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

Why we don’t use AI

yarnspinner.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 86 posts

Re: Why we don’t use AI

#71

Post by poulpy123 »

munksbeer wrote: post #69
pu_pe wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the optimistic take. The pessimistic one is that we, people who need to work jobs to survive, are not an intrinsic part of human existence and will be obsolete and/or left to die once we no longer have an economic purpose.

I can't see that being a realistic outcome. We're a long, long way from that, if it is possible. Billionaires are only billionaires because people buy their company shares. If no-one has any money and we're consigned to scrape in the dust for food, what will billionaires do? Who will buy their products, their shares? Somehow there is always this huge leap between "Strong AI" -> stuff happens -> "about 10k people live…

Sorry but you misunderstand how things work.

Money is a tool that has no value by itself. Billionaires are billionaires because they get a much bigger part of the work their group is producing (the group can be one company, a region, a country or the whole world depending on how you see things). If AI does the work instead of people, it will change nothing for them.

You can be optimistic (it will self regulate and everyone will benefit from AI) or pessimistic (only the billionaire class will benefit from AI). But in any case, there will be no need to sell products or share if there is a class of artificial slaves that can replace workers

Re: Why we don’t use AI

#72

Post by poulpy123 »

rendang wrote: post #10

One could probably think of dozens of reasonable arguments for avoiding LLM use, but this one is awful. If LLMs actually are able to get more work done with fewer people aka "firing people" that would be wonderful for humankind. If you disagree and like getting less work done with more people, you are welcome to forego tractors, dishwashers, the steam engine, and all the rest.

I would like for an AI to do my work, unfortunately I have to buy food and pay my rent.

The Industrial Revolution caused a great deal of damage. It was a net positive in the long term because new jobs were created to replace those that were lost, but it took decades and enormous violence. Now, the promise of AI is that it will be more efficient than any human being. If this becomes a reality, there will be, by definition, no new jobs created for the people replaced by AI.

Re: Why we don’t use AI

#73

Post by poulpy123 »

UqWBcuFx6NV4r wrote: post #17
rendang wrote: post #10

One could probably think of dozens of reasonable arguments for avoiding LLM use, but this one is awful. If LLMs actually are able to get more work done with fewer people aka "firing people" that would be wonderful for humankind. If you disagree and like getting less work done with more people, you are welcome to forego tractors, dishwashers, the steam engine, and all the rest.

Yeah. This has been an interesting cultural shift, especially with “the kids”. I’ve had at least a few people passionately tell me that using (non-generative, non-LLM) AI to assist with social network content moderation, is unethical, because it takes away jobs from people. Mind you, these are jobs in which people are exposed to CSAM, gore, etc. A fact that does not dissuade people of this view. There are certainly s…

Last time I checked, most people needed a "jerb" to buy food, have a shelter or provide their children. So when the promise is to lose this "jerb" they are fully in the right to be scared.

Re: Why we don’t use AI

#74

Post by poulpy123 »

majormajor wrote: post #31
UqWBcuFx6NV4r wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. This has been an interesting cultural shift, especially with “the kids”. I’ve had at least a few people passionately tell me that using (non-generative, non-LLM) AI to assist with social network content moderation, is unethical, because it takes away jobs from people. Mind you, these are jobs in which people are exposed to CSAM, gore, etc. A fact that does not dissuade people of this view. There are certainly s…

I can't speak to outside the US, but here companies have gotten much more worker-hostile in the last 30 years and generally the economy has not delivered a bunch of wonderful new jobs to replace the ones that the information age already eliminated (let alone the ones that people are trying to eliminate now). A lot of new job growth is in relatively lower-paying and lower-stability roles. Forty years ago I would've ha…

I can talk as a non American: it's the same everywhere in the countries where no new jobs are created. It's maybe less visible when the law is more protective, but at the end a social security net is still a net and works only as long as the rest is sturdy

Re: Why we don’t use AI

#76

Post by tpm »

thefz wrote: post #60
barishnamazov wrote: post #11

I struggle with the "good guys vs bad guys" framing here. Is a small indie dev "dodgy" if they use AI to unblock a tricky C# problem so they can actually finish their game? Yarn Spinner seems to conflate "Enterprise Scale Replacement" (firing 500 support staff) with "assistive tooling" (a solo dev using GenAI for texture variants). By drawing such a hard line, they might be signaling virtue to their base, but they ar…

> Is a small indie dev "dodgy" if they use AI to unblock a tricky C# problem so they can actually finish their game? What about learning the tools you use everyday by yourself?

That's very hard if not impossible in current dev environment to do by yourself. You simply can't learn every part of every tool and if it's something only used rarely there is little reason to learn too much about it. You also want to build and ship in some reasonable timeframe.

Re: Why we don’t use AI

#77

Post by gamblor956 »

barishnamazov wrote: post #11

I struggle with the "good guys vs bad guys" framing here. Is a small indie dev "dodgy" if they use AI to unblock a tricky C# problem so they can actually finish their game? Yarn Spinner seems to conflate "Enterprise Scale Replacement" (firing 500 support staff) with "assistive tooling" (a solo dev using GenAI for texture variants). By drawing such a hard line, they might be signaling virtue to their base, but they ar…

I think that presumes that an LLM is capable of "unblocking a tricky C# problem" that a group of humans cannot with research. LLMs don't understand the code they output; they just regurgitate code that's already in their training set (the proof is in the pudding; see the many posts on HN about these LLM coding assistants outputting copyrighted code token for token).

So if the tricky C# problem isn't already in their data set, the output of the LLM is, at best, random crap. Even the worst human effort would exceed the output of the LLM, and that is the average case for any "tricky" problem. LLMs are fundamentally only useful on the most common types of problems that are can better be addressed by using frameworks, plugins, or APIs.

(And on that note: every programmer I've met who says that LLM coding agents 10x'd their output is the type of programmer that would have been PIP'd or fired 10 years ago for incompetence. We used to call them "code monkeys" for obvious reasons. Junior programmers think that LLM coding agents are awesome because they don't have the experience or skill to understand just how bad the output of LLM coding agents is, and the few that survive in the industry long enough to become senior programmers will laugh at their younger selves at how much of an unmaintainable mess they made vibe coding.)

Re: Why we don’t use AI

#78

Post by bitbasher »

When IDEs entered the market, they were the talk of the town. Improve your programming speed. Blazingly fast refactoring. A graphical debugger and logging information. Intellisense, inline documentation and the whole nine yards.

Many developers never bothered with IDEs. We were happy using Vim, Emacs and many of us continue to do so today.

It's not surprising the first "innovation" was agentic programming with a modified IDE.

I'm sure many people will enjoy their new IDEs. I don't enjoy it. I enjoy doing things a different way.

Re: Why we don’t use AI

#79

Post by xyzsparetimexyz »

barishnamazov wrote: post #11

I struggle with the "good guys vs bad guys" framing here. Is a small indie dev "dodgy" if they use AI to unblock a tricky C# problem so they can actually finish their game? Yarn Spinner seems to conflate "Enterprise Scale Replacement" (firing 500 support staff) with "assistive tooling" (a solo dev using GenAI for texture variants). By drawing such a hard line, they might be signaling virtue to their base, but they ar…

> a solo dev using GenAI for texture variants

While not as bad as firing 500 people, using ai to generate slop (and it is inherently slop due to being generated quickly by ai) is still bad.

Re: Why we don’t use AI

#80

Post by xyzsparetimexyz »

goobert wrote: post #29

It's like saying we won't use compilers because it puts all the people who would manually create punch cards out of a job

No it's not. AI is a lossy snapshot of existing internet content. It's not going to innovate by virtue of what it is. It's a Chinese room using human language to pretend to be one of us. It's disgusting.
Post reply on HN