Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?

news.ycombinator.com

341–350 of 812 posts

Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?

#341
post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same experience. But that's simply because you think you're experienced but the OP knows that you're just deluding yourself. Just kidding. More seriously, I think this is a true reflection of a cultural phenomena. All discussions have become more polarized. There is a more of a generational divide in perception and discussion. I would also say there is a loss of nuance. To complicate this even further there is a real…

> There is a more of a generational divide in perception and discussion. I would also say there is a loss of nuance. The youth are facing an enormous employment crisis. Many have found themselves completely unemployable through no fault of their own. And then AI leaders go around to commencement speeches to rub it in. There's no loss of nuance, the situation has just escalated a lot.

And then AI leaders go around to commencement speeches to rub it in.

This is a good example of anti-AI bias.

This didn’t happen. Out of thousands of commencement speeches across the country, a handful of speakers, none of whom are “AI leaders”, mentioned AI in passing and students booed.

So yeah, I’d say there’s a loss of nuance.

Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?

#342
The overwhelming majority of people don't just dislike AI but are aggressively anti-clanker. Tech is a bubble of mass AI psychosis so you might miss this fact, but it very much is the exception not the norm.

For many if us, being anti-clanker in our day to day jobs has an actual negative impact on our careers and livelihoods so we need to shut up and hide the obvious reality anyone with more than 3 braincells can clearly grasp. HN is anonymous so you can see what people actually think instead of what they're forced to pretend they think at work in order to not be punished by our billionaire-owned companies.

We particularly hate the malinche retards like you lining up to glaze AI. Do you think it makes you special or something? That you'll be the ones to survive layoffs and be AI tech leads once the Epstein class pushing clankers cleans house?

Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?

#343

> 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…

I am with you. Over the last 40 years I've spent a great many hours enjoying the process of creating software. I did a PhD in mechanical engineering, but the ductility of programming won me over. I started following PG when I read his two Lisp books many years ago, and some of his examples (implement OOP in one chapter!) blew my mind. And they enabled my first company.

These days, however, my time is spent managing agents. I have lost the joy of craftsmanship. I don't spend my day in emacs anymore.

But I am learning to enjoy it. Maybe because I have always had a utilitarian streak, and I actually care for the ends, so husbanding incredibly efficient means is thrilling. I am actually having fun.

Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?

#344
post #161
post #14

It'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…

Thanks for putting it this way. I have to admit I was really astonished by the question as I feel like HN is very much pro-AI at least in the sense that there is more AI promotion on HN than there is AI acceptance among people in the real world. It's been months if not years since most of the posts are about genAI, and in a largely favorable way. It's actually quite fascinating that for some people it feels like the…

I find it somewhat encouraging to hear that the devoted AI shills have not managed to generate the artificial consensus / synthetic consent that they seem to have been intending to.

Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?

#345

>AI “writes bad code,” “introduces bugs,” “creates technical debt,” or something along those lines. Which is undeniably true. I am not "anti-AI", in fact, it helps me immensely in my current job, but in my experience, using these tools still requires quite a lot of involvement. Otherwise, updating existing or adding new functionality becomes increasingly difficult as the system grows. The funniest thing is that when…

Calling it AI is where the problem lies. An LLM is not AI. It is a next token prediction function. That is a very powerful function but just one function out of millions in the overall stack. As an engineer you still have to have the right framework to call that function with the right inputs at the right places and validate the results. But if you focus on the technical details and not the marketing hype you can get amazing results in the areas where it works.

Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?

#346
If you think HN crowd is Anti AI, try to talk to a random person on the street. HN crowd is generally more measured on the topic. Current AI is not the perfect solution, and comes with many many soci economic problems and general HN statement reflects that alongside the mindblowing strides made

Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?

#347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being 10x (or whatever multiplier) faster at programming doesn't mean you're going to be 10x faster in designing a product or any other aspect that goes into making a good product. Even if you hired an actual programmer, it'd take a massive amount of time to build a Photoshop clone. Of course, at the end Photoshop is lines of code and it could be output as is, end to end. One problem is that users aren't generally gi…

> Of course, at the end Photoshop is lines of code and it could be output as is, end to end And yet it’s not. > LLMs also take a relatively long time to output acceptable code, often taking tens of minutes before giving you a small diff. The larger the codebase, the longer it usually takes to start producing code, even over an hour. The problem is that they don’t generate acceptable code, they generate code that need…

> And yet it’s not.

That was my point as well. That it hasn't been output, even though it could be done by a talented solo developer given enough time, and that current LLMs definitely aren't able to do so.

> The problem is that they don’t generate acceptable code, they generate code that needs to be edited to be acceptable.

You've never had an LLM output a one line bugfix that is correct to the point where you don't have to edit it?

To make things more concrete, here's an example from the creator of Redis on how he utilizes LLMs in programming: https://antirez.com/news/164

Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?

#348
So here is the thing, this community by it's nature is mainly powered by people that actually understand what they are doing, enjoy actually using their brains to make things happen, and are likely filled with the ability to actually create real life changing technology.

AI cannot think, and just processes requests through input and generates output based from training data.

There is no passion, there is no human brain improvement or anything that we as a human race evolve from over time.

The best creations have been creations built by us and will continue to be that way.

Yes, we created AI, but what is next after AI, we still like to create things ourselves which is what fuels the creation of the next best thing.

People who pride themselves on using a prompt to get something output miss out on the intellectual stimulation and brain development that comes with doing the work yourself and collaborating with other humans to get the work done.

These build memories, group bonding, and other things that exist in the real world that will never happen if AI does all the work.

You will also notice those that offload everything to AI are horrible at thinking for themselves over time. It has to be a balance, AI has some great use cases, but should not be used for everything as that takes away the natural challenge we as humans need to have.

I have seen the devaluation of what should be done by seeing a coworker say we built this thing. When I say oh you and your girlfriend built it, amazing, then they say no me and AI did it.... I say so you mean you told it to build that thing. It give a very real false since of capability and accomplishment while not highlighting the hard fact that the prompter is not an engineer, architect, scientist and has not built any real technical skill and wastes away sending prompts to a machine while not actually growing their own capabilities.

Then said person gets frustrated because they are stuck in their job, tired due to vibe coding with no visible results on their investment of time except for loss of money they have spent on tokens. Tokens in little to no financial return is what the bulk of people are seeing because the bulk of us that spend money do not want to see the same vibe coding mess that has been spammed everywhere.

There is also the massive security issues that vibe coded apps have at scale which is very hard for a human to maintain, follow, and keep secure. As we don't know why x code is there and the logic of it being there would need to be reviewed by a human that is the only thing in the equation that can actually think.

So use it as a tool, but still continue to do the bulk of the work yourself so you continue to grow is the best route to success over a very long period of time.

Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?

#349
post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To OP's point, I am curious why a tech forward crowd would consider AI-training/inference anywhere close to a significant contributor of greenhouse gasses? Datacenters are like a tiny blip on emissions plots [1] I think AI is a convenient foil to get people whipped up and out to vote, but I know HN is not the forum for that. The technical data clearly says that closed-loop water coolers don't use that much water and…

> Datacenters are like a tiny blip on emissions plots Maybe in 2023, but what about now?

You think we’ve built that many data centers next to coal fired power plants that the emissions have gotten anywhere close to the emissions of all the iron smelters and the billions of people that commute in gas cars?

We could triple the data centers since 2023 and run them all on coal or natural gas and then maybe they’d even show up as a significant slice on these pie charts.

Our bubbles have blinded us to the scale of the real problem.

Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?

#350

> Over the past six months, there hasn’t been a single day where I’ve checked the HN Best RSS feed without seeing a post about how AI “writes bad code,” “introduces bugs,” “creates technical debt,” or something along those lines. because it's true > Users don’t care whether the code was written by AI or by hand, or which framework you used. They care that the product works. How can you guarantee that it works though?…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN