optimize for this metric, but not for creators to optimize for it. That's because the AI works for Youtube. It doesn't work for creators, just as it doesn't work for users.
People are complex creatures, so any attempt at guessing what someone wants at a specific time without any input from them seems just flawed at a conceptual level. If Youtube wanted to help users, they would just fix their search, or incorporate AI in the search box. That's a place where LLMs could work, I think.
When you look at things this way, the reason why Netflix/Youtube get rid of old stuff has nothing to do with users, but with some business strategy that they have that differs from the music industry.
Re: AI is stifling new tech adoption?
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess that's like arguing a Prius Prime isn't electric because even though it has a battery and can drive all electric, it also has a gas engine. :shrug: But very clearly, Preact has the option of the exact same reactivity primitive and design as Vue, Solid, Qwik, and Svelte https://preactjs.com/guide/v10/signals/ > In Preact, when a signal is passed down through a tree as props or context, we're only passing aroun…
I'll accept an analogy with a hybrid car. In this analogy, Preact would be a gas car with an additional electric engine bolted on as an afterthought.
Re: AI is stifling new tech adoption?
#235This is truly terrible. What happened to a new JS front end library every week? If this keeps up, we won't get to completely throw away all of our old code and retool every two years (the way we've been operating for the last 20 years) How will we ever spend 85% of our time spinning up on new js front end libraries? And don't even get me started on the back end. If AI had been around in 2010, we probably still have s…
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Don't get me wrong, it's also one of the few places where you find experts from all sorts of industry mingling. But the quality of commentary on HN has plummeted in the last 10 years.
Re: AI is stifling new tech adoption?
#236Re: AI is stifling new tech adoption?
#237I actually asked this a while back, but got little response: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40263033 > Ask HN: Will LLMs hurt adoption of new frameworks and technology? > If I ask some LLM/GPT a react question I get good responses. If I ask it about a framework released after the training data was obtained, it will either not know or hallucinate. Or if it's a lesser known framework the quality will be worse tha…
I like what FastHTML folks did by preparing what amounts to instructions for LMs. From their Github [1]: > This example is in a format based on recommendations from Anthropic for use with Claude Projects. This works so well that we’ve actually found that Claude can provide even better information than our own documentation! This is the file: https://docs.fastht.ml/llms-ctx.txt [1] https://github.com/AnswerDotAI/fasth…
Re: AI is stifling new tech adoption?
#238I don't think this is a bad thing. Pretty much all of the author's examples of "new and potentially superior technologies" are really just different flavors of developer UX for doing the same things you could do with the "old" libraries/technologies. In a world where AI is writing the code, who cares what libraries it is using? I don't really have to touch the code that much, I just need it to work. That's the future…
> In a world where AI is writing the code, who cares what libraries it is using? I don't really have to touch the code that much, I just need it to work. That's the future we're headed for, at lightning speed. This attitude works for write-and-forget workflows where the only thing that matters is whether it returns the answer you want (AKA "hacking it"). Once you add in other concerns: security, performance, maintain…
Does anyone care about that? E.g. CRWD is all time high, after all. There is zero need to change anything according to market.
Re: AI is stifling new tech adoption?
#239This is truly terrible. What happened to a new JS front end library every week? If this keeps up, we won't get to completely throw away all of our old code and retool every two years (the way we've been operating for the last 20 years) How will we ever spend 85% of our time spinning up on new js front end libraries? And don't even get me started on the back end. If AI had been around in 2010, we probably still have s…
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Re: AI is stifling new tech adoption?
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
As if web/css wasn't a new gui library no one asked for. Peak programming was VB6 & Delphi 6 (maybe 7). Everything after that was just treading water in increasingly degenerate ways.
Eh. Web is the best write-once-run-everywhere we've achieved so far, especially with the proliferation of WASM. I'd be lying if I said it was perfect, but it's better than Java.
Web for a decade or more now has been "Rewrite a hundred times, run only in chrome"