AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making • Hacker News Board

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#271

Post by slopinthebag » Mon, Jul 20, 2026, 7:57 AM UTC

ifwinterco wrote: post #96

slopinthebag wrote: post #7

The AI mania has been really fascinating to witness because on the surface it’s surprising that so many otherwise intelligent people have fallen into it. But I suppose intelligence as a concept is multifaceted and doesn’t include wisdom. I also wonder if it has to do with personality, where the people whose personality best suits leadership roles are more susceptible to this psychosis. I think there is also an archet…

It's the bell curve meme every time - very, very often stupid people end up being "wiser" than moderately intelligent people. Meanwhile the really intelligent people end up with beliefs surprisingly close directionally to the stupid people who've barely thought about an issue, just fleshed out with 100x the detail. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing

The bellcurve meme is essentially that the people on the left use their intuition, the people in the middle discount intuition for pure rationality, and the people on the right are intelligent enough to understand that their intuition is correct.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#272

Post by AussieWog93 » Mon, Jul 20, 2026, 8:22 AM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #254

keeganpoppen wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

One of the most wild parts of the "Is AI useful" arguments is how different people are getting so astoundingly different results from it. One guy will claim that he can one-shot "Port this unmaintained app from 2017 to modern Android," go do the dishes, and come back to a working application. And the next guy will say, "I can't get it to do anything groundbreaking and have to micro-babysit it every step of the way to…

I'm the GP that got Claude to port the app, set up the SMTP server etc. etc. And I do see stuff on that level of complexity, multiple times a week. I'm not a full-time software dev any more, but did learn the craft at a really good company before AI came along - and I've been doing basic sysadmin stuff by hand, almost exclusively on the terminal, for almost a decade now.

A lot of pithy responses to your comments that contain some pretty bad-faith assumptions about AI "power users", but to answer your question I think part of it genuinely does come down to a "skill issue" - or at least familiarity.

AIs really do have huge blind spots, and there are things it can't do well. But on the flip side, there are modes of operation that do get good results and if you keep it in this "zone" you can get amazing results.

For example, here is my CLAUDE.md that's global to all projects: https://github.com/EspoTek/.claude/blob/master/CLAUDE.md

Note the "Working with unfamiliar data or systems" section - it doesn't stop the models from making wrong assumptions but it does get them to test these assumptions with simple experiments and course-correct before human eyes ever see the result.

Setting up things like CLAUDE.md files and skills so that it doesn't make the same mistakes over and over is a big help too. The model doesn't literally get smarter, but it knows how to avoid pitfalls its fallen into in the past.

If you want to have a chat about it earnestly, my email's in my profile.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#273

Post by robocat » Mon, Jul 20, 2026, 8:49 AM UTC

sph wrote: post #268

ryandrake wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the most wild parts of the "Is AI useful" arguments is how different people are getting so astoundingly different results from it. One guy will claim that he can one-shot "Port this unmaintained app from 2017 to modern Android," go do the dishes, and come back to a working application. And the next guy will say, "I can't get it to do anything groundbreaking and have to micro-babysit it every step of the way to…

> Assuming both people are truthful and operating in good faith, how can this be explained? Quite simply, difference in skill. The sysadmin that has configured a few applications in their career would likely get annoyed at how many mistakes an LLM makes. The manager who barely knows their way around a shell, uses an LLM to configure an application in less than the three business days it will take them, and will claim…

The most interesting part of the Dunning-Kruger paper was the "skilled and aware of it" subgroup.

Try to be aware that mentioning Dunning-Kruger is recursive.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#274

Post by robocat » Mon, Jul 20, 2026, 9:04 AM UTC

ElProlactin wrote: post #45

fzeroracer wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this is surprising at all. I'm pretty sure I've saved my employers similar amounts in the past, because what happens is something gets configured months or years ago, the dev leaves, everyone forgets and assumes things are how they are. I've had to delete some really silly code that would slow things down or just force waits as a result of either dealing with legacy APIs or some other arcane reason. Not…

The point isn't that this stuff happens. It's that a person who is trying to sell consulting services with ranty "this industry is a sham" and "it's a disgrace that it was even possible" blog posts has a website with just 5 major navigation links...and one of them is 404.

2 brain cells, have you tried reading below the fold of https://hermit-tech.com/business-owners

Soy un loser

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#275

Post by btschaegg » Mon, Jul 20, 2026, 9:19 AM UTC

> The world’s organisations have been captured by people in the throes of frothing excitement, and saner people who now live in a state of constant commingled fear and frustration.

This reminds me of "Youth without God" by Ödön von Horváth:

> Perhaps Anne’s mother was right. Perhaps men are mad now—those who aren’t mad haven’t the courage to put their maniacal fellows into strait-jackets.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#276

Post by amalcon » Mon, Jul 20, 2026, 10:01 AM UTC

DiscourseFan wrote: post #256

amalcon wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you were in NYC, some of this may be a Boston/NYC difference. NYC is much more anti-Waymo (which I interpret mostly as an extension of being much more anti-car in general). There are also substantially different cultures between the two re: art and finance, which may have reflected on the AI questions. I don't think you can decouple Trump from himself in this way without a concrete explanation. If some factor caus…

I’m not sure I understand your point. Its not the case that more people voted for Trump in a place where more people are taking reverse psychological cues from him, but precisely the opposite case, the more people take reverse cues the less vote for him, which implies their positions are on account of reaction and not because they are genuinely reflecting on their social and political condition, which would elevate t…

You are simply incorrect about that. More people voted for Trump in NYC (the typical exemplar of "the northeast") than in SFO (the exemplar of the part of California that is more pro-AI than NYC).

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#277

Post by mike_hearn » Mon, Jul 20, 2026, 10:16 AM UTC

Aerroon wrote: post #176

dtj1123 wrote: post #94

Most of us on some level felt confident that AI would completely revolutionise our society. The singularity made sense to me, at least. It hasn't worked out like that, but rather than accept the crushing reality of our mistake and take a second to re-evaluate, we've decided to LARP out the future we promised ourselves by crowbar-and-vaselineing AI into every crack and crevice we can find and loudly proclaiming progre…

Even as a teenager the singularity didn't make sense to me. Why would AI capabilities suddenly improve by an astronomical amount? It's still going to be running on hardware and software that we (humans) design. Even if AI reached parity with human brains it would still need to improve efficiency by orders of magnitude to reach parity with human society's output. And only then could it start to outpace the improvement…

Probably not though. AI is already designing its own chips, optimizing its own GPU kernels, suggesting the next experiments to run and writing its own harnesses... recursive self improvement is here already. It's just a question of speed, time and how far it goes.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#278

Post by muvlon » Mon, Jul 20, 2026, 11:42 AM UTC

jauntywundrkind wrote: post #42

A1kmm wrote: post #16

> All of the AI projects we have observed as a team are failing. Every single one – we have seen 0% success in a year and a half, not only amongst projects we have been asked to participate in, but even within projects that we have observed in passing while doing totally unrelated work. That's got to be hyperbole, which blows out their credibility. They chose to say 'AI' rather than, for example, LLM, or Transformer…

Their previous article on AI shows a pretty strident ham-handedness. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48002795 In general I find their submissions tend towards extreme grandiosity. I find I really appreciate people who have some nuance about the world, can see some duality, and the many many many submissions here are (I admit) often quite fun and enjoyable, but spoken much more from a bully pulpit perspective, wi…

That's a completely different person, they (ludic and smileplease) just both happen to be publishing on mataroa.blog. This is a blogging website anybody can sign up for, basically Medium but for nerds.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#279

Post by Schlagbohrer » Mon, Jul 20, 2026, 1:28 PM UTC

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #250

AussieWog93 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just don't understand how someone could think we're going back to a pre-LLM world. Have you not used one since Opus 4.5 came out? Especially as somebody that's no longer in the software profession and so doesn't have 40 hours a week to just sit there and crank out code, agentic AI is a technological leap on the level of search engines, bulletin boards or compilers. You can literally just open Claude Code, say: - "A…

>> Have you not used one since Opus 4.5 came out? Every time there's a new model This Changes Everything. Every single time. Every time someone points out a limitation of LLMs it's always the same refrain: "Have you tried the latest? Because they're so much better now!". Except this happens with every single model generation. Every time the new models are so good that it's a seismic shift, a step change, a paradigm s…

But it is now possible for a very non technical user to vibe code Grand Theft Auto II for fun. In two years they'll be able to vibe code GTA V for fun.

Likewise with many other things - people who don't know how to code can produce large custom programs which do what they needed. They're probably not amazingly well written nor maintainable by a human with limited time on their hands but that also doesn't matter at all for nearly all use cases.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#280

Post by jdw64 » Mon, Jul 20, 2026, 1:35 PM UTC

oliculipolicula wrote: post #270

jdw64 wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, it's just shouting into an echo chamber. They call it organizational failure, but it's really just 'come on, my side.' A consultant who does that is untrustworthy. It means they have no metrics. Same goes for their 0% claim. It's overgeneralization, isn't it? So why did they fail, what went wrong, and how should these AI projects be analyzed—and by what metrics? They skip all that and just throw out a singl…

(i'm more chatty because it's my "down-day". Hope you don't mind) I don't think you're upset because AI is useful and valuable. Are you upset because you can't describe how the bubble will burst? Some (more) quantitative types saying that the economics are deflationary. So NVIDIA have already won. But there are some that claim that the bubble has nothing to do with NVIDIA's monopoly on compute (21.C steam engine/stee…

I think AI is useful and has value, but what I find problematic is the illogical behavior that people display while claiming to be engaging in thoughtful writing.

Rather than saying NVIDIA will be the ultimate winner, I think Apple could be the final winner as a hedge against semiconductor stocks, at least for now.

In that sense, I'm not sure. You can't time a bubble, so it's just a bubble.

But I do think NVIDIA will remain powerful because of its CUDA ecosystem—though the future is uncertain.