alt Hacker News> Feels like a false equivalency.
It's clearly a textbook example of survivorship bias.
In the 90s the same argument was directed at this new thing called the internet, and those who placed a bet on it being a fad ended up being forgotten by history.
It's rather obvious that this AI thing is a transformative event in world history, perhaps more critical than the advent of the internet. Take a look at traffic to established sites such as Stack Overflow to get a glimpse of the radical impact. Even in social media we started to see the dead internet theory put to practice in real time.
And coding is the lowest of low hanging fruits.
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> It's rather obvious that this AI thing is a transformative event in world history, perhaps more critical than the advent of the internet. Take a look at traffic to established sites such as Stack Overflow to get a glimpse of the radical impact. Even in social media we started to see the dead internet theory put to practice in real time.
It's worth noting that SO was declining well before ChatGPT launched. It seems more likely that the decline of SO was more driven by Google ranking changes to prioritise websites that served Google ads. Certainly I remember having to go down a few results to get SO results for a while, even when the top results were just copypasta from SO.
Internet is something new. By definition llm coding isn’t doing anything you couldn’t have done already. Once the agents aren’t writing a human syntax based language but are spitting out opaque functions in binary machine code, then they are doing something new and compelling imo because there are real performance gains with that.
> In the 90s the same argument was directed at this new thing called the internet, and those who placed a bet on it being a fad ended up being forgotten by history.
Allow me to introduce you to the dot-com boom, where everyone who bet on the internet went broke.
> In the 90s the same argument was directed at this new thing called the internet, and those who placed a bet on it being a fad ended up being forgotten by history.
Almost all people are "forgotten" by history.
In any case, people who were not even born yet in the 1990s are using the internet today, very successfully, so clearly you can wait.
In the 90s was also the dotcom boom, and the vast majority of those who placed an all-in bet on it being everything lost it all in the dotcom bust and also "ended up being forgotten by history". Some of those bets were prescient but too early but many of those bets never made any sense. The dotcom bust was worse than the software industry crash we're experiencing now.
"It's rather obvious that this AI thing is a transformative event in world history" perhaps but it's not at all obvious how it's going to shake out or which bets are sensible.