| ▲ | waldrews 5 hours ago |
| Remember, back in the day, when a year of progress was like, oh, they voted to add some syntactic sugar to Java... |
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| ▲ | nrhrjrjrjtntbt an hour ago | parent | next [-] |
| More like 6 different new nosql databases and js frameworks. |
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| ▲ | crystal_revenge an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| That must have been a long time back. Having lived through the time when web pages were served through CGI and mobile phones only existed in movies, when SVMs where the new hotness in ML and people would write about how weird NNs were, I feel like I've seen a lot more concrete progress in the last few decades than this year. This year honestly feels quite stagnant. LLMs are literally technology that can only reproduce the past. They're cool, but they were way cooler 4 years ago. We've taken big ideas like "agents" and "reinforcement learning" and basically stripped them of all meaning in order to claim progress. I mean, do you remember Geoffrey Hinton's RBM talk at Google in 2010? [0] That was absolutely insane for anyone keeping up with that field. By the mid-twenty teens RBMs were already outdated. I remember when everyone was implementing flavors of RNNs and LSTMs. Karpathy's character 2015 RNN project was insane [1]. This comment makes me wonder if part of the hype around LLMs is just that a lot of software people simply weren't paying attention to the absolutely mind-blowing progress we've seen in this field for the last 20 years. But even ignoring ML, the world's of web development and mobile application development have gone through incredible progress over the last decade and a half. I remember a time when JavaScript books would have a section warning that you should never use JS for anything critical to the application. Then there's the work in theorem provers over the last decade... If you remember when syntactic sugar was progress, either you remember way further back than I do, or you weren't paying attention to what was happening in the larger computing world. 0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdIURAu1-aU 1. https://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn-effectiveness/ |
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| ▲ | handoflixue an hour ago | parent [-] | | > LLMs are literally technology that can only reproduce the past. Funny, I've used them to create my own personalized text editor, perfectly tailored to what I actually want. I'm pretty sure that didn't exist before. It's wild to me how many people who talk about LLM apparently haven't learned how to use them for even very basic tasks like this! No wonder you think they're not that powerful, if you don't even know basic stuff like this. You really owe it to yourself to try them out. | | |
| ▲ | crystal_revenge 34 minutes ago | parent [-] | | > You really owe it to yourself to try them out. I've worked at multiple AI startups in lead AI Engineering roles, both working on deploying user facing LLM products and working on the research end of LLMs. I've done collaborative projects and demos with a pretty wide range of big names in this space (but don't want to doxx myself too aggressively), have had my LLM work cited on HN multiple times, have LLM based github projects with hundreds of stars, appeared on a few podcasts talking about AI etc. This gets to the point I was making. I'm starting to realize that part of the disconnect between my opinions on the state of the field and others is that many people haven't really been paying much attention. I can see if recent LLMs are your first intro to the state of the field, it must feel incredible. | | |
| ▲ | handoflixue 20 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | Seriously, all that familiarity and you think an LLM "literally" can't invent anything that didn't already exist? Like, I'm sorry, but you're just flat-out wrong and I've got the proof sitting on my hard drive. I use this supposedly impossible program daily. | |
| ▲ | CamperBob2 26 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | That's all very impressive, to be sure. But are you sure you're getting the point? As of 2025, LLMs are now very good at writing new code, creating new imagery, and writing original text. They continue to improve at a remarkable rate. They are helping their users create things that didn't exist before. Additionally, they are now very good at searching and utilizing web resources that didn't exist at training time. So it is absurdly incorrect to say "they can only reproduce the past." Only someone who hasn't been paying attention (as you put it) would say such a thing. |
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| ▲ | throwup238 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| > they voted to add some syntactic sugar to Java... I remember when we just wanted to rewrite everything in Rust. Those were the simpler times, when crypto bros seemed like the worst venture capitalism could conjure. |
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| ▲ | OGEnthusiast 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Crypto bros in hindsight were so much less dangerous than AI bros. At least they weren't trying to construct data centers in rural America or prop up artificial stocks like $NVDA. | | |
| ▲ | SauntSolaire 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Instead they were building crypto mining warehouses in rural America and propping up artificial currencies like BTC. | | |
| ▲ | ryandrake an hour ago | parent [-] | | Crazy how the two most hyped and funded technologies of the decade were: energy wasting fake money for criminals and energy wasting plagiarism machines. |
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| ▲ | mgfist 36 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It's funny how people complain about the rust belt dying and factories leaving rural communities and so on, then when someone wants to build something that can provide jobs and tax revenue, everyone complains. | | |
| ▲ | jakeydus 21 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | How many people are employed at the average data center? A few dozen? Versus a steel mill, that’s nothing. A chicken plant in Nebraska closed down this last month. 3200 people lost their jobs. You think Meta will fill it with GPUs and the whole town will have jobs again? | |
| ▲ | lostlogin 26 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | I’ve heard about the risk of AI leading to job losses and wealth concentration. I haven’t heard about new businesses, job creation and growth in former industrial towns. What have I missed? |
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| ▲ | zahlman 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Speaking of which, we never found out the details (strike price/expiration) of Michael Burry's puts, did we? It seems he could have made bank if he'd waited one more month... | | |
| ▲ | kamranjon 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | I think they expire in March 2026 if the NVIDIA stock drops to $140 a share? Something close to that I think. |
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| ▲ | quaintpartridge 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | They were, just not as many. https://www.wired.com/story/the-worlds-biggest-bitcoin-mine-... |
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