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

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

#381

Post by JKCalhoun »

It feels like the "Hype Wave" is going through oscillations before it damps down.

You know, it starts with hype about this new thing that is, perhaps, smarter than humans—or at least may soon be. And then the backlash comes and AI's reputation follows in descension.

And from such backlash and hate, some people start to say, "Hey, it's not so bad. It works for me." And maybe AI's reputation begins to swings toward the positive…

I suppose this is to be expected and perhaps ultimately healthy. I know for myself the swings in attitudes regarding AI have caused me to give pause and consider both sides with more regard than I might have. It has blunted some of my criticism and praise, sharpened others.

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

#382

Post by ranger207 »

There's a lot of people talking about the technical aspects of AI, but I think the (for a lack of a better term) marketing of AI is just as important. Insisting that anyone who is anti-AI is on the wrong side of history does not tend to make people who leaned in that direction reconsider their opinions, it tends to make them think that pro-AI people are arrogant and thus push them even further towards being anti-AI.

This is even bigger with AI because of a couple of other recent trends that have been marketed the exact same way and have failed to live up to the hype: cryptocurrencies ("have fun being poor"), NFTs, the metaverse, etc. None of these have turned out to be the absolute use-this-or-you'll-be-unable-to-participate-in-society level changes that their proponents have claimed. Now AI proponents are making the same claims, but people have seen that the last few times this has been claimed (often by the same people) and therefore don't believe the new claims.

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

#383

Post by beng-nl »

TylerE wrote: post #269
jimmygrapes wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't had the patience or mentality to really absorb "ok but how is this useful" until that thread and your highlighted references. Thank you for the curated highlights, however brief it may be, because it's very hard to find such diamonds without dedicating far too much time wading through the abstract gatekept comments on the topic, in most cases. Real world examples give me much hope!

Lemme give another. I was formerly quite anti-AI but bought a cheap Claude plan just to play around with it a bit. First thing I built with it was this - https://github.com/tylereaves/onscreen-piano , in about an hour and maybe 10 prompt cycles. It replaced, for my specific use case, the 10% of the functionality of an increasingly-unreliable commercial app. That's including building the website, setting up actions fo…

Your last paragraph hit home with me. I also find it refreshing to be clear and direct, have the intent be directly understood, and have a pleasant, good faith, high signal conversation as a result. I hardly ever experience that with humans (I recognize that that’s not ‘everyone else’s fault’ of course).

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

#385

Post by wiether »

trumpdong wrote: post #295
wiether wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've also have to work with a guy like that. It could be okay if it wasn't for the fact that they have a high esteem of themselves and don't learn shit. The first POC they vibecoded and managed to sell was a pile of trash that we couldn't realistically deploy as it. So we spent two weeks to make it something decent enough to have the minimum confidence of the thing being reliable and safe enough to reach staging. Two…

Why not make him vibedeploy it, and then you hack it to prove your point?

For good reasons, they don't have access to our infra.

I wasn't involved, but I heard last year they tried to vibedeploy, provisioning an AWS account in their own name with their own credit card. I let you imagine what happened and why they haven't retried this since.

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

#386

Post by sajithdilshan »

metalspot wrote: post #369
sajithdilshan wrote: post #232

I feel like the negativity is mainly due to lack of understanding on how LLMs work under the hood. The more you learn about it, the more you realize that it’s just a glorified autocomplete machine and the reason why it looks so capable is the engineering behind prompt and harness. Unless there is another breakthrough in model training, I don’t see AI taking over anytime soon. However I do agree that’s it has become a…

> glorified autocomplete machine It is a next token prediction function and it is important to understand the technology accurately based on what it actually is. What is unique about a next token prediction function though is that every computer program is just a string of instructions. At the theoretical limit a next token prediction function can generate the entire instruction stream (boot loader, OS, application)…

What you’re saying is correct if the model is trained with all the knowledge humanity had, has and ever produce. But at the moment the next token prediction is quite limited to the training data.

Things could change if the model supports re-inforced leaning. That way the LLM would change the weights in real time based on a feedback loop, but again that could vastly improve the quality of the token prediction or completely degrade it as well

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

#388

Post by sajithdilshan »

lyu07282 wrote: post #258
sajithdilshan wrote: post #232

I feel like the negativity is mainly due to lack of understanding on how LLMs work under the hood. The more you learn about it, the more you realize that it’s just a glorified autocomplete machine and the reason why it looks so capable is the engineering behind prompt and harness. Unless there is another breakthrough in model training, I don’t see AI taking over anytime soon. However I do agree that’s it has become a…

> the engineers can use to increase their productivity which is a positive thing This might be the underlying hidden psychology: being more productive and efficient isn't benefitting the working class. It won't make them more money or make them work less hours, it just means overall more work for equal or less pay or less jobs for programmers outright. It doesn't make things cheaper or better, it just translates into…

That’s not true. If you look at the history of humanity, every invention (internet, automobiles, telephones, vaccines, etc) has increased the productivity of human race and in-return increased the quality of life and lifted millions of people out of abject poverty. Productivity increased through AI is basically the same. Over the time it would elevate the living standards of millions of people.

As for making more money as a software engineer, it’s individual responsibility. You need to change your mindset of being just an employee and think as an entrepreneur. AI has made is so easy to build an MVP in record time and try things out. If you want to make money a nine to five job is not what you should be focusing on.

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

#389

Post by Decabytes »

I am not 100% opposed to AI and I spent multi hundreds of dollars across the major players right now, but I'll see what I can add.

> At some point, execution speed starts to matter more than the elegance of the code.

This sentiment has been with us for a long time, and AI has only made it worse. Many people have experienced the damaging effects that focusing on execution speed have had on our lives, and you would think if AI makes us 10x faster, we could spend half that time actually making programs more performant and secure. But all of the gains always funnel into speed, when we have the golden opportunity to make things better.

Then there are the players that make it. Casey Muratori recently did a video called "It just Happened" where Eric Schmidt gives a commencement speech and washes his hands of the negative things that have happened in it, even though his decisions at Google and the technology he helped create made a lot of that happen. A quote from Casey's Video

> This is a case where someone who had direct decision-making authority during the time period when the very worst most dystopian parts of the technology business model were developed, perfected and entrenched. And he is giving this commencement speech to a group of students who have known nothing but that their whole lives. They're not like me. They didn't know a time before all of this. They didn't experience technology in the 80s or something like this.

One of the most important things in that quote is that there are people who have known nothing but a predatory, privacy invasive technology world. When that is your baseline, new technology that could advance that at 10x speed does not feel great. And now it requires only a couple bad actors and a subscription to make that happen.

At work we are mandated to use AI. That feels bad for a lot of reasons. But one of the worse is having to review AI generated code. I have never liked reviewing other peoples PRs, and now with the speed AI code is created, I could spend the whole day just doing that. So now my job is worse because I have to do more of the part I like the least.

Next, I've been thinking a lot about "the human scale of things". To me that means slowing down, and not consuming things faster than my lizard brain can understand. While I might be able to go 10x faster, unless I'm doing something I've done a million times before, I will not be able to keep that much code in my head. So I quickly lose understandings of projects, and I have to fight hard to rebuild my knowledge.

Lastly, as someone who has "vibecoded" an app, It feels completely impersonal. Yea I had the idea, and yea I had to type the prompts, but producing a whole mountain of code over the course of weeks or months (I've done both) just leaves me feeling empty on the inside. There is still a selfish human component to the programming that I and I suspect others do, and AI takes away from that

I'm not sure what the solution is though. Do we say, if you don't want to take ownership over the bad things that happen then we will down play your part in the good? Do we try to set up organizations that persecute those accountable? Should Eric Schmidt be in jail? Should he be fined? Do we as developers try to use the tools "for good?" I don't know, and I'd love to know what other people have to say on this

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

#390

Post by azangru »

squidbeak wrote: post #365
azangru wrote: post #353

> Users don’t care whether the code was written by AI or by hand Users don't. Question is, do developers, who are tasked to read, modify, and maintain the code?

That's the point though isn't it? Those readers / maintainers / modifiers won't be developers.

Will there be developers at all then? What would they do? What would define their role? What skills/qualifications would they need?
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