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I Am Tired of AI

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Re: I Am Tired of AI

#331

In Star Trek, one thing that I always found weird as a kid is they didn't have TVs. Even if the holodeck is a much better experience, I imagine sometimes you would want to watch a movie and not be in the movie. Did the future not have works like No Country for Old Men or comedies like Monty Python, or even just stuff like live sports and the news? Nowadays we know why the crew of the enterprise all go to live perform…

That's actually a good point. I'm curious to see if people will keep making selfies everywhere they go after they realize that you can take a selfie at home and have an AI create an image that looks like you are somewhere else.

"This is me in front of the Statue of Liberty

- Oh, are you in NYC?

- Nope, it's a snap filter"

Somehow selfies should lose value, right?

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What fascinates me about your comment is that you are expressing that you trusted what you read before. For me, LLMs don't change anything. I already questioned the information before and continue to do so. Why do you think that you could trust what you read before? Is it now harder for you to distinguish false information, and if so, why?

> For me, LLMs don't change anything. I already questioned the information before and continue to do so. I also did, but LLM increased the volume of content, which forces my brain first try to identify if content is generated by LLMs, which is consuming a lot of energy and makes brain even less focused, because now it's primary goal is skimming quickly to identify, instead of absorbing first and then analyzing info

The web being polluted only makes me ignore more of it.

You already know some of the more trustworthy sources of information, you don't need to read a random blog which will require a lot more effort to verify.

Even here on hackernews, I ignore like 90% of the spam people post. A lot of posts here are extremely low effort blogs adding zero value to anything, and I don't even want to think whether someone wasted their own time writing that or used some LLM, it's worthless in both cases.

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#333
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> But I’m pretty sure I can do without all that ... test cases ... Test cases? I did a Show HN [1] a couple of days back for a UI library built almost entirely with AI. Gpt-o1 generated these test cases for me: https://github.com/webjsx/webjsx/tree/main/src/test - in minutes instead of days. The quality of test cases are comparable to what a human would produce. 75% of the code I've written in the last one year has b…

That means the code you wrote must have been pretty boring and repeatable. No way AI would produce code for, for example, proprietary hardware solutions. Try AI with something which isn't already on StackOverflow. Besides, I'd rather spent hours on writing a code, than trying to explain a stupid bot what I want and reshape it later anyway.

Also the most useful and expensive testcases require understanding of the whole project. You need to validate the functionality from end-to-end and also that system does not crash for unexpected things and so on. AIs don't have that level understanding as "a whole" yet.

For sure, simple unit tests are easy to generate with AI.

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#334
I fully agree with this sentiment, also interesting to see Bas Dijkstra being featured on this platform.

Another article that touches on a lot of the issues I have with the place AI currently occupies in the landscape is this excellent article: https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/i-will-fucking-piledrive-you...

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#335
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Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would never have imagined hackers becoming copyright zealots advocating for lawsuits. I must be getting old but I still remember the Pirate Bay trial as if it was yesterday.

The common denominator is big corporations trying to screw us over for profit, using their immense wealth as a battering ram. So, capitalism. It's taboo to criticize that though.

> It's taboo to criticize that though

In what world is this taboo? That critique comes back in at least half the HN threads about AI.

Watch any non-technical video about AI on Youtube and it will mention people being worried of the power of mega-corporations.

Your take is about as taboo as wearing a Che Guevara tshirt.

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#336
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Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one claimed humans are perfect. But gen AI is a force multiplier for every problem we had to deal with. It's just completely different scale. Your brain is about to be DDOSed by junk content. Of course, gen AI is just a tool that can be used for good or bad, but spam, targeted misinformation campaigns, and garbage content in general is one area that will be most amplified because it became so low effort and they d…

> Your brain is about to be DDOSed by junk content. It's not the best analogy because there's already more junk out there than can fit through the limited bandwidth available to my brain, and yet I'm still (vaguely) functional. So how do I avoid the junk now? Rough and ready trust metrics, I guess. Which of those will still work when the spam's 10x more human? I think the recommendations of friends will still work, a…

So you're basically sheltering yourself and seeking human curated content? Good for you, I follow similar strategy. How do you propose we apply this solution for the masses in today's digital age? or you're just saying 'each on their own'?

Sadly, you seem to not be looking further than your nose. We are not talking about just you and me here. Less tech literate people are the ones at a disadvantage and need protection the most.

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#337
What I'm really tired of is people completely misrepresenting the Luddites as if they were simply anti-progress or anti-technology cult or whatever and nothing else. Kinda hilariously sad that the propaganda of the time managed to win over the genuine concerns that Luddites had about inhumane working environments & conditions.

It's very telling that the rabid AI sycophants are painting anyone who has doubts about the direction AI will take the world as some sort of anti-progress lunatic, calling them luddites despite not knowing the actual history involved. The delicious irony of their stances aligning with the people who were okay with using child labor and mistreating workers en-masse is not lost on me.

My hope is that AI does happen, and that the first people to rot away because of it are exactly the AI sycophants hell-bent on destroying everything in the name of "progress", AKA making some rich psychopaths like Sam Altman unfathomably rich and powerful to the detriment of everyone else.

A good HN thread on the topic of luddites, as it were: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37664682

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#338

I am tired and hungry… The thing I’m tired of is elites stealing everything under the sun to feed these models. So funny that copyright is important when it protects elites but not when a billion thefts are committed by LLM folks. Poor incentives for creators to create stuff if it just gets stolen and replicated by AI. I’m hungry for more lawsuits. The biggest theft in human history by these gang of thieves should be…

I like the stone soup narrative on AI. It was mentioned in a recent Complexity podcast, I think by Alison Gopnik of SFI. It's analogous to the Pragmatic Programmar story about stone soup, paraphrasing: Basically you start with a stone in a pot of water — a neural net technology that does nothing meaningful but looks interesting. You say: "the soup is almost done, but would taste better given a bunch of training data.…

First gen models trained on books directly. Latest Phi distilled textbook-like knowledge down from disparate sources to create novel training data. They are all fairly open about this change and some are even allowing upset publishers to confirm that their work wasn't used directly. So stones and ionized water go in the soup.

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#339

I'm not tired, I'm afraid. First, I'm afraid of technological unemployment. In the past, automation meant that workers could move into non-automated jobs, if they were skilled enough. But superhuman AI seems now only few years away. It will be our last invention, it will mean total automation. There will be hardly any, if any, jobs left only a human can do. Many countries will likely move away from a job-based market…

>But superhuman AI seems now only few years away Seems unreasonable. You are afraid because marketing gurus like Altman made you believe that a frog that can make bigger leap than before will be able to fly.

> If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that something is possible, he is almost certainly right

- Arthur C. Clarke

Geoffrey Hinton is a 76 year old Turing Award* winner. What more do you want?

*Corrected by kranner

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Writing a text of decent quality used to constitute proof of work. This is now no longer the case, and we haven't adapted to this assumption becoming invalid. For example, when applying to a job, your cover letter used to count as proof of work. The contents are less important than the fact that you put some amount of effort in it, enough to prove that you care about this specific vacancy. Now this basic assumption h…

This. I am very picky about how I use ML still, but it is unsurpassed as a virtual editor. It can clean up grammar and rephrase things in a very light way, but it gives my prose the polish I want. The thing is, I am a very decent writer. I wrote professionally for 18 years as a part of my job delivering reports of high quality as my work product. So, it really helps that I know exactly what “good” looks like by my st…

As usual, LLMs are an excellent tool when you already have a decent understanding of the field you're interested in using them in. Which is not the case of people posting in social media or creating their first programs. That's where the dullness and noise come from.

The noise ground has been elevated 100x by LLMs. It was already bad before but it's accelerated the trend.

So, yes, we should have never been trusting anything online but before LLMs we could rely on our brains to quickly identify the bad. Nowadays, it's exhausting. Maybe we need a LLM trained on spotting LLMs.

This month, I, with decades of experience, used Claude Dev as an experiment to create a small automation tool. After countless manual fixes, it finally worked and I was happy. Until I gave thr whole thing a decent look again and realized what a piece of garbage I had created. It's exhausting to be on the lookout for these situations. I prefer to think things through myself, it's a more rewarding experience with better end results anyway.

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