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This time is different

shkspr.mobi

41–50 of 400 posts

Re: This time is different

#41
post #26

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

I see hoverboards everywhere, which are the self balancing scooter tech from the Segway. Many little ebikes as well making deliveries.

75% of restaurant orders are delivery now due to widespread personal electric transportation. It already has fundamentally changed humanity.

https://youtu.be/KOSUEFqszK8

Re: This time is different

#42
post #26

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

Heh - that went right off the cliff, when... well, I will let the reader research that themselves...

The guy who died on one was Jimi Heselden, who was a British entrepreneur who bought the company from the American inventor, Dean Kamen. Dean is alive, however he was recently found to have hung out with the "disgraced financier".

Re: This time is different

#43
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.

AI is real but the socio-political environment is far from conductive to some form of productive use of it - as opposed to using it as a war-machine - AI isn't going to fail in that role but very few will be happy about it.

I mean, disillusionment is the least of my worries.

Re: This time is different

#44
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Maybe AI is useful to you, but the US economy is currently buoyed by promises of AI replacing the workforce across the board. Most of Mag-7 are planning to spend over 500B on capex this year alone on building out datacenters for AI pipelines that have yet to prove that it can generate a sustainable profit. Yes, AI is useful in some environments, but the current pricing is heavily subsidized. So my point stand, the hy…

> but the US economy is currently buoyed by promises of AI replacing the workforce across the board.

Still don't understand what's the end goal here. Assuming they don't deliver, then there are billions of investments that will go bust. Assuming they deliver, millions lose their jobs and there's going to be a bloodbath on the streets.

Re: This time is different

#45
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 wit…

> 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.

From the post, which is not a very long one: "All of the above technologies are still chugging along in some form or other (well, OK, not Quibi). Some are vaguely useful and others are propped up by weirdo cultists"

Re: This time is different

#46
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.

> most of the people that were the loudest won't say they were wrong

I was so expecting to find this wind-up aimed at those peddling the "AI is hype" laziness.

It's laziness because they have little CS fundamentals to base such claims on, and the deductions can be made, just not clearly to people who need to study a lot more.

It's like watching an invisible train (visible to those with strong CS) rolling down the tracks at a leisurely pace. Those sitting in their stalled car on the tracks are busy tweeting about "AI HPY PE TRAIN." Until it wrecks their car, the gimmick is free oxygen. It's a lot easier to write articles than it is to build GPUs and write programs.

Re: This time is different

#47
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Maybe AI is useful to you, but the US economy is currently buoyed by promises of AI replacing the workforce across the board. Most of Mag-7 are planning to spend over 500B on capex this year alone on building out datacenters for AI pipelines that have yet to prove that it can generate a sustainable profit. Yes, AI is useful in some environments, but the current pricing is heavily subsidized. So my point stand, the hy…

Leaving aside the economic shitshow and other things.

I think you're right but for the wrong reasons wrt sustainable profit.

Specifically, overcounting how much it will cost in 5 years to run AI because you're extrapolating current high prices, and at the same time undercounting how the demand will drive efficiency gains.

Re: This time is different

#48
Honestly, the remixes this generation suck compared to priors.

"This time will be different," they said about the Metaverse, ignoring the vast tranches of MUCKs, MUDs, MMOs, LSGs, and repeated digital real estate gold rushes of the past half-century. Billions burned on something anyone who played Second Life, Entropia, FFXIV, EQ2, VRChat, or fucking Furcadia could've told you wasn't going to succeed, because it wasn't different, it just had more money behind it this time.

"NFTs are different", as collectors of trading cards, art prints, coins, postage stamps, and an infinite glut of collectibles looked at each other with that knowing, "oh lord, here we go" glance.

"Crypto is different", as those who paid attention to history remembered corporate scrip, gift cards, hedge funds, the S&L crisis, Enron, the MBS crisis, and the multitude of prior currency-related crises and grifts bristled at the impending glut of fraud and abuse by those too risky to engage in traditional commerce.

And thus, here we are again. "This time is different", as those of us who remembered the code generators of yore pollute our floppy drives and salesgrifts convinced our bosses that their program could replace those expensive programmers roll our eyes at the obvious bullshit on naked display, then vomited from stress as over a trillion dollars was diverted from anything of value into their modern equivalent - with all the same problems as before.

I truly hate how stupidly people with money actually behave.

Re: This time is different

#49
this just looks like someone hearing about tons of hyped things from people across the internet (which almost by definition, is full of false signals and grifters), imagining they are coming from the same person, then arguing with how wrong that person always is. how is that interesting?

Re: This time is different

#50
LLMs have not radically transformed the world yet because the number of people capable of solving problems by typing into a blinking cursor on a blank screen is actually quite small. Take that subset of the population and reduce it to those that can effectively write communicative prose, and its even smaller still.

It's just an interface problem. The VT100 didn't change the world overnight either.

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