251–260 of 570 posts
I’m sad that it’s crowded out all the interesting stuff I used to love learning about on HN.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_adoption_life_cycle
Alternately: the trough of disillusionment.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's a hail mary dash towards AGI. If we get computers to think for us, we can solve a lot of our most pressing issues. All but one of them simultaneously, in fact. The one being left out: wanting to keep existing.
What are you talking about? AGI is practically a prerequisite for transhumanism, and, well, not dying. If you want to "keep existing" AGI happening is probably your only hope.
If you want to keep existing, slow down, make sure AGI is aligned first, and go into cryo if necessary.
If you don't want to keep existing, that doesn't mean you get to risk the rest of us.
I don't think I'm quite bored. I'm exhausted/fatigued with the pace.
This. I don't know how I'm burnt out from making this thing do work for me. But I am.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Big Data, The Cloud, Quantum Computing, Web 3.0, and maybe a few I've forgotten about. Only thing that stuck thus far is the cloud. Though not for infinite scalability and resiliency, cause that just dumps big invoices in your lap.
Big Data absolutely became a thing The Cloud happened as well, as you've pointed out AI adoption is well past Quantum and Web 3. Comparing it to those two is nonsensical.
All those listed and more, are part of the cycles that the parent comment mentioned and which I've continued.
Same thing with Agile. Mostly sprint-based waterfall, iterative development is not something I've ever seen in practice. Or people over processes, remember those ideas?
BigData, was another hype cycle where even smaller companies wanted a "piece of the action". I've worked at the time in a sub 50 developers company, and the higher ups where all about big data. When in fact our system was struggling with GBs of data due to frugality in hardware.
For a moment in time you couldn't spit in any direction without hiting a Domain Driven Design talk. And now we disable safeguards and LLMs write a mix of garbled ideas from across all the laundered open source training data.
Too early to tell where AI will land, and if it will bring down the economy with it, but spending rate doesn't deliver equal results for all, and we will have to see after the dust settles.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't see the threat from AI as capitalist at all, but more so feudalist. I mean, if things go in the direction of the worst-case scenario. It seems like the power potential transcends the problems of capitalism entirely. But for now it's strictly hypothetical. Nothing I'm doing with AI matters enough to really make any statements about a broader scale in my field, let alone in entire economies.
Capitalism is feudalism but with raw generational wealth instead of generational wealth with divine right characteristics.
The more I think about it though, I'm not sure feudalism is the right analogy. Serfs had a purpose and were depended upon. In a society where AGI is in the hands of a few, it seems reasonable to believe that there wouldn't be a need for serfs at all. Labour would become utterly irrelevant. You'd have no lord to be bound to. You'd be unnecessary.
I imagine the transition there would be some brutal form of capitalism, but the destination would not be fuedalism. I don't think we have a historical analog for that hypoethical destination.
Yes. Go to Mastodon. I accidently stumbled on Mastodon last night (I knew about it of course but largely ignored it). Of the 100 or so posts they were all cool stuff. Only one was AI related and it was more a researchy geeky thing than the brainrot "I fired all my staff an hour ago. They were not happy. CRLF. CRLF. I have an agentic circus and I am the ringmaster of 666 agents. CRLF....." crap you get on Linked in.
I've been meaning to try Mastodon for a long time (I was never really a Twiiter user). As others have said elsewhere though, I'm not sure where to start. Did you just download the app and join mastodon.social?
This might sound like snark, but I truly don’t mean it that way. I think what’s interesting about AI, and why there’s so much conversation, is that in order to be a good user of AI, you have to really understand software development. All the people I work with who are getting the most value out of using AI to deliver software are people who are already very high-skilled engineers, and the more years of real experienc…
Any thoughts on what the next generation of software devs is going to look like without as much manual experience?
For example, I haven’t racked and cabled a server in over 15 years. That used to be a valuable skill.
I also used to know how to operate Cisco switches and routers (on the original IOS!). I haven't thought about CIDR and the difference between a /24 and a /30 since the year 2008. A class IP addresses, how do those work? What subnet am I on? Is thing running on a different VLAN? Irrelevant to me these days. Some people still know it! But not as many as in the past.
The late Dr. Richard Hamming observed that once a upon a time, "a good man knew how to implement square root in machine code." If you didn't know how to do that, you weren't legit. These days nobody would make such a claim.
So some skills fade and others rise. And also, software has moved in predictable cycles for many decades at this point. We are still a very young field but we do have some history at this point.
So things will remain the same the more they change on that front.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And I’m shocked that anyone into tech can be so blind to the adverse effects the current tech industry is having on our world and our society. We owe it to the world, as the experts, to be critical. The march of automation and technology has made the world a better place in some ways. I sure love modern medicine, but those drones flying over Ukraine and Russia sure don’t seem like they are making the world a better p…
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AI is fine . The hype is annoying. What's even worse though are the incredible amounts of money and energy that are being thrown at it, with no regard for the consequences, in times of record inequality and looming climate apocalypse. AI is the red herring that'll waste all our attention until it's too late.
In 2-3 decades 30% of the world population will be over 60 years old (~3 BILLION seniors).We don't have an economic model for it, nor does gen-z want to all be Personal Support Workers while paying rent. Nvidia only makes 6million data center GPUs a year. Huawei makes 900k. We need 10 to 100x more to be able to automate enough just to hold civilization together. Amazon built datacenters with near 0 water use but it u…
Thats not accurate. The estimate is about 2 billion in 25 years.
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/ageing-and-...
We also have models for how that works at a country level because we have countries that have far exceeded that.
And the vast majority of 60 year olds are still self sufficient and economically productive.
Average global retirement age is around 65 and in most countries it’s creeping towards 70. And percent of world population over 70 looks much more manageable over the time span we can realistically model.