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This time is different

shkspr.mobi

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Re: This time is different

#31

Post by edent »

nozzlegear wrote: post #22
edent wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is, the successful tech rarely get the excessive hype. MRNA vaccines. Where are the countless breathless articles about these literal life saving tech? A few, maybe, but very few dudes pumping out asinine "white papers" and trying to ride the hype train. Solar and battery. Again, lots of real world impact but remarkably few unhinged blowhards writing endless newsletters about how this changes everything. I'…

Unrelated to the conversation but: > Not everything is written to be insightful. Some things are just written to get them out of my head. I like that, going to use it as the motivation to get some things out of my own head.

Yes! More blogging :-)

Re: This time is different

#32

Post by edent »

ej88 wrote: post #28
edent wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I spent an hour with Gemini this morning trying to get instructions to compile a common open source tool for an uncommon platform. It was an hour of pasting in error messages and getting back "Aha! Here's the final change you need to make!" Underwhelming doesn't even begin to describe it. But, even if I'm wrong, we were told that COBOL would make programming redundant. Then UML was going to accelerate development. Vi…

> write an article dismissing ai > usage is copy pasting code back and forth with gemini the jokes write themselves

That's the most recent time. But I've bounced around all the LLMs - they're all superficially amazing. But if you understand their output they often wrong in both subtle and catastrophic ways.

As I said, maybe I'm wrong. I hope you have fun using them.

Re: This time is different

#34

Post by chasd00 »

NitpickLawyer wrote: post #23
p-o wrote: post #19

By the looks of it, 2026 might be the year where reality and fiction will finally collide with AI and we'll be able to see if all the hype was warranted. But like all the previous hype, most of the people that were the loudest won't say they were wrong, and they'll move to the next thing, pretending like they never were the one that portrayed AI as the holy Graal.

> and we'll be able to see if all the hype was warranted. Umm, what? For the past 3 years, every year I've said something along the lines of "even if models stop improving now, we'll be working on this for years, finding new ways to use it and make cool stuff happen". The hype is already warranted. To have used these tools and not be hyped is simply denial at this point.

i think the point is AI has to go much further and faster than it has in the past 3 years to justify the investments being made from the hype. The hype did its job now the AI industry has to execute and create the returns they promised. That is still very much up in the air, if they can't then the tech was over hyped.

Re: This time is different

#36

Post by GMoromisato »

I get that everyone has a strong opinion on whats-going-to-happen-with-AI, but I really think nobody knows.

We're in that part of turbulence where we don't know if the floating leaf is going to go left or right.

The people who will have the hardest time with this transition are those who go all in on a specific prediction and then discover they were wrong.

If you want to avoid that, you can try very very hard to just not be wrong, but as I said, I don't think that's possible.

Instead, we need to be flexible and surf the wave as it comes. Maybe AI fades away like VR. Or maybe it reshapes the world like the internet/smartphones. The hardest thing to do right now, when everyone is yelling, is to just wait and see what happens. But maybe that's the right thing to do.

[p.s.: None of this means don't try to influence events. If you've got a frontier model you've been working on, please try to steer us safely.]

Re: This time is different

#37

Post by chasd00 »

Everything is the same until it's not, good luck predicting when "until it's not" is on the horizon though. Isn't technology innovation a power law thing? Everything hums along fairly regular and then, out of the blue, there's a massive impact. Personally, I think AI has made a pretty large impact in software dev and overall tech industry but I don't see AGI any time soon (and that hype has died down) and therefore I don't see the economics working out. The coding tools, API integrations, chatbots, those are great but I don't see them producing the returns required to keep companies like OpenAI running unless OpenAI takes all the customers and all the ad clicks from everyone else ( Athropic, Alhphabet, X, Amazon, Meta, even Microsoft ). I just don't see that happening.

Re: This time is different

#38

Post by pinkmuffinere »

some_furry wrote: post #15
javawizard wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if that was an automated HN edit? Similarly to how titles that start with "how" usually have that word automatically removed.

Usually HN only auto-edits on first submission. If you go in and undo it manually as the submitter, you can force it to read how you intend.

oh interesting, TIL I can go edit my submission titles! That's useful, I've definitely submitted stuff and gotten a less-good title due to the automated fixes, so I'll have to pay attention to this next time

Re: This time is different

#40

Post by hnuser123456 »

riddley wrote: post #26

Author forgot Segway. Remember when it was going to fundamentally change humanity?

Their Ninebot escooters are pretty damn good, far better than most random brands.

I spent most of Covid in VRChat and met my current live-in gf, so the metaverse was real for me too.

I also made decent money selling crypto, so that part was real for me too.

And AI coding, for as dumb as even the best models are, still enabled me to create things that I wanted to, but wouldn't have had time or gotten nearly as far without.

I dunno if the author realizes, but all the things they mentioned did materialize in one way or another, just not exactly how the hype described it.

Maybe if they could let go of some of the cynicism, they could find something to be optimistic about. Nothing ever goes exactly as planned, but that doesn't mean nothing is good.

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