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Is it a bubble?

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Re: Is it a bubble?

#261

Post by simianwords »

stego-tech wrote: post #240
f154hfds wrote: post #38

The post script was pretty sobering. It's kind of the first time in my life that I've been actively hoping for a technology to out right not deliver on its promise. This is a pretty depressing place to be, because most emerging technologies provide us with exciting new possibilities whereas this technology seems only exciting for management stressed about payroll. It's true that the technology currently works as an e…

I'm right there with you, and it's been my core gripe since ChatGPT burst onto the stage. Believe it or not, my environmental concerns came about a year later, once we had data on how datacenters were being built and their resource consumption rates; I had no idea how big things had very suddenly and violently exploded into, and that alone gave me serious pause about where things are going. In my heart, I firmly beli…

Some person asked this same question about computers back in the day.

Re: Is it a bubble?

#263

Post by yunnpp »

xdc0 wrote: post #228
Daishiman wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Early stage teams do lean on LLMs for scaffolding, tests and boilerplate, but the hard engineering work is still human. I no longer believe this. A friend of mine just did a stint a startup doing fairly sophisticated finance-related coding and LLMs allowed them to bootstrap a lot of new code, get it up and running in scalable infra with terraform, and onboard new clients extremely quickly and write docs for them ba…

If you are in charge of that tooling, how do you ensure the correctness of the work? Or is it that at this point the responsibility goes one level higher now where implementation details are not important or relevant at all and all it matters is it behaves as described?

Just look at what they are stating:

> that did exactly what I needed

> I have zero knowledge of k8s, helm or configmaps.

Obviously this is not anything resembling engineering, or anything a respectful programmer would do. An elevator that is cut lose when you press 0 also works very well until you press 0. The claims of AI writing significant chunks of code come from these sort of people with little experience in programming or engineering in general, SPA vibe coders and what not. You should tremble at the thought of using any of the resulting systems in production, and certainly not try to replicate that workflow yourself. Which gives you a sense of how overblown these claims are.

Re: Is it a bubble?

#264

Post by jiggawatts »

some-guy wrote: post #259

One thing I don't hear people talking about very is about how AI is going to make money in any other way other than cutting employment. With the internet, and especially with the internet being accessible by anyone anywhere in the world in the late 2000s and early 2010s globally, that growth was more obvious to me. I don't see where this occurs with AI. I don't see room for "growth", I see room for cutting. We were a…

"There is no good outcome for the 99% because of AI" should be talked about more, but the media is owned by the 1%.

Either the bubble bursts and everyone's retirement funds take a hit, 2008 style,

Or a decent chunk of the workforce becomes unemployed and unemployable.

Re: Is it a bubble?

#265

Post by simianwords »

9rx wrote: post #152
mxschumacher wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what are some historical examples of bubbles that didn't pop?

Since this is HN, I'll go with the most obvious: Software development. Unsustainable, speculative growth through the COVID-19 period, but on the other side relatively slow decline.

This is the perfect example of people who constantly cried that it is a bubble but it wasn’t.

Re: Is it a bubble?

#266

Post by x0x0 »

simianwords wrote: post #260
some-guy wrote: post #259

One thing I don't hear people talking about very is about how AI is going to make money in any other way other than cutting employment. With the internet, and especially with the internet being accessible by anyone anywhere in the world in the late 2000s and early 2010s globally, that growth was more obvious to me. I don't see where this occurs with AI. I don't see room for "growth", I see room for cutting. We were a…

Why not? AI assisted shopping for example will boost growth. Productivity also boosts growth.

How does AI assisted shopping create more economic activity? Even assuming you can do it, and people do find it helpful, it likely just shifts who people buy from, not how much?

Re: Is it a bubble?

#267

Post by johnfn »

n8cpdx wrote: post #233
johnfn wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But I really did do around 4 to 5 weeks of work in a single week on my personal site. At this point you just seem to be denying my own reality.

If you read my comments, you’ll see that I did no such thing. I asked if you did 5-10 years of work in the last year (or 5-10 weeks of work in the last week) and didn’t get a response until you accused me of denying your reality. You’ll note the pattern of the claims getting narrower and narrower as people have to defend them and think critically about them (5-10x productivity -> 4-5x productivity -> 4-5x as much cod…

What you are seeing is the difference between what I personally feel and what I could objectively prove to an AI skeptic.

If I have to "prove" my productivity in a court of law - that is to say, you - I'll down-modulate it to focus on the bits that are most objective, because I understand you will be skeptical. For instance, I really do think I'm 10x faster with Terraform, because I don't need to read all the documentation, and that would have taken absurd amounts of time. There were also a few nightmarish bugs that I feel could have taken me literally hours or infinity (I would have just given up), like tracking down a breaking change snuck in in a TS minor update when I upgraded from 2.8 to latest, that Codex chomped through. But I imagine me handwaving "it's definitely 10x, just trust me" on those ones, where the alternatives aren't particularly clear, might not be an argument you'd readily accept. On the other hand, the 5x gains when writing my website, using tech I know inside and out, felt objective.

Re: Is it a bubble?

#268

Post by ares623 »

IanCal wrote: post #146
zparky wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been blowing my mind reading HN the past year or so and seeing so many comments from programmers that are excited to not have to write code. It's depressing.

There are three takes that I think are not depressing: * Being excited to be able to write the pieces of code they want, and not others. When you sit down to write code, you do not do everything from scratch, you lean on libraries, compilers, etc. Take the most annoying boilerplate bit of code you have to write now - would you be happy if a new language/framework popped up that eliminated it? * Being excited to be ab…

Except in this case you won't be able to afford going to the shops anymore. Or even if the shops will still be around. What use is an autonomous car if you can't use it.

Re: Is it a bubble?

#269

Post by 9rx »

simianwords wrote: post #265
9rx wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since this is HN, I'll go with the most obvious: Software development. Unsustainable, speculative growth through the COVID-19 period, but on the other side relatively slow decline.

This is the perfect example of people who constantly cried that it is a bubble but it wasn’t.

Nobody pays attention to things aligned to the fundamentals. When people are crying that there is a bubble, it is a bubble. Plain and simple.

We know for certain it was a bubble as non-bubbles have sustainable growth. As all the software developers now struggling to find work will be happy to tell you, the growth wasn't sustainable. The proof is in the pudding.

Re: Is it a bubble?

#270

Post by simianwords »

9rx wrote: post #269
simianwords wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the perfect example of people who constantly cried that it is a bubble but it wasn’t.

Nobody pays attention to things aligned to the fundamentals. When people are crying that there is a bubble, it is a bubble. Plain and simple. We know for certain it was a bubble as non-bubbles have sustainable growth. As all the software developers now struggling to find work will be happy to tell you, the growth wasn't sustainable. The proof is in the pudding.

How do you prove that software development is a bubble?

Stock prices are at all time high and continuously growing.

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