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

I quit. The clankers won

dbushell.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 515 posts

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#31

Post by xnorswap »

farfatched wrote: post #18

> The AI industry is 99% hype; a billion dollar industrial complex to put a price tag on creation. At this point if you believe AI is ‘just a tool’ you’re wilfully ignoring the harm. > (Regardless, why do I keep being told it’s an ‘extreme’ stance if I decide not to buy something?) > The 1% utility AI has is overshadowed by the overwhelming mediocracy it regurgitates. This sort of reasoning is why you might have been…

Yes, declaring AI to be 99% hype just turns away people like me from what the author has to say.

I was an AI sceptic for a long time until toward the end of last year when I seriously evaluated them, and came to realise it could add tremendous value.

When someone comes along and declares that it's all hype, it goes against my experience that it's getting things done.

I can also see the harm it does, and I hope the tooling improves to reduce that harm. For example, there's a significant lack of caching in the tooling. It's constantly re-reading the same files every day, and more harmfully, constantly fetching the same help pages and blog-posts from the web.

If it had a generous built in HTTP cache, and instruction to maximise use of the cache, then it could avoid a lot of re-fetching of content, which would help reduce the harms.

Declaring my experience to be invalid and based on nothing but hype doesn't engage people like me at all.

And it's the people like me, the middle-of-the-road developer working on enterprise software, that either need convincing to not use the tools, or for our habits to change to minimise the harm.

Because otherwise we're quietly getting on with using it, potentially destroying forests and lakes as we do.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#32

Post by ramon156 »

bitmasher9 wrote: post #8

Picking out my favorite idea out of many: we do need ways to stay mentally sharp in the age of AI. Writing and publishing is a good one. I also recommend stimulating human conversations and long-form reading. More and more the bar is being lowered. Don’t fall to brain rot. Don’t quite quit. Stay active and engaged, and you’ll begin to stand out among your peers.

I can confidently say that, yes, reading helps a lot. My mental model has shifted a bit that words are cheap (printing -> writing -> typing -> generating) and that we should accept there is something like high quality text.

I haven't really been a reader, but I can definitely notice when a book/text is "hard". I'm currently reading the old testament, and I understand very little (even the oxford one that has a lot of annotations is hard for me). I like this, because its a measurement of what I don't know (if that makes sense).

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#33

Post by flir »

muskstinks wrote: post #13

One problem writing does have: we grew up in a massive changing and progressing software writing area. A golden area. Now i still show clean code videos from bob and other old things to new hires and young collegues. Java got more features, given but the golden area of discovery is over. The new big thing is ai and i'm curious to see how it will feel to write real agents for my company specific use cases. But i'm als…

> But i'm also seeing people so bad in their daily jobs, that I wish to get their salary as tokens to use.

Oof. The modern "Go away or I will replace you with a very small shell script"

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#34

Post by kasey_junk »

xnorswap wrote: post #31
farfatched wrote: post #18

> The AI industry is 99% hype; a billion dollar industrial complex to put a price tag on creation. At this point if you believe AI is ‘just a tool’ you’re wilfully ignoring the harm. > (Regardless, why do I keep being told it’s an ‘extreme’ stance if I decide not to buy something?) > The 1% utility AI has is overshadowed by the overwhelming mediocracy it regurgitates. This sort of reasoning is why you might have been…

Yes, declaring AI to be 99% hype just turns away people like me from what the author has to say. I was an AI sceptic for a long time until toward the end of last year when I seriously evaluated them, and came to realise it could add tremendous value. When someone comes along and declares that it's all hype, it goes against my experience that it's getting things done. I can also see the harm it does, and I hope the to…

It’s worse than that, in the linked “I’ve done my research” they make the tired claim that ai hallucinates api calls. Which while true has not been a practical problem since tool calling was added.

I think the position that ai is morally troubling enough that the downsides out way the positives is perfectly defensible. But the entire argument becomes a joke when you can’t accurately catalog the positives.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#36

Post by EdgeNRoots »

cyanydeez wrote: post #19
bitmasher9 wrote: post #8

Picking out my favorite idea out of many: we do need ways to stay mentally sharp in the age of AI. Writing and publishing is a good one. I also recommend stimulating human conversations and long-form reading. More and more the bar is being lowered. Don’t fall to brain rot. Don’t quite quit. Stay active and engaged, and you’ll begin to stand out among your peers.

I'm pretty sure all this AI is built on top of Silicon valley's technobabble of "permanent underclass" which seems to have zero introspection as to why we're just going to accept the feudal overlords of technology. But besides that, it's interesting so many people are willing to tailor their entire workflow and product to indeterminate machines and business culture. I recommend everyone stop using these infernal clou…

I agree on the over-reliance part, but I don’t think it’s AI itself .It’s how people choose to use it.

Most people are outsourcing thinking instead of using it to go deeper. The tools aren’t the problem, the default behavior is.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#37

Post by zzzeek »

rants about AI from people who have already decided up front to never actually attempt to use the tools (which seems to be the case here from the post and the other one it links) are not really providing any value to the discourse.

There is nothing new about using machinery to automate boring / repetitive tasks, including the wall of resistance that comes up. But it should be clear that genuinely useful tooling and automation tends to become a normal part of life, from the plow, to the printing press, to the dishwasher, to digital video editing, to autocorrect, and now to large language models.

There's a lot that has to be worked out with LLMs in particular as they are now encroaching heavily upon human creativity and thought. This is an extremely important topic. But rants like these with terms like "the plagarism machine" and "the solution is that we all must vow to never use AI in any shape or form" are not really contributing.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#38

Post by bombcar »

You have to write for yourself. People have said this for years, decades, millennia even - but nobody really believes that writing to an audience of zero (or one, if Mom is still around) is worth it.

Everyone wants to be a famous author, or at least a published/somewhat acknowledged one; few are willing to write their novel and be satisfied with zero or near-zero sales/readings.

But that is exactly what you need to do, especially in the age of AI. Everyone who was "in it to win it" (think linkedinslop which existed before AI) is going to certainly use AI - because they do not give a shit about the quality of themselves - they just want the result.

And you can only become a writer (unpublished, unread, or no) by doing the writing - it takes time (10,000 hours?) that cannot be replaced by AI, just like you can't have the body of a marathon runner without running (yes, yes, the joke). You may be able to get 26 miles and change away, even very fast, but unless you personally do the running of that distance without cheating, you will not get the inherent benefits.

And if you instruct an AI, or another human even, to write for you, you may get some of the results you want, but you won't have changed to become a writer.

We shouldn't celebrate the successful blogs; they're already rewarded enough. It's celebrating the unsuccessful blogs that is needed - even if, frankly, the vast majority of them are sub-AI levels of crap it is still a human changing and progressing behind them.

Babies fall over a lot but unless you take them out of the stroller and let them do so, they'll never progress to crawling, walking, running.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#40

Post by beeflet »

bombcar wrote: post #29
jordanb wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just because they invented cars doesn't mean you stop jogging. They literally made it a crime to walk down the street.

across the street, no? It's also a crime to jog on the railroad tracks.

If it's a crime to jog on railroad tracks, and the avalibility of rail makes it so that everything you need is only accessible by rail, I conclude that rail prevents you from jogging.
Post reply on HN