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This time is different

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Re: This time is different

#291

Post by hdgvhicv »

segfaultex wrote: post #223
johnfn wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I ran into the non existent methods and functions far more a year ago than I do today. I hadn’t even considered it as I don’t write a lot of code, Most of my job is talking with people to understand the problems and to drive strategy.

Re: This time is different

#292

Post by throwaway5Am1k »

esperent wrote: post #167

> 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…

>Electricity, cheap computing, calculators, photography, the internet, the steam engine, the printing press, tv, cars, gps, bicycles...

All of those were invented pre-1980. To misquote Thiel, if you remove TVs/phones from a house, you would think we're living in the 1970s

Re: This time is different

#293

Post by hdgvhicv »

MaybiusStrip wrote: post #93
thomassmith65 wrote: post #69

The 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.

What disturbs me is the speed of improvement, moreso then the capability.

Maybe it will plateau in the next 6-24 months, in which case it will “only” be as disruptive as the computer or industrial revolutions, albeit at a faster pace.

If not, I don’t think anyone can predict.

Re: This time is different

#294

Post by rsynnott »

getnormality wrote: post #276
esperent wrote: post #167

> 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…

So if you were overwhelmingly wrong about technology fads in your lifetime by saying yes to everything, you can comfort yourself by saying that if you had gone back a century and said yes to everything, you would have been right about some things!

But not most things; there was a lot of nonsense back then, too. We all go to work in a bullet fired through a tunnel by pneumatic pressure, right?

(This was a real thing, and they got as far as partially building a tunnel under the Thames for it, before sanity prevailed.)

Re: This time is different

#295

Post by qsera »

unchar1 wrote: post #208
edent wrote: 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…

Calculators are a particularly bad example for your case. There was absolutely hyperbole against calculators when they were introduced. [1] With similar sentiment as well "They make us dumb" "Machines doing the thinking for us" Cars were definitely seen as a fad. More accurately a worse version of a horse [2] If you looked through your other examples, you'd see the same for those as well. Some things start as fads, b…

LLMs will absolutely will have a place. There is no question about it. But it will be doing searching for us, not thinking.

The flip side to this is that a lot of jobs today that appear to require "thinking" is actually just doing looking up aka "search"..

Re: This time is different

#296

Post by hdgvhicv »

doyougnu wrote: post #177
naravara wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a good analogy will be the way word processors changed printing. Suddenly anyone with access to a computer had the ability to do professional level editing and layout. Most of them didn’t have the taste or skills to use the tools to the fullest, but it still opened up a ton of possibilities that weren’t available before because it was never practical to hire an actual professional to do a poster for a dinky c…

I think this is exactly right. I've been thinking of "this time" as similar to the advent of digital spreadsheets. Spreadsheets existed for thousands of years but spreadsheet programs transformed spreadsheet work that took hours or weeks into seconds. You still had to know what you were doing, and if you knew what you were doing you were easily 10x faster than those that didn't. I think we are in a similar situation…

We have a generation of computer programmers who have known nothing but building on top of AWS. Vendor lockin at a career level. Most were building on top of Microsoft before that. Platform agnosticism and open source and specifically the ownership and control was mostly niche.

I don’t see that changing.

Re: This time is different

#297

Post by usrnm »

qsera wrote: post #290
usrnm wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No no, an intelligent person looking at a crude steam engine could see what potential it has. This is not hindsight Steam engines were known since the first century, at the vert least: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile It does take a lot of imagination and creativity to come up with new and better ways to use an already existing idea. We're currently just scratching the surface of what LLMs are going to do fo…

Yea, sure. Better search could be used in ways that we can't think of right now..

I already use AI tools for more things than just "better search". Like, today. For work.

Re: This time is different

#298

Post by rsynnott »

cogman10 wrote: post #100
tomlue wrote: 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…

The problem is in the middle of such a change it's hard to recognize if this is a real change or if this is another Wankel motor. Plenty a visual programming language has tried to toot their own horns as being the next transformative change in everything, and they are mostly just obscure DSLs at this point. The other issue is nobody knows what the future will actually look like and they'll often be wrong with their p…

> Sounds like the making of a scifi horror novel :D

See ‘Service Model’. YMMV on whether you consider it horror.

Re: This time is different

#299

Post by throwuxiytayq »

throwaway5Am1k wrote: post #292
esperent wrote: post #167

> 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…

>Electricity, cheap computing, calculators, photography, the internet, the steam engine, the printing press, tv, cars, gps, bicycles... All of those were invented pre-1980. To misquote Thiel, if you remove TVs/phones from a house, you would think we're living in the 1970s

Neural networks were in invented in the 40s. I don’t know what your point is, and I’m mostly convinced that you don’t have any, just as the article author and 99% of people shitposting their wishful thinking about AI.

Re: This time is different

#300

Post by Twisell »

rogerrogerr wrote: post #228
massysett wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 n…

The key mistake you make is to believe that "first world" is sustainable by it's own. A lot of people are hired today because they are good at a physical tasks, globalized capitalism just decided that it's cheaper to manufacture it overseas (with all the environmental and societal downsides that hit us back in the face).

So don't worry if we lure ourlselves that it's ok to stop caring for "intelligence job" globalization will provide for every aspect where AI is lacking. And that's not just a figure of speech they are already plenty of "fake it until you make it" stories about AI actually run by overseas cheap laborers.

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