I don’t think there are any sectors of the population that are “overwhelmingly pro-AI” except for: a) people who think it will help them better exploit or surveil others; b) people who think it will raise their social standing by making their deficiencies less obvious if they pass AI work off as their own
Ask HN: Are 80s high school hobby programmers overwhelmingly pro-AI?
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Re: Ask HN: Are 80s high school hobby programmers overwhelmingly pro-AI?
#22Well, a considerable amount of what you call "80s high school hobby programmers" ended up going through formal computer science education in an university, the only difference being that a lot of them already had been programming since their early teens.
On the contrary, my experience is that Gen-X programmers are far more sentimental about the machine and languages, while Millenials have been raised in the cult of the VC backed startup money printing machine.
Just compare the zeitgeist of Slashdot circa 2000 with the ethos of HN nowadays.
Re: Ask HN: Are 80s high school hobby programmers overwhelmingly pro-AI?
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
The executive class is overwhelmingly Gen-X and that class is very pro-AI.
Executives are not engineers. Not even the CTO
Additionally they likely never were "hobby programmers", so the specific generation (Gen-X) may be a match, the question was defined more specific.
Re: Ask HN: Are 80s high school hobby programmers overwhelmingly pro-AI?
#24Nope. I built and programmed a single-board Kim-1 in high school and went on to an Apple II then Commodore 64. The thing is 80's hobby programmers also read a ton of science fiction which, unironically, was very pro-tech but also explored the social impact of tech. Case-in-point: My favorite AI novel of that era was "The Adolescence of P1" which starts with an engineer innocently prompting P1 to dig a foundation for…
You know science fiction is not real, right?
Re: Ask HN: Are 80s high school hobby programmers overwhelmingly pro-AI?
#25I am very pro-AI and I was coding in the late 80s, although not in high school, I was in elementary at the time.
Given I started on an Apple IIe with a green screen and basic, and have since had to shift languages and techniques repeatedly over the decades, I have to be someone that embraces new technology if I want to stay relevant and productive.
This means that I will adopt things that make sense and AI does make sense.
Re: Ask HN: Are 80s high school hobby programmers overwhelmingly pro-AI?
#26Nope. I built and programmed a single-board Kim-1 in high school and went on to an Apple II then Commodore 64. The thing is 80's hobby programmers also read a ton of science fiction which, unironically, was very pro-tech but also explored the social impact of tech. Case-in-point: My favorite AI novel of that era was "The Adolescence of P1" which starts with an engineer innocently prompting P1 to dig a foundation for…
You know science fiction is not real, right?
Everything is imaginary until somebody makes it real.
Re: Ask HN: Are 80s high school hobby programmers overwhelmingly pro-AI?
#27I'm 55, about to turn 56, and I did hobby programming back in the 80s, mainly in a C64 and C128, so I fit the bill, although I'm no developer and right now all my programming is reduced to some shell scripts aimed to automate repetitive or tedious tasks.
And no, I'm not "overwhelmingly" pro-AI. Especially since many of us know that the AI concept is storied and goes a long time even before our generation, and this LLM-based AI isn't really AI in a proper sense.
This "AI" has some good uses, granted, but the cost-benefit ratio is stupidly bad. For all the benefits that I can see with AI, if this means that I have to put up with scrapers aggressively ruining the Web, data centers gobsmacking available resources, and getting GPU and memory prices gouged to death on me, I'd rather pass. It's not an attractive proposition, simply stated.
Worse yet, I teach; and AI-enabled cheating is making my work much harder.
So, pardon me if I'm a little unenthusiastic about this newfangled artificial intelligence that isn't.
Re: Ask HN: Are 80s high school hobby programmers overwhelmingly pro-AI?
#28I'm a hobby programmer from the 80s. If I want to make a table from wood, I'm not going to start by shopping at IKEA.
It aligns with my general thoughts about mastering a craft.
Re: Ask HN: Are 80s high school hobby programmers overwhelmingly pro-AI?
#29Nope. I built and programmed a single-board Kim-1 in high school and went on to an Apple II then Commodore 64. The thing is 80's hobby programmers also read a ton of science fiction which, unironically, was very pro-tech but also explored the social impact of tech. Case-in-point: My favorite AI novel of that era was "The Adolescence of P1" which starts with an engineer innocently prompting P1 to dig a foundation for…
When Harley was One.
Re: Ask HN: Are 80s high school hobby programmers overwhelmingly pro-AI?
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
The executive class is overwhelmingly Gen-X and that class is very pro-AI.
Executives are not engineers. Not even the CTO
No, but that doesn't stop them from pushing vibe coded software at meetings and demanding it be put into production or otherwise regurgitating verbatim what their agents tell them.