I mean, I get the author's point not to over-hype AI, but the microwave oven is one of the most successful inventions in the past 100 years.
How about ... the Segway? I hear whole cities will be designed around them.
That strikes me as a likely outcome. Many other things have played out similarly.
Ai obviously has solid use cases, it’s just not the whole kitchen.
So the point is even successful new technology can be over-hyped.
Of course, LLMs may or may have a functionality that expands to everything also. Unlike a microwave over, if LLMs have limitations, those limitations aren't visible.
1.) customers who don't know about the practice, now expect food right away for very cheap price, which bankrupts traditional restaurants that cook from fresh ingredients. An analogy could be off the shelf software or custom software losing sales to vibe coded software
2.) customers who do know about the practice, stops ordering food altogether, due to food issues (prepared ingredients are very low quality, oil could be very dirty) or they could cook prepared food at home in their own microwave for even cheaper. An analogy is programmers coding their own software using vibe coding.
3.) declining quality of food, and less and less people eating out in China. It's gotten so bad that now hotel restaurants, which would be the fine dining options, are setting up food stalls in the street to sell cheap but freshly cooked food, in order to get people into the hotel restaurants. An analogy might be softwares with per seat pricing changing to action based pricing for an initial period.
In india such clay pots are sold by villagers and are slowly getting in vogue.
With gen AI, it’s much less clear cut what the long-term limitations are.
Looking back on BERT I can name a handful of dealbreakers that haven't changed and have no solution on the horizon.
I think LLM is here to stay but cheap output won't have value. We're rapidly tired if its flooding of the zone with spam. The microwave killed some traditional ways of cooking, and the LLM is killing some older ways of communicating. Not because it's better, but because it makes e-mail tiresome.
> Also it heats food inside out equally as compared to stove which transmit heat from the out layer to inside
This is also false, photons don't teleport themselves to the inside of food.
This frequency does not happen to be absorbed by cooking oils very much.
An approximate rule of thumb is that a nominally powered microwave oven will penetrate an inch to maybe two inches into ordinary food before all the energy has been absorbed so that's about as far as it will heat "toward the inside" rather than from the inside. Unless it's little things like small potatoes where the needed heat forms through-and-through. For much bigger stuff where the deep part can not be energized directly, it can be good to take it easy so the outer target layer can be kept from overheating long enough for the outer layer itself to cook the inside thoroughly.
Or take a break a couple times to stir a large bowl of soup between heating sessions.
I love microwave, but the usual "if all I have it's a hammer..." is a thing
https://www.finalroundai.com/blog/github-ceo-thomas-dohmke-w...
HN comments thread, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44797264
WheelsAtLarge•6mo ago
allears•6mo ago
fuzzfactor•6mo ago
>Today’s microwave can cook a frozen burrito. Tomorrow’s microwave will be able to cook an entire Thanksgiving Dinner.
Actually it went like that in reverse.
They didn't really mass-market microwaves in the 1970's until they were capable of cooking a whole turkey faster than ever, and then developed free microwave cooking lessons well-attended at appliance stores. Where they demonstrated how to cook a whole Thanksgiving dinner, live. You can't make this up. Smelled wonderful :)
There was a very prevalent attitude that the emerging microwave could be nothing less than a major appliance, and there was not yet a concept for launching anything that was not thought capable of replacing a conventional oven right away.
They weighed about 75 pounds and were naturally big enough to hold a turkey.
This is the kind of microwave ovens that Dire Straits was lamenting about delivering at the time, before they got better gigs, with less stress on the hands & fingers.
Don't ask me how I know . . .
jzb•6mo ago
I didn't find it funny, myself, but I did find it to be a pretty good takedown. It's not funny (to me, anyway) because "humor equals tragedy plus time". It'll be funny in 10 years if/when we're not living in an AI slop hellscape and being constantly bombarded with AI marketing/having it shoved down our collective throats. Right now it's just "ugh, so true".
cpach•6mo ago
TheAlchemist•6mo ago
MBCook•6mo ago