4 ms·
what if cool new tech is just slowing down and AI is masking it.
by sharemywin 10mo ago
what if cool new tech is just slowing down and AI is masking it.
- cratermoon 10mo agoNot a "what if". Can you name 3 new cool technologies that have come out in the last 5 years?
- ericmcer 10mo agoUhhh, LLMs? The shit computers can do now is absurd compared to 2020. If you showed engineers from 2020 Claude, Cursor, and Stable Diffusion and didn't tell them how they worked their minds would be fucking exploding.
- solumunus 10mo agoIt’s really incredible how quickly people take things for granted.
- saubeidl 10mo agoLLMs are one, granted. GP asked for three, though.
- FloorEgg 10mo agoGGPs question doesn't make sense though. What does it mean for a technology to "come out". Also what does three prove? Is three supposed to be a benchmark of some kind? I would wager every year there are dozens, probably hundreds, of novel technologies being successfully commercialized. The rate is exponentially increasing. New procedural generation methods for designing parking garages. New manufacturing approaches for fuselage assembly of aircraft. New cold-rolled steel shaping and folding methods. New solid state battery assembly methods. New drug discovery and testing methods. New mineral refinement processes. New logistics routing software. New heat pump designs. New robotics actuators. See what I mean?
- potbelly83 10mo agoGreat list, and most of those don't involve big tech. I think what your list illustrates is that progress is being made, but it requires deep domain expertise.
- FloorEgg 10mo agoTechnology advances like a fractal stain, ever increasing the diversity of jobs to be done to decrease entropy locally while increasing it globally. I would wager we are very far from peak complexity, and as long as complexity keeps increasing there will always be opportunities to do meaningful innovative work.
- AnimalMuppet 10mo ago1. We may be at the peak complexity that our population will support. As the population stops growing, and then starts declining, we may not have the number of people to maintain this level of specialization. 2. We may be at the peak complexity that our sources of energy will support. (Though the transition to renewables may help with that.) 3. We may be at the peak complexity that humans can stand without too many of them becoming dehumanized by their work. I could see evidence for this one already appearing in society, though I'm not certain that this is the cause.
- FloorEgg 10mo ago1. Human potential may be orders of magnitude greater than what people are capable of today. Population projections may be wrong. 2. Kardachev? You think we are at peak energy production? Fusion? Do you see energy usage slowing down, or speeding up, or staying constant? 3. Is the evidence you're seeing appear in society just evidence you're seeing appear in media? If media is an industry that competes for attention, and the best way to get and keep attention is not telling truth but novel threats + viewpoint validation, could it be that the evidence isn't actually evidence but misinformation? What exactly makes people feel dehumanized? Do you think people felt more or less dehumanized during the great depression and WW2? Do you think the world is more or less complex now than then? From the points you're making you seem young (maybe early-mid 20s) and I wonder if you feel this way because you're early in your career and haven't experienced what makes work meaningful. In my early career I worked jobs like front-line retail and maintenance. Those jobs were not complex, and they felt dehumanizing. I was not appreciated. The more complex my work has become, the more creative I get to be, the more I'm appreciated for doing it, and the more human I feel. I can't speak for "society" but this has been a strong trend for me. Maybe it's because I work directly for customers and I know the work I do has an impact. Maybe people who are caught up in huge complex companies tossed around doing valueless meaningless work feel dehumanized. That makes sense to me, but I don't think the problem is complexity, I think the problem is getting paid to be performative instead of creating real value for other people. Integrity misalignment. Being paid to act in ways that aren't in alignment with personal values is dehumanizing (literally dissolves our humanity).
- kylehotchkiss 10mo agoSo LLMs exist therefore nothing else is worth the time? That’s sort of the gist of HN these past few years
- manicennui 10mo agoSurely you have realized by now that a large portion of the HN userbase is here for get rich quick schemes.
- kylehotchkiss 10mo agoahh brings me back to the blockchain days, and the many excuses people tried to use them instead of a SQL database for whatever reason
- phantasmish 10mo agoMoreover: people’ve been crowing about LLM-enabled productivity for longer than it took a tiny team to conceive and build goddamn Doom. In a cave! With a box of scraps! Isn’t the sales pitch that they greatly expand accessibility and reduce cost of a variety of valuable work? Ok, so where’s the output? Where’s the fucking beef? Shit’s looking all-bun at the moment, unless you’re into running scams, astroturfing, spammy blogs, or want to make ELIZA your waifu.
- ericmcer 10mo agoNo I was just skeptical of the GPs assertion that tech hasn't produced anything "cool" in the last 5 years when it has been a nonstop barrage of insane shit that people are achieving with LLMs. Like the ability for computers to generate images/videos/songs so reliably that we are debating if it is going to ruin human artists... whether you think that is terrible or good it would be dumb to say "nothing is happening in tech".
- throw310822 10mo agoThis was posted earlier today: https://www.danshapiro.com/blog/2025/12/i-made-the-xkcd-impossible-app-without-any-words/ https://www.danshapiro.com/blog/2025/12/i-made-the-xkcd-impo... The xkcd comic is from 11 years ago (September 2014).
- kylehotchkiss 10mo agoYeah. Where are all the great new Mac native apps putting electron to shame, avalanche of new JS frameworks, and affordable SaaS to automate more of life? AI can write decent code, why am I not benefiting from that a consumer?
- ynavigator 10mo agoWell, if you're a consumer of code, then technically you benefit. Otherwise, you probably won't notice it as much.
- sp527 10mo agoIt's almost like a lot of our technologies were pretty mature already and an AI trained on 'what has been' has little to offer with respect to 'what could be'.
- kylehotchkiss 10mo agooof that's profound. Really nice closing thought for 2025.
- giancarlostoro 10mo agoNeura Link, Quantum computers are making interesting milestones with Microsoft releasing a processor chip for Quantum computing. Green steel is another interesting one, though not as 'sexy' as the previous two.
- stuckinhell 10mo agodidn't believe the quantum stuff, so I googled it. I'm shocked how far its come. Even China has some kind of photonic quantum chips now.
- zzleeper 10mo agoWait so quantum is going to actually deliver something useful within the next 10-20 years??
- dlivingston 10mo ago1. Copilot for Microsoft PowerPoint 2. Copilot for Windows Notepad 3. Copilot for Windows 11 Start Menu
- Ifkaluva 10mo agoNah man, I’m still waiting for Copilot for vim.
- ar_lan 10mo agoLLMs, Apple Silicon, self-driving cars just off the top of my head without really thinking about it.
- reshlo 10mo agoAll of those things are more than 5 years old.
- ar_lan 10mo agoI could not get in a Waymo and travel across San Francisco five years ago, are you serious?
- AlotOfReading 10mo agoGPT-2 was 6 years ago, the first Apple silicon (though not branded as such at the time) was 15 years ago, and the first public riders in autonomous vehicles happened around 10 years ago. Also, 2/3 of those are "AI".
- jajuuka 10mo ago1 year is being pedantic. Apple Silicon is clearly referring to the M series chips which have disrupted and transformed the desktop/laptop market. Self driving also refers to the recent boom and ubiquity of self driving vehicles.
- iAMkenough 10mo agoM series is an interation of A series, "disrupting markets" since 2010. LLMs are an iteration of SmarterChild. "Self driving vehicles" is an iteration of the self-parking and lane assist vehicles of the last decade. I'm bored.
- warmedcookie 10mo agoDamn, what an LLM roast. Smarterchild couldn't even recall past 3 messages
- astrange 10mo agoIncredibly cheaper batteries and solar panels. Much better induction stoves.
- cratermoon 10mo agoI was thinking computer-related, but those are good, and better battery technology helps with computing.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]