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Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

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Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#161

Post by bigstrat2003 »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #98
vrganj wrote: post #18

AI is fine . The hype is annoying. What's even worse though are the incredible amounts of money and energy that are being thrown at it, with no regard for the consequences, in times of record inequality and looming climate apocalypse. AI is the red herring that'll waste all our attention until it's too late.

> AI is fine. The hype is annoying. I'm finding the detractors worse than the hype, because it seems like a certain subset of detractors [0] formed their opinion on AI in late 2022/early 2023 when ChatGPT came out (REALLY!? Over 3 years ago!?) and then never updated their opinions since then. They'll say things like "why would I want to consume X amount of energy and Y amount of water just to get a wrong answer?" In…

> a certain subset of detractors [0] formed their opinion on AI in late 2022/early 2023 when ChatGPT came out (REALLY!? Over 3 years ago!?) and then never updated their opinions since then.

On the contrary. I update my opinion all the time, but every time I try the latest LLM it still sucks just as much. That is why it sounds like my opinion hasn't changed.

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#162

Post by jakelsaunders94 »

Garlef wrote: post #97

“Everything has already been said, but not yet by everyone.” — Karl Valentin --- Personally, I'm still very interested in the topic. But since the tech is moving very fast, the discussion is just very very unevenly distributed: There's lots of interesting things to say. But a lot of takes that were relevant 6 months ago are still being digested by most.

This is a great saying, thank you for sharing it. Out of curiosity, do you have any links to intersting AI articles you've read recently? Maybe I'll change my mind.

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#163

Post by mattgreenrocks »

chatmasta wrote: post #103

What I miss is people showing off their hand-crafted libraries or frameworks. That’s become way less common now that everyone is building a layer up the stack. I fear we’ll be stuck in a permanent state of using Tailwind and React and all the LLM-favored libraries as they were frozen in time at the beginning of 2025. Then again, that’ll be the agent’s problem, not mine… All that said, it’s extremely exciting. I’ve be…

Perhaps we're in an AI summer and a tech winter. Winter is always the time when people hole up, dream, and work on whatever big thing is next.

We're about due for some new computing abstractions to shake things up I think. Those won't be conceived by LLMs, though they may aid in implementing them.

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#164

Post by bengale »

_doctor_love wrote: post #153

This might sound like snark, but I truly don’t mean it that way. I think what’s interesting about AI, and why there’s so much conversation, is that in order to be a good user of AI, you have to really understand software development. All the people I work with who are getting the most value out of using AI to deliver software are people who are already very high-skilled engineers, and the more years of real experienc…

Spot on take. The people I’ve noticed that say things like “it’s not useful” are the ones who are doing so little they can’t see the value.

This isn’t to say there’s not hype. Just that if you’re not seeing big productivity gains you need to make sure you really are an outlier and not just surplus to requirements.

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#165

Post by xvector »

arcxi wrote: post #130
Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI is fine. The hype is annoying. I'm finding the detractors worse than the hype, because it seems like a certain subset of detractors [0] formed their opinion on AI in late 2022/early 2023 when ChatGPT came out (REALLY!? Over 3 years ago!?) and then never updated their opinions since then. They'll say things like "why would I want to consume X amount of energy and Y amount of water just to get a wrong answer?" In…

This very comment is measurably more harmful than any AI criticism that annoys you - someone will read this and assume it's appropriate to accept whatever bullshit Claude generates at face value, with terrible consequences. In contrast, what harm do those detractors cause? They don't generate as much code per hour?

By that logic we should all live in air-filtered bubbles. Anyone denying this is causing harm. After all, people might die if you let them out of their air-filtered bubble!

The "harm" (if you can call it that) is clear, detractors slow the pace of progress with meaningless and incorrect hand-wringing. A lack of progress harms everyone (as evidenced our amazing QoL today compared to any historical lens.)

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#167

Post by mlsu »

Over the last couple of years I've realized how shitty and tiring it is to do anything at all on the computer. Reading something like Reddit was tiring before, because of spam, submarine advertising, etc. But it was still worth it because the signal to noise ratio was still there. Now? No way. Easily 50% of comments are AI generated.

I used to have this idea that if I built something cool it would be valuable to donate it to the world for free. But now increasingly I'd be just making a donation to the training data, and on top of this I'm in competition with AI slop. Most people won't tell the difference and won't care. The noise floor for doing absolutely anything collaboratively on the computer is now 10x higher than it was before, and I'm basically checked out at this point. Even HN is becoming tiring to read since I think around 10-15% of comments that I read are AI generated. When that number reaches 30% I'm done forever, gone. My life is too short to waste time on this shit.

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#168

Post by plagiarist »

steve_adams_86 wrote: post #52
oulipo2 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I don't see the threat from AI as capitalist at all, but more so feudalist. I mean, if things go in the direction of the worst-case scenario. It seems like the power potential transcends the problems of capitalism entirely. But for now it's strictly hypothetical. Nothing I'm doing with AI matters enough to really make any statements about a broader scale in my field, let alone in entire economies.

Capitalism is feudalism but with raw generational wealth instead of generational wealth with divine right characteristics.

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#169

Post by onemoresoop »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #98
vrganj wrote: post #18

AI is fine . The hype is annoying. What's even worse though are the incredible amounts of money and energy that are being thrown at it, with no regard for the consequences, in times of record inequality and looming climate apocalypse. AI is the red herring that'll waste all our attention until it's too late.

> AI is fine. The hype is annoying. I'm finding the detractors worse than the hype, because it seems like a certain subset of detractors [0] formed their opinion on AI in late 2022/early 2023 when ChatGPT came out (REALLY!? Over 3 years ago!?) and then never updated their opinions since then. They'll say things like "why would I want to consume X amount of energy and Y amount of water just to get a wrong answer?" In…

Follow closely on what the detractors say. Most of them are using AI themselves and are just pushing back on the hype or other ludicrous claims and that's a good thing. Is the current crop of Gen AI anything near AGI? Is it worth the current valuation? Can a company fire most staff and run on gen AI? We may see the economy completely crash and not because AI takes over but because of bad investments, hype and greed.

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#170

Post by jakelsaunders94 »

keithnz wrote: post #105

No, well, I still enjoy the articles. The thing that always surprises me is the negativity in comment threads. I'm genuinely quite excited about AI based development. Yesterday I was playing around with developing a marketing plan for a market gap where we could leverage our product and finding what features in our product would need changing/adding to improve our offering. Quite interesting results!

I think in most places on the internet the negative comments are the ones that will win out. Same for AI I suppose. I tried not to bemoan the whole concept here, just the amount of 'airtime' it gets. Sort of like when something happens in the news (lately it's been the Epstein files for me), and you wish you could see a more balanced picture of world events.
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