A thousand percent.
- Rust was a bit memetic.
- Blockchain had more of a sceptic tone to it.
- But ChatGPT, is really different.
You have posts on how to use it better, how it's so good that it may turn against us, and things built on top of it. I don't think this is going to stop. Especially with the pace that OpenAI has shown by shipping GPT-4, updating the models, plugins, and so on. They may be fine-tuning GPT-5 right now.
Hacker News have been through so many fads I've lost count at this point. Here are some I remember clearly:
- Ruby on Rails
- React
- NodeJS
- Bitcoin and much later, cryptocurrencies and blockchain
- Docker
- Golang
- Kubernetes
- Serverless
- "JAMStack" / static websites
- Remote work / Digital nomadism
- no code / low-code platforms (although this was never that intense compared to others like Ruby on Rails or Golang)
I'm sure others can remember more fads that have come and go :)
I think we're entering a new era of the economy and of the tech business and many other businesses. I was in the software biz when the internet took off and nothing since then reminds of that time like LLMs do.
The amount of actual products coming out every single day that incorporate LLMs, and the new tooling that shows up for devs and experimenters on HN is amazing. This community is way ahead of the curve on this topic. It's quite exciting to be here!
Yeah, at this point, I'm hankering for a "ChatGPT-to-butt" browser extension like the old "cloud" variant.
There's a new era all the time. Previously, it was NFT rise and fall, Ukraine war, Great Resignation, COVID. Rust hasn't been the hype topic for a while. I'm surprised Web3 hasn't taken off here, but then again it's the worst crowd for it.
HN tends to be a little irrational - back during Ukraine War, everyone would accuse each other of being Russian sockpuppets lol. And then with COVID, we'd have cameras that track if you were touching your face, and all kinds of contact tracing apps.
I've been trying to get people interested in AI for years. I'd get downvoted all the time saying that AI can understand sarcasm or that it would be as good as a human in writing code by 2025. It's a bit frustrating to see it get so overhyped now.
Show HN also boosts the hype further. There's a lot of stuff here that are cool ideas, but they were made overnight. Then there's the cooler stuff that took a week to build. And every now and then you see something properly thought through.
Never thought I would miss all the Wordle clones :)
At first I thought mist if these headlines were related to new functional languages from the ML family. Since I enjoy reading the headlines without immediately clicking on the links, it took me a little time to understand that ML had nothing to do with functional programming.
No no, just a fad. It's the same signal pulse as a dopamine spike, as a fad coming and going through a culture (think hula hoops or fidget spinners).
Not that ChatGPT it's self is a fad, just the discussion here.
It feels like the early dialup Internet / Netscape navigator days
Yeah but just hope that the AI winter is coming pretty soon
AI is currently a trending topic. So it’s natural that everyone and their dog is talking about it right now. Plus, it’s impressive.
Every LLaMa commit gets a damn submission
It makes me feel like HN is back to the good old days.
New era of hype definitely.
What other subject matters?
The current AI hype has single-handedly reduced the time I spend in here by 80%.
It's all everybody talks about, starry-eyed. Hey, I made a ChatGPT programming language. Hey, I put ChatGPT into my doorbell. Hey, why don't we solve world hunger with ChatGPT?
And the most irritating of all: For any topic, there is a comment saying "I have asked ChatGPT about <topic>, here's what it has to say about it: ..."
The AI winter can't come soon enough.