Is it really that hard to distinguish genuine revolutions (iPhone, Rust, AI, reusable rockets, etc.) from hyped nonsense (Blockchain/web3, Metaverse, etc.)?

It is funny that you list AI under genuine revolutions while I would list it (or at least 90% of it) under hyped nonsense.

[–] crispy_kilt@feddit.de 5 points 4 months ago

It can be both

[–] FizzyOrange@programming.dev 4 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Modern AI (LLMs etc) is definitely a revolution. Anyone that has tried ChatGPT can tell that, just like the only people saying the iPhone was a fad were the ones that hadn't used it.

The thing that is hyped around AI is companies just trying to shove it into everything, and say stuff uses AI when it is totally inappropriate. That doesn't mean AI itself is nonsense though. The same thing happened with the iPhone (everything had an app even if it made no sense).

[–] taladar@sh.itjust.works 0 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

If the iPhone had been hyped like AI is today people would have claimed you could replace your hammer, saw, garden hose and cooking utensils with an iPhone.

Meanwhile current AI is pretty much useless for any purpose where you actually need to rely on a decent chance to get quality results without human review.

[–] FizzyOrange@programming.dev 2 points 4 months ago

Meanwhile current AI is pretty much useless for any purpose where you actually need to rely on a decent chance to get quality results without human review.

Sure but there are tons of applications where you can tolerate lower than human levels of performance.

The amount of time ChatGPT has saved me programming is crazy, even though it struggles with more complex or niche tasks.

Here's what I used it for most recently:

Write an HTML page that consists of a tree of elements with interspersed text. These are log files with expandable sections. The sections can be nested.

The difficult part is I want the text content that is stored in the HTML file to be compressed with zlib and base64 encoded. It should be decompressed and inserted into the DOM once when each DOM node first becomes visible.

Be terse. Write high quality code with jsdoc type annotations.

It write a couple of hundred lines of code that was not perfect but took 5 minutes to fix. Probably saved me an hour writing it from scratch (I'm not a web dev so I'd have to look things up).