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Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

blog.jakesaunders.dev

131–140 of 570 posts

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#131
post #95
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just the absolute expenditure. It's the type of expenditure. https://www.selc.org/news/resistance-against-elon-musks-xai-...

[flagged]

Interesting that you accuse your parent of political posturing at the end of your post, which indeed contains plenty political posturing.

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI is fine. The hype is annoying. I'm finding the detractors worse than the hype, because it seems like a certain subset of detractors [0] formed their opinion on AI in late 2022/early 2023 when ChatGPT came out (REALLY!? Over 3 years ago!?) and then never updated their opinions since then. They'll say things like "why would I want to consume X amount of energy and Y amount of water just to get a wrong answer?" In…

Claude Opus 4.6 regularly makes up shit and hallucinates. I'm not a detractor by any means but "exceptionally rare" is fantasyland.

Can vouch for this, plus, when it does work, stuff can take forever. Then, if I let it unsupervised, higher risk of doing the wrong thing. If I supervise it, then I become agent nanny.

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#134
post #18

AI is fine . The hype is annoying. What's even worse though are the incredible amounts of money and energy that are being thrown at it, with no regard for the consequences, in times of record inequality and looming climate apocalypse. AI is the red herring that'll waste all our attention until it's too late.

> AI is fine. The hype is annoying. I'm finding the detractors worse than the hype, because it seems like a certain subset of detractors [0] formed their opinion on AI in late 2022/early 2023 when ChatGPT came out (REALLY!? Over 3 years ago!?) and then never updated their opinions since then. They'll say things like "why would I want to consume X amount of energy and Y amount of water just to get a wrong answer?" In…

The detractors are a lot less numerous and certainly a lot less preachy than the ones on the hype train.

AI is alright. It's moderately useful, in certain contexts it speeds me up a lot, in other contexts not so much.

I also think that the economics of it make no sense and that it is, generally, a destructive technology. But it's not up to me to fix anything, I just try to keep on top of best practices while I need to pay bills.

The economics bit is not my problem though. If all AI companies go bust and AI services disappear I can 100% manage without it.

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#135
post #95
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just the absolute expenditure. It's the type of expenditure. https://www.selc.org/news/resistance-against-elon-musks-xai-...

[flagged]

Those links are about air pollution, not carbon emissions. You're engaging in some political posturing of your own.

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#137

What I miss is people showing off their hand-crafted libraries or frameworks. That’s become way less common now that everyone is building a layer up the stack. I fear we’ll be stuck in a permanent state of using Tailwind and React and all the LLM-favored libraries as they were frozen in time at the beginning of 2025. Then again, that’ll be the agent’s problem, not mine… All that said, it’s extremely exciting. I’ve be…

If it helps, I've mostly been using AI to implement things in the craziest languages I can justify.

I write Typescript and SQL by day, my last two personal projects were Rust and Perl.

I do worry that I'm not learning them as deeply, but I am learning them and without AI as an accelerant I probably wouldn't be trying them at all.

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#138
post #18

AI is fine . The hype is annoying. What's even worse though are the incredible amounts of money and energy that are being thrown at it, with no regard for the consequences, in times of record inequality and looming climate apocalypse. AI is the red herring that'll waste all our attention until it's too late.

How did HN become this kind of website?

Because AI is attacking, plagiarizing, competing with, and destroying the most common industry of people here on HN, so suddenly it mattered more to people who were previously unaffected.

Some people have been concerned with this kind of politics all along. Some people are realizing they should be now, because of AI. And that's okay; both groups can still work together.

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#139
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

No, it’s… fine. Useful in a limited capacity. Not the machine god, but not machine Satan either. The reality is kind of boring.

This isn't even our first AI hype cycle. That happened in the late 70s-80s. Every lab and agency needed Lisp machines to teach computers how to identify Russian missiles—or targets. The "GOFAI" techniques did not live up to the expectations of them, but they settled into niches where they were tremendously useful, and life went on. The same will happen with today's matmul-as-a-service AI.

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#140
post #18

AI is fine . The hype is annoying. What's even worse though are the incredible amounts of money and energy that are being thrown at it, with no regard for the consequences, in times of record inequality and looming climate apocalypse. AI is the red herring that'll waste all our attention until it's too late.

> AI is fine. The hype is annoying. I'm finding the detractors worse than the hype, because it seems like a certain subset of detractors [0] formed their opinion on AI in late 2022/early 2023 when ChatGPT came out (REALLY!? Over 3 years ago!?) and then never updated their opinions since then. They'll say things like "why would I want to consume X amount of energy and Y amount of water just to get a wrong answer?" In…

You do realize though that using Claude Desktop to "search" through confluence is like paying a world class architect on the hour just to give you some tips on how to layout your small loft to maximize sunlight.

This is such a perfect example of the mania behind this rollout.

There's no way you can make the financials work here compared to JetBrains spending the same millions spent on AI infrastructure and instead building better search in Confluence. Confluence search SUCKS, but that's just a lack of focus (or resources) on building a more complex, more robust solution. It's a wiki.

Either way, making a more robust search is a one time cost that benefits everyone. Instead, you're running a piece of software that goes directly to Anthropic's bank account, and to the data centers and to hyper scalers. Every single query must be re-run from scratch, costing your company a fortune, that if not managed properly will come out of spending that money elsewhere.

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