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

I don't care how well your "AI" works

fokus.cool

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 808 posts

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#281

Post by intothemild »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #237
TrackerFF wrote: post #188

I get that some people want to be intellectually "pure". Artisans crafting high-quality software, made with love, and all that stuff. But one emerging reality for everyone should be that businesses are swallowing the AI-hype raw. You really need a competent and understanding boss to not be labeled a luddite, because let's be real - LLMs have made everyone more "productive" on paper. Non-coders are churning out small…

> If your org is blindly data/metric driven Are there for profit companies (not non profits, research institutes etc…) that are not metric driven?

Most early stage startups I've been in weren't metric driven. It's impossible when everyone is just working as hard as they can to get it built, to suddenly slow down and start measuring everyone's output.

It's not until later. When it's gotten to a larger size, do you have the resources to be metric driven.

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#282

Post by skydhash »

markbnj wrote: post #201

I think the dangers that LLMs pose to the ability of engineers to earn a living is overstated, while at the same time the superpowers that they hand us don't seem to get much discussion. When I was starting out in the 80's I had to prowl dial-up BBSs or order expensive books and manuals to find out how to do something. I once paid IBM $140 for a manual on the VGA interface so I could answer a question. The turn aroun…

I’m glad you listed the manual example. Usually when people are solving problems, they’re not asking the kind of super targeted question in you second example. Instead it’s an exploration. You read and target the next concept you need to understand. And if you do have this specific question, you want the surrounding context because you’ll likely have more questions after the first.

So what people do is collecting documentations. Give them a glance (or at least the TOC), the start the process to understand the concepts. Sure you can ask the escape code for setting a terminal title, but will it says that not all terminals support that code? Or that piping does not strip out escape codes? That’s the kind of gotchas you can learn from proper manuals.

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#283

Post by bgwalter »

lxgr wrote: post #277
bgwalter wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being anti "AI" has nothing to do with being progressive. Historically, hackers have always rejected bloated tools, especially those that are not under their control and that spy on them and build dossiers like ChatGPT. Hackers have historically derided any website generators or tools like ColdFusion[tm] or VisualStudio[tm] for that matter. It is relatively new that some corporate owned "open" source developers use t…

> hackers have always rejected bloated tools [...] Hackers have historically derided any website generators Ah yes, true hackers would never , say, build a Debian package... Managing complexity has always been part of the game. To a very large extent it is the game. Hate the company selling you a SaaS subscription to the closed-source tool if you want, and push for open-source alternatives, but don't hate the tool, a…

Local alternatives don't work, and you know that.

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#284

Post by lxgr »

ceejayoz wrote: post #257
lxgr wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like various hackers came to various different conclusions from trying them out, then. Why feign surprise about this?

Why not? I was surprised how hard many here fell for the NFT thing, too.

Please, not the old "AI is the new crypto" trope.

Various people have been wrong on various predictions in the past, and it seems to me that any implied strong overlap is anecdotal at best and wishful (why?) thinking at worst.

The only really embarrassing behavior is never updating your priors when your predictions are wrong. Also, if you're always right about all your prognoses, you should probably also not be in the HN comments but on a prediction market, on-chain or traditional :)

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#285

Post by trashb »

stuartjohnson12 wrote: post #8
aforwardslash wrote: post #4

Everytime I read one of these "I don't use AI" posts, the content is either "my code is handcrafted in a mountain spring and blessed by the universe itself, so no AI can match it", or "everything different from what I do is technofascism or ". Maybe Im missing something, but tech is controlled by a handful of companies - always have been; and sometimes code is just code, and AI is just a tool. What am I missing?

There's a lot of overlap between "AI is evil megacapitalism" and "AI is ineffective", and I never understood the latter, but I am increasingly arriving to the understanding that the latter claim isn't real, it's just a soldier in the war being fought over the former.

Have you measured?

https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.09089

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#286

Post by atleastoptimal »

TrackerFF wrote: post #188

I get that some people want to be intellectually "pure". Artisans crafting high-quality software, made with love, and all that stuff. But one emerging reality for everyone should be that businesses are swallowing the AI-hype raw. You really need a competent and understanding boss to not be labeled a luddite, because let's be real - LLMs have made everyone more "productive" on paper. Non-coders are churning out small…

Many people actually are becoming more productive. I know you're using quotes around productive to insulate yourself from the indignity of admitting that AI actually is useful in specific domains.

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#287

Post by rbongers »

I view current LLMs as new kinds of search engines. Ones where you have to re-verify their responses, but on the other hand can answer long and vague queries.

I really don't see the harm in using them this way that can't also be said about traditional search engines. Search engines already use algorithms, it's just swapping out the algorithm and interface. Search engines can bias our understanding of anything as much as any LLM, assuming you attempt to actually verify information you get from an LLM.

I'm of the opinion that if you think LLMs are bad without exception, you should either question how we use technology at all or question this idea that they are impossible to use responsibly. However I do acknowledge that people criticize LLMs while justifying their usage, and I could just be doing the same thing.

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#288

Post by FuriouslyAdrift »

bgwalter wrote: post #265
easterncalculus wrote: post #244

> I find it particularly disillusioning to realize how deep the LLM brainworm is able to eat itself even into progressive hacker circles. That's the thing, hacker circles didn't always have this 'progressive' luddite mentality. This is the culture that replaced hacker culture. I don't like AI, generally. I am skeptical of corporate influence, I doubt AI 2027 and so-called 'AGI'. I'm certain we'll be "five years away"…

Being anti "AI" has nothing to do with being progressive. Historically, hackers have always rejected bloated tools, especially those that are not under their control and that spy on them and build dossiers like ChatGPT. Hackers have historically derided any website generators or tools like ColdFusion[tm] or VisualStudio[tm] for that matter. It is relatively new that some corporate owned "open" source developers use t…

VSCodium is the open source "clean" build of VS Code without all the Microsoft telemetry and under MIT license.

https://vscodium.com/

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#289

Post by forgetfulness »

bgwalter wrote: post #265
easterncalculus wrote: post #244

> I find it particularly disillusioning to realize how deep the LLM brainworm is able to eat itself even into progressive hacker circles. That's the thing, hacker circles didn't always have this 'progressive' luddite mentality. This is the culture that replaced hacker culture. I don't like AI, generally. I am skeptical of corporate influence, I doubt AI 2027 and so-called 'AGI'. I'm certain we'll be "five years away"…

Being anti "AI" has nothing to do with being progressive. Historically, hackers have always rejected bloated tools, especially those that are not under their control and that spy on them and build dossiers like ChatGPT. Hackers have historically derided any website generators or tools like ColdFusion[tm] or VisualStudio[tm] for that matter. It is relatively new that some corporate owned "open" source developers use t…

Hackers never had a very cohesive and consistent ideology or moral framework, we heard non stop of the exploits of people funded as part of Cold War military pork projects that got the plug pulled eventually, but some antipathy and mistrust of the powerful and belief in the power of knowledge were recurrent themes nonetheless

So why is it a surprise that hackers mistrust these tools pushed by megacorps, that also sell surveillance to governments, with “suits” promising other “suits” that they’ll be making knowledge obsolete? That people will no longer need to use their brains, that people with knowledge won’t be useful?

It’s not Luddism that people with an ethos of empowering the individual with knowledge are resisting these forces

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#290

Post by the__alchemist »

I am getting tilted by both corp AI hype and the luddites like this. If you don't think that term is appropriate, then I am not sure if it's ever appropriate to use it in the general sense. The "I know you will say you use it appropriately but others don't" pre-emption is something I have seen before, and it isn't convincing.

This article lacks nuance, and could be summarized as "LLMs are bad" Later, I suspect this author (and others of this archetype) will moderate and lament "What I really meant was: I don't like corporations lying about LLMs, or using them maliciously; I didn't imply they don't have uses". The words in the article do not support this.

I believe this pattern is rooted in social-justice-oriented (Is that still the term?) USA left politics. I offer no explanation for this conflation, but an observation.

Post reply on HN