alt Hacker NewsThank you for your thoughtful response. I was hoping others might relate to this experience in some way.
I wonder about the transcendence take as well. I think a lot of us are strapped into this ride regardless. If there’s a fresh new paradigm awaiting, I hope it’s a good one.
But my main observation is mostly personal: I get taken in a lot by technology waves, hoping things will get better, but I haven’t ever crisply defined “better.” Or my criteria has been too loose and I conflate novelty with progress. If advanced models eventually accelerate science and medicine so that more people can lead healthy fulfilling lives, that sounds a lot better. But if a model helps me use an undocumented API of a random IoT device tomorrow, I don’t think anything is much better, and I didn’t even get much out of the process. When efficiency isn’t paramount, I’m often not clear on when to take the shortcut versus when to do the work.
> I get taken in a lot by technology waves, hoping things will get better, but I haven’t ever crisply defined “better.”
Yeah, I think this is the issue more than anything having to do with LLMs. It’s also why I stopped switching to the latest JS library du jour many years ago. The one I had worked fine. I don’t need to learn React because it just came out after learning fourteen other paradigms / frameworks.
> Or my criteria has been too loose and I conflate novelty with progress.
Yup.
> If advanced models eventually accelerate science and medicine so that more people can lead healthy fulfilling lives, that sounds a lot better.
Agreed.
> But if a model helps me use an undocumented API of a random IoT device tomorrow, I don’t think anything is much better, and I didn’t even get much out of the process.
Disagree, but it depends on what you’re looking to get out of it. Is the interesting part the RE / discovery? Or do you just want to control your car from Home Assistant?
That is, once you’ve RE’d a React native app, you don’t really learn anything new by doing it again. I have no problem with an LLM helping me with that.
But if I want to learn to RE a binary or app? Then I’ll do that!