11 ms·

Remember, back in the day, when a year of progress was like, oh, they voted to add some syntactic sugar to Java...

throwup238 9mo ago
> they voted to add some syntactic sugar to Java... I remember when we just wanted to rewrite everything in Rust. Those were the simpler times, when crypto bros seemed like the worst venture capitalism could conjure.
- OGEnthusiast 9mo ago
  Crypto bros in hindsight were so much less dangerous than AI bros. At least they weren't trying to construct data centers in rural America or prop up artificial stocks like $NVDA.
  - quaintpartridge 9mo ago
    They were, just not as many. https://www.wired.com/story/the-worlds-biggest-bitcoin-mine-is-rattling-this-texas-oil-town/ https://www.wired.com/story/the-worlds-biggest-bitcoin-mine-...
  - SauntSolaire 9mo ago
    Instead they were building crypto mining warehouses in rural America and propping up artificial currencies like BTC.
    - ryandrake 9mo ago
      Crazy how the two most hyped and funded technologies of the decade were: energy wasting fake money for criminals and energy wasting plagiarism machines.
      - scotty79 9mo ago
        [flagged]
        deleted 9mo ago
        [deleted]
  - zahlman 9mo ago
    Speaking of which, we never found out the details (strike price/expiration) of Michael Burry's puts, did we? It seems he could have made bank if he'd waited one more month...
    - kamranjon 9mo ago
      I think they expire in March 2026 if the NVIDIA stock drops to $140 a share? Something close to that I think.
  - mgfist 9mo ago
    It's funny how people complain about the rust belt dying and factories leaving rural communities and so on, then when someone wants to build something that can provide jobs and tax revenue, everyone complains.
    - lostlogin 9mo ago
      I’ve heard about the risk of AI leading to job losses and wealth concentration. I haven’t heard about new businesses, job creation and growth in former industrial towns. What have I missed?
    - jakeydus 9mo ago
      How many people are employed at the average data center? A few dozen? Versus a steel mill, that’s nothing. A chicken plant in Nebraska closed down this last month. 3200 people lost their jobs. You think Meta will fill it with GPUs and the whole town will have jobs again?
      - scotty79 9mo ago
        Many more are employed while building it. And they will never stop building. It's modern version of rail. But instead of distances it will cover the area.
        uxcolumbo 9mo ago
        Will local folks get those jobs to build the data center? And if so, what happens to those builders once the data center is built?
        scotty79 9mo ago
        > Will local folks get those jobs to build the data center? Yes. At some point the demand will be so high that imported workers won't suffice and local population will need to be trained and hired. > And if so, what happens to those builders once the data center is built? They are going to be moved to a new place where the datacenters will need to be built next. Mobility if the workforce was often cited as one of the greatest strengths of US economy.
nrhrjrjrjtntbt 9mo ago
More like 6 different new nosql databases and js frameworks.
- dotancohen 9mo ago
  A Wordpress zero day and Linux not on the desktop. Netcraft confirms it.
crystal_revenge 9mo ago
That must have been a long time back. Having lived through the time when web pages were served through CGI and mobile phones only existed in movies, when SVMs where the new hotness in ML and people would write about how weird NNs were, I feel like I've seen a lot more concrete progress in the last few decades than this year. This year honestly feels quite stagnant. LLMs are literally technology that can only reproduce the past. They're cool, but they were way cooler 4 years ago. We've taken big ideas like "agents" and "reinforcement learning" and basically stripped them of all meaning in order to claim progress. I mean, do you remember Geoffrey Hinton's RBM talk at Google in 2010? [0] That was absolutely insane for anyone keeping up with that field. By the mid-twenty teens RBMs were already outdated. I remember when everyone was implementing flavors of RNNs and LSTMs. Karpathy's character 2015 RNN project was insane [1]. This comment makes me wonder if part of the hype around LLMs is just that a lot of software people simply weren't paying attention to the absolutely mind-blowing progress we've seen in this field for the last 20 years. But even ignoring ML, the world's of web development and mobile application development have gone through incredible progress over the last decade and a half. I remember a time when JavaScript books would have a section warning that you should never use JS for anything critical to the application. Then there's the work in theorem provers over the last decade... If you remember when syntactic sugar was progress, either you remember way further back than I do, or you weren't paying attention to what was happening in the larger computing world. 0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdIURAu1-aU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdIURAu1-aU 1. https://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn-effectiveness/ https://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn-effectiveness/
- handoflixue 9mo ago
  > LLMs are literally technology that can only reproduce the past. Funny, I've used them to create my own personalized text editor, perfectly tailored to what I actually want. I'm pretty sure that didn't exist before. It's wild to me how many people who talk about LLM apparently haven't learned how to use them for even very basic tasks like this! No wonder you think they're not that powerful, if you don't even know basic stuff like this. You really owe it to yourself to try them out.
  - 9mo ago
odiroot 9mo ago
I'm very relieved we've moved away from rewriting everything in Rust.
- jll29 9mo ago
  There's no reason not to use Rust for LLM-generated code in the longer term (other than lack of Rust code to learn from in the shorter term). The stricter typing of Rust would make sematic errors in generated code come out more quickly than in e.g. Python because using static typing the chances are that some of the semantic errors are also type violations.
  - yencabulator 9mo ago
    > (other than lack of Rust code to learn from in the shorter term) FWIW Claude Code is quite good at writing Rust, and Claude and Gemini are both surprisingly good at explaining complex third-party Rust libraries.
- michaelcampbell 9mo ago
  Have we though? I'm glad we're not shouting about it from the rooftops like it's some magical "win" button as much, but TBH the things I use routinely that HAVE been rewritten in rust are generally much better. That could also just be because they're newer and have the errors of the past to not repeat.

> they voted to add some syntactic sugar to Java... I remember when we just wanted to rewrite everything in Rust. Those were the simpler times, when crypto bros seemed like the worst venture capitalism could conjure.

OGEnthusiast 9mo ago
Crypto bros in hindsight were so much less dangerous than AI bros. At least they weren't trying to construct data centers in rural America or prop up artificial stocks like $NVDA.
- quaintpartridge 9mo ago
  They were, just not as many. https://www.wired.com/story/the-worlds-biggest-bitcoin-mine-is-rattling-this-texas-oil-town/ https://www.wired.com/story/the-worlds-biggest-bitcoin-mine-...
- SauntSolaire 9mo ago
  Instead they were building crypto mining warehouses in rural America and propping up artificial currencies like BTC.
  - ryandrake 9mo ago
    Crazy how the two most hyped and funded technologies of the decade were: energy wasting fake money for criminals and energy wasting plagiarism machines.
    - scotty79 9mo ago
      [flagged]
      - deleted 9mo ago
        [deleted]
- zahlman 9mo ago
  Speaking of which, we never found out the details (strike price/expiration) of Michael Burry's puts, did we? It seems he could have made bank if he'd waited one more month...
  - kamranjon 9mo ago
    I think they expire in March 2026 if the NVIDIA stock drops to $140 a share? Something close to that I think.
- mgfist 9mo ago
  It's funny how people complain about the rust belt dying and factories leaving rural communities and so on, then when someone wants to build something that can provide jobs and tax revenue, everyone complains.
  - lostlogin 9mo ago
    I’ve heard about the risk of AI leading to job losses and wealth concentration. I haven’t heard about new businesses, job creation and growth in former industrial towns. What have I missed?
  - jakeydus 9mo ago
    How many people are employed at the average data center? A few dozen? Versus a steel mill, that’s nothing. A chicken plant in Nebraska closed down this last month. 3200 people lost their jobs. You think Meta will fill it with GPUs and the whole town will have jobs again?
    - scotty79 9mo ago
      Many more are employed while building it. And they will never stop building. It's modern version of rail. But instead of distances it will cover the area.
      - uxcolumbo 9mo ago
        Will local folks get those jobs to build the data center? And if so, what happens to those builders once the data center is built?
        scotty79 9mo ago
        > Will local folks get those jobs to build the data center? Yes. At some point the demand will be so high that imported workers won't suffice and local population will need to be trained and hired. > And if so, what happens to those builders once the data center is built? They are going to be moved to a new place where the datacenters will need to be built next. Mobility if the workforce was often cited as one of the greatest strengths of US economy.

nrhrjrjrjtntbt 9mo ago

More like 6 different new nosql databases and js frameworks.

dotancohen 9mo ago
A Wordpress zero day and Linux not on the desktop. Netcraft confirms it.

crystal_revenge 9mo ago

That must have been a long time back. Having lived through the time when web pages were served through CGI and mobile phones only existed in movies, when SVMs where the new hotness in ML and people would write about how weird NNs were, I feel like I've seen a lot more concrete progress in the last few decades than this year. This year honestly feels quite stagnant. LLMs are literally technology that can only reproduce the past. They're cool, but they were way cooler 4 years ago. We've taken big ideas like "agents" and "reinforcement learning" and basically stripped them of all meaning in order to claim progress. I mean, do you remember Geoffrey Hinton's RBM talk at Google in 2010? [0] That was absolutely insane for anyone keeping up with that field. By the mid-twenty teens RBMs were already outdated. I remember when everyone was implementing flavors of RNNs and LSTMs. Karpathy's character 2015 RNN project was insane [1]. This comment makes me wonder if part of the hype around LLMs is just that a lot of software people simply weren't paying attention to the absolutely mind-blowing progress we've seen in this field for the last 20 years. But even ignoring ML, the world's of web development and mobile application development have gone through incredible progress over the last decade and a half. I remember a time when JavaScript books would have a section warning that you should never use JS for anything critical to the application. Then there's the work in theorem provers over the last decade... If you remember when syntactic sugar was progress, either you remember way further back than I do, or you weren't paying attention to what was happening in the larger computing world. 0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdIURAu1-aU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdIURAu1-aU 1. https://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn-effectiveness/ https://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn-effectiveness/

handoflixue 9mo ago
> LLMs are literally technology that can only reproduce the past. Funny, I've used them to create my own personalized text editor, perfectly tailored to what I actually want. I'm pretty sure that didn't exist before. It's wild to me how many people who talk about LLM apparently haven't learned how to use them for even very basic tasks like this! No wonder you think they're not that powerful, if you don't even know basic stuff like this. You really owe it to yourself to try them out.
- 9mo ago

odiroot 9mo ago

I'm very relieved we've moved away from rewriting everything in Rust.

jll29 9mo ago
There's no reason not to use Rust for LLM-generated code in the longer term (other than lack of Rust code to learn from in the shorter term). The stricter typing of Rust would make sematic errors in generated code come out more quickly than in e.g. Python because using static typing the chances are that some of the semantic errors are also type violations.
- yencabulator 9mo ago
  > (other than lack of Rust code to learn from in the shorter term) FWIW Claude Code is quite good at writing Rust, and Claude and Gemini are both surprisingly good at explaining complex third-party Rust libraries.
michaelcampbell 9mo ago
Have we though? I'm glad we're not shouting about it from the rooftops like it's some magical "win" button as much, but TBH the things I use routinely that HAVE been rewritten in rust are generally much better. That could also just be because they're newer and have the errors of the past to not repeat.