Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

731–740 of 812 posts

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

#731

Post by x1n13y84issmd42 »

I just don't see much use for AI coding agents beyond PoC and prototypes, that are to be ditched soon.

In my 15 years long developer career I've always found ways to automate all kinds of chores in big projects - simple shell scripts generate boilerplate code for services/modules/controllers/etc, modern infrastructure & tools automate or completely hide a lot of mundane work while giving back valuable data to act upon (think testing and deployment), the code itself is almost always highly modular and lets me to rearrange complex logic in no time with minimum risk. All that while having complete understanding of what's going on, and full control over every aspect of the software I'm responsible for.

And I have a feeling that writing proper prompts to achieve all that (even given the model has enough context) would simply be more work than just properly programming it the old way.

Besides that, the models feeding on OSS and Indian code from GitHub is not only injust, it's also very limited in how creative it can be - the next innovation would leave LLM-generated solutions behind if kept in vault, so LLMs cannot learn form it. And I have a feeling that's where we're heading - death of OSS (esp. in the wake of the recent supply-chain attacks) and a new round of closed-source technological competition.

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

#732

Post by FabHK »

hunterpayne wrote: post #566
FabHK wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crypto has no technological merit compared to earlier solutions, except "permissonlessness", which enables the circumvention of rules and regulations (at huge expense). But, sure, enabling crime is "doing something".

It solves a CS problem called the Byzantine Generals problem. That problem was thought to have no solution before blockchains were created. The lack of CS knowledge on this board is pretty staggering sometimes.

That is complete nonsense, indicative of your lack of knowledge, and utterly typical of crypto hype: mendacious or ignorant or both.

The State Machine Replication problem in distributed computing has been studied since the 1960s or so, and indeed can be solved using Byzantine Broadcast. That has been solved for various settings:

* Permissioned (+ PKI), synchronous: SMR possible for any f (Dolev Strong 1983)

* Permissioned (no PKI), synchronous: SMR impossible if f≥n/3 (PSL 1980, FLM 1985)

* Permissioned, asynchronous setting: SMR impossible even with f=1 (FLP 1985)

* Permissioned, partially synchronous: deterministic SMR with "eventual liveness" possible if fThe theory to achieve reliable state machine replication even in the presence of byzantine failures was sorted out in the 1980s, and the practice followed in the late 1990s (PBFT (Castro Liskov 1999), byzantine Paxos, etc.)

So, just to drive the point home: the Byzantine Generals problem (more precisely: Byzantine Broadcast & SMR) was a solved problem by the late 1990s.

What Bitcoin (ie LCR + PoW) added was to do it in the permissionless setting, just as I've said. (It also increased f from n/3 to n/2, modulo "selfish mining", and while earlier solutions were consistent always, available eventually, LCR + PoW is available always, consistent eventually, which is arguably the wrong tradeoff for finance.)

> The lack of CS knowledge on this board is pretty staggering sometimes.

You don't say.

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

#733

Post by DrewADesign »

vips7L wrote: post #652
vbezhenar wrote: post #512

Because 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…

> Actually I'd prefer to deliver product 0.1x faster Ideas being expensive was a good thing.

Good ideas are still expensive — there’s just a much lower barrier to pursuing dumb ideas so it’s happens a lot more than it should.

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

#734

Post by Lerc »

queenkjuul wrote: post #699
Lerc wrote: post #689

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on what you mean by skeptisism. Skeptisism about homeopathy is a different class of beast to climate change skepticism. I am absolutely not saying that all arguments on the limitations of LLMs are bigotry. I just noticed that some of the participants adopt the attitudes, and behaviours that mirror bigotry. I haven't felt the need to construct a lexicon of derisive terminology to discuss this topic. That do…

Companies and technologies are not people. They are not analogous.

I do not think they need to be people in order to oberve that people behave in a manner that resembles bigotry.

Is it your contention that the the epithets and derision do take the same form as bigotry but do not qualify as such because the targets of derision lack personhood?

I am doubtful that any existing AI has the capacity for personhood, but I think you are taking the position that no AI could ever be a person.

Would it be sufficient for some people to believe they are people for it to be bigotry? Or would you consider the behaviour to not be bigoted if they did not consider the target to be a person?

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

#735

Post by DrewADesign »

bah9 wrote: post #707
star-glider wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Longshoremen are anti-cranes. Same thing.

Not the same. Longshoremen become unemployed, I didn't. I just don't this new type of work as a prompt engineer and would never choose it as my career

> Longshoremen become unemployed, I didn't

* yet

Longshoremen didn’t largely become unemployed in 5 years, and the ones that remained were unionized, so their salaries didn’t plummet. Developers have no such protection and we’re about to have way more developers than we need. I’m glad I jumped ship a couple years ago.

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

#736

Post by DrewADesign »

oblio wrote: post #601
star-glider wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Longshoremen are anti-cranes. Same thing.

Longshoremen in many places were paid advance salaries until retirement and then full pensions. Programmers will get a pat on the back.

> Programmers will get a pat on the back.

* shoved in the back while facing the door, and told it’s their own fault for getting screwed over.

If you want to know what the future holds for the software dev field, look at copywriters and concept artists. The tech world has been so coddled for so long that many developers think their high salaries, cushy work conditions and clout come from their inherent worth as people rather than persistently high demand for their professional skillset. They’ve got another thing coming.

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

#737

Post by DrewADesign »

raccoonhands wrote: post #725
lowbloodsugar wrote: post #620

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine if AI actually delivers utopia and you get to code all you want because your every need is taken care of.

0.01% chance of happening. also i am actively trying to kill my love for coding and move onto 90% agentic at this point since it's doing me more harm than good. i dont think ill get another chance to write code in the future all things considered besides for comp. programming activities

I’d say that 0.01% statistic is pretty optimistic. We’ve got a better chance of a thunderstorm on the moon.

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

#738

Post by exe34 »

If I have to wield AI to fix your slop, and be held responsible for successfully making it work, then I'm going to be invested in how bad the slop is to begin with. I'm more than happy to be paid to generate slop if I don't have to ever read it and be held responsible for it.

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

#739

Post by DrewADesign »

thephyber wrote: post #667
whatisthiseven wrote: post #653

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bizarre to say that. When I have it perform work on a bespoke code base on a niche videogame, in a less commonly used language, is that still "regurgitating stuff"? No, it is impossible for it to have seen this combination of things. It routinely produces, suggests, and correctly implements novel things that had not existed. You can see this yourself by learning how LLMs work, or anecdotally using these tools.

LLMs are terrible at generating code for “less commonly used languages”. They require LOTS of data for high accuracy. I describe it this way: they are good at interpolating from what data they were trained on, but terrible at extrapolating. I agree with the parent that the LLM-generated content isn’t novel, it’s just a rehash of two things it was trained on.

I have wasted quite a number of hours trying to use LLMs to write things for less common languages. Sure they can one-shot some impressive stuff in C#, Python, and JavaScript… but try working in Object Pascal: it’s non-obvious hallucination after non-obvious hallucination, presented confidently enough to make it difficult to see it’s complete garbage, so you waste a ton of time trying to polish a turd.
Post reply on HN