undefined | Better HN

0 pointspoincaredisk1y ago0 comments

>You can’t be a techno-optimist anymore.

You can be, we're just getting old. LLMs are very exciting! WASI (and a bit older WebAssembly) is a bold idea! Rust is a breath of fresh air and ancient tools are finally being rewritten! Edge computing may change the way we write programs! Hardware is finally ready for VR!

Now, I'm quite sceptical and pessimistic about all of the above. But I think this says more about me than about the world. Younger me would be prototyping a LLM in Rust and compiling it to webassembly to use in his VR game right now. Current me thinks similarly to you.

0 comments

5 comments · 1 top-level

majewsky1y ago· 4 in thread

> LLMs are very exciting

This just goes back to your grandparent comment: "I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes."

Also, I'm not particularly excited about my day job becoming about fixing up half-broken scripts that other people pump out with LLMs.

> WASM/WASI is a bold idea

I will admit that I have not looked into this a lot, but how is WASM substantially different from other bytecode interpreters like the JVM?

> Rust is a breath of fresh air

Finally something that I agree about.

> and ancient tools are finally being rewritten

But as someone in their 30s who has now personally witnessed several hype cycles, I am increasingly frustrated by the observation that most things billed as "progress" are either "change for the sake of change" or "reinventing technologies that existed decades ago under different names" (e.g. JVM -> WASI or FreeBSD jails -> Linux containers).

throwaway7ahgb1y ago

"I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes."

To read this and get upset is very bizarre to me. LLMs as most of the public know, is just a few years old. The things these services are doing are nothing short of sci-fi ideas 10 years ago. And were complaining it can't do our laundry?

IMO this is peak first world complaning. Give it some time.

JohnFen1y ago

> And were complaining it can't do our laundry?

As I read it, the complaint is that it looks like it will be automating the things we don't want automated rather than automating the things we do.

1 more reply

poincarediskOP1y ago

You seem to have missed my point slightly. 17 year old me would be very excited about LLMs - they have potential to be very disrupting, and are almost magical compared to what we had just a few years ago (remember when image recognition was a challenge?). Current day me is not. And I have also witnessed several hype cycles - enough to grow tired of pointless changes. Even though I was an early adopter of everything 20 years ago, always ready to try new technologies.

But did the world really change? Are dangerous technology and hype cycles new? Or maybe the world is the same but it is me who have changed? Will current day teenagers recollect 2020s as a golden age of tech?

ryandrake1y ago

I thought about that when I wrote the comment: Maybe it's me (or the world) that's changed, and not the technology. But that's not it. What has changed is the technology, and specifically who the technology is empowering/serving. 17 year old me was excited about PCs because they empowered/served the user. 47 year old me is not excited about LLMs and 17 year old me also would not be excited about LLMs. Because LLMs are obviously being developed for the purpose of empowering/serving the LLM companies, not necessarily the user. Any benefit the user happens to get out of LLMs is a side effect and not really the purpose of the software.

I am actually excited about LLMs that are entirely mine to tinker with, run 100% on my own silicon, open up and modify, publish my changes.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse