> enough real-world feedback would have surfaced to identify the major issues
You think the real world has nothing better to do than test your shitty code?
Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
471–480 of 812 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#472I call these AI tools "proprietary non-determenistic database of the free internet". They belong to american companies which can cut off your access if american government doesn't like your country's government. They fed from the free internet that many of us grew up in, store it in humans unreadable form and sell you access to it. If some day claude starts to spit out compiled binaries instead of code nobody will no…
The argument that LLMs are "feeding me back free and open internet" seems to skip the most useful aspect of the tool.
I could never, as an individual read, let alone synthesize and make decisions with, the amount of information on the internet. The LLM takes that free and open information and feeds me back novel information based on that free information. It gives me ideas, opinions, and hard data based on that information.
It's the most powerful information synthesizing tool in existence. I don't find the argument that "it's built on free information and sold to you" fair or plausible at all.
It's like saying you're free to make your own bottled water. Technically true, but in reality not.
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#473There are two different crowds using "AI": - One crowd is using to research algorithms, libraries, write boilerplate code, write test harnesses, introspect and integrate with APIs, do hands-off refactoring, and automating what would otherwise be boring tasks. They still think about architecture, best practices, understanding things in detail and the general shape of the solution is in their hands. - Another crowd is…
I don't think thats really it. For me personally I am vaguely indifferent to programmers using LLMs to make more shitty code. My worry is the second and third order effects For work currently, as an SRE, I'm being asked to maintain and look after slop as if its properly built and instrumented. Our platform has clear rules and conventions, and AI isn't following those. For the wider world, I fucking hate that image/vi…
This is the opposite of a loom. With a loom you can very easily see that what it makes is exactly like cloth made by hand, except it's more uniform and faster. There also wasn't this weird drive to drive out the heretics so the AI messiah may dwell among us, this desire to put all eggs in one basket, instead of welcoming competition and a control group.
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#474It'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…
I think society is divided on AI because we've let the billionaire tech bro class rawdog power resources and AI deployments and I welcome the pushback on those 2 axes. The water nonsense OTOH saps my will to live.
But also, the algorithms push enragement equals engagement and that favors pushing content to the product (us) that enrages the product to drive up their engagement numbers so they click on more ads.
Meanwhile, the medical applications of AI alone are astounding. But that doesn't get people mad so it doesn't get promoted as near as much as the latest clueless word salad from a rich dude. Election season is going be to very interesting this year IMO.
https://erictopol.substack.com/p/the-paradox-of-medical-ai-i...
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#475They loved having an identity built around a skill most people didn’t have and the power/money that came with that. Losing that is tough.
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#476I call these AI tools "proprietary non-determenistic database of the free internet". They belong to american companies which can cut off your access if american government doesn't like your country's government. They fed from the free internet that many of us grew up in, store it in humans unreadable form and sell you access to it. If some day claude starts to spit out compiled binaries instead of code nobody will no…
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Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#477Earlier quoted context omitted.
I get that results in your mind is a vibecoded full feature photoshop as the goal post, which is fair enough. That's no less arbitrary than say me defining the goal post as can it make me a useful script & thus has already delivered results with receipts. That's why I'm saying this whole look at one point in time logic isn't useful here. Depending on where you set the cutoff you get diametrically opposed answers. >Po…
> I get that results in your mind is a vibecoded full feature photoshop as the goal post, which is fair enough. That's no less arbitrary than say me defining the goal post as can it make me a useful script & thus has already delivered results with receipts. I think vibe coded photoshop is what’s being talked about from Anthropic, OpenAI as the end goal - Dario is on record saying that AI will replace engineers and Sa…
>I want to know where people _genuinely_ think the cutoff is
I don't think there is/should be one at all. If you and I stand in front of a crazy fast growing plant the question on how tall it'll be tomorrow is initially interesting, but a couple measurements in when it's clear the answer is exponentially the relevant question stops being how high is it now / will be tomorrow and more holly shit how long can this keep going & where does this go.
>Except they’re not. Someone is paying for this compute power, and energy.
Certainly, and the questionable subsidizations may disappear but the tech won't. If APIs disappear tomorrow I'll be looking into building a LLM rig. And researchers at unis will continue to do research to advance the tech. And chinese labs will continue. Pace may be somewhat limited but IPOs blowing up stop this tech train
>The cursor founder has said that he ships 10x
CEOs say all kinds of crazy shit. I don't think their promises and marketing is a good reference point for how a technology is actually developing
>usage based to billing
I don't think it's relevant at all for general purpose technologies like this. It'll land where market forces dictate. Maybe some people go bankrupt. Do you know what the billing model on the first electricity grids were? I don't. And I don't care. If it's useful the market will figure out the economics.
>why aren’t major engineering organisations spending all their hiring grown on these tools
They are spending big. Just because they're not committing 100% of their budget right now doesn't mean it hasn't yielded results. It's an evolving situation not a mature technology.
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#478Earlier quoted context omitted.
I suspect there is a lot of selection bias going on as well. Forums like this, reddit, X, readers of news sites etc tend to be filled with people that don’t have much going on in their lives, have a lot of free time to comment, are less likely to exploit the benefits of AI, and more likely to have simpler skills sets that are replaceable with AI. Talking to people in real world, I would say the overwhelming majority…
Probably not the best way to reduce complicated feelings. Do those people not deserve to be able to live and survive or are they all just replaceable?
Everyone's replaceable in capitalism
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#479It'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…
I think society is divided on AI because we've let the billionaire tech bro class rawdog power resources and AI deployments and I welcome the pushback on those 2 axes. The water nonsense OTOH saps my will to live. But also, the algorithms push enragement equals engagement and that favors pushing content to the product (us) that enrages the product to drive up their engagement numbers so they click on more ads. Meanwh…
When people complain about"AI" they almost always mean general purpose LLMs and media generators. Nobody is complaining about OCR, MNIST trials, or machine translation.
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#480Earlier 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…
Are currently, but at the scale AI corps are trying to deploy at they'll be the largest user of electricity.