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Comment by 29_29 | Hacker News Reader

Friends I know who previously worked on crypto side projects are suddenly LLM experts.

With exception to the term experts, which I imagine is a term you've applied, I don't think there's anything inherently bad with people changing their focus to the latest tech.

Could this perhaps be a you issue? How do you feel when you think about people changing from microservice architecture to blockchain to crypto and now to language models?

IMO being a good technologist entails being skeptical of technologies. Someone has to and should be blindly optimistic, and some people’s jobs borderline depend on it (like VCs) because the risk-reward is asymmetric for them. Overall though, we need to maintain a culture of skepticism around technology — much like scientists do around science. That’s especially true when discussing tech that either: discredits the industry in the eyes of the non-tech public; enables widespread fraud against vulnerable people; or could have significant negative impacts on “the commons” like spam, pollution, reckless political or economic disruption, etc.

"Changing their focus to" vs "appointing themselves as an expert at" are two very different things.

Depends if people are appointing themselves as experts or if people are claiming people are experts for changing their interests. Right now, its impossible to know which. I've seen people getting excited about LLMs and their potential and there's nothing wrong with that.

It could be a me issue. Or Crypto could be down?

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