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Tell HN: I'm sick of AI everything

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Re: Tell HN: I'm sick of AI everything

#201

Post by acdha »

corvus-cornix wrote: post #39

I'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 then. This feels similar from the perspective of stock prices just going up for absolutely absurd reasons—Allbirds would have fit right in—but AI in some ways seems even worse because much of what was being hawked in the dotcom era was at least something that real people would want to buy: usually poorly executed and unsustainably priced but e.g. Kozmo.com wasn't wrong that a ton of people would love to order stuff and have it brought to your home or office. I had some business meetings with pets.com and they were unbelievably bloated—think a room full of people openly admitting that they were just killing time waiting for the IPO so they could cash out their options—but tons of people buy pet food, toys, and medicine online today.

In contrast, a lot of companies are just wedging AI into things where ordinary people don't want or benefit from it anywhere near the level needed to actually pay for it, especially with unreliability being an unsolved problem—the amount you'd pay for something to, say, summarize boring business documents goes down considerably when you have to closely read the original looking for errors and omissions and scrutinize any response to make sure it's not critically flawed.

There's also a weird difference in enthusiasm based on the societal impacts: the web let you do things you couldn't do before, but a lot of AI tools and services are really oriented at your boss’ boss’ boss’ boss’ boss saying they can layoff half of your department and still get more work out of the survivors. There's some cool stuff, yes, but unlike the mood during the dotcom era we now have a prominent tone of dread about deprofessionalization and larger concerns about how businesses will even work if a significant chunk of customers are pushed out of stable employment.

Re: Tell HN: I'm sick of AI everything

#202

Post by emp17344 »

hackable_sand wrote: post #119
simonw wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because "I really wish posts like this would clarify". I was making a point that saying "I hate AI" is intellectually lazy. The discourse here can be a whole lot better if people put more effort into clarity. I want Hacker News to be a better place for technically sophisticated conversations than most of Reddit.

But you know exactly which form of AI is exhausting everyone through mediocre application. You know exactly which form of AI requires constant propaganda and astroturfing to get a thimble of adoption. Fugazi as fuck

I’ve never heard this guy say anything negative about an AI product. Makes it impossible to trust him.

Re: Tell HN: I'm sick of AI everything

#203

Post by gigatree »

Jamesbeam wrote: post #168

I would be miserable too if my job had to do with anything Internet. It has gone from this cool inter-human knowledge hub and space for creation to a place where everyone tries to sell you something and make the sales pitch unskippable. It’s miserable. It started getting weird when the full home invasion of Internet-connected nonsense started. I have eyes, I can see there is no milk in the fridge, I don’t need a push…

That is really really cool

And I think you’re right that AI will give a lot of people the push they’ve needed to get back to real life, even if at the same time it pulls a majority of people further into the matrix

Re: Tell HN: I'm sick of AI everything

#204

Post by theshrike79 »

vrighter wrote: post #175
theshrike79 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I have never had it automate any tedium for me. Because if I didn't write it, I need to scrutinize all of it, but without the benefit of a prebuilt mental model. Reading through tons of similar looking code (because it's supposed to automate boilerplate) looking for subtle mistakes is mind numbingly boring. It's like looking at a wall full of periods in font size 8, and trying to find the one comma.

_Writing_ tons of similar looking code is equally error prone.

Only a complete psycho doesn't copy-paste code when doing something thats 90% repetitive.

Ironically our AI PR review has caught a bunch of those during unrelated commits :D

Re: Tell HN: I'm sick of AI everything

#205

Post by tcholewik »

acdha wrote: post #201
corvus-cornix wrote: post #39

I'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 then. This feels similar from the perspective of stock prices just going up for absolutely absurd reasons—Allbirds would have fit right in—but AI in some ways seems even worse because much of what was being hawked in the dotcom era was at least something that real people would want to buy: usually poorly executed and unsustainably priced but e.g. Kozmo.com wasn't wrong that a ton of people would love to…

I’m sorry but can you elaborate on how Allbirds fit in here? Thats just seems like a random reference that I do not understand.

Re: Tell HN: I'm sick of AI everything

#206

Post by chorkpop »

tcholewik wrote: post #205
acdha wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was around then. This feels similar from the perspective of stock prices just going up for absolutely absurd reasons—Allbirds would have fit right in—but AI in some ways seems even worse because much of what was being hawked in the dotcom era was at least something that real people would want to buy: usually poorly executed and unsustainably priced but e.g. Kozmo.com wasn't wrong that a ton of people would love to…

I’m sorry but can you elaborate on how Allbirds fit in here? Thats just seems like a random reference that I do not understand.

Allbirds recently decided to pivot to AI. Yes, the shoe company.

Re: Tell HN: I'm sick of AI everything

#208

Post by Shocka1 »

epgui wrote: post #26
bambax wrote: post #17

One problem is that when people delegate tasks to AI, they don't themselves learn anything from doing the task -- not just in the general sense of personal improvement, but in the very concrete sense of "what is it that was produced". Before AI, when someone showed you a presentation or an Excel sheet, even if it was complete horseshit that they had made up, they knew what was in it: they knew more about it than you,…

This drives me absolutely nuts.

It's from the ground up at this point. I'm in my last Master's course at a very well known and expensive private university in the Northeast. When we have presentations it sometimes feels like maybe 10 to 20% of us actually know the material in our slides. I'm all about generating templates and whatnot, but when every bullet point has an em hyphen and you are stumbling over your words, reading the sentences verbatim and having a hard time expanding on them... That is not someone worthy of being a Master in their field IMO. But these people pay full tuition so I'm assuming they graduate and are all working amongst us.

Re: Tell HN: I'm sick of AI everything

#209

Post by Shocka1 »

morgengold wrote: post #156

Bombardement of social media with AI blob could very well lead to a complete abadonment from these platforms.

LinkedIn was already bad enough, but now it's really bad. 98% of posts are LLM generated, and the few software engineering jobs posted are getting over 100 applicants in 30 minutes hah!

Re: Tell HN: I'm sick of AI everything

#210

Post by customguy »

simonw wrote: post #133
hackable_sand wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you know exactly which form of AI is exhausting everyone through mediocre application. You know exactly which form of AI requires constant propaganda and astroturfing to get a thimble of adoption. Fugazi as fuck

I think generative AI for slop posts and images on Facebook is a different issue from generative AI for coding agents, even when they share the same underlying models. Or generative AI that was used to find 272 vulnerabilities that were fixed in Firefox 150 this week: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/privacy-security/ai-security-zer...

They also share many underlying issues, e.g. the grand scale stealing of what humans wrote for other humans without ever consenting to a shred of this, who will make more things to steal from, or how the people who wield these things make them annoying.

Fixing 272 FF vulnerabilities, compared to the nuking of the web and everything, what someone here called invasion of the body snatchers, is like a bottle of water in exchange for boiling all oceans and making rain fall stop forever. It's that meaningless and trivial in my eyes. We would have had bug fixes anyway, we could have coded anyway. The destruction, and "just" of society and communication and thought, not even talking about the goons who make bank with this stuff, is on a whole new level, and I'd say of a new quality compared to previous iterations of mass society ratcheting up to make people smaller and more alienated. This isn't the newspaper or the radio or TV or the internet, it's all of those and then some, and the worst parts mostly it seems.

We don't need anyone with half an idea to be able to make an "indie" game (not very independent when you first need to suck up everything any human created and put on the web, honestly, this makes the greediest AAA companies look like honest workers) or a "Hollywood level movie" in 5 minutes. Nobody has time to play/watch any of that crap.

The product isn't interesting. That a human made it is, because then I can think what of it I can or can't do. If it's just some artifact shat out by the collective human creativity mushed around until the output is nice, it's just in the way. The web is on the path to become a park full of turds, and you can search for a blade of grass all day.

AI companies may have no moats, but humans will make moats. Just some areas and communities where no "AI" stuff, regardless of hair splitting, is allowed. And then we'll see how pushy the proponents get, if it's really just about some cool new tool or rather some sort of harness everybody gets herded into, with some trinkets like all the slop and yet another "app" not even the maker actually uses.

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