The only winning move is not to play • Hacker News Board

Re: The only winning move is not to play

#21

Post by BenGosub » Thu, Dec 04, 2025, 8:00 AM UTC

doug_durham wrote: post #2

Isn't it "The only winning move is to do good work"? If non-AI aided work is superior then it should win out in the long run because companies that do that type of research will be able to make superior decisions and thus be rewarded in the market. The argument isn't really AI versus non-AI, it's quality work versus shoddy work. It is right to lose patience with people who submit shoddy work whatever the source.

In theory yes, but in practice I wouldn't say that for example the way Facebook and Instagram developed is an example of superiority in social media design that has won. Honestly, technology can make life worst and we should find against that.

Also, things like visual arts and music can be watered down by devaluating the real stuff and equaling it with AI generated stuff.

Arguably, we used to be better at making physical stuff, we used to make beautiful amps, synths and drum machines, which to this day are highly valued only has software equivalents today.

Re: The only winning move is not to play

#22

Post by kscarlet » Thu, Dec 04, 2025, 8:04 AM UTC

8bitsrule wrote: post #5

"A new theoretical analysis ... provides evidence that large language models, such as ChatGPT, are mathematically constrained to a level of creativity comparable to an amateur human.... The study highlights that human creativity is not symmetrically distributed" - https://www.psypost.org/a-mathematical-ceiling-limits-genera... URL of study: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jocb.70077

The linked study is utterly unconvincing... textual arguments (am I reading philosophy?) with formula jumping up out of nowhere, figures showing not measurable data but made-up simple linear/inverse proportional curve... is this paper written by LLM?

Re: The only winning move is not to play

#23

Post by legsrunny » Thu, Dec 04, 2025, 8:52 AM UTC

One of the all time worst introductory paragraphs to a blog post. LLMs might not be able to replace whatever you are doing, but they can surely write with more clarity.

Re: The only winning move is not to play

#24

Post by Havoc » Thu, Dec 04, 2025, 10:50 AM UTC

> The executives who never cared about research in the first place?

Don’t think caring is high on the list of things that matter in this context. Progress and commercial incentives are unforgiving

Not playing is just going to relegate people to artisanal work and not sure artisanal research is even a thing.

I get the sentiment but this feels very much like an attempt to stand in the way of a tsunami and thinking you won’t get swept off your feet because of a principled stance

Re: The only winning move is not to play

#25

Post by gaigalas » Thu, Dec 04, 2025, 4:38 PM UTC

kromem wrote: post #4

Seems very strawmanned. There's currently a bit of an 80/20 rule with AI where it does great automating 80% of an overlapping problem domain and chokes on it 20% of the time. The idea of someone giving 100% of their work to Claude as in the examples is dumb. But so is someone doing 100% of the busywork themselves. Don't waste your own time and your client's money for the sake of some nonsense purity ideal. Learn to t…

We are seeing the same patterns: move to advertisement, anti-open source strategies, aggressive acquihires.

Companies driving AI are dinosaurs, funded by dinosaurs or aiming to become like them.

It literally feels like nothing has changed in 30 years.

There is absolutely no knowledge gap in learning to use AI tools. Only non-developers have issues, and they dominated the discourse with make-believe fantasy problems. Writing text, organizing markdown documents, writing good specifications... this is just not hard at all. Any developer can pick it up in a week, it's not a matter of adaptation, it's a matter of choice.