> For me the LLM topic is just all enveloping in a way the other trends haven't been.

Same here, for sure. I just try to dodge it all as best I can. Seems like every question has the possible answer of LLMs, and nearly always, someone provides it.

There's also this annoying dissonance between 'evangelists' and reality. Evangelists often feign that we're on the cusp of artificial general intelligence, while in practice LLMs remain stupid, error prone, and unreliable for anything beyond tasks that have a vast number sources for highly relevant training. Which also somewhat dilutes the utility, because I could just as well find those sources!

Oh right, that must just be because I'm not giving it the magic prompt that makes them magically turn into geniuses.

The current trend in LLMs is synthetic data and inference-time reasoning. They're past data sources.

The new problem is this only works when you can verify the answers.

Sometimes I wish I had the drugs that would make me believe in things like "we're on the cusp of AGI", everything would be so much more exciting.

Crypto currencies became purely speculative asses and their volatility ensured that they wouldn’t be useful for payment processing. Has block chain in general made any progress in payment processing?

I very much agree, just that if you were talking about idk something like compilers people wouldn't barge in about crypto.

Any HN topic now just feels like a small jump to LLMs.

I recognize my above is a bit of a strawman, hard to recall exact posts / comments over the years.

> covered a specific niche of overall software stuff (payment processing)

At the time it was everything blockchain. Not just payments. Decentralized, smart contracts and the like.

It's true it did get pretty rediculous and somewhat collapsed (at least in public interest).

I just don't see why every time we need to go through the incredible hype / death cycle.

LLMs are a useful tool if used properly, I hope I start seeing them used to create distinct value.

"Replicants are either a benefit or a hazard."—Deckard

It's deeply funny that they hit you with the ole "you don't understand AI" when it's your day job though. So you've got that going for you.