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Please stop the AI confidence theater

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Re: Please stop the AI confidence theater

#251

Post by john_strinlai »

cassianoleal wrote: post #247
john_strinlai wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wonder how most of them sleep at night. i hate marketing . but most everyday, 9-5 in a cubicle marketers are just trying to feed their families and keep a roof over their head. its just a job, it doesnt need to be an identity. or, you know, people can encourage all marketers to commit suicide a la bill hicks. its fun to be edgy sometimes. (edit: i find it so strange that suggesting a tiny bit of empathy for someo…

I think the first thing you should learn about HN is that there's all sorts of individuals on it. Reducing all of us to "the people on the venture capital marketing forum" is not helping your ability to understand what goes on here.

huh, i thought it was just one person with multiple accounts, thanks

Re: Please stop the AI confidence theater

#252

Post by dingaling »

john_strinlai wrote: post #18

> 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.…

E-mail, software encryption, HTTP and chat protocols have utterly transformed daily life.

Re: Please stop the AI confidence theater

#253

Post by therealdrag0 »

harimau777 wrote: post #159

Can someone explain to me: I have big problems with how AI companies stole artist's art and I have big concerns with how AI might be overused or misused. However, I don't understand how people can still say that AI is useless. Everyday when I use AI I am impressed with everything it can do. Particularly in coding, AI is useful right now (this may or may not be due to how messy the codebase that I'm working in is). To…

It’s constantly goalpost moving.

“It’s totally useless” to “it hallucinates constantly” to “it’s not revolutionary” to “show me where it’s 100x productivity gains” to “if AI is so good then why isn’t OpenAI one shoting all its software and even cloning all software on the planet?”

Re: Please stop the AI confidence theater

#254

Post by comfysocks »

senordevnyc wrote: post #208
heresalexandria wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're literally doing novel research. The smartest mathematicians in the world couldn't solve Erdős' planar unit distance problem for 80 years, and OpenAI's models knocked that out a couple months ago. This stuff is moving fast, and if you aren't evaluating SoTA on at least a quarterly basis, you're going to have a bad time.

I admire your efforts here, but you’re tilting against windmills with your comments here. There’s a loud contingent of AI skeptics on HN who haven’t updated their tired arguments in years. Their fervent hatred of AI is mere religious dogma at this point, not anything empirical. The upside is that we’re competing against these folks. Let them continue to stick their heads in the sand.

Somewhere, someone may be painting an equally reductive picture of you and your position.

You two are obviously smart people, but have you considered that maybe you are unconsciously being backed into a position that is just as absolutist as those you are arguing against? That you are just taking the opposite side in a binary argument where each side sees only one side of the coin?

Re: Please stop the AI confidence theater

#255

Post by senordevnyc »

comfysocks wrote: post #254
senordevnyc wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I admire your efforts here, but you’re tilting against windmills with your comments here. There’s a loud contingent of AI skeptics on HN who haven’t updated their tired arguments in years. Their fervent hatred of AI is mere religious dogma at this point, not anything empirical. The upside is that we’re competing against these folks. Let them continue to stick their heads in the sand.

Somewhere, someone may be painting an equally reductive picture of you and your position. You two are obviously smart people, but have you considered that maybe you are unconsciously being backed into a position that is just as absolutist as those you are arguing against? That you are just taking the opposite side in a binary argument where each side sees only one side of the coin?

I use these tools all day every day, and the feeble arguments against them that I’m referencing don’t match my experience from a year ago, let alone today. I rarely argue much about AI on HN anymore, it seems utterly pointless. It’s genuinely sad to me to see how many here are so blinded by rage and fear that they can’t have an honest conversation about the pros and cons of AI. Obviously not everyone, but that’s who my comment was addressing.

I also wouldn’t characterize my position as absolutist or one side of a binary. Interesting that you’d assume that.

Re: Please stop the AI confidence theater

#256

Post by comfysocks »

senordevnyc wrote: post #255
comfysocks wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somewhere, someone may be painting an equally reductive picture of you and your position. You two are obviously smart people, but have you considered that maybe you are unconsciously being backed into a position that is just as absolutist as those you are arguing against? That you are just taking the opposite side in a binary argument where each side sees only one side of the coin?

I use these tools all day every day, and the feeble arguments against them that I’m referencing don’t match my experience from a year ago, let alone today. I rarely argue much about AI on HN anymore, it seems utterly pointless. It’s genuinely sad to me to see how many here are so blinded by rage and fear that they can’t have an honest conversation about the pros and cons of AI. Obviously not everyone, but that’s who…

Fair enough. I too use LLM coding tools all day everyday. If we’re specifically talking about the arguments in this thread, I have experienced both sides of the argument. Some use cases are more in-distribution than others. I wouldn’t dismiss either side out of hand. I see it more as a “yes, but…”

Re: Please stop the AI confidence theater

#257

Post by senordevnyc »

comfysocks wrote: post #256
senordevnyc wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use these tools all day every day, and the feeble arguments against them that I’m referencing don’t match my experience from a year ago, let alone today. I rarely argue much about AI on HN anymore, it seems utterly pointless. It’s genuinely sad to me to see how many here are so blinded by rage and fear that they can’t have an honest conversation about the pros and cons of AI. Obviously not everyone, but that’s who…

Fair enough. I too use LLM coding tools all day everyday. If we’re specifically talking about the arguments in this thread, I have experienced both sides of the argument. Some use cases are more in-distribution than others. I wouldn’t dismiss either side out of hand. I see it more as a “yes, but…”

I’m talking about this kind of inane bullshit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48775974

Or even worse: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48775860

Re: Please stop the AI confidence theater

#258

Post by cwmoore »

pixelready wrote: post #240
tavavex wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how most of them sleep at night. Do they think they're providing a valuable service? Do they like what they're doing? Do they think of themselves as good people?

It strikes me as sort of civil society “arms dealer” type of role, like lawyers. In a utopia where everyone cooperated in good faith and behaved honorably we would not need them (or very few of them), but as soon as one group arms themselves, everyone must regardless of their feelings about it. Then the marketers become an interest group unto themselves and stoke the paranoia of everyone who might need their services…

There’s a name for this right? Marketers that discredit free markets, lawyers that ruin the law, accountants w bank on loopholes, social services that thrive without a social safety net, the lobbyists of democracy, what else? Actual mercenaries and prostitutes kinda fall under the “all is fair in love and war” frame, but the others?

Re: Please stop the AI confidence theater

#259

Post by rstuart4133 »

john_strinlai wrote: post #18

> 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.

Off the to of my head web browsers, the algorithms that made WiFi / 5G / Bluetooth possible, public key encryption, GPS, SQL, TCP/IP, Reed Solomon codes spring to mind. Without them like today would be very different. Sounds life changing to me.

The current valuations of AI companies suggest AI will have a similar effect. I think it will, in the long term. People tend to overestimate/oversell the short term effects of technology, and underestimate the long term effects.

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