Comment by brudgers
1 day ago
I used the HN |Past| feature to go back 15 years.
https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2011-06-08
There are three articles about Steve Jobs. To me LLM's are a more intellectually interesting cargo-cult than that cult of personality cargo-cult, but YMMV.
In 2011 the iPhone was ~4 years old and iPads were ascendant as the only tablet game in town. Google was still playing catch up with Android as a knock-off, having just debuted Android Honeycomb.
The actual topics are:
- the Apple campus that is still unique today
- a rectification of an urban legend about Jobs and Knuth
- a clip showing Jobs was prescient in the late 90s about personalized cloud tech
Dismissing the focus on Jobs as a cult of personality is a mistake, he was simply very influential, and so was Apple at this time.
Meanwhile LLMs are the antithesis of the Jobsian style: just cramming pirated data into a model and reselling it as fake intelligence without real source attribution.