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Uhhh, LLMs? The shit computers can do now is absurd compared to 2020. If you showed engineers from 2020 Claude, Cursor, and Stable Diffusion and didn't tell them how they worked their minds would be fucking exploding.

So LLMs exist therefore nothing else is worth the time? That’s sort of the gist of HN these past few years
Moreover: people’ve been crowing about LLM-enabled productivity for longer than it took a tiny team to conceive and build goddamn Doom. In a cave! With a box of scraps!

Isn’t the sales pitch that they greatly expand accessibility and reduce cost of a variety of valuable work? Ok, so where’s the output? Where’s the fucking beef? Shit’s looking all-bun at the moment, unless you’re into running scams, astroturfing, spammy blogs, or want to make ELIZA your waifu.

No I was just skeptical of the GPs assertion that tech hasn't produced anything "cool" in the last 5 years when it has been a nonstop barrage of insane shit that people are achieving with LLMs.

Like the ability for computers to generate images/videos/songs so reliably that we are debating if it is going to ruin human artists... whether you think that is terrible or good it would be dumb to say "nothing is happening in tech".

This was posted earlier today:

https://www.danshapiro.com/blog/2025/12/i-made-the-xkcd-impo...

The xkcd comic is from 11 years ago (September 2014).

Surely you have realized by now that a large portion of the HN userbase is here for get rich quick schemes.
ahh brings me back to the blockchain days, and the many excuses people tried to use them instead of a SQL database for whatever reason
It’s really incredible how quickly people take things for granted.
LLMs are one, granted. GP asked for three, though.
GGPs question doesn't make sense though. What does it mean for a technology to "come out".

Also what does three prove? Is three supposed to be a benchmark of some kind?

I would wager every year there are dozens, probably hundreds, of novel technologies being successfully commercialized. The rate is exponentially increasing.

New procedural generation methods for designing parking garages.

New manufacturing approaches for fuselage assembly of aircraft.

New cold-rolled steel shaping and folding methods.

New solid state battery assembly methods.

New drug discovery and testing methods.

New mineral refinement processes.

New logistics routing software.

New heat pump designs.

New robotics actuators.

See what I mean?

Great list, and most of those don't involve big tech. I think what your list illustrates is that progress is being made, but it requires deep domain expertise.
Technology advances like a fractal stain, ever increasing the diversity of jobs to be done to decrease entropy locally while increasing it globally.

I would wager we are very far from peak complexity, and as long as complexity keeps increasing there will always be opportunities to do meaningful innovative work.

1. We may be at the peak complexity that our population will support. As the population stops growing, and then starts declining, we may not have the number of people to maintain this level of specialization.

2. We may be at the peak complexity that our sources of energy will support. (Though the transition to renewables may help with that.)

3. We may be at the peak complexity that humans can stand without too many of them becoming dehumanized by their work. I could see evidence for this one already appearing in society, though I'm not certain that this is the cause.

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