Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

771–780 of 812 posts

Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?

#771

Post by supertroop »

bah9 wrote: post #762
supertroop wrote: post #753

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess I wasn’t very clear. At this point I haven’t found of level of abstraction where AI cannot be helpful. I have set it upon architecture problems but the main obstacle is the domain knowledge that it lacks. My company is working on uploading all of our internal specs as skills, but AI gets confused with poor English and outdated specs. Some groups have succeeded and the high level arch suggestions are being rev…

Ah, this sounds so unfun to me. As I thought, actual "thinking" is providing context due to bad, not self sufficient, documentation I think I am just not result driven. I like to do stuff myself, not providing info to some super intelligence to do cognitive work This role is also require way less qualifications and cognitive ability. You need local knowledge, not fundamental knowledge: why in this exact company thing…

Yeah I’m a type-a. People talk about all their unfinished personal projects and I’m like “heh?” Why not finish?? I guess some of us can see things through and others just want to dabble. That’s fine. There’s only so much time we’re alive: don’t let other people tell you what should be fun!

Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?

#772

Post by oblio »

star-glider wrote: post #759
DrewADesign wrote: post #736

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Programmers will get a pat on the back. * shoved in the back while facing the door, and told it’s their own fault for getting screwed over. If you want to know what the future holds for the software dev field, look at copywriters and concept artists. The tech world has been so coddled for so long that many developers think their high salaries, cushy work conditions and clout come from their inherent worth as people…

I'd argue that a lot of knowledge workers in general are about to experience a similar rude awakening. To the clear benefit of society as a whole, who are spared rents, but it won't be fun for the entitled.

> To the clear benefit of society as a whole, who are spared rents, but it won't be fun for the entitled.

Why?

These people aren't the modern day equivalent of aristocrats.

They're not even the modern day equivalent of the bourgeoisie.

They're the modern day equivalent of the craftsmen/guild members.

Taking out the craftsmen won't enrich the farmers and unskilled workers.

Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?

#773

Post by dang »

johnfn wrote: post #647
dang wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I say "simply" because, as I mentioned, it's an invariant—possibly the most consistent phenomenon we've observed on HN [1]. But if it's so consistent, how can it go unnoticed for long (as you've reported) and/or get perceived as one-sided ("HN is so anti-A") when in fact it is usually two-sided ("HN users are divided on A")? The answer is that what you notice depends on how you feel [2]. If you like A, or (more preci…

Thank you for the very long and thoughtful comment. It's an fun and interesting idea to think about, and I certainly don't mind reading long tangents :) But I want to push back on it a tad: I think it misses my point a little bit. I completely am fine with HN being a negative place - I wouldn't have been here so long if this bothered me! But I don't think all divisiveness is made equal. And in particular, I think the…

Yes, not all divisive topics are equally divisive. It depends on how people feel. More people feel more intensely about AI than about Typescript, and certain other topics exceed even AI in intensity. The dynamic I was describing is powered by feelings so it makes sense it would show up more where those are more intense. I think that accounts for the differences you've experienced, no?

> I completely am fine with HN being a negative place

That can't be true, or else the personal attacks, derisive and incendiary content you're describing wouldn't bother you!

Also, it isn't possible to treat comment quality and negativity as separate issues because the two are related. Negativity reduces comment quality, for many reasons. One is what when people are angry or frightened they become repetitive and uncreative. Another is that such comments evoke more, and worse, from others.

> I would like to suggest that when comments get that derisive, that those comments are removed faster and those users are banned faster.

No argument there, but this is what we're already doing, or at least trying to do, regardless of the topic. If we knew a more effective way to do it, we'd be there!

Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?

#774

Post by [deleted] »

li2uR3ce wrote: post #755
llm_nerd wrote: post #557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>because it's true I mean, it's just as true that most teams “write bad code,” “introduce bugs,” “create technical debt,” or something along those lines. There is this amazing thing that happens where when we talk about AI code, it's always compared against some idealized infinitely capable professional following every best practice, purposefully and carefully crafting every line. Which is fantasy. Most of you are cr…

> AI is absolutely imperfect, just like teams of human developers. The old "nothing's perfect therefore everything is equally imperfect" fallacy. It's not a binary. While everything is flawed, somethings are more flawed than others. Welcome to the world, it's complex. > when we talk about AI code, it's always compared against some idealized Have you ever seen a development mailing list? Seems like when human code is…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?

#775

Post by mclightning »

adamtaylor_13 wrote: post #750
tpdly wrote: post #684

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you undervalue the contribution of internet-scale data to foundation modeling, and because LLMs can obsolete the content they required, I think its fair to characterize it as theft. Obviously RL contributes a lot to capabilities, but the judgement that an LLM uses to 'synthesize information' is born from the training data. The scale of the data really is beyond intuition. books3, for example, would 230 yrs of…

Can you steal something that is free and openly available? I just don't understand this argument. "Theft" feels like a nice, heavy, moral accusation to toss at those you're debating with, but the actual prerequisites for theft don't even exist in this situation.

It is a lot more complicated than that. Your content is not simply used, copied, or even just simply distributed. The very terrain that you produce, distribute, represent your content has shifted due to the mechanics of it. Anything you produce is grabbed into AI summaries. They're grabbed into the training data. Humans produce free/open materials for many reasons. A lot of them don't have room to breathe and gain structure due to AI siphoning the entire atmosphere of web; eg communities

Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?

#776

Post by trumpdong »

pj_mukh wrote: post #768
trumpdong wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are currently, but at the scale AI corps are trying to deploy at they'll be the largest user of electricity.

"largest user of electricity" Compared to what? More than all heavy industry? All residential usage for a given sector? Seems like a tall ask requiring some modeling.

Yep they think they'll use more than all heavy industry, which they also think they'll make obsolete. The plans are for something like, a DC in every city that each uses as much electricity as the whole state currently does. Yes it's completely insane.

Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?

#777

Post by Izkata »

hn_throw2025 wrote: post #257
csbartus wrote: post #99

It's a gut feeling. We _know_ LLMs can't be _that_ good as they are promoted. I've spent the last 6 months creating a production grade app from scratch with Claude where I wrote no single line of code. I've reviewed code and it was looking good, almost completely following my templates, workflows, skills. Now I've started to make minor manual updates and I'm horrified. Claude has no idea why there were those template…

> No consistency, chaotic application of different conventions, duplicated code, ghost code (does nothing), and perhaps more as I'm digging in. I didn’t understand this part. You said you reviewed the code and it was looking good, so how did the cruft creep in? Were you reviewing every diff, or taking an occasional sample?

Reviewing is a very different mindset than writing it yourself. You don't have all the context you would have built up had you done it, and it's much much more difficult to think through all cases. So I'm thinking: The individual changes all looked good in isolation, and they started borderline rubber-stamping the changes without stepping back to think about the larger context.

Looking at the individual changes in isolation, it's harder to see it doesn't match other conventions, duplicates code, removes or disables paths without cleaning up, etc. I'll bet there's also some crazy spaghetti code in there, from helping a co-worker clean up their Ai-generated code that they didn't understand.

Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?

#778

Post by FabHK »

trumpdong wrote: post #403
FabHK wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crypto has no technological merit compared to earlier solutions, except "permissonlessness", which enables the circumvention of rules and regulations (at huge expense). But, sure, enabling crime is "doing something".

Enabling crime is massive. You have to remember that "crime" includes things like "selling abortion pills", "selling LSD", "selling ivermectin" and of course "supporting Palestine Action"

Yes. And while the law sometimes gets things wrong, in general it is good that it tries do distinguish between useful and harmful things, morally right and morally wrong.

And a tool that serves only to subvert the law (at enormous expense) does not strike me as valuable or worth supporting.

NB: I support the outcome of the 1990's crypto war (in the good old days when "crypto" meant cryptography, not crime-token), namely the right to private uncensored unrestricted communication. But a private uncensored unrestricted way of sending around money is a terrible idea, as we can see empirically.

Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?

#780

Post by bulbar »

fasterik wrote: post #513
4k0hz wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This problem only exists because of the marketing move to call anything even slightly ML related "AI". I see it as a double edged sword. People that want the category of AI to succeed can claim a victory when someone uses it to approximate protien folding and invent new drugs. But that also means the entire field is constantly being dragged down by low quality vibe coded sites, slop videos on social media, whatever h…

>This problem only exists because of the marketing move to call anything even slightly ML related "AI". We need to remember what "Artificial Intelligence" actually means. It refers to the field of research starting in the 1950's developing algorithms related to combinatorial search, planning, and reasoning. Machine Learning isn't AI in the sci-fi movie sense, but it's among the topics you'll find in a textbook like R…

AI effectively has always been "currently best methods that mimic human decision making".
Post reply on HN