5 ms·

Those people have no self-reflection and in 5 years when their claims haven't come true they'll have already moved onto whatever the latest hyped up thing is. J

Those people have no self-reflection and in 5 years when their claims haven't come true they'll have already moved onto whatever the latest hyped up thing is. Just like how we still don't have mass driverless cars, and just like how Bitcoin didn't take over the world, just like how LLMs aren't going to take all our jobs. I bet there's a good alignment between people making outrageous LLM claims and people who shilled for those other things too, for how they were "right around the corner". Ironically, an actually good use case of LLMs would be to scan peoples HN posts and compile a rating of how many hyped up topics they shilled for in the past, so that we know who to just kind of ignore when they're hyping up something new, as they don't have a good track record.

hkt 2y ago
Let's make that happen!
wnevets 2y ago
> I bet there's a good alignment between people making outrageous LLM claims and people who shilled for those other things too, for how they were "right around the corner". I'm still waiting for NFT's to take over the video gaming space, its just around the corner!
- FridgeSeal 2y ago
  Pppphhh we don’t make video games anymore. We just get the latest LLM to boil a lake so we can aimlessly wander an incoherent fever-dream! It’s the future of gaming!!1!
- AlexandrB 2y ago
  Video games? What's that? We're all supposed to be using NFTs in the metaverse at this point.
  - PaulHoule 2y ago
    Isn't that Microsoft's plan with Game Pass and buying the whole western game industry? You'll have a choice between Axie Infinity or Nikke: Goddess of Victory.
    - Animats 2y ago
      > Nikke: Goddess of Victory. Oh, that's funny. The Goddess of Victory is Nike.[1] But the game people are probably scared of the shoe company that uses the same name. There was also the famous Nike anti-aircraft missile, once deployed around major American cities.[2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nike_(mythology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nike_(mythology) [2] https://nikemissile.org/ https://nikemissile.org/
      - alterom 2y ago
        To their defense, Nikke reads much closer to the original Greek name than Nike.
  - 3a2d29 2y ago
    I remember a post on Blind where someone was passionately arguing that if we put house ownership on the blockchain, 2008 wouldn't have happened because a big part of it was not knowing who owned what homes.
- LargeWu 2y ago
  Gaming is actually a pretty reasonable use case for NFT's, or blockchain generally. At it's core, an NFT is a digital asset with verifiable ownership. Many, many games have the concept of owning digital assets; the fact that they're not on a blockchain is an implementation detail. All the hype around monkey-ape pictures and microtransactions was offputting to a lot of gamers, making the whole thing come off like a big cash-grab (which it mostly was), but from a purely technological standpoint, blockchain might not be a terrible solution for games with transferable digital assets.
  - wnevets 2y ago
    its gonna happen its just around the corner!
    - throw646577 2y ago
      It's like tapping HN on the knee with a reflex hammer, isn't it?
  - throwaway48476 2y ago
    Most people are tired of 400gb of cosmetics. They want less but higher quality. The NFT people also lied through their teeth about how NFTs work.
    - LargeWu 2y ago
      So, the use case I'm thinking of is more along the lines of non-cosmetic assets. Take FIFA Ultimate Team, for example. The way it works currently is that each player in the game has one or more "cards", or sets of stats. Special versions come out all the time which have significant impact on gameplay. FIFA has an in-game market where you can buy/sell/trade cards, for in-game scrip. Want to sell your special Killian Mbappe card you just pulled? Congrats, you can get 1,000,000 FifaCoins, not redeemable for real money. Of course, you can certainly buy FifaCoins for real money. A blockchain implementation could potentially allow people to sell that card directly to somebody else, for real money (or more specifically, crypto tokens that can be redeemed for real money). Would you rather have 1,000,000 FifaCoins, or $100? Whether or not this is desirable to games is a different question, but the game is already essentially pay-to-win, so it's not like it would ruin the game from that perspective. It already has microtransactions. The main reason you probably won't be seeing this is because it would cut the publisher (EA) out of the loop, which is very, very lucrative for them.
- Zambyte 2y ago
  NFTs have been popular in videogames for over a decade. They're just almost always using a centralized network (see: the Steam community market).
  - wnevets 2y ago
    > They're just almost always using a centralized network (see: the Steam community market). That doesn't sound like a NFT to me. "A non-fungible token (NFT) is a unique digital identifier that is recorded on a blockchain" [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-fungible_token https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-fungible_token
    - Zambyte 2y ago
      Non-fungible tokens are not even necessarily digital. They are merely tokens[0] that are not fungible[1], as the name suggests. Digital non-fungible tokens are stored in a digital database, of which blockchain is one kind. [0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/token https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/token [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fungibility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fungibility
      - wnevets 2y ago
        As the authority on the subject you should definitely correct the Wikipedia page
  - quickthrowman 2y ago
    Please link me to the public blockchain explorer for Steam community items. I’ll wait.
    - Zambyte 2y ago
      There isn't one, because there is no blockchain. You already know that so why comment this?
throw646577 2y ago
> I bet there's a good alignment between people making outrageous LLM claims and people who shilled for those other things too, for how they were "right around the corner". Have you ever played the "scroll back far enough" game on e.g. Twitter? So many guys (it is always guys) with .ai in their posts used to have .eth in their posts. They used to be all-in on NFTs. Grifters gonna grift. Salesmen are much more likely to believe sales pitches, etc. I would also add that "Get over it!" is a reliable tell for an awful person. It means "I do not wish to be confronted with even the smallest, most unarguable negative consequences of the position I have enthusiastically bought into".
zamadatix 2y ago
It's easy to say ${new_thing} is going to take off (takes a while to be disproven), it's even easier to say ${new_thing} _isn't_ going to take off (takes a while to be disproven and most things don't take off), but it's hardest to actually have a clue when you're talking about something which changes life forever (like the internet), a curiosity [for now] (like Google Glass), or just a scam from the ground up (pick a scammy cryptocoin) immediately when you see it.
- tialaramex 2y ago
  The Internet is "just" the third Network. Both its predecessors (the Universal Postal Union and the Public Switched Telephone Network) are still hugely important, it's amazing that people don't understand the significance until it's shoved in their faces as a result of Tim's mediocre hypermedia software (the "World Wide Web") and even there are plenty of nay-sayers for years. The Network is a big deal, as big a deal as say, pornography or literacy. But while iterations of the Network are significant they're also sort of predictable. A society which builds the PSTN is going to build something akin to the Internet next.
- akira2501 2y ago
  > it's even easier to say ${new_thing} _isn't_ going to take off Not around here it isn't. > but it's hardest to actually have a clue when you're talking about something which changes life forever Most of us saw the Internet coming from a decade away, Google Glass was never going to be a thing, and once cryptocurrency "mixers" got invented everyone saw the writing on the wall.
  - zamadatix 2y ago
    > Not around here it isn't. Then why is this the top thread on the post? > Most of us saw the Internet coming from a decade away If that was true as we'd like to believe for most of us HN would be more of a retirement community than a startup community. You can blend a bit of how everyone knew which parts of the internet were scams and how that wasn't all there was to it in that as well. Everything seems obvious in retrospect, down to how "obviously it was only going to explode larger after the dot com boom" or "getting into ads would be the way the most money was made". All of the areas that failed or were different than expected get forgotten. And most importantly... > Google Glass was never going to be a thing Given many years a lot of things end up working out in ways that weren't really expected but are, retrospectively, "obvious from a decade away". Much of the time this doesn't even require new technology of the day, though it may be better with the advances. Will that be a Google Glass style thing? I doubt it personally... but I can also manage to temper that with my certainty not being absolute.
Kiro 2y ago
We have driverless cars, Bitcoin just hit $100k, and LLMs are undoubtedly taking over jobs. Hyping something that never materializes is one thing, but these are not that.
- 3a2d29 2y ago
  I will admit, there were a lot of people saying ridiculous things about crypto in 2021. Many of those people were very wrong, but still rewarded with bitcoin hitting 100k. Those same people say it will hit 200k inevitably. I think all their reasoning is wrong, but yet they have been right. Curious what HN's opinons are.
  - mywittyname 2y ago
    > I think all their reasoning is wrong, but yet they have been right. Curious what HN's opinons are. There's no way to predict the price. Everyone who's claiming to make a prediction is just guessing. There are a number of influential people who are heavily invested in crypto, and so long as they have the ability to keep money funneling other people's money into it, prices will continue to increase. So I think the safest guess to make is that it prices will continue to rise for a least the next few years.
- hamasho 2y ago
  I kinda feel Bitcoin hitting $100k does not mean its success. I think it proves to fail to become a currency as intended at first, and instead it becomes a gambling target and political tools for billionaires. That's far from the original purpose.
outworlder 2y ago
> Those people have no self-reflection and in 5 years when their claims haven't come true they'll have already moved onto whatever the latest hyped up thing is. Yeap. Just like there are interesting use cases for blockchains (note that I said interesting, not necessarily practical) and machine learning, there are interesting use cases for LLMs. The problem is that people then come up with new applications "really soon now" and use that to hype up wallstreet.
Animats 2y ago
> Just like how we still don't have mass driverless cars, and just like how Bitcoin didn't take over the world, just like how LLMs aren't going to take all our jobs. In San Francisco, we do have mass driverless cars. It's hard to drive across SF without seeing one. Bitcoin didn't take over the world, but it's well on the way to taking over the administration and Congress through sheer lobbying spending. LLMs aren't taking over all the jobs, but if everything you do for money goes in and out over a wire, less people like you are needed.
bsder 2y ago
> Just like how we still don't have mass driverless cars Mass? No. Not yet. However, Waymo is doing a pretty good job at this point. I'm no longer "It's indefinitely 15 years in the future" about self-driving cars. My interactions with Waymo cars leads me to believe that they are probably better than the "average" driver, nowadays. They almost certainly have passed the "average teenager" bar long ago.

hkt 2y ago

Let's make that happen!

wnevets 2y ago

> I bet there's a good alignment between people making outrageous LLM claims and people who shilled for those other things too, for how they were "right around the corner". I'm still waiting for NFT's to take over the video gaming space, its just around the corner!

FridgeSeal 2y ago
Pppphhh we don’t make video games anymore. We just get the latest LLM to boil a lake so we can aimlessly wander an incoherent fever-dream! It’s the future of gaming!!1!
AlexandrB 2y ago
Video games? What's that? We're all supposed to be using NFTs in the metaverse at this point.
- PaulHoule 2y ago
  Isn't that Microsoft's plan with Game Pass and buying the whole western game industry? You'll have a choice between Axie Infinity or Nikke: Goddess of Victory.
  - Animats 2y ago
    > Nikke: Goddess of Victory. Oh, that's funny. The Goddess of Victory is Nike.[1] But the game people are probably scared of the shoe company that uses the same name. There was also the famous Nike anti-aircraft missile, once deployed around major American cities.[2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nike_(mythology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nike_(mythology) [2] https://nikemissile.org/ https://nikemissile.org/
    - alterom 2y ago
      To their defense, Nikke reads much closer to the original Greek name than Nike.
- 3a2d29 2y ago
  I remember a post on Blind where someone was passionately arguing that if we put house ownership on the blockchain, 2008 wouldn't have happened because a big part of it was not knowing who owned what homes.
LargeWu 2y ago
Gaming is actually a pretty reasonable use case for NFT's, or blockchain generally. At it's core, an NFT is a digital asset with verifiable ownership. Many, many games have the concept of owning digital assets; the fact that they're not on a blockchain is an implementation detail. All the hype around monkey-ape pictures and microtransactions was offputting to a lot of gamers, making the whole thing come off like a big cash-grab (which it mostly was), but from a purely technological standpoint, blockchain might not be a terrible solution for games with transferable digital assets.
- wnevets 2y ago
  its gonna happen its just around the corner!
  - throw646577 2y ago
    It's like tapping HN on the knee with a reflex hammer, isn't it?
- throwaway48476 2y ago
  Most people are tired of 400gb of cosmetics. They want less but higher quality. The NFT people also lied through their teeth about how NFTs work.
  - LargeWu 2y ago
    So, the use case I'm thinking of is more along the lines of non-cosmetic assets. Take FIFA Ultimate Team, for example. The way it works currently is that each player in the game has one or more "cards", or sets of stats. Special versions come out all the time which have significant impact on gameplay. FIFA has an in-game market where you can buy/sell/trade cards, for in-game scrip. Want to sell your special Killian Mbappe card you just pulled? Congrats, you can get 1,000,000 FifaCoins, not redeemable for real money. Of course, you can certainly buy FifaCoins for real money. A blockchain implementation could potentially allow people to sell that card directly to somebody else, for real money (or more specifically, crypto tokens that can be redeemed for real money). Would you rather have 1,000,000 FifaCoins, or $100? Whether or not this is desirable to games is a different question, but the game is already essentially pay-to-win, so it's not like it would ruin the game from that perspective. It already has microtransactions. The main reason you probably won't be seeing this is because it would cut the publisher (EA) out of the loop, which is very, very lucrative for them.
Zambyte 2y ago
NFTs have been popular in videogames for over a decade. They're just almost always using a centralized network (see: the Steam community market).
- wnevets 2y ago
  > They're just almost always using a centralized network (see: the Steam community market). That doesn't sound like a NFT to me. "A non-fungible token (NFT) is a unique digital identifier that is recorded on a blockchain" [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-fungible_token https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-fungible_token
  - Zambyte 2y ago
    Non-fungible tokens are not even necessarily digital. They are merely tokens[0] that are not fungible[1], as the name suggests. Digital non-fungible tokens are stored in a digital database, of which blockchain is one kind. [0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/token https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/token [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fungibility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fungibility
    - wnevets 2y ago
      As the authority on the subject you should definitely correct the Wikipedia page
- quickthrowman 2y ago
  Please link me to the public blockchain explorer for Steam community items. I’ll wait.
  - Zambyte 2y ago
    There isn't one, because there is no blockchain. You already know that so why comment this?

throw646577 2y ago

> I bet there's a good alignment between people making outrageous LLM claims and people who shilled for those other things too, for how they were "right around the corner". Have you ever played the "scroll back far enough" game on e.g. Twitter? So many guys (it is always guys) with .ai in their posts used to have .eth in their posts. They used to be all-in on NFTs. Grifters gonna grift. Salesmen are much more likely to believe sales pitches, etc. I would also add that "Get over it!" is a reliable tell for an awful person. It means "I do not wish to be confronted with even the smallest, most unarguable negative consequences of the position I have enthusiastically bought into".

zamadatix 2y ago

It's easy to say ${new_thing} is going to take off (takes a while to be disproven), it's even easier to say ${new_thing} _isn't_ going to take off (takes a while to be disproven and most things don't take off), but it's hardest to actually have a clue when you're talking about something which changes life forever (like the internet), a curiosity [for now] (like Google Glass), or just a scam from the ground up (pick a scammy cryptocoin) immediately when you see it.

tialaramex 2y ago
The Internet is "just" the third Network. Both its predecessors (the Universal Postal Union and the Public Switched Telephone Network) are still hugely important, it's amazing that people don't understand the significance until it's shoved in their faces as a result of Tim's mediocre hypermedia software (the "World Wide Web") and even there are plenty of nay-sayers for years. The Network is a big deal, as big a deal as say, pornography or literacy. But while iterations of the Network are significant they're also sort of predictable. A society which builds the PSTN is going to build something akin to the Internet next.
akira2501 2y ago
> it's even easier to say ${new_thing} _isn't_ going to take off Not around here it isn't. > but it's hardest to actually have a clue when you're talking about something which changes life forever Most of us saw the Internet coming from a decade away, Google Glass was never going to be a thing, and once cryptocurrency "mixers" got invented everyone saw the writing on the wall.
- zamadatix 2y ago
  > Not around here it isn't. Then why is this the top thread on the post? > Most of us saw the Internet coming from a decade away If that was true as we'd like to believe for most of us HN would be more of a retirement community than a startup community. You can blend a bit of how everyone knew which parts of the internet were scams and how that wasn't all there was to it in that as well. Everything seems obvious in retrospect, down to how "obviously it was only going to explode larger after the dot com boom" or "getting into ads would be the way the most money was made". All of the areas that failed or were different than expected get forgotten. And most importantly... > Google Glass was never going to be a thing Given many years a lot of things end up working out in ways that weren't really expected but are, retrospectively, "obvious from a decade away". Much of the time this doesn't even require new technology of the day, though it may be better with the advances. Will that be a Google Glass style thing? I doubt it personally... but I can also manage to temper that with my certainty not being absolute.

Kiro 2y ago

We have driverless cars, Bitcoin just hit $100k, and LLMs are undoubtedly taking over jobs. Hyping something that never materializes is one thing, but these are not that.

3a2d29 2y ago
I will admit, there were a lot of people saying ridiculous things about crypto in 2021. Many of those people were very wrong, but still rewarded with bitcoin hitting 100k. Those same people say it will hit 200k inevitably. I think all their reasoning is wrong, but yet they have been right. Curious what HN's opinons are.
- mywittyname 2y ago
  > I think all their reasoning is wrong, but yet they have been right. Curious what HN's opinons are. There's no way to predict the price. Everyone who's claiming to make a prediction is just guessing. There are a number of influential people who are heavily invested in crypto, and so long as they have the ability to keep money funneling other people's money into it, prices will continue to increase. So I think the safest guess to make is that it prices will continue to rise for a least the next few years.
hamasho 2y ago
I kinda feel Bitcoin hitting $100k does not mean its success. I think it proves to fail to become a currency as intended at first, and instead it becomes a gambling target and political tools for billionaires. That's far from the original purpose.

outworlder 2y ago

> Those people have no self-reflection and in 5 years when their claims haven't come true they'll have already moved onto whatever the latest hyped up thing is. Yeap. Just like there are interesting use cases for blockchains (note that I said interesting, not necessarily practical) and machine learning, there are interesting use cases for LLMs. The problem is that people then come up with new applications "really soon now" and use that to hype up wallstreet.

Animats 2y ago

> Just like how we still don't have mass driverless cars, and just like how Bitcoin didn't take over the world, just like how LLMs aren't going to take all our jobs. In San Francisco, we do have mass driverless cars. It's hard to drive across SF without seeing one. Bitcoin didn't take over the world, but it's well on the way to taking over the administration and Congress through sheer lobbying spending. LLMs aren't taking over all the jobs, but if everything you do for money goes in and out over a wire, less people like you are needed.

bsder 2y ago

> Just like how we still don't have mass driverless cars Mass? No. Not yet. However, Waymo is doing a pretty good job at this point. I'm no longer "It's indefinitely 15 years in the future" about self-driving cars. My interactions with Waymo cars leads me to believe that they are probably better than the "average" driver, nowadays. They almost certainly have passed the "average teenager" bar long ago.