>and it was nearly always dudes Yeah I know what you are, don't try to pretend.
And wtf does it even matter? Such a weird comment to even make.
This time is different
351–360 of 400 posts
Re: This time is different
#352> 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…
The thing is many of those did not fail at all. They just weren't that great from the start. A overhyped technology is a technology that makes people believe it is going to be something that it isn't and solve issues that it doesn't (or that weren't really issues).
To take the first of the list: 3D TV. Everybody liked the idea of being more immersed in a fictional world. But if you watch closely (I studied both media science and film directing), you will realize that there are already traditional 2D films that are so immersive, parts of the audience dislike these films for the lack of distance between what they are watching and themselves. Which is why I said of the brink of the last 3D hype that this is not going to last. So the issue was for the most part that the problem 3D appeared to be solving wasn't actually a problem, while a whole segment of the market fooled itself and the consumers into this was actually the future.
Blockchain is literally the same and everybody could easily predict it by the point block chain evangelists started trying to find blockchain-shaped problems, when they didn't find any useful legal applications where a traditional chain of trust wasn't vastly superior.
Now LLMs are actually useful. The question is just, how much money is that usefulness worth for a regular person to pay and what does it do to society and the planet as a side-effect.
Re: This time is different
#353A very cynical article. Actually IT IS different. Actually if they manage to create a viable small nuclear reactors or Quantum computers the world will change like it changed with the Watt thermal engine. Why he is not talking about the Internet, trains, electricity, nuclear bombs, rockets,aviation or engines? Because they worked, like AI works today. All of them were bubbles at the time and they changed the world fo…
> Why he is not talking about the Internet, trains, electricity, nuclear bombs, rockets,aviation or engines? Because they worked, like AI works today. Except for the minor bit that AI doesn't work today, and it is not yet clear if it ever will.
It does work
Re: This time is different
#354Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did google not rely on Gemini to do their ISA changeover? https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.14928 Was Gemini worse than no tool at all there?
Probably. According to the paper, 83.82% of automated commits were already made by algorithmic tools (non-LLM). For the remainder, a three-phase LLM approach was tried, and achieved a success rate of 30%. Based on these numbers, it probably would have been faster, cheaper, and more efficient to just enhance their current strategy rather than screwing around with text generators.
I think that’s a bad faith read on that paper.
Re: This time is different
#355> 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…
Facts
Re: This time is different
#356Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It absolutely is. It was published as Fiction. The vast majority of people didn’t think it was anymore realistic than Interstellar etc. There’s plenty of stories where we cure cancer, but the 50% improvement in cancer treatments over the last 40 years just doesn’t get much hype because it’s so slow. It’s hard to get excited about the idea cancer may be gone in 200 years because while that will be awesome for people…
The electrical telegraph was integral to the growth and consolidation of the British Empire. Britain acquired more colonies and held on to them for longer than the other European powers partly due to its naval might, but also due to far superior bureaucratic and communications technology.
I think you misunderstood what I was saying.
Technology can be quite useful directly and have significant second order effect, hype is about the second order effects being overblown. Second order effects are difficult to predict when something is actually novel, will LLM’s make programming obsolete is harder to answer in 2023 than 2063.
Home automation like dishwashers really did meaningfully impact how much effort was needed to keep a home livable, but we didn’t predict the kind of helicopter parenting that happened because of more free time especially after smaller families became common. Thus a great majority of incorrect predictions where just hype.
The faster new technology becomes widespread the harder it is to predict those second order effects and thus more hype you see.
Re: This time is different
#357Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's very true in terms of how capable these chatbots clearly are, but I believe the author was using 'underwhelming' to refer to the societal impact. So far, life goes on roughly the same as it did five years ago. This can feel 'underwhelming' in contrast to the onslaught of public discussion about, and huge investments in, AI. Most of us here on HN are programmers, and we all know how radically LLMs have changed…
lol “chatbots”. I’m using these chatbots to produce advanced software. Chatbots, get real
Is this a debate over who is the harder-core developer? That's of interest to nobody. Probably not even us.
Re: This time is different
#358Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ex historian here, now engineer. I would gently suggest you’re underestimating the magnitude of some of the transformations wrought by the technologies that OP mentioned for the people that lived through them. Particularly for the steam engine and the broader Industrial Revolution around 1800: not for nothing have historians called that the greatest transformation in human life recorded in written documents. If you t…
Not at all, I fully appreciate that these inventions transformed life. I’m skeptical because so much of the breathless AI chatter claims AI will eclipse all these inventions. It is the breathless AI commentators, not I, who have lost all perspective on the magnitude and sweep of history.
It’s not AI per se, but rather ai enabled robotics that can change the world in ways that are different in kind, not just degrees, to earlier changes.
No other change has had the potential to generate value for capital without delivering any value whatsoever to the broader world.
Intelligent robotic agents enable an abandonment of traditional economic structures to build empires that are purely extractive and only deliver value to themselves.
They need not manufacture products for sale, and they will not need money. Automated general purpose labor is power, in the same way that commanding the mongol hordes was power. They didn’t need to have customers or the endorsement of governments to project and multiply that power.
Of course commanding robotic hordes is the steelman of this argument, but the fact that a steelman even exists for this argument, and the unique case that it requests and requires actually zero external or internal cooperation from people makes it fundamentally distinct in character.
Humans will always have some kind of economic system, but it very well may become separate from -and competing for resources with- industrial society, in which humans may become a vanishing minority.
Re: This time is different
#359Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why do you and many of your industry friends conveniently never actually post their 'perfect code' when asked for proof? I've asked like five different people now that make these claims and they just vanish into the ether.
Note that when code is shown, like the "browser" that was recently put on blast, it's often terrible. Are we experiencing a huge influence campaign on HN?
Yes
Re: This time is different
#360You forgot about crypto, 3D printing and games with virtual real estate.