There is no such thing as an "AI". It's just a marketing term for so-called neural networks (that supposedly emulate a brain) running large language models. They don't have intelligence, they are merely guessing machines. They can generate sentences and fake images and videos. We shouldn't be wasting gigawatts of computing energy to run these things.
Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
611–620 of 812 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#612The issue is that folks are substituting judgment and critical thinking for “vibe coding”, and having it spit out 10x more code than you could in the same amount of time is addictive and feels easy. The long term impacts and the issues of trusting the non-deterministic algorithms seem to be ignored by the folks addicted to the easy production of code. That is problematic and over time will come back to bite all of us.
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#613Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I would suggest that you are looking at the product, not the effect on the workers. The powered loom produced more uniform, much cheaper fabric. It wasn't colourful or particularly flamboyant. It took a lot more work to get patterns (its where punch card come from) But thats not the point. Powered looms meant that cottage industry that employed people close to sources of production (ie cotton/calico in india and wool…
> I would suggest that you are looking at the product, not the effect on the workers.
Sure, I was in that comment. What you said is true, too, and given how much of this is driven by greed and not need, I would even say it's more important.
But the effect on the product matters, too, of course. Not just quality and bloat wise, but in a way it's like saying we no longer need to know how to read and write, we all get a butler and just ask them what a text says, or to write letters for us. Because the butler is smarter than any human, and it's so convenient. I'm ironically "with the Catholic Church" (not really, but you know) on this one because I see people/companies who want to be like the Catholic Church in the middle ages, and even without those, how sheer laziness can plunge us into some idiocratic abyss.
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#614>>>At some point, execution speed starts to matter more than the elegance of the code.
Execution speed only matters to investors and the stock market. Your users don't give a shit.
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#615Earlier quoted context omitted.
My boss was fired yesterday, in part because every single document, email, meeting agenda, performance review, and PR he's written for a year has been pure AI slop. His defense was always "everyone uses AI, including you" and I'm like yes i do use it for code but never communications, and my code is always 10x better than the untested slop I was constantly asked to review. This is a guy with 30 years engineering expe…
Interesting. What factors led your boss's boss to this decision? Does he not have AI psychosis? I thought the further up someone was in an organisation, the more AI they used.
Me and several colleagues lodged formal complaints over the last six months as increasingly unacceptable work kept coming through
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#616It'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…
Saying that society is divided on AI therefore HN, being society, should also be divided is an absurd take. I expect the people in here to be domain experts, understand simple concepts like closed loop water cooling, deterministic vs non-deterministic systems, maybe some basic concept of how a GPU and vector math works and most notably the exponential pace that it’s becoming both more capable and more efficient. Unfo…
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Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#617Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 infor…
Nothing about the information it feeds you is novel. It's all stolen repetition of someone else's work.
That is simply not true. The naive “glorified auto-complete / stochastic parrot” argument may have some merit when applied to generic pre-trained models, which only learn from unsupervised next-token prediction. But the post training through reinforcement learning the frontier models undergo is very sophisticated and they genuinely learn to do novel things that are purely the work of the model being trained (and the work of the GPUs they burn along the way of course).
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#618[dead]
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#619>>>At some point, execution speed starts to matter more than the elegance of the code. Execution speed only matters to investors and the stock market. Your users don't give a shit.
This is just false. For starters, your users most _definitely_ don't care about how "elegant" your code is either. They want new features to keep them engaged, or to make the product better. The quicker they get those wants fulfilled by your product, the less likely they are to churn off your product onto something else that has those features that they are missing.
The only people who care about code elegance are the people looking at the code, which is orders of magnitude fewer people than those who are _using_ the artifacts of what the code actually represents.
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#620Because I enjoy writing code. I enjoy being paid for writing code. And I don't enjoy writing prompts for AI. Code is not just a means to an end. Code is a means to my happiness. Users might not care, but I do care. I love good code. I feel great when I can write good code. I won't say that I don't care about users. I do. But I care about me, first and foremost. And AI threatens to remove my lifestyle and workstyle. T…
Imagine if AI actually delivers utopia and you get to code all you want because your every need is taken care of.