Tools: Code Is All You Need

Hype cycle for drones and VR was similar -- at the peak, you have people claiming drones will take over package delivery and everyone will spend their day in VR. Reality is that the applicability is more narrow.

I mean both of these things are actually happening (drone deliveries and people spending a lot of time in VR), just at a much much smaller scale than it was hyped up to be.

Drones and VR require significant upfront hardware investment, which curbs adoption. On the other hand, adopting LLM-as-a-service has none of these costs, so no wonder so many companies are getting involved with it so quickly.

That's the claim for AR, not VR, and you're just noticing how research and development cycles play out, you can draw comparisons to literally any technology cycle.

A parallel outcome for LLMs sounds realistic to me.

If it’s not happening at the scale it was pitched, then it’s not happening.

This makes no sense, just because something didn't become as big as the hypemen said it would doesn't make the inventions or users of those inventions disappear.

Right, but abstract costs are still costs to someone, so how far does that go before mass adoption turns into a mass liability for whomever is ultimately on the hook? It seems like there is this extremely risky wager that everyone is playing--that LLM's will find their "killer app" before the real costs of maintaining them becomes too much to bear. I don't think these kinds of bets often pay off. The opposite actually, I think every truly revolutionary technological advance in the contemporary timeframe has arisen out of its very obvious killer app(s), they were in a sense inevitable. Speculative tech--the blockchain being one of the more salient and frequently tapped examples--tends to work in pretty clear bubbles, in my estimation. I've not yet been convinced this one is any different, aside from the absurd scale at which it has been cynically sold as the biggest thing since Gutenberg, but while that makes it somewhat distinct, it's still a rather poor argument against it being a bubble.

Considering what we've been seeing in the Russia-Ukraine and Iran-Israel wars, drones are definitely happening at scale. For better or for worse, I expect worldwide production of drones to greatly expand over the coming years.

Good drones are very Chinese atm, as is casual consumer drone delivery. Americans might be more than a decade away even with concerted bipartisan war-like effort to boost domestic drone competency.

The reality is Chinese.

You checked out drone warfare? It’s all the rage in every conflict at the moment. The hype around drones is not fake, and I’d compare it more to autonomous cars because regulation is the only reason you don’t see a million private drones flying around.

For something to be considered “happening” you can’t just have a handful of localized examples. It has to be happening at a large noticeable scale that even people unfamiliar with the tech are noticing. Then you can say it’s “happening”. Otherwise, it’s just smaller groups of people doing stuff.

Yes, to an extent, but I would say that is an extension of artillery and long-range fire capabilities.

As is well known, AI is whatever hasn't been done yet.

Aren’t people building DIY drones that are close to and in some cases superior to off the shelf Chinese drones?

Off the shelf Chinese drones is somewhat vague, we can just say DJI. Their full drone and dock system for the previous generation goes for around $20k. DJI iterates on this space on a yearly cadence and have just come out with the Dock 3.

54 minute flight time (47 min hover) for fully unmanned operations.

If you're talking about fpv racing where tiny drones fly around 140+ mph, then yeah DJI isn't in that space.

That is in fact the claim for VR. Remember the Metaverse? Oculus headsets are VR headsets. The Apple Vision Pro is a VR headset.

That hardly seems like it would take the US 10 years to replicate on a war footing aside from the price.

I mean if we’re talking dollar to dollar comparison, the US will likely never be able to produce something as cheaply as China (unless China drastically increases their average standard of living).

People claimed that we would spend most of our day on the internet in the mid-90s, and then the dotcom bubble burst. And then people claimed that by 2015 robo-taxis would be around all the major cities of the planet.

You can be right but too early. There was a hype wave for drones and VR (more than one for the latter one), but I wouldn't be so sure that it's peak of their real world usage yet.

The metaverse is and was a guess at how the children of today might interact as they age into active market participants. Like all these other examples, speculative mania preceded genuine demand and it remains to be seen whether it plays out over the coming 10-15 years.

Ahh yes let’s get the next generation addicted to literal screens strapped to their eyeballs for maximum monetization, humanity be damned. Glad it’s a failing bet. Now sex bots might be onto something…

It may or may not be a failing bet. Maybe smartphones are the ultimate form of human-data interface and we'll simply never do better.

>> You can be right but too early.

Unless opportunity cost is zero this is a varation on being wrong.

I'll take your argument a bit further. The thing is -- "human-data" interfaces are not particularly important. Human-Human ones are. This is probably why it's going to be difficult, if not impossible, to beat the smartphone; VR or whatever doesn't fundamentally "bring people closer together" in a way the smartphone nearly absolutely did.

VR may not, but social interaction with AR might be more palatable and better UX than social interaction while constantly looking down at at a computer we still call a "phone" for some reason.

There’s a really weird phenomenon too with drones. I’ve used Chinese (non-drone) software for work a bunch in the past and it’s been almost universally awful. On the drone side, especially DJI, they’ve flipped this script completely. Every non-DJI drone I’ve flown has had miserable UX in comparison to DJI. Mission Planner (open source, as seen in the Ukraine attack videos) is super powerful but also looks like ass and functions similarly. QGC is a bit better, especially the vendor-customized versions (BSD licensed) but the vendors almost always neuter great features that are otherwise available in the open source version and at the same time modify things so that you can’t talk to the aircraft using the OSS version. The commercial offerings I’ve used are no better.

Sure, we need to be working on being able to build the hardware components in North America, and I’ve seen a bunch of people jump on that in the last year. But wow is the software ever bad and I haven’t really seen anyone working to improve that.

> The Apple Vision Pro is a VR headset.

For some use cases it is indeed used for VR. But it has AR applications and all the necessary hardware and software.

Which is why I think there are two distinct kinds of perspective, and for one of them, AI hype is just about at the right levels - and being too early is not a problem, unless it delays things indefinitely.

I wrote about it recently here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44208831. Quoting myself (sorry):

> For me, one of the Beneficiaries, the hype seems totally warranted. The capability is there, the possibilities are enormous, pace of advancement is staggering, and achieving them is realistic. If it takes a few years longer than the Investor group thinks - that's fine with us; it's only a problem for them.

Drones are delivering. Ukraine?

"Drone warfare" isn't really a thing. Drones in the battlefield remain something that:

a) Hegemon uses to avoid needing to deploy boots to the ground

b) Resource strapped combatants use as a supplement of guerrilla tactics

c) Specops have used to great publicity effect in a context of very heavy use of traditional intelligence assets

The narrative that "this changes everything" is very much in line with how we see the story around AI developing as well. Highly publicized demos that hide the enormous efforts in traditional technologies and good old human labor surrounding them.

What exactly are they delivering in Ukraine, besides publicity?

You're getting from it the one thing it can deliver. Dazzle and publicity.

Yes. That, and a shit ton of work done - work I wouldn't manage to do, or wouldn't even try, without AI tools.

That's extremely judgmental of you. There is strong merit in building online, international but close-knit communities. I have met many friends for life through the internet and through my own experience as CTO of a popular metaverse project (that failed because of a hostile takeover and ridiculous pivot to a sex bot startup that spat in the face of our loyal users)

I cared deeply about our users, about connection and technology. I also love being outside and meeting IRL with friends I've met online. I just took a road trip through the West with a friend from Armenia whom I met doing metaverse work and the exchange of culture was exhilarating.

VR isn't even required for the metaverse, which tells me you're criticizing something of which you have an incomplete understanding. The metaverse is about people and deep connections. About building communities. That's nothing to criticize.

Ammunition? Supplies? Explosives to the enemy?

You know you can do all that in meatspace for free right now, as our species has been doing since the dawn of civilization.

I’m not convinced a literal screen strapped to your face can beat your human senses perceiving the world and other human beings in the flesh at a biochemical level.

Not until people are strapped with IV drug releasing devices flooding their brains with happy chemicals to imitate the joy of real life experiences with others. That would be barely scratching the surface of imitating human-human interaction.

The cool thing is that I don't need your approval or permission to decide how I want to network with others, or in what ways I decide to integrate technology into my networking.

> I’m not convinced a literal screen strapped to your face can beat your human senses perceiving the world and other human beings in the flesh at a biochemical level.

No shit? I already said VR isn't a core part of the metaverse vision. Zuckerburg didn't invent the concept of the metaverse or its modern incarnation, he co-opted it and even changed his company name in an attempt to make the metaverse synonymous with his company and particular vision. Do everyone a favor and decouple this from your understanding of what the metaverse scene set out to do.

My network stretches across the globe, it's impossible to replicate this without technology. Judge less, seek to understand more.