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Comment by eob | Hacker News Reader

I know we're all suffering exhaustion from all things GPT, all the time, but the new possibilities that keep popping up continue to amaze me.

I would far rather ask AWS: "Which ALB threw the error for the request to /foo/bar" than figure out how to put the dots together and discover myself.

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I’m not exhausted at all.

Unlike the NFT craze, there’s actually something here haha I can use it right now and do it

Right, every time I see the AI hype compared to crypto my brain breaks a little.

As far as I'm aware crypto never saved me a minute of time, but even in a pretty conservative accounting, ChatGPT has shaved a few hours of tedium off various coding tasks since it released for me. Not to mention just the sheer entertainment value I've gotten out of it.

I definitely understand some of the concern and share some apprehension about certain aspects of this tech, but I can't understand how some folks can't seem to find even a _little_ to be excited about here.

> As far as I'm aware crypto never saved me a minute of time

It's saved me days and weeks of international wires. Basically for the last half-decade, things that would have been international wires and subject to crazy scrutiny, missing deposits, "which institution has the funds" back and forth, and that's been reduced to domestic transfers.

The international vendor would just receive crypto, or vice versa. And we would use our local methods to have local money in our bank account.

Oh right, and at unlimited amounts. That's important, a lot of people are never moving enough to know this is a problem.

Fees were not percentage based, and the commerce could work 24/7. this is very different from whatever arbitrary limitation is placed on the other method.

This is funny to explain because it assumes we even wanted our state's currency after the fact to begin with (USD for me, I'm American), since we could buy goods and services and investments and entertainment with the crypto immediately. But going back and forth is fine. I want to pay fiat people or a credit card off? Its in the bank account same day. I want to stake in a crypto service? I can do that immediately.

I don't think there is any metric on how large this use case is: curiosity inducing international wires replaced by low risk domestic transactions. I don't think it is possible to quantify because they just look like address to address transfers, and domestic withdrawals. I think its common enough.

Yeah, I'm aware there are some legitimate uses for crypto, apologies that I came off overly dismissive.

My point is mainly that the use cases for GPT/LLMs are pretty glaringly obvious to anyone with an imagination and should be proportionally more difficult to dismiss as seems to be a somewhat popular minority opinion here on HN.

Crypto has been equally revolutionary, but the value lies in a different stratum that’s harder to relate to than the immediate gratification of AI-enhanced chat.

Things are going to get really interesting where these worlds collide. I look forward to truly open models built on blockchains. I know I’ll give off mad scientist vibes for saying this, but a highly distributed model that can’t be shut down, blocked, centrally programmed, or constrained is the future I’m excited to see.

> a highly distributed model that can’t be shut down, blocked, centrally programmed, or constrained is the future I’m excited to see

Brushing over the idea that we’d run an ML model on a blockchain like it’s a general purpose computer… we already have a distributed model that can’t be shut down. LLaMA leaked over BitTorrent, and that was used to build Alpaca - and that’s a small model (~4gb) that basically anyone can download and run on any device.

As long as people keep seeding it, then it’ll stay distributed and resistant to being blocked etc. as long as we distribute info like we do today, anyone will be able to train the model (like they did from LLaMA -> alpaca).

> Brushing over the idea that we’d run an ML model on a blockchain like it’s a general purpose computer

Glad you were able to brush that straw man out of the way for us.

> LLaMA leaked over BitTorrent . . . small model . . . anyone can download and run

I’m aware of that, but I’m referring to models with parameter counts in the trillions; that is, the kinds of models that require super computers (or globally distributed commodity infrastructure and ASICs) to run. As the state of the art advances, what leaked years or even weeks ago will not matter; people want the latest and greatest, and they’ll demand that it serves their interests, not OpenAI’s.

The dev ops potential is inspiring. Log diving can be so frustrating/cumbersome/tedious.

You get paid to log dive.

You get paid for outcomes.

It’s only a matter of time before DataDog builds this into their product, among other logging systems.

that was my first thought! This friendly dog is the personification of that company's name. Does Alexis Lê-Quôc read hackernews?

I got paid to make a simple tool and some standard conventions to make log wading. Between gateway events with errors in BPMN and correlation ids auto logged in every message, it’s pretty easy to figure out where in 40 services something blew up that failed our process.

Yes, because it's both useful and tedious. If it becomes just useful but not tedious, the price goes down but I'm also free to take on other tasks. If this happens to enough tasks, perhaps there will be need for less of us.

I'm not sure what you're suggesting but it adds no value to the discussion.

I'm suggesting that the boring and menial work making up the majority of your day is, in fact, your job and if it's automated to any meaningful degree, you will be unemployed rather than freed up to do more interesting thing.

I suppose we have different jobs. I and my team go out of the way to automate menial work so that we focus our time on value add for the customer more directly.

So if a fake dog can log dive, does that mean the current log divers are... live dogs?

Now I finally understand why people say SRE is a dog-eat-dog world.

I’m tired of all the threads of interesting and viable-looking use cases being bombarded by the same contrarian armchair philosophers offering an unsolicited lecture about how LLMs don’t provide value because they aren’t conscious, or whatever.

Keep this stuff coming!

I had the impression that people didn't really care about consciousness of LLMs. After all, they're just glorified Markov chains.

The main criticism seems to focus on the fact that they "hallucinate" a bit too often.

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