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The web was a shared experience, by its very nature. The interconnection was the point. LLMs allow anyone to put themselves in a one-man bubble of their own creation. In a way, it is the antithesis of the internet - if the web is a global public square, the API is a digital cloister.

by sanderjd1 hours ago|

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Pretty much by definition, a new paradigm will be very different from the previously new paradigm.

Personally, I don't think the interconnected "social" nature of the web turned out very well. Maybe (probably) the "one-man bubble" nature of AI also won't turn out well. But I'm skeptical of holding up the web's social nature as a positive. I think it turned out pretty bad. (I shared everyone's optimism in the late 90s and early 2000s and I used to just be mad at Facebook / Zuckerberg for screwing it up, but I dunno, maybe it was always going to end up this way.)

by layer83 hours ago|

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But you could still focus on backend stuff and desktop or CLI programs, think and discuss about programming languages and software engineering on the code level in all the non-web related ways with a large community. You could opt-out of most of the web-related things (which is what I did) and still have a wide community to interact with. Whereas AI appears to be dissolving almost all that community. I hope that will turn out to be a false appearance, but the thesis is that it won’t.

by sanderjd1 hours ago|

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Ok but I think this is just a kind of myopic view that is specifically focused on the things you were / are interested in. AI is a different paradigm that is changing things for a different contingent of people.

To try to demonstrate my point with an example: If you were a journalist, the web changed literally everything in a way that was inescapable. As a software engineer, it changed a lot for a lot of people but it was not inescapable. The situation with AI is, so far, the reverse. Journalists have mostly (and correctly IMO) concluded that this isn't actually that useful to their writing, and it hasn't changed their distribution channels in the way the web did. But for software engineers, it's changing things dramatically.

I guess my perspective is just that new paradigms are not uniformly disruptive.

by layer81 hours ago|

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The article is about how AI affects intellectual communities. In my comment above I was focusing on the software engineering community that the first part of the article was discussing, and which I mistakenly took your comment to be referring to.

It’s probably right that when looking at the total of all intellectual communities, the difference in influence of the web versus AI is more nuanced. Nevertheless, I can see AI being more disruptive there overall in the way the article describes. Though I hope that this will turn out to not be the case.

by sanderjd40 minutes ago|

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No I don't think you misunderstood, I do think I broadened my take between my comment and my reply to you. I don't mean to imply that I think I have this all figured out or anything, I'm still playing with these ideas in my own mind and trying to figure out what I think.

But I do think that my general sense is that it is both similar in scale to the disruption of the web, and also very different in ways that are hard to suss out at this point.