alt Hacker NewsIt's telling how out of touch the evaluators of these things are that the grand winner designed a tool that's been in use by fire services for decades. (Software that predicts fires based on lightening strikes). But you slap LLM on it, and assert that somehow you can replace the arborists and helicopter pilots with drones (as if the human piloting the thing is the expensive part of a multi million dollar vehicle hauling tonnes of water around anyway) and that tricks non-professionals into thinking you're disrupting a field.
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I’ve been at multiple hackathons over the past 15y that rewarded impractical or copies of existing products. And I think that’s fine? A hackathon doesn’t have to be about creating something revolutionary IMHO.
Still LLMs do remove most of the fun of hackathons
Its kind of insulting how many people look at other industries and think they can "solve" the problems with their simple solution. As if the people in these industries havent been thinking about this problem for decades.
The human pilot is not an expensive part of it but it is a dangerous job and when mistakes or issues happen you lose a life you didn't need to lose. Out of all jobs to eliminate that doesn't sound so bad.
There's a whole class of software people who think the rest of the world is a bunch of pitiful and sadly ignorant apes stuck in the past who just need the loving administration of the clarity, vision and genius of the software engineer to fix all their problems.