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Comment by netdevphoenix | Hacker News Reader

Difference is you are not a trillion dollar plus technology hyped as a harbinger of civilisational change.

It can be that while also causing problems. It's like when a self driving car crashes, it's big news and everyone runs around like their pants are on fire. When a human driver crashes, it's a blip on local news or not even that.

When a human driver controlling a bus crashes though it's a big story. Even bigger when it's a train. News scales with novelty and people impacted - 1 driver being a problem isn't an issue, an ai system used in many cars... That is more newsworthy.

Probably because there are 1000x or whatever human driven miles compared to AI. And no one wants to be crippled by an AI have have to fight $billon_dollar_corp for compensation.

Difference is in how you sell it.

We all know that people make mistakes. I.e. crash a car from time to time.

We all are sold a view that AI will save humanity, cure all diseases, solve all problems, allow for autonomous driving and many other (lies?).

While making basic mistakes or crashing on trivial crossroads..

Hype is way overblown.

The anti-hype is also way overblown. Nobody is saying that today's AI is omniscient and never makes mistakes. Future models will make fewer mistakes. They will still not hook into the universe with a cheat code and do everything at 100 percent reliability. It's a straw man.

The hype has significant real-world consequences such as nonsensical amounts of funding and valuations that could crash the world economy at some point. Until there some "check" on this system, i think the anti-hype is quite valid.

Overblown? Not really. There is still not enough of criticism given asinine hype given by the LLM and adjacent companies.

Funny of you to mention strawman after presenting one.

CI is shell scripts as a service. There is no safe way to use it.

AI does it a lot faster and ignores rules even harder than humans do, but it's not the root problem here.

Sadly I'm not. Either way, how LLMs work mean that traditional software analysis tools are every bit as important as they were in the before times. This is why we see a lot of hype around LLMs and formal verification.

The problem is that if everyone is 10x faster with LLMs then we're also wrong ~10x as frequently as we were before

I mean… it’s only Monday!

But yes, there is an interesting change in the past decade, where everything new must be over-hyped.

Perhaps it is attention overload and needing to shout. Perhaps it’s that technological progress has significantly slowed while communication options have exploded (coincidence?).

I look at it a lot like EVs. They’re great, if your use case is inside the specific band. But, that isn’t who they were being marketed to. And now… “pushback” is putting it lightly.

> But yes, there is an interesting change in the past decade, where everything new must be over-hyped.

Yep, the good old "Our tech is making the world a better place" has gotten old and a new approach was needed. If you are not making standard databases obsolete with a blockchain or MapReduce or gaining business enlightenment from Big Data, no one wants to fund your startup. Civilisation level change is the new upper bound.

> But yes, there is an interesting change in the past decade, where everything new must be over-hyped.

Or, it's that the last two years have been the largest and fastest shift in the daily life of a programmer since the compiler, with near everyone moving, simultaneously, to this new tech, not because of hype, but because of practical personal benefit.

Regardless, everything being hyped isn't new. There's always been silly hype in tech.

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