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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?

#541

Post by vikramkr »

chrismarlow9 wrote: post #354

I've seen it before and over time it always plays out similarly. - the cloud was invented and we were told CTOs would be able to just point and click and make infrastructure and apps! What did we actually get? Another layer of abstraction to debug through. Does it have is perks? Yes. Does it have it's own problems? Yes. Is it more expensive than setting up bare metal and having a solid team? Well that depends on what…

What's wrong with the cloud? I get the point about a hype cycle but those two examples don't seem even remotely in the same universe of similarity. SQL is still around, but the cloud won pretty comprehensively no? If you're starting something new, there's still a debate around what's the best database to use and stuff, but I'm struggling to imagine a content where the idea of managing your own hardware would even make sense as something to consider outside of the context of an existing large company with pre-existing on prem infra? And at least in the web world, 90+% of the time you are just going to go and click some buttons in vercel and posthog and whatever and that's your infra. The generic saas webapps that make up a huge chunk of the new projects that would be making architecture decisions where you might theoretically consider on prem are pretty well covered by the point and click abstractions - most of them probably wouldn't exist with the friction and overhead of having to actually manage bare metal

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

#542

Post by hollowturtle »

> 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.

That's not true, or true only for you or very specific/narrow scenarios that are trained inside the neural net. You can't rule out that's true for everyone. I spent months trying to speed up a novel idea I have only to be frustrated and eventually start it all over via hand coding, and the journey was actually worth it because I learned a lot! And no I wasn't using the Agent in the wrong way

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

#543

Post by jplusequalt »

skeledrew wrote: post #398
KaiserPro wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I also worry about the debasement of value of human work. Looking at history, say of the weavers, it didn't work out to well for them when the powered loom came along. They eventually moved on to other things, because that was the only option. And the world is better with the power loom. It's scary but we still have to embrace that eventually pretty much all valuable labour will be automated, and by then our societ…

>They eventually moved on to other things, because that was the only option.

Who is they? The majority of British textile workers experienced destitute conditions following industrialization.

That's one of my two gripes with AI:

1) It's posed to take over knowledge work, and yet our societies have no safety nets for the millions of knowledge workers.

2) It promotes superficial understanding. It sounds so convincing and compresses complex topics into a few messages, leaving users thinking they know more than they actually do.

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

#544

Post by emp17344 »

ofjcihen wrote: post #423
torben-friis wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, "AI good" and "AI bad" are very silly camps to describe a topic. You might have seen some comments by me receiving votes lately that some might classify as anti-AI. I'm not for banning it, I use it at work and at home, I learn about it. Here a few positions I hold, for example: - There is a fundamental deviation between what we should be seeing if we were surrounded by 100x enabled engineers and reality. We're…

I echo almost all of your points daily and it’s incredibly refreshing to see a level-headed response like this. Tbf I think this is probably the way most people see it at the moment from my discussions with others. The static comes from people who have essentially staked their entire reputation on AI one way or another.

Some of it is TESCREAL ideology. Tech circles have been inundated with quasi-religious belief surrounding AI for most of the 21st century, which then biases tech enthusiasts towards extremist positions on LLMs.

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

#545

Post by self_awareness »

kmaitreys wrote: post #106

If you're impressed by something which was done by AI, then you're not qualified enough to judge it.

How's that supposed to work?

If I'm impressed by $SOMETHING, then I'm not qualified enough to judge it?

This means that only negative judgement is valid?

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

#546

Post by hollowturtle »

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

Go develop a non trivial videogame, a performant compiler, an embedded code in a microcontroller that don't allocate and so on instead of developing a web app. Why?? Why in hell bloated code doesnt matter on the web? The state of web just sucks because of that

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

#547

Post by jplusequalt »

skeledrew wrote: post #536
KaiserPro wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They eventually moved on to other things, because that was the only option. Yes, but then whole swathes of the English countryside (and then the Indian countryside) was plunged into destitution for generations and it took rebellions, massacres and revolutions to get something like comfortable living.

Yeah there was no system in place then to ensure those who were left without means to survive would be able to survive. Shouldn't be the case with the knowledge of that history and all this time we have to actually change things. We quite literally know that it's a matter of only a few years now before the vast amount of knowledge work (at least) is fully automated away; governments should be making changes to make t…

>It'd be highly irresponsible to not do so, and I dread that most will be irresponsible.

This is why I can't stand people who talk about embracing AI. You suggest that society needs to adjust to AI, but then turn around and admit you doubt it'll happen.

You'd rather roll over, than take a stance.

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

#548

Post by emp17344 »

simianwords wrote: post #181
oleg_antonyan wrote: post #148

I 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…

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…

This is extremely inflammatory. It’s like you’re trying to start a fight. You’re actively degrading the quality of the discussion.

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

#549

Post by BodyCulture »

This is not a question of ideology or personal beliefs. It’s just a matter of fact that AI systems, especially LLMs, are not capable of producing reliable results.

This is a fundamental issue and for many uses we still need the old school way of computing that produces reliable results. It doesn’t happen accidentally, you know, a lot of resources went into this. AI just isn’t there yet and probably won’t be there anytime soon, no matter how much compute we throw at it.

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

#550

Post by bartread »

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…

I think the community is divided. But I think it’s less A/B and more a spectrum. There are plenty of more balanced comments rolling in from people who’ve been using it for a while and have experienced both the advantages and disadvantages.

E.g., agentic development is great for solo projects and prototyping, but can become overwhelming alarmingly quickly when you’ve got multiple devs involved, especially if they’re not all super-disciplined and consistent about how they use their agents. And we’re all learning how to deal with that.

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