These articles are so off from reality to the point that it can't be taken seriously at all. I keep wondering how they keep popping at HN. At least the author admit he is biased..
Downright delusional.
I think you might be fooling yourself with AI
151–160 of 174 posts
Re: I think you might be fooling yourself with AI
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
To clarify, I mean for the bettors.
Oh... Then...I don't think I understood what your point was.. How is running a inference business similar to sports betting, but specifically placing bets, not running a successful sports betting business?
I'm drawing a parallel between the people who are fooling themselves with AI (ex: claude code users) and sports bettors.
Re: I think you might be fooling yourself with AI
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
1. Does this make money 2. Does this warrant the unsubsidized cost of AI? 3. Does this justify the harmful externalities of AI? I don't need personal anecdotes. I want evidence that organisations make more money, get more efficient (and so on) due to AI. Please cite a paper.
A lot of software projects don't make money directly. Our company makes money. This would have cost thousands of dollars paid to a contractor previously with unclear results so yes it's 100% justified. You're citing a paper that does not reproduce in the year 2026 and a guy who built a following on doom&gloom projections with zero actual verifiable sources and demanding proof. SMH
The 2025 paper showed how people could fool themselves. How easy it seems that you fool yourself.
The 2026 paper admitted it's different and has issues.
> A lot of software projects don't make money directly. Our company makes money.
That's an evasive answer and you know it. It's about AI making an impact on the bottom line, justifying it's cost.
> A lot of software projects don't make money directly. Our company makes money. This would have cost thousands of dollars paid to a contractor previously with unclear results so yes it's 100% justified.
Thousands of dollars is pocket change even for a small company. That's not the kind of impact AI is supposed to have. You see why I'm not convinced? You also don't talk about the unsubsidised cost of AI nor the negative externalities.
Re: I think you might be fooling yourself with AI
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
This mostly reads like wishful thinking about the future, that's not a basis to make decisions on right now.
I do not think that wishful thinking is assumption that rapidly evolving hardware which is currently one of the bottlenecks in high demand would become faster in the future.
This isn't how it works. Hundreds of billions are spend on existing NVIDIA AI hardware that must first be recuperated. This kind of speculation doesn't make sense to me.
Re: I think you might be fooling yourself with AI
#155[dead]
Re: I think you might be fooling yourself with AI
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagree and I think the distinction is what we mean by "helpful in software engineering". Is Fable helpful in that it can write some code that does what I told it to do? Yes, obviously. I don't think anyone is arguing that, because it's trivial to see that if you tell a frontier model to do a coding task, it usually does it well enough. Is Fable helpful in that over the span of six months of using it, the codebase…
> it's trivial to see that if you tell a frontier model to do a coding task, it usually does it well enough So you do not disagree? You agree 100%? Yes, it is trivial to see. Hence my near-anaphylactic reaction to articles like this, which specifically claim that it is NOT useful. Do you just mentally filter that out or something? > Is [..] the codebase and my brain's relation to it is in a better state than if I had…
> I think that anyone planting a big flag at 0 (no AI) in 2026, with what we have available, is indeed doing it for emotional reasons
I just think there is a possibility that being on the AI spectrum is not necessarily better than being at 0. Maybe retaining maximal understanding is better in the long run, even better than minimal, supervised AI usage. Productivity in the long run might be better without it, we just don't know.
Re: I think you might be fooling yourself with AI
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
I understand what you're saying about side projects but it just sounds... like buying a landscape wall print from IKEA instead of taking a photo and having it printed on canvas. My non-work projects are exercises for the brain and for learning, and if instead I could just automagic them into existence they'd feel hollow and almost cheating.
Sure, it's cheating if you want to frame it like that. But it's still a huge boost in productivity.
Is it? Genuine question. Say you didn't do these things at all -- what would that change to your life? Are you gaining productivity in high-impact things, or stuff that might scratch an itch but you don't really need all things considered?
Re: I think you might be fooling yourself with AI
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, it's cheating if you want to frame it like that. But it's still a huge boost in productivity.
Is it? Genuine question. Say you didn't do these things at all -- what would that change to your life? Are you gaining productivity in high-impact things, or stuff that might scratch an itch but you don't really need all things considered?
Productivity is a measure of progress towards a goal, not a judgment of whether that goal is worth pursuing.
Re: I think you might be fooling yourself with AI
#159Zitron might be right about the economics of it, maybe it really does come crashing down. But we won't be forgetting about it. Even if AI stopped progressing today, it will still be massively, undeniably, insanely useful. I could use current models forever. LLM does things for me that couldn't be done in 2023. I don't want to go back to a world without it, but I'm also ok with progress stalling right here. As for the…
Taking your anecdotes at face value for a moment (which I should not), how does this benefit of AI you describe justify the nearly 1 trillion dollar investment? Do you think that your perceived increased productivity offsets the true, unsubsidised cost of AI?
Doesn't matter. If they all go bust, I can still run an open weights model locally.
Re: I think you might be fooling yourself with AI
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Unfortunately, given participant feedback and surveys, we believe that the data from our new experiment gives us an unreliable signal of the current productivity effect of AI tools." That's more than a caveat. That says, this study is unreliable. And why? "The primary reason is that we have observed a significant increase in developers choosing not to participate in the study because they do not wish to work without…
> The primary reason is that we have observed a significant increase in developers choosing not to participate in the study because they do not wish to work without AI. Why do you think this is? Who wants to spend an afternoon gluing API calls together when the robot can do it in 5 minutes?
If you look at the data 25% of the people who reported attempting a task without AI did not complete it. Seeing as the time spent on AI tasks was not that much higher than the time spent on completed Non-AI tasks, I suspect it was less about unwillingness, and more about inability.
We should really be studying AI related cognitive and/or skill decline more heavily.