Sounds like you need a cyberdeck
Tell HN: I'm sick of AI everything
141–150 of 216 posts
Re: Tell HN: I'm sick of AI everything
#142I'm looking at engineering job specs at the moment and it's very wearisome that every company seems to have pivoted from highlighting the unique value they provide to customers to putting AI front and centre in their employer branding. My eyes immediately glaze over at what may have been the result of "Claude, take this HR/marketing/whatever copy and inject some AI". I've adopted the tools because they're useful, but…
I was around during the dot-com bubble. When it popped it popped pretty quickly. It wasn't a slow leak. Everything needed to be a dot-com and everything was centered around being a dot-com no matter what the business actually did. Money was pouring and almost anything dot-com was getting funding. I moved to a dot-com right at the tail end of it. We built a pretty decent startup from scratch within the first two month…
It's definitely looking like we've passed the peak of the S-curve here.
But there is one difference between now and the dot-bomb that could make the shape of what's next different (note, only "could"; it might very well be very similar): with the massively increased financialization of everything, the link between reality and stocks/private equity investment has become much more tenuous. Speculative investors, as a group, know to some extent that they can keep the bubble going just by continuing to buy.
For a time.
But eventually they will have exhausted all they can squeeze from the "greater fools", and someone's risk analysis department will say "if we don't sell it all now, we'll be stuck holding the bag." And that will start a cascade. Because the other big difference between 2000 and today is the degree of automation in trading....
Re: Tell HN: I'm sick of AI everything
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
The sad part wasn't the bubble bursting... It was watching all the potential being squandered and the internet basically being relegated to click farming and selling people crap they don't need. All the really cool stuff seems to have died with the bubble...
You're still around :)
If only the Internet were much more frequently as nice as your reply. :-)
Re: Tell HN: I'm sick of AI everything
#144Step 1: remove reference to blockchain Step 2: insert reference to AI
I do find it somewhat interesting that crypto mining firms are perfectly placed to pivot to AI. Both ventures involve building out large clusters of machines to use GPUs to convert electricity into money.
There's the joke theory that satoshi nakomoto was someone sent back in time to accelerate us towards the singularity
Re: Tell HN: I'm sick of AI everything
#145For me it’s just become…incredibly boring. There’s something uninspiring about a machine thats supposed to “do the hard things for you” so to speak. I like using my mind and understanding things deeply. Sure you could say that “managing the AI” can be deeply understood in a way but it’s just not exciting.
That's just silly. AI is really bad at the hard things. What it's really good at is automating the tedium away.
Like I had a connector made for service X. Needed one for Y and Z, all use the same basic authentication scheme, but slight differences on where they want the bits set at.
That used to be a week-long project easily with me going through the docs for each service, maybe copy-pasting something from service X and modifying the bits by hand.
Now I can just go "look at projects/service-x-api, now do that but for Service Y in projects/service-y-api" to an agent, tab away and come back to a 90-100% working thing. It went through the API documentation by itself, looked up some blog posts on the undocumented crap they added in January that broke the official flow and made it work.
Meanwhile I could do something with actual impact, helped other people learn stuff and wrote internal guidelines.
Re: Tell HN: I'm sick of AI everything
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t know that washing machines have replaced understanding things on a deep level but if they have for you I’m very curious to hear how.
The zen of doing your chores by hand
There's a specific set of people who get a Zen feeling from doing things the long way.
I'm not one of those, my brain doesn't give me any more dopamine whether I spent a long time doing a thing or took a shortcut. I don't even get dopamine from completing the task, I just get a list of more things that need to be done.
Re: Tell HN: I'm sick of AI everything
#147I'm working with AI since early 00's and it was a lot of fan of this with very little community of an artificial neural networks developers. Now AI is widely available and used by people with discussable level of intelligence to generate tons of slop, so all the internet looks like a big trash bin.
It's the whole iceberg thing.
There's a LOT going for "AI" and language models in general, but the general population only sees the tip where people post obvious AI slop "art" and screenshot ChatGPT answers on actual questions.
Re: Tell HN: I'm sick of AI everything
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t know that washing machines have replaced understanding things on a deep level but if they have for you I’m very curious to hear how.
The zen of doing your chores by hand
Thinking about the world and oneself isn't a repetitive chore in the way washing your clothes is.
"I doubt, therefore I think, I think, therefore I am" -- if I no longer think, what's left? Biomass? Why us then.. why not goo, or just more parking space?
Re: Tell HN: I'm sick of AI everything
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was around during the dot-com bubble. When it popped it popped pretty quickly. It wasn't a slow leak. Everything needed to be a dot-com and everything was centered around being a dot-com no matter what the business actually did. Money was pouring and almost anything dot-com was getting funding. I moved to a dot-com right at the tail end of it. We built a pretty decent startup from scratch within the first two month…
I was a teenager around the dot-com and to this day I feel an idealized sense of longing for participation in the exciting times of the dot-coms. You guys got to enjoy the blazing innovation of the new internet, so full of endless possibilities. Tough luck on your bubble popping moment though.
Well, it was exciting I guess. I even knew someone who worked for pets.com!
On the other hand, I worked for a startup selling product information management software to large retailers, and was about as non dot-com as you could get. When the bubble burst, all the funding disappeared for all tech companies, not just the dot-com ones, so we were also all out of a job. Which was not fun.
Re: Tell HN: I'm sick of AI everything
#150tell me about it, my client started recently sending me AI generated QA reports, I guess I don't need to mention in 98% reported issues they are false positive just wasting my time
and it's similar with trying to watch Youtube on TV (Smarttube), too much AI slop though try to be picky when choosing suspicious videos