There are plenty of us. Before AI, it was blockchain and web3. Before that, it was virtual reality. Before that, it was 3D printing. Before that... you get the idea. HN has always reflected the latest hype train. It's always been that way.
The leadership then hyped up Devin or whatever, only to find the whole workplace in chaos after a few months. All this was done to attract VC money, and now they're hiring for the same position again.
But since the target audience was always technical (although gullible) people, the incentive to make it useful beyond coin purchases never manifested.
But moreso: scalability.
The blockchains that are worth anything don’t scale to the level of total worldwide transactions per second.
I’ve heard “But Lightning!” — sure, so before I can send any money, I have to find a fellow to relay my transactions against.
> I know a few small companies that have legitimately let people go without even having a proper replacement.
In terms of collateral damage, blockchain nonsense is probably still winning, at least for now, though its victims were often at least somewhat complicit in their own destruction.
One glaring example of the difference - you're making an analogy by saying that people were saying "get on board web3 or you'll be left behind". I'm not sure I heard people say it quite this way, but even if they did - what was the causal mechanism they claimed would "leave you behind" exactly? Why would the average user care? Not at all clear.
Whereas, correct or not, there's a very obvious reason to think adopting AI is critical - in SE, for example, it promises drastic changes to how people work and increases in productivity - it's pretty clear why not adopting it is a bad idea.
While LLMs are still new, ML itself is by no means a new or unproven technology. Recommendation engines built on ML are, for better or worse, the backbone of the average person's online experience. Fraud and spam detection, built on ML, are baked into most of our digital utilities (email, payments, etc.) How many apps do you use that involve ETA predictions? Because those are all built on ML. Image recognition, speech-to-text, even the camera on most smartphones--it all relies on ML.
Even looking purely at LLMs, they've reached a point of adoption that blockchain never did. ChatGPT alone reports over 200 million users per week. Google search, possibly the most ubiquitous product in the history of the internet, uses LLMs as a standard part of search.
You may have criticisms of the technology, you may think it is overhyped or that companies are making a mistake by leaning into it, but it's difficult to rationally dismiss it as a purely speculative hype bubble when its usage is so widespread.
There's always has and always will be a "Vulture Culture" on HN that rubs my FSF sensibilities somewhat the wrong way from time to time, but with this latest AI and crypto bubble it really feels like that shared sense of wonderment is being greatly usurped by the vulture crowd to a toxifying degree.
They don't want to grow money in 10 years. They want to make money now. It really hasn't always been this bad.
It was also good to teach that if enough people believe cryptocurrency is a way to invest money, it becomes as legitimate a way to invest money than any other. Also informed me of all the nuances and how naive ideology, even if misplaced and bad at forming the future, and money from illegal activities can become a legitimate investment option and become part of the mainstream where all of its past can be mostly ignored by current cryptocurrency owners. Anyway, right or wrong, that is my current view on it and it was informed by what I chose to read about it on HN.
Even the current flood of AI content I find useful to gradually understand how to use it or not, bring attention around ethical dilemmas, what is the useful for and what is not useful for.
And since I can chose what I read very easily on HN, it doesn’t bother me at all the hype-driven subject of HN submissions.
But I guess it’s just like programming languages: either people rant about them or no one uses them.
- To garner VC money - To drive down wages and make employees more fungible
It doesn’t matter if it’s true or not. As long as enough people believe it, that’ll become the new baseline.
"<a well established C/C++ program, existing for many years> written in ruby" (or whatever the language was that week, so replace that with go, rust, etc.)
Besides the exaggeration of the first sentence, I’m actually deadly serious about the rest.
- For competent power users, tiling window managers are better than desktop metaphor WMs
- Is Java finally dead?
- Is my manager a bitchass for not promoting me to the senior role (SF/GOOG/M/24)
- If you don’t use the trackpoint on your Thinkpad your mom’s a hoe
Good morning to all.
With short term flash in the pan hype cycles like that superconductor one, prediction markets astroturfing also seems involved. Basically the more hype you drum up, the more people you can lure into betting on room temperature superconductors, the more money you stand to win when it turns out to be nothing of the sort.
Just like yc, most things will not work out. Some will. You can read about all of them here. The noise around the thing is one of many signals.
We seem to be stuck in a tarpit of reinventing tactics, but there hasn’t been a major strategic shift for over a decade.
I am part of the problem, posting links to the obsessive recreation (not by me) of old arcade machines.
Also, there are startups that failed because the founders decided to ditch Go, Python, or JavaScript for Rust. Now, they can’t hire people, and no one wants to deal with the mess.
now you may have ignored it and not lost money like 90% who joined the hype... but now you have a president bound by support of that very money and they already made promises to clear the way even further for those people.
likewise with AI, even if you ignore it, there are proxy wars happeing with little more reason than to showcase the viability of autonomous robots in trench warfare for the next round of arms sales. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrrXNZyoc8k