Why were weavers so anti-mechanical loom? Is it more complicated than that?
Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
211–220 of 812 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#212The root cause if of course AI's role in loss of power on compensation (coding as a skill is no longer as valuable), and loss of power in labor vs capital. It's hard to face this, specially for the one oasis in the job market that pays well.
The contrarian bet is that being able to code (by yourself) may be more valuable in the future. It will certainly become rarer.
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#213It's simply divided. With every such division A vs. B, the A team thinks HN is anti-A and the B team thinks it's anti-B. This is an invariant. You can see from the following megathread, currently on the front page, that HN is by no means anti-AI: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48406174 . Sometimes it just takes the right initial condition (e.g. title) to brin…
While I agree that it's "divided", I wouldn't say "simply". Mentioning AI brings out a sharply negative side of HN that I had not seen before 2023. It is the only subject where, when I have shared that I built something with it, I have gotten derogatory comments claiming I am inexperienced, unintelligent, and that the thing I built (a hobby project) is unimpressive or embarrassing. This has never happened in the deca…
I would say that HN was at least as sharply negative during the cryptocurrency craze. I recall various submissions asking "Why is HN so anti-crypto?" as well.
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#214I don't think it is a large number of people creating this perception, I think it is more their depth of feeling about the issue. I am often struck by the similarity with bigotry about migrants, where they are portrayed as unreliable and undtustworthy entities that are threatening jobs. Simultaneously arguing their inability and ability are problematic. You have a second vein of behaviour that object on more religiou…
It is truly vile to compare concerns about LLMs to anti-immigrant discrimination.
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#215A lot of people on HN are anti- overhyping , which comes across as being opposed to the thing being overhyped. It was similar when cryptocurrency overhyping was popular.
That's what I feel. Whenever I see someone writing something to the effect of “LLMs will replace X” (where X could be literally anything including software developers) I get an intense urge to write something against it. Not something nice, mind you.
I also find takes from the anti-LLM to be exceedingly dumb at times. Oh this text has this and that, it must have been written by LLM and thus is not worth even considering.
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
Respectfully, this looks like coping with the fact that a fundamentally new technology is discovered but people can’t cope with the immensity of it so they end up throwing in shallow and spread out criticisms spanning sovereignty, USA bad, replacing people bad etc. It’s my personal opinion and it looks extremely incurious analysis of what’s going on. Even if a person doesn’t like AI, I would expect a curious person t…
the grandparent commentor described potential future paths of unfettered ai usage. it's not clear why arises the expectation that a discussion of future possibilities must adhere to a contemporary argumentative format (mainly because concrete evidence of future events does not exist). it's your right to interpret this discussion as 'USA bad', personally I think it's very likely that the USA will continue to exercise…
The USA is terrifying from a non-US perspective now, and it's never been great. We're furious at the states and sick of being dependent on its enshittified technology.
Anti-AI sentiment absolutely and correctly has a "USA bad" steak.
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#217It's simply divided. With every such division A vs. B, the A team thinks HN is anti-A and the B team thinks it's anti-B. This is an invariant. You can see from the following megathread, currently on the front page, that HN is by no means anti-AI: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48406174 . Sometimes it just takes the right initial condition (e.g. title) to brin…
While I agree that it's "divided", I wouldn't say "simply". Mentioning AI brings out a sharply negative side of HN that I had not seen before 2023. It is the only subject where, when I have shared that I built something with it, I have gotten derogatory comments claiming I am inexperienced, unintelligent, and that the thing I built (a hobby project) is unimpressive or embarrassing. This has never happened in the deca…
I think there's definitely groups on both sides, and I feel like it's similar to cryptocurrency a few years back. There's people really into it, and in response there's people really against it. On a smaller scale, see for example rust. In contrast there isn't as much vitriol against, say, world hunger because there isn't people very obviously pro-that to push against.
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#218> I’ll probably make a lot of enemies by saying this, do people realize that code is just a means to an end? You will need a lot more to make yourself my enemy, but this is the divisor between us... not that you like to use Claude and I don't. I think it depends a lot on where your interest in (self) development lies. My main motivator has always been to understand how things work, and myself being able to create as…
That's well said and where I ended up as well. This whole thing did reveal that a lot of people really never enjoyed programming at all and only saw it as some irritating necessity. I don't really like that crowds presumption that everyone else disliked it too.
For me working through the programming part is the understanding and solving. Programming languages are pretty beautiful and encourage different ways of thinking. Hopefully we can understand it and contribute.
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#219>> Let’s face it: by the time I manually ship version 1.0 of a product, the AI-assisted version could have been deployed 10x faster. By then, enough real-world feedback would have surfaced to identify the major issues, and tools like Claude Code would make it possible to fix and ship version 2.0 at an incredible pace.
Really depends on what you are shipping, what your users expect and what your personal preference is. I do not want to go 10x on products that need high performance / high reliability, is deployed at large scale where its not easy to undo. But for other stuff, sure why not. The problem is everyone just puts everything in same basket. Either way, AI is useful but not to the same extent people claim it to be.
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#220HN crowd is quite pro-AI. Many reddit forums like r/programming have simply banned AI topics.
"Content about AI and LLMs are considered off-topic with the sole exclusion of deeply technical content about implementation."