Live data from Hacker News

I guess I kinda get why people hate AI

anthony.noided.media

101–110 of 278 posts

Re: I guess I kinda get why people hate AI

#101
post #3

> Microsoft’s AI CEO is saying AI is going to take everybody’s job. And Sam Altman is saying that AI will wipe out entire categories of jobs. ANd Matt Shumer is saying that AI is currently like Covid in January 2020—as in, “kind of under the radar, but about to kill millions of people”. > I legitimately feel like I am going insane when I hear AI technologists talk about the technology. They’re supposed to market it.…

Tech has slowly been moving that way anyways. In terms of ROI, you’re often much better off targeting whales and large clients than trying to become the ubiquitous market service for consumers. Competition is fierce and people are poor comparatively, so you need the volume for success.

Meanwhile if you go fishing for niche whales, there’s less competition and much higher ROI for them buying. That’s why a lot of tech isn’t really consumer friendly, because it’s not really targeting consumers, it’s targeting other groups that extract wealth from consumers in other ways. You’re selling it to grocery stores because people need to eat and they have the revenue to pay you, and see the proposition of dynamic pricing on consumers and all sorts of other things. Youre marketing it for analyzing communications of civilians for prying governments that want more control. You’re selling it to employers who want to minimize labor costs and maximize revenue, because they have millions or billions often and small industry monopolies exist all around, just find your niche whales to go hunting for.

And right now I’d say a lot of people in tech are happy to implement these things but at some point it’s going to bite you too. You may be helping dynamic pricing for Kroger because you shop at Aldi but at some point all of this will effect you as well, because you’re also a laboring consumer.

Re: I guess I kinda get why people hate AI

#102
post #3

> Microsoft’s AI CEO is saying AI is going to take everybody’s job. And Sam Altman is saying that AI will wipe out entire categories of jobs. ANd Matt Shumer is saying that AI is currently like Covid in January 2020—as in, “kind of under the radar, but about to kill millions of people”. > I legitimately feel like I am going insane when I hear AI technologists talk about the technology. They’re supposed to market it.…

So, what I don't get is, taking it to its logical conclusion, if AI takes all the jobs then who are your customers? Who will buy your stock? Who will buy the software that all the developers you used to employ used to write? How do these CEOs and investors see this playing out?

You’re not supposed to ask such logical questions. It kills the AI vibe.

Re: I guess I kinda get why people hate AI

#103

The amount of EM dashes and usage of negation does make me think AI wrote part of this. I'll give credit for lack of semicolons, but people are starting to get a bit better at "humanizing" their outputs.

I'm certainly seeing a huge amount of AI-assisted writing recently (that "I Love Board Games" article posted here yesterday was a good example), but I think this one is human-written. Pangram shows it as human written also.

Re: I guess I kinda get why people hate AI

#104
post #3

> Microsoft’s AI CEO is saying AI is going to take everybody’s job. And Sam Altman is saying that AI will wipe out entire categories of jobs. ANd Matt Shumer is saying that AI is currently like Covid in January 2020—as in, “kind of under the radar, but about to kill millions of people”. > I legitimately feel like I am going insane when I hear AI technologists talk about the technology. They’re supposed to market it.…

Sam Altman is a known sociopath who has no problem achieving his goals by any means necessary. His prior business dealings (and repeated patterns with OpenAI) are evidence of this. Shumer is of a similar stock but less capable, so he gets caught in his lies. I’m still shocked people work with Altman knowing his history, but given the Epstein files etc it’s not surprise. Our elite class is entirely rotten. Best advice…

I'm shocked how congratulatory things were for OpenClaw joining Altman Inc

Re: I guess I kinda get why people hate AI

#105
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps stop entering into saturated markets and using AI to try and shortcut your way to the moon? There's no way any LLM code generator can replace a moderately complex system at this point and looking at the rate of progress this hasn't improved recently at all. Getting one to reason about a simple part of a business domain is still quite difficult.

> and looking at the rate of progress this hasn't improved recently at all. The rate of progress in the last 3 years has been over my expectations. The past year has been increasing a lot. The last 2 months has been insane. No idea how people can say "no improvement".

If your expectations were low, anything would have been over your expectations.

There was some improvement in terms of the ability of some models to understand and generate code. It's a bit more useful than it was 3 years ago.

I still think that any claims that it can operate at a human level are complete bullshit.

It can speed things up well in some contexts though.

Re: I guess I kinda get why people hate AI

#106
post #8

> If I can somehow hate a machine that has basically stopped me from having to write boring boilerplate code, of course others are going to hate it! Poor author, never tried expressive high-level languages with metaprogramming facilities that do not result in boring and repetitive boilerplate.

Honestly, this. The mainstream coding culture has spent decades dealing with shoehorning stateful OOP into distributed and multithreaded contexts. And now we have huge piles of code, getters and setters and callbacks and hooks and annotation processers and factories and dependency injection all pasted on top of the hottest coding paradigm of the 90's. It's too much to manage, and now we feel like we need AI to understand it all for us.

Meanwhile, nobody is claiming vast productivity gains using AI for Haskell or Lisp or Elixir.

Re: I guess I kinda get why people hate AI

#107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The marketing is clearly effecting individual developers, too. There's a mass psychosis happening

> There's a mass psychosis happening There absolutely is but I'm increasingly realizing that it's futile to fight it. The thing that surprises me is that people are simultaneously losing their minds over AI agents while almost no one is exploring playing around with what these models can really do. Even if you restrict yourself to small, open models, there is so much unexplored around messing with the internals of th…

There's a good reason for that. The end result of exploring what they can actually do isn't very exciting or marketable

"I shipped code 15% faster with AI this month" doesn't have the pull of a 47 agent setup on a mac mini

Re: I guess I kinda get why people hate AI

#108
Disclaimer: self plug[0]

I honestly believe everything will be normalized. A genius with the same model as I will be more productive than I, and I will be more productive than some other people, exactly the same as without AI.

If AI starts doing things beyond what you can understand, control and own, it stops being useful, the extra capacity is wasted capacity, and there are diminishing returns for ever growing investment needs. The margins fall off a cliff (and they're already negative), and the only economic improvement will come from Moore's Law in terms of power needed to generate stuff.

The nature of the work will change, you'll manage agents and what not, I'm not a crystal ball, but you'll still have to dive into the details to fix what AI can't, and if you can't, you're stuck.

[0]https://www.fer.xyz/2026/02/llm-equilibrium

Re: I guess I kinda get why people hate AI

#109
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is reality. None of our much-promoted AI initiatives have resulted in any ROI. In fact they have cost a pile of cash so far and delivered nothing.

Many AI initiatives have had massive ROI though. The implementation problems are similar to any pre-AI tech rollout and hugely expensive non-AI tech implementations fail all the time.

Name one that has at least $200mn ROI over capital investment. Show me the balance sheet for it as well. And make sure that ROI isn't from suddenly not paying salaries.

Re: I guess I kinda get why people hate AI

#110
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well I've just watched two major projects fail which were running mostly on faith because someone read too many "I used 15 AI agents to vibe code..." blog posts and sold it to management. The promoters have a deep technical understanding of the problem domain we have but little understanding of what an LLM can achieve or what it can understand relating to the problem at hand. Yes you can indeed vibe code a startup. B…

> I've just watched two major projects fail This is an opportunity. You can have a good long career consulting/contracting for these types of companies.

Why do you think I work there!

Emergency clean up work is ridiculous money!

Post reply on HN