8 ms·

The last line has been my experience as well. I only trust what I've verified firsthand now because the Internet is just so rife with people trying to influence

• roenxi 2y ago
  > I knew Uber, Netflix, Spotify were revolutionary the first time I used them. Maybe re-tune your revolution sensor. None of those are revolutionary companies. Profitable and well executed, sure, but those turn up all the time. Uber's entire business model was running over the legal system so quickly that taxi licenses didn't have time to catch up. Other than that it was a pretty obvious idea. It is a taxi service. The innovations they made were almost completely legal ones; figuring out how to skirt employment and taxi law. Netflix was anticipated online by and is probably inferior to YouTube except for the fact that they have a pretty traditional content creator lab tacked on the side to do their own programs. And torrenting had been a thing for a long time already showing how to do online distribution of video content.
  • roncesvalles 2y ago
    They were revolutionary as product genres, not necessary individual companies. Ordering a cab without making a phone call was revolutionary. Netflix at least with its initial promise of having all the world's movies and TV was revolutionary, but it didn't live up to that. Spotify because of how cheap and easy it was to have access to all the music, this was the era when people were paying 99c per song on iTunes. I've tried some AI code completion tools and none of them hit me that way. My first reaction was "nobody is actually going to use this stuff" and that opinion hasn't really changed. And if you think those 3 companies weren't revolutionary then AI code completion is even less than that.
    • xnx 2y ago
      > Ordering a cab without making a phone call was revolutionary. With the power of AI, soon you'll be able to say "Hey Siri, get me an Uber to the airport". As easy as making a phone call.
      • jemmyw 2y ago
        And end up at an airport in an entirely different city.
      • roncesvalles 2y ago
        There was a gain in precision going from phone call to app. There is a loss of precision going from app to voice. The tradeoff of precision for convenience is rarely worth it. Because if it were, Uber would just make a widget asking "Where do you want to go?" and you'd enter "Airport" and that would be it. If a widget of some action is a bad idea, so is the voice command.
      • esafak 2y ago
        Easier, because you don't have to search for a phone number.
      • alabastervlog 2y ago
        And they'll be able to tack an extra couple dollars onto the price because that's a good signal you're not gonna comparison shop. Innovation!
      • nitwit005 2y ago
        You can book a flight or a taxi with a personal assistant app like Siri today. People don't seem very interested in doing so. Barring some sort of accessibility issue, it's far easier to deal with a visual representation of complex schedule information.
    • immibis 2y ago
      "Do something existing with a different mechanism" is innovative, but not revolutionary, and certainly not a new "product genre". My parents used to order pizza by phone calls, then a website, then an app. It's the same thing. (The friction is a little bit less, but maybe forcing another human to bring food to you because you're feeling lazy should have a little friction. And as a side effect, we all stopped being as comfortable talking to real people on phone calls!) Napster came before Spotify.
  • csomar 2y ago
    > None of those are revolutionary companies. Not only Uber/Grab (or delivery app) were revolutionary, they are still revolutionary. I could live without LLMs and my life will be slightly impacted when coding. If delivery apps are not available, my life is severely degraded. The other day I was sick. I got medicine and dinner with Grab. Delivered to the condo lobby which is as far as I can get. That is revolutionary.
    • InfiniteTitan 2y ago
      Is it revolutionary to order from a screen rather than calling a restaurant for delivery? I don’t think so.
      • Dakizhu 2y ago
        Honestly, yes. Calling in an order can result in the restaurant botching the order and you have no way to challenge it unless you recorded the call. Also, as someone who’s been on both sides of the transaction, some people have poor audio quality or speak accented English, which is difficult to understand. Ordering from a screen saves everyone valuable time and reduces confusion.
        • philwelch 2y ago
          I’ve had app delivery orders get botched, drivers get lost on their way to my apartment, food show up cold or ruined, etc. The worst part is that when DoorDash fucks up an order, the standard remediation process every other business respects—either a full refund or come back, pick up the wrong order, and bring you the correct order—is just not something they ever do. And if you want to avoid DoorDash, you can’t because if you order from the restaurant directly it often turns out to be white label DoorDash. Some days I wish there was a corporate death penalty and that it could be applied to DoorDash.
      • fragmede 2y ago
        Practically or functionally? Airbnb was invented by people posting on craigslist message boards, and even existed before the Internet, if you had rich friends with spare apartments. But by packaging it up into an online platform it became a company with 2.5 billion in revenue last year. So you can dismiss ordering from a screen instead of looking at a piece of paper and using the phone as not being revolutionary, because of you squint, they're the same thing, but I can now order take out for restaurants I previously would never have ordered from, and Uber Eats generated $13.7 billion in revenue last year, up from 12.2.
  • jimbokun 2y ago
    > The innovations they made were almost completely legal ones; figuring out how to skirt employment and taxi law. The impact of this was quite revolutionary. > except for the fact that they have a pretty traditional content creator lab tacked on the side to do their own programs. The way in which they did this was quite innovative, if not "revolutionary". They used the data they had from the watching habits of their large user base to decide what kinds of content to invest in creating.
    • TeMPOraL 2y ago
      > The impact of this was quite revolutionary. In screwing over a lot of people around the world, yes. Otherwise, not really. Ordering rides by app was an obvious next step that's already been pursued independently everywhere. > They used the data they had from the watching habits of their large user base to decide what kinds of content to invest in creating. And they successfully created a line of content universally known as something to avoid. Tracks with the "success" of recommendation systems in general.
  • Breza 2y ago
    I strongly disagree about Netflix. It came out when I was in high school without a car. Being able to get whatever DVD I wanted without having to bum a ride from my parents--and also never have to pay late fees--was a major game changer.
• fragmede 2y ago
  > it's just not there Build the much maligned Todo app with Aider and Claude for yourself. give it one sentence and have it spit out working, if imperfect code. iterate. add a graph for completion or something and watch it pick and find a library without you having to know the details of that library. fine, sure, it's just a Todo app, and it'll never work for a "real" codebase, whatever that means, but holy shit, just how much programming did you need to get down and dirty with to build that "simple" Todo app? Obviously building a Todo app before LLMs was possible, but abstracted out, the fact that it can be generated like that's not a game changer?
  • namaria 2y ago
    How are you surprise that getting an LLM to spit out a clone of a very common starter project is evidence of it being able to generate non trivial and valuable code - as in not a clone of overabundant codebases - on demand?
    • fragmede 2y ago
      because in actually doing the exercise, and not just talking about it, you'd come up with your own tweak on the Todo app that couldn't be directly be in the training data. you, as a smart human, could come up with a creative feature for your Todo app to have, that no one else would make, showing that these things can compose between the things in their training data and produce a unique combination that didn't exist before. copying example-todo.app to my-todo.app isn't what's impressive, having it able to add features that aren't in the example app is what is. If it only has a box of Lego and can only build things from them, and can't invent new Lego blocks, there's still a large amount of things it can be told to build. That it can assemble those blocks together into a new model that isn't in the instruction manual might not be the most surprising thing in the world, but when that's what most software development is, is the fact that it can't invent new blocks really going to hold it back that much?
      • namaria 2y ago
        I think you're getting too distracted with the analogies. LLMs have been shown to spit out easily code for patterns that are very common such as todo apps. That isn't very impressive in itself. LLMs are cool and show some interesting emergent properties, but knowing why they work getting them to make a very common type of app doesn't show a great deal of emergent ability beyond searching a compressed space and reproducing a common pattern found in it. It's easy to underestimate the amount and variability of the training data used. There are possibly tens of thousands of variations on todo apps available on github alone.
• mlsu 2y ago
  Revolutionary things are things that change how society actually works at a fundamental level. I can think of four technologies of the past 40 years that fit that bill: the personal computer the internet the internet connected phone social media those technologies are revolutionary, because they caused fundamental changes to how people behave. People who behaved differently in the "old world" were forced to adapt to a "new world" with those technologies, whether they wanted to or not. A newer more convenient way of ordering a taxicab or watching a movie or music are great consumer product stories, and certainly big money makers. They don't cause complex and not fully understood changes to way people work, play, interact, self-identify, etc. the way that revolutionary technologies do. Language models feel like they have the potential to be a full blown sociotechnological phenomenon like the above four. They don't have a convenient consumer product story beyond ChatGPT today. But they are slowly seeping into the fabric of things, especially on social media, and changing the way people apply to jobs, draft emails, do homework, maybe eventually communicate and self-identify at a basic level. I'd almost say that the lack of a smash bang consumer product story is even more evidence that the technology is diffusing all over the place.