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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?

#461

Post by senordevnyc »

card_zero wrote: post #459
senordevnyc wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm specifically saying that AI leaders didn't go around making pro-AI commencement speeches. At all. The absolute closest example is Schmidt, who was last CEO of Google more than a decade before ChatGPT launched, and is now CEO of an aerospace company. No other "AI leaders" gave commencement speeches where they were booed. So you're blatantly lying and spreading misinformation to feed a negative narrative about the…

For the record, besides Schmidt being booed, there was Gloria Caulfield (property development), and Scott Borchetta (music production). Then Jeremy Scott (fashion) tore up his AI-written speech and got cheered for that, and Ronny Chieng (The Daily Show) got cheered for saying "fuck AI" several times.

Exactly.

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

#462

Post by trumpdong »

saltcured wrote: post #439
uxhacker wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The argument is dialectical. In other words both sides are right. There is a really important question that is been lost between the anti and pro AI camps which is really answering what AI is good at and what AI is bad at, and what is the root cause of the weaknesses. Is it intrinsic to the models that LLM's use, or the way thy have been trained. In this knowledge is where the gold mine is for the next start up. For…

> There is a really important question that is been lost between the anti and pro AI camps which is really answering what AI is good at and what AI is bad at, ... I think some of this pro/anti AI discussion is really a proxy for something else though. There is another unstated, societal disagreement about personal responsibility and the behaviors of the AI tool users. It isn't entirely new, as people have always been…

I don't know if that's specific to AI. It seems accountability levels are in hell right now. Consider anything the president has done and how that would have gone if any other president ever did it. Or anything AI companies do. Or anything Tesla does. Or X.

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

#463

Post by derekja »

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…

On the medical pieces, a very nice agentic medical AI worth looking at is https://biomni.phylo.bio

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

#464

Post by trumpdong »

thunky wrote: post #451
overfeed wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It wasn't just that crypto was an obvious grift Was it universally obvious? Hindaight is 20/20 There were many block-chain startups funded, and even FAANG got caught up in the hype. FWIW, I was a crypto sceptic, but I had many arguments with believers online and in my social circles. Side note: a crypto enthusiast colleague bought a house off their crypto gains, it may be a grift, but a small number of crypto-belie…

> Was it universally obvious? Yes. Crypto was never productive. But nice that your buddy financed a house with other people's dumb money.

Crypto is the best way to pay for illegal things online, which is a really big business.

In fact as the act of paying itself has become more restricted, it's often also a good way to make illegal payments for completely legal goods and services.

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

#465

Post by _0ffh »

dang wrote: 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…

Thoughtful comment, and I'd like to add another angle: However meaningful it is to say the community is divided, I also think that individuals are "divided" on the question as well.

I can speak from myself as an example (although n=1): I am incredibly open to machine learning and the advances it brings. On the other hand I am extremely conscious of the fact that the current LLMs do often write bad code, which becomes especially obvious once projects go much beyond "private toy" size. For me personally the consequence is that I try to make my projects even more modular, and the modules even more clearly delineated. With proper guidance, current LLMs work mostly fine when working on isolated modules. That doesn't mean they don't sometimes fail even there, but they also on rare occasions come up with surprisingly clever solutions when you let them loose on a code base, as long as the problem you want them to fix is mostly isolated in a couple of modules.

So long story short, you can be all for LLMs and still be conscious of their shortcomings, and that just vibe coding applications you intend to let loose on unsuspecting customers is probably a bad idea, and possibly outright immoral. We have already seen more than enough examples of vibe coded applications dumping sensitive user data into the lap of anyone who is inclined to pick up a stick and prod them a little bit.

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

#466

Post by rakel_rakel »

DonsDiscountGas wrote: post #330
rakel_rakel wrote: post #152

> 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…

> My main motivator has always been to understand how things work Which things, specifically? I got started programming in order to control scientific instruments and analyze the data I collected. I care about the systems I'm studying. I don't really care much about the software I'm programming. As OP said it's a means to an end. I think you're right that people on HN are generally more curious but it doesn't have to…

> Which things, specifically?

Low level systems programming mostly. Embedded systems, *nix userland programs, API and library design, sometimes including writing assembly although in very small fractions.

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

#467

Post by rakel_rakel »

metalspot wrote: post #351
rakel_rakel wrote: post #152

> 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…

> people are driven by different things This is important to understand. I have been coding since I was 11 when I got my first C64, and it is a genuine passion for me, but I also love working with LLM tooling. One of the biggest things for me is that after decades of sitting in front of a computer I have chronic back and wrist pain that makes it impossible to do the long deep focus sessions that were normal when I wa…

That's awesome, I'm happy for you finding such great value in it!

Not sure if it's important or not, but for the sake of OP's discussion I note that your value is not necessarily tied to "speed of execution".

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

#468

Post by mikodin »

pj_mukh wrote: post #349
mpliax wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 scal…

I'm curious what part of the charts would data centers fall under?

I'm assuming it would be under the Energy emissions category, but I didn't find anything particular around data centers or "technology" or "internet" or something like that.

Would it fall under "Electricity and heat"? Or just general "Buildings"? or "Commercial buildings"? Or am I way off base?

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

#469

Post by coffeefirst »

knivets wrote: post #221

> 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?…

What this looks like it practice: enterprise SaaS vendor introduces bug, I report the bug, get a canned AI response because literally nobody cares, and it never gets fixed. The product continues to deteriorate.

No, it’s not just one vendor.

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

#470

Post by downrightmike »

pj_mukh wrote: post #276
OlivOnTech wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You forgot the push forward towards more destruction of the planet we depend on to live, and the centralization of wealth in addition to the one of power.

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…

They basically undo all the reduce renew recycle efforts we've been doing since the 90's
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