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Comments (85)

• seertaak
  To my mind at least, it is different. I lean heavily on AI for both admin and coding tasks. I just filled out a multipage form to determine my alimony payments in Germany. Gemini was an absolute godsend, helping answer questions in, translate to English, draft explanations, emails requesting time extensions to the Jugendamt case worker.This is super scary stuff for an ADHDer like me.I have an idea for a programming language based on asymmetric multimethods and whitespace sensitive, Pratt-parsing powered syntax extensibility. Gemini and Claude are going to be instrumental in getting that done in a reasonable amount of time.My daily todos are now being handled by NanoClaw.These are already real products, it's not mere hype. Simply no comparison to blockchain or NFTs or the other tech mentioned. Is some of the press on AI overly optimistic? Sure.But especially for someone who suffers from ADHD (and a lot of debilitating trauma and depression), and can't rely on their (transphobic) family for support -- it's literally the only source of help, however imperfect, which doesn't degrade me for having this affliction. It makes things much less scary and overwhelming, and I honestly don't know where I'd be without it.
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  thomassmith65
  The hype around AI is admittedly annoying - especially from the Wall St crowd who don't know how to pronounce 'Nvidia' correctly, and who haven't managed to internalize the fact that the chatbots they use hallucinate.It really is 'different', though, in the same way the Internet was.It took about 20 years (ie: since The World ISP) for the Internet to work its way into every facet of life. And the dot com bubble popped half-way through that period of time.AI might 'underwhelm' for another five or ten years. And then it won't. Whether that's good or bad, I don't know.
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  voiper1
  >Blockchain... NFTs >The problem is, the same dudes who were pumped for all of that bollocks now won't stop wanging on about Artificial Intelligence.I was firmly in the camp that blockchain was not a viable solution to any problem, and that NFTs sound stupid. I think AI is much different than that list. So, there goes your argument?
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  CompoundEyes
  I’m doing enterprise coding tasks that used to take a month of whole team coordination from mockups to through development and testing in 3 days now. It’s all test driven development, codex 5.3 and a small team of two people who know how to hold it right orchestrating the agents. There’s no reason not to work this way. The sociotechnical engineering aspects of this change are fascinating and rewarding to solve.
• ozgung
  > 3D TV, AMP, Augmented Reality, Beanie Babies, Blockchain, Cartoon Avatars, Curved TVs, Frogans, Hoverboards, iBeacons, Jetpacks, Metaverse, NFTs, Physical Web, Quantum Computing, Quibi, Small and Safe Nuclear Reactors, Smart Glasses, Stadia, WiMAX.I’ve never heard half of the things and the other half is mostly consumer electronics or specific product names. The closest example here is Quantum Computing, which is also a serious technology in development. I think for the OP these are all tech buzzwords that he invests in without understanding what they really are. That’s why he thinks all these unrelated things are the same.
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  tengbretson
  LLMs have not radically transformed the world yet because the number of people capable of solving problems by typing into a blinking cursor on a blank screen is actually quite small. Take that subset of the population and reduce it to those that can effectively write communicative prose, and its even smaller still.It's just an interface problem. The VT100 didn't change the world overnight either.
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  p-o
  By the looks of it, 2026 might be the year where reality and fiction will finally collide with AI and we'll be able to see if all the hype was warranted.But like all the previous hype, most of the people that were the loudest won't say they were wrong, and they'll move to the next thing, pretending like they never were the one that portrayed AI as the holy Graal.
• lxgr
  This just sounds like the "nothing ever happens" theorem slightly rephrased, of which Scott Alexander did a great refutation here: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/heuristics-that-almost-alwa...
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  riddley
  Author forgot Segway. Remember when it was going to fundamentally change humanity?
• wewewedxfgdf
  When non-programmers make sweeping statements about LLMs.Deep disconnect from reality.
• chasd00
  Everything is the same until it's not, good luck predicting when "until it's not" is on the horizon though. Isn't technology innovation a power law thing? Everything hums along fairly regular and then, out of the blue, there's a massive impact. Personally, I think AI has made a pretty large impact in software dev and overall tech industry but I don't see AGI any time soon (and that hype has died down) and therefore I don't see the economics working out. The coding tools, API integrations, chatbots, those are great but I don't see them producing the returns required to keep companies like OpenAI running unless OpenAI takes all the customers and all the ad clicks from everyone else ( Athropic, Alhphabet, X, Amazon, Meta, even Microsoft ). I just don't see that happening.
• Windchaser
  For me, this captures it:"All of the above technologies are still chugging along in some form or other (well, OK, not Quibi). Some are vaguely useful and others are propped up by weirdo cultists. I don't doubt that AI will be a part of the future - but it is obviously just going to be one of many technology which are in use.> No enemies had ever taken Ankh-Morpork. Well technically they had, quite often; the city welcomed free-spending barbarian invaders, but somehow the puzzled raiders found, after a few days, that they didn't own their horses any more, and within a couple of months they were just another minority group with its own graffiti and food shops.- Terry Pratchet's Faust Eric"
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  stego-tech
  Honestly, the remixes this generation suck compared to priors."This time will be different," they said about the Metaverse, ignoring the vast tranches of MUCKs, MUDs, MMOs, LSGs, and repeated digital real estate gold rushes of the past half-century. Billions burned on something anyone who played Second Life, Entropia, FFXIV, EQ2, VRChat, or fucking Furcadia could've told you wasn't going to succeed, because it wasn't different, it just had more money behind it this time."NFTs are different", as collectors of trading cards, art prints, coins, postage stamps, and an infinite glut of collectibles looked at each other with that knowing, "oh lord, here we go" glance."Crypto is different", as those who paid attention to history remembered corporate scrip, gift cards, hedge funds, the S&L crisis, Enron, the MBS crisis, and the multitude of prior currency-related crises and grifts bristled at the impending glut of fraud and abuse by those too risky to engage in traditional commerce.And thus, here we are again. "This time is different", as those of us who remembered the code generators of yore pollute our floppy drives and salesgrifts convinced our bosses that their program could replace those expensive programmers roll our eyes at the obvious bullshit on naked display, then vomited from stress as over a trillion dollars was diverted from anything of value into their modern equivalent - with all the same problems as before.I truly hate how stupidly people with money actually behave.
• almosthere
  For all of those, there is a gartner hype cycle. The thing that matters is when it comes out the back end, is 1m, 1b, 6b people using it?for all the things you listed, less than 1000 people are using it, with AI we're clearly not finished with the gartner hype cycle, but the back end is going to be over a billion users.
• GMoromisato
  I get that everyone has a strong opinion on whats-going-to-happen-with-AI, but I really think nobody knows.We're in that part of turbulence where we don't know if the floating leaf is going to go left or right.The people who will have the hardest time with this transition are those who go all in on a specific prediction and then discover they were wrong.If you want to avoid that, you can try very very hard to just not be wrong, but as I said, I don't think that's possible.Instead, we need to be flexible and surf the wave as it comes. Maybe AI fades away like VR. Or maybe it reshapes the world like the internet/smartphones. The hardest thing to do right now, when everyone is yelling, is to just wait and see what happens. But maybe that's the right thing to do.[p.s.: None of this means don't try to influence events. If you've got a frontier model you've been working on, please try to steer us safely.]
• Dwedit
  Use the reader view button.
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  NickNaraghi
  Perhaps this is the failure to understand the distinction between a technology and a meta-technology. Upgrading the factory that builds the robots is much different than upgrading the robots.
• whynotminot
  This lazy kind of post annoys me because it sort of groups any of us saying that this technology is profoundly different in with all the town criers who have said this kind of thing before — even if we have never said it before and were even skeptical of past declarationsEffectively, it’s a statement saying nothing can ever be profoundly different, because people have said it before and been wrong.Lazy.
• hoten
  this just looks like someone hearing about tons of hyped things from people across the internet (which almost by definition, is full of false signals and grifters), imagining they are coming from the same person, then arguing with how wrong that person always is. how is that interesting?
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  TeamDman
  I enjoyed Dave Cridland's comment more than the article. The article is dismissive of AI and other technologies in an unsubstantiated way.New things are happening and it's exciting. "AI bad" statements without examples feel very head-in-sand.
• dist-epoch
  Nuclear weapons - this time is differentInternet - this time is differentiPhone - this time is different
• BoppreH
  What is the point being made here? Some past technologies were overhyped, therefore AI is overhyped? Well, some past consumer technologies did change the world (smartphones, texting, video streaming, dating apps, online shopping, etc), so where's the argument that AI doesn't belong to this second group?Also, every single close friend of mine makes some use of LLMs, while none of them used any the overhyped technologies listed. So you need a specially strong argument to group them together.
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  redwood
  I hoped the article would be be a meta-discussion of "time" and perhaps relativity or some other phenomenon. Sigh, it's an investment thesis saying "This Time is Different" is a risky bet.
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  ChrisMarshallNY
  I would suggest editing the title to "This Time is Different". I think that captures the essence much better.Love the Sir Terry reference.
• pavel_lishin
  Title got mangled somehow, the original title is "This time is different".