[svara]

Yes, it's been odd to observe the parallels with the web3 craze.

You asked people what their project was for and you'd get a response that made sense to no one outside of that bubble, and if you pressed on people would get mad.

The bizarre thing is that this time around, these tools do have a bunch of real utility, but it's become almost impossible online to discuss how to use the tech properly, because that would require acknowledging some limitations.

[crystal_revenge]

Very similar to web3! On paper the web3 craze sounded very exciting: yes, I absolutely would love an alternate web of truly decentralized services.

I've been pretty consistently skeptical of the crypto world, but with web3 I was really hoping to be wrong. What's wild is there was not a single, truly distributed, interesting/useful service at all to come out of all that hype. I spent a fair bit of time diving into the details of Ethereum and very quickly realized the "world computer" there (again, wonderful idea) wasn't really feasible for anything practical (I mean other than creating clever ways to scam people).

Right now in the LLM space I see a lot of people focused on building old things in new ways. I've realized that not only do very few people work with local models (where they can hack around and customize more), a surprisingly small number of people write code that even calls an LLM through an API for some specific task that previously wasn't possible (regular ol'software build using calls to an LLM has loads of potential). It's still largely "can some variation on a chat bot do this thing I used to do for me".

As a contrast, in the early web, plenty of people were hosting their own website, and messing around with all the basic tools available to see what novel thing they could create. I mean "Hamster Dance" was it's own sort of slop, but the first time you say it you engaged with it. Snarg.net still stands out as novel in it's experiments with "what is an interface".

[neoromantique]

>As a contrast, in the early web, plenty of people were hosting their own website, and messing around with all the basic tools available to see what novel thing they could create

I'm hoping that the already full of slop centralized platforms now with LLM fueled implosion will overflow and lead to a renaissance of sorts for small and open web, niche communities and decoupling from big tech.

It's already gaining traction among the young, as far as I can see.