I enjoyed Dave Cridland's comment more than the article. The article is dismissive of AI and other technologies in an unsubstantiated way.

New things are happening and it's exciting. "AI bad" statements without examples feel very head-in-sand.

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edent 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

OP here. Unless you're still watching Quibi on your curved TV, delivered via WiMax then, yeah, I'd say it was pretty bloody substantiated.

I like technology. I made a decent living from it. But if I had chased every hyped fad that was promised as the next big thing, I doubt I'd be as happy as I am now.

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troosevelt 3 hours ago | parent [-]

You're not really saying anything, though. For every tech hype that has failed, there is another that's changed the world. This IS changing the world and our industry, regardless of whether it reaches the heights of the hypers.

I mean you're just stating that sometimes tech doesn't meet it's hype. What's insightful about that? It's a given; cherry-picking examples doesn't prove your case.

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Joker_vD 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> For every tech hype that has failed, there is another that's changed the world.

Well, no, the ratio is most definitely not 1-to-1.

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edent 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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'm struggling to think of a tech from the last 20 years which has lived up to its hype.

Not everything is written to be insightful. Some things are just written to get them out of my head.

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ravioli_fog 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I personally see plenty of hype but I've also been following the trends and using the tools "on the ground". At least in terms of software these tools are a substantial shift. Will they replace developers? No idea, but their impacts are likely to be felt for a very long time. Their rate of improvement in programming is growing rapidly.

Do feel AI is overall just hype? When did you last try AI tools and what about their use made you conclude they will likely be forgotten or ignored by the mainstream?

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edent 2 hours ago | parent [-]

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. Visual programming would mean no more mistakes.

All of them are in the coding mix somewhere, and I suspect LLMs will be.

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ej88 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> write an article dismissing ai

> usage is copy pasting code back and forth with gemini

the jokes write themselves

	▲	edent 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		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.

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nozzlegear 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

	▲	edent 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yes! More blogging :-)

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3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

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MarkusQ 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It's not unsubstantiated though. The claim is "People frequently assert that 'this time is different' and they are almost always wrong" and it proceeded to provide a reasonable list of analogous manias.

This only doesn't feel like substantiation if you reject the notion that these cases are analogous.

"You shouldn't eat that."

"Why not?"

"Everyone else who's eaten it has either died or gotten really sick."

"But I'm different! Why should I listen to your unsubstantiated claims?"

"(lists names of prior victims)"

"That doesn't mean anything. I'm different. You're just making vague and dismissive unsubstantiated claims."

The claim isn't "AI bad" the claim is more along the lines of "there's a lot of money changing hands and this has all the earmarks of a classic hype cycle; while attention/diffusion models may amount to something the claims of their societal impacts are almost certainly being exaggerated by people with a financial stake in keeping the bubble inflated as long as possible, to pull in as many suckers as possible."

If you want another example (which you won't find analogous if you've already drunk the koolaid):

https://theblundervault.substack.com/p/the-segway-delusion-w...