Live data from Hacker News

There's no earthly way of knowing which direction we are going

kottke.org

11–20 of 87 posts

Re: There's no earthly way of knowing which direction we are going

#11
post #10

The commencement/graduating speeches including AI in the video at the end are infuriating. The message from people giving those speeches is literally "deal with it" and how tone deaf do they have to be to patronize those booing students with "I understand your fear". The graduation episode where the AI readout missing some student names and then the college saying "we used AI to readout and some names were missed. We…

I suspect there is an unspoken factor here, which is that business leaders are not impressed by the WFH silent quitting attitude of junior staff, they’re happy to replace them with AI, and they don’t have sympathy because “yet another thing is hard.”

I’ve seen the silent quitting attitude in a workplace and it is toxic. OTOH young people have had a lot to deal with, and social media is damaging their mental health. OTOOH quit social media and try to address some of the issues you have. It’s very hard to know where the balance between sympathetic arm-round-the-shoulder and tough-love-develop-some-grit should lie.

Re: There's no earthly way of knowing which direction we are going

#12
post #4

I will argue that we are going forward - for better or for worse. In my humble opinion, taking into account the sad state of the world today, any change is welcomed.

The problem is that we are pushed forward, not going at our own pace.

In his commencement speech that got booed by the audience, Eric Schmidt says, "When someone offers you a seat on the rocketship, you do not ask which seat. You just get on. [...] Find a way to say yes."

That's the billionaire class telling you where your place is in their plan for the world. Nobody asks if you even want to leave the planet, figuratively speaking.

The last sentence in particular shows the contempt he has for the students in the audience, and is reminiscent of another (alleged) incident:

https://www.msn.com/en-in/news/world/tried-to-convince-me-i-...

The part of the speech I quoted is not in the video linked in the article, but you can watch it here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MYggR_PPRg

Re: There's no earthly way of knowing which direction we are going

#13
post #10

The commencement/graduating speeches including AI in the video at the end are infuriating. The message from people giving those speeches is literally "deal with it" and how tone deaf do they have to be to patronize those booing students with "I understand your fear". The graduation episode where the AI readout missing some student names and then the college saying "we used AI to readout and some names were missed. We…

I suspect there is an unspoken factor here, which is that business leaders are not impressed by the WFH silent quitting attitude of junior staff, they’re happy to replace them with AI, and they don’t have sympathy because “yet another thing is hard.” I’ve seen the silent quitting attitude in a workplace and it is toxic. OTOH young people have had a lot to deal with, and social media is damaging their mental health. O…

Why do you assume it’s the juniors who are silent quitting?

Re: There's no earthly way of knowing which direction we are going

#14
I was surprised to find out how much hate there is for AI in art.

An artist, Yuumei, is the perfect candidate to use AI– drawing by hand since early 2000s, wrist injury precluding heavy work.

People seem to think art should be done only by humans, that AI steals art, and is bad for the environment.

But she wants to use it to be able to produce the work she wants, including comics with lots of art and such. Given that she's ultimately still responsible for the creative direction and result, this seems like something AI is greatly help for.

Example hate video and comments: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=495VOuAnCJM

Re: There's no earthly way of knowing which direction we are going

#16
post #4

I will argue that we are going forward - for better or for worse. In my humble opinion, taking into account the sad state of the world today, any change is welcomed.

History shows that blindly welcoming change just because someone promises you a better future is a dangerous thing.

Re: There's no earthly way of knowing which direction we are going

#17
> tools that let users build personalized mini apps tailored to their needs.

We’ve reinvented Java Applets. I mean, I do like the idea behind that sort of stuff, it’s just that all sorts of little things break along the way. For example, I asked Claude to put together a specific recipe, it could do that, I got my Artifact/cooking widget/whatever. It even let me switch between metric and imperial (and didn’t save that preference) and let me change the quantity and updated the ingredient amounts (except the phone going to sleep led to it all resetting).

Sometimes I feel like we are very much stuck in being able to produce things but they simply aren’t high enough quality (which might take years or decades more of model training and efficiency improvements) and also that maybe we’re doing things a decade too soon. Imagine trying to build AI data centres with 2010 or 2000 hardware and how limited the models you’d be able to run would be. Maybe that’s also why the current outcomes are sometimes shitty. The other theory is that there’s simply not enough high quality data to train truly good models and we’ll plateau and model collapse in training will be common.

Re: There's no earthly way of knowing which direction we are going

#18
post #8
post #5

What's wrong with the Polish author example?

According to "experts", you have to suffer to make good art. She used a tool that reduced that suffering phase, so she's "garbage" now. I don't know about AI, but I think the main problem nowadays is that a growing number of people can only deal with binary categories, either it's godly or it's trash. To conclude, anything that is not written with a stone tablet is garbage.

Amazon books are now heavily infected with AI slop, I've yet to read a book which is detectably AI generated which is not garbage. When that stops being the case, perhaps people will stop objecting to it.

This isn't about suffering vs not, it's about quality vs garbage. If the judges truly couldn't tell though and actually read the book properly, I'd say it's fine to use AI in that sense as the author clearly heavily supervised it or just used it for inspiration and they produced something the judges valued.

Part of the problem with other use-cases is that we have up to now assumed that writing a book took significant effort and therefore do not have controls in place for quality. If it doesn't take significant effort to generate something plausible, all the rules have to change to take that into account.

Post reply on HN