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Please stop the AI confidence theater

elenaverna.com

131–140 of 282 posts

Re: Please stop the AI confidence theater

#131
post #109

Ok I'll take the bait. > Look: I work at an AI company. I use AI all day. Looks like OP works at dropbox. Dropbox is not an AI company. It's not remotely one. Why does this matter? Because it undermines the entire point of the post. Later: > And if you’re watching that kind of hyped content: You can be part of the solution, too. Hold your favorite creators accountable! Ask them to show you the receipts! If you know t…

Dropbox is an AI-company, according to to Dropbox https://blog.dropbox.com/topics/product/introducing-AI-power... The challenge in 2026 is finding the company that's not AI-powered (according to themself)

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Re: Please stop the AI confidence theater

#132

> Cut it out. You’re only hurting yourself. Were it so, I wouldn’t mind so much. But they hurt others, too.

Yup, this is why I get so irritated with AI boosters. If it were just a matter of "I disagree", then I would be happy to ignore the people whom I believe to be deluded, but the problem is: layoffs are real, economic impacts are real, datacenter impacts are real, the impacts on education are real, the impacts on college graduates who can't find jobs are real, the impact of people suffering from psychosis is real. And most of these impacts are from _hype_, not because the technology does what was promised. e.g The CEO fires his workers and then has to rehire a few months later because it turns out the AI couldn't do the job. These people are causing SO MUCH harm, and for what purpose? To ingratiate themselves to billionaires who don't respect them anyway, or to get a retweet on twitter?

Re: Please stop the AI confidence theater

#133

> Show me something truly life changing. i dont think there is any software on the planet that i would consider "truly life changing", so i find it a bit weird to hold ai up to that standard. as a note, i found this particularly funny: " It’s doing more harm than good. " followed immediately by " This post is sponsored by Firecrawl. Firecrawl is the web data API to search, scrape, and interact with the web at scale.…

> i dont think there is any software on the planet that i would consider "truly life changing", so i find it a bit weird to hold ai up to that standard.

Maybe a bait or not, but quite important for planes, for example. Or just cardiac pacemaker...

Re: Please stop the AI confidence theater

#134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same thing is happening in YouTube right now. My feed is filled with AI generated never ending rambling videos about simple topics that can be explained in 1 or 2 mins, but it keeps on dragging up to 10-30 mins to milk the maximum from monetisation

Youtube channels are also getting hyper-monetized now. Private equity firms finally learned that some of these informational channels draw a huge crowd of loyal viewers with a very specific kind of technical interest and have built high levels of trustworthiness. Ideal targets for running ads. Now they buy all these channels and have their marketers optimize every corner for generating easy money.

There is a guy on YouTube who did very thorough and well-done presentations on airliner crashes and mishaps and one of the reasons they were so good was that he was a very experienced pilot himself. He was able to give deep insight into the technical details, the industry, and the challenges that pilots face. He always talked at length about those in the context of the incident he was covering, which was how his videos were so much more interesting compared to your typical "accident documentaries" thrown together by outside amateurs which are frankly the majority of videos in this space on YouTube.

But since the last year or so, I can't watch him anymore. He sold his channel (and his brand, literally himself) to some kind of YouTube content company and the videos he puts out now are just not watchable. From what I can tell, he mainly does only the presentation now, with only a minor amount of editorializing. Other people seem to do everything else. The visualizations are impressive but the video title/thumbnails are pure click-bait (to the point of being factually false), the videos are WAY longer than they need to be, and he'll repeat the SAME information multiple times just to stretch the time out to 45 minutes to an hour.

I like a good story, but it's really hard to pad out most disaster videos into that amount of time unless you have something more to offer than say, "well, the official crash investigation said this and that." His videos now feel a lot more like those old Discovery Channel documentaries that were basically surface-level filler content in between the ads.

Re: Please stop the AI confidence theater

#135

My observation is that a lot of folks still discounting the capabilities or impact of AI either aren't working with frontier intelligence or aren't using it right. While the coding horse has been beat within an inch of its life already, I'd recommend throwing Codex on 5.5 high thinking with Computer Use + auto approve at the next thing you're about to spend 5+ minutes on to start to get a feel for how well it handles…

Or they aren’t building a SaaS with React or a TUI with Typecript, which is about the only thing that LLMs have “solved”.

Re: Please stop the AI confidence theater

#137
post #118

My observation is that a lot of folks still discounting the capabilities or impact of AI either aren't working with frontier intelligence or aren't using it right. While the coding horse has been beat within an inch of its life already, I'd recommend throwing Codex on 5.5 high thinking with Computer Use + auto approve at the next thing you're about to spend 5+ minutes on to start to get a feel for how well it handles…

> no brainer An excellent epithet for people who depend on AI!

The same attitude has been directed at points through history for people "who depend on the internet," "who depend on computers," and "who depend on machines."

I was told growing up "you won't always have a calculator in your pocket" and yet now my phone has an offline LLM on it.

Re: Please stop the AI confidence theater

#138

As a hobbyist exploring LLMs since Summer 2022 (electrician by trade)... I've been as blown away by generative AI results/output as I've been left laughing at its hallucinations . My first forays were via CrAIyon & ThisWordDoesNotExist .com . Now, four years later: I've finally been able to purchase a 5070Ti (from a ~1080Ti~ – so, an upgrade ). The past few days have been overwhelming as I explore the rights/wrongs o…

Ah, a 5070.

You will find this most prescient: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48557728

Re: Please stop the AI confidence theater

#139

My observation is that a lot of folks still discounting the capabilities or impact of AI either aren't working with frontier intelligence or aren't using it right. While the coding horse has been beat within an inch of its life already, I'd recommend throwing Codex on 5.5 high thinking with Computer Use + auto approve at the next thing you're about to spend 5+ minutes on to start to get a feel for how well it handles…

I hate that these discussions go nowhere because there's no common metric anymore.

I have no idea what stuff like "is it always perfect?" means because it varies so much from person to person. Too many people have different expectations, are working on different problems, or have different standards or goals for there to be a common constructive discussion.

Re: Please stop the AI confidence theater

#140

> Show me something truly life changing Does the fact that I barely wrote any lines of code in the past six months while my job has been for the past 20 years (and still is) that of producing code, feels "life changing" enough?

Being unemployed can be life changing too, if it can do your job
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