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Comment by numlock86 | Hacker News Reader

While I get your point, this kind of gives me "Old man yelling at cloud" vibes. Yes, all the AI talk and bullshit bingo became quite annoying at this point, and I also can't wait for it to settle. But AI is here, and it's here to stay. Wether we like it or not. It's like what dotcom was for the internet back then. We'll get through this eventually - with a bubble bursting here and there - but making fun of it with overtuned phrases like "Everything will be connected to the internet in the future, even your fridge, car and toothbrush!" won't age too well I am afraid.

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I think the point is that AI was here 40 years ago [1].

LLMs/RAGs/Transformers are the newish thing that's here to stay.

I've seen my colleagues vocabulary regress from "training transformers" to just "using AI", without clarifying if are using claude or actually building a network. I was recently told that no one says "vibe coding" any more (now it "agentic AI", I was told). My colleague who does ML research was told he was the only one at his workplace that wasn't doing AI.

So the problem isn't the technology (a lot of the technology is great), it's that the discussion around it has been dumbed down by hype.

[1]: https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1985-04-rescan

I'm Gen Z..

and I'm just regurgitating what Google sends me via email and funny things like renaming Vertex AI to "Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform" (not a joke) even though Vertex is mostly used for inference, e.g. Claude via gcloud or fine tuning models etc.

and I use Claude code every day, so I'm not like completely dismissing AI/agentic stuff.

You know an org is in trouble when renaming products is celebrated.

People thought Pets.com was here to stay as well

chewy.com is literally pets.com and it is thriving.

Remember HN is mocking the capability/technology itself not the ability of specific firms to survive.

It seems pretty clear to me that we've exhausted the possibilities of the transformer architecture. Whatever we're using in 20 years will certainly be a different technology.

>chewy.com is literally pets.com and it is thriving.

Seems like a stretch, considering it's down 50% compared to a year ago.

https://www.nyse.com/quote/XNYS:CHWY

Chewy.com is not pets.com. They're in the same market, but it's not useful to say that a business built around limitless hypergrowth is the same as a business built around medium sized sustainability.

The analogy doesn't work at all. Pets is a single small company. The dot-com boom largely survived and was profoundly important.

I just.. I don't know the mental model of the people who speak like this. What is the point you are trying to make..

Ok, then people thought Enron was here to stay, until it wasn't. Life is ephemeral.

The point is that other topics exist that deserve talking about. There is SO much talk about LLMs everywhere, and in this kind of event they will eclipse other, perhaps more interesting conversations.

You do know that this was the same thing people said about crypto, right? And that the internet of things where your fridge connects to the Internet is hated by most consumers and had nowhere near the impact that IoT evangelists said it would?

The old man yelling at the cloud is often correct, just powerless.

Well clouds are a lie. It's just someone else's computer.

gives me … vibes.

Your writing says a lot about you, too.

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