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I guess I kinda get why people hate AI

anthony.noided.media

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Re: I guess I kinda get why people hate AI

#231

Post by brabel »

AstroBen wrote: post #124
brabel wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can confirm. We don’t know if AI really is about to make programmers who write code by hand obsolete, but we sure as hell fear our competitors will ship features 10x faster than us. What is the logical next step?? Invest lots of money on AI or keep hoping it’s a fad and risk being left in the dust, even if you think that risk is fairly small?

Why is it an all or nothing decision? Do a small test: if you're 10x faster then keep going. If not, shelve it for a while and maybe try again later

It is an all or nothing decision. We were letting devs make a decision about AI use and it turned out just a few were using it. The rest were using it just a little. But we noticed people were still spending time on stuff that AI can easily do for them!! I know because I had to do stuff for devs who were just not able to do things quickly enough and I did it with AI in minutes. Quite disappointing. But my conclusion is that we need to push AI quite strongly and invest in the best services otherwise people don’t even try it, and when they do it if it’s some cheap service they quickly dismiss it. So here we are.

Re: I guess I kinda get why people hate AI

#232

Post by heraldgeezer »

Balinares wrote: post #228
heraldgeezer wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN has become so marxist they hate the country they live in

Oh no! What a pity. In hindsight, mind you, countries that treat their population like disposable labor units to be wrung dry and then discarded, tend to see the population develop opinions about that eventually.

>disposable labor units

This is the source of migration allowance but I bet you stand there with a "Refugees welcome" sign.

Re: I guess I kinda get why people hate AI

#233

Post by surgical_fire »

munksbeer wrote: post #216
NitpickLawyer wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a bit more useful than it was 3 years ago. It's comments like these that make me not really want to interact with this topic anymore. There's no way that your comment can be taken seriously. It's 99.9% a troll comment, or simply delusional. 3 years ago the model (gpt3.5, the only one out there basically) was not able to output correct code at all. It looked like python if you squinted, but it made no sense. To…

> It's comments like these that make me not really want to interact with this topic anymore. It's a religious war at this point. People who hate AI are not going to admit anything until they have no choice. And given the progress in the last few months, I think we're a few years away from nearly every developer using coding agents, kicking and screaming in some cases, or just leaving the industry in others.

This is such a weird framing.

My comment was that I think AI is useful. I use it on a daily basis, and have been for quite a while. I actually pay for a Chat GPT account, and I also have access to Claude and Gemini at work.

That you frame my comment as "people who hate AI" and calls ir "a religious war" honestly says more about you than me.

It seems that if you don't think that AI is the second coming of Christ, you hate it.

Re: I guess I kinda get why people hate AI

#234

Post by munksbeer »

v3xro wrote: 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.

The rule of metaprogramming is that it ends up just as convoluted and full of edge cases as regular code, just without a nice way to debug. The rule is also that it always seems like a fantastic idea at first and will solve so many isues.

I've been programming since 1994. I've seen a lot. I almost always end up despising any metaprogramming system and wish we'd just kept things simpler even if it meant boilerplate.

Re: I guess I kinda get why people hate AI

#235

Post by hunter-gatherer »

bovermyer wrote: post #54

My feelings on AI are complicated. It's very useful as a coding autocomplete. It provides a fast way to connect multiple disparate search criteria in one query. It also has caused massive price hikes for computer components, negatively impacted the environment, and most importantly, subtly destroys people's ability to understand.

I've come to the same conclusions. I don't think the feelings are complicated though. It's just personal when you find use in it. It's kind of like cryptocurrency in the way that it doesn't democratize efficiency and usefulness amongst everyone. So for a few it is a powerful and useful tool, but ultimately at the cost of everything else.

Re: I guess I kinda get why people hate AI

#236

Post by munksbeer »

surgical_fire wrote: post #233
munksbeer wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's comments like these that make me not really want to interact with this topic anymore. It's a religious war at this point. People who hate AI are not going to admit anything until they have no choice. And given the progress in the last few months, I think we're a few years away from nearly every developer using coding agents, kicking and screaming in some cases, or just leaving the industry in others.

This is such a weird framing. My comment was that I think AI is useful. I use it on a daily basis, and have been for quite a while. I actually pay for a Chat GPT account, and I also have access to Claude and Gemini at work. That you frame my comment as "people who hate AI" and calls ir "a religious war" honestly says more about you than me. It seems that if you don't think that AI is the second coming of Christ, you…

To be honest, I didn't even really read your comment. I was mostly responding to NitpickLawyer in general terms. Sorry about that, it wasn't really aimed at you.

But you're sort of doing the same thing I did - "second coming of Christ"?!

Re: I guess I kinda get why people hate AI

#237

Post by topocite »

cmiles8 wrote: post #47

The cracks are showing, and all the “AI is going to eliminate 50% of white collar jobs” fear mongering is simply signaling we’re in the final stages before the bubble implosion. The AI bros desperately need everyone to believe this is the future. But the data just isn’t there to support it. More and more companies are coming out saying AI was good to have, but the mass productivity gains just aren’t there. A bunch of…

I just don't agree with this at all.

Right now is the good time for the job market. The S&P is at an all time high.

In the next recession, I expect massive layoffs in white collar work and there is no way those jobs are coming back on the other side.

40-50% of US white collar work hours are spent on procedural, rules-based tasks. Then another large chunk is managing the people doing procedural, rules-based tasks and support of people doing rules based tasks. Salary and benefits are 50% of operating costs for most business.

Maybe you do something really interesting and unique but that is just not what most white collar workers in the US are doing.

I know for myself, these are the final days of white collar work before I am unemployable as a white collar worker. I don't think the company I work for will exist either in 5 years. It is not a matter of Claude code being able to update a legacy system or not. It is that the tide hasn't really gone out in 15 years and all these zombie companies are going to get wiped out at the same time AI is automating the white collar jobs. Delaying the business cycle from clearing over and over is not a free lunch, it is a bill that has been stacking up for a long time.

On the other side, the business as usual of today won't be an option.

From my own white collar experience, I think if you view procedural rules-based tasks as a graph, the automation of any one task depends so much on other tasks being automated. So it will seem like the automation is not working but at some point you get a contagion of automation. Then so much automation will happen at once.

Re: I guess I kinda get why people hate AI

#238

Post by atemerev »

SoftTalker wrote: post #137
atemerev wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am absolutely sure that WW3 is inevitable, for these exact reasons. Later, the survivors will be free to reorganize the society.

Nature likes to do occasional resets. Probably explains the Fermi paradox as well.

All our human history is a tiny speck on astronomical timescales. The timescale of life itself, on the other hand, is quite significant. Just from this we can somewhat deduce that life might be common in the universe, but sentience might be rare.

Re: I guess I kinda get why people hate AI

#239

Post by atemerev »

mitchdoogle wrote: post #181
atemerev wrote: post #63

Well, the process cannot be stopped or paused, whether we like it or not, for a few relatively obvious reasons. And relying on your government do do the right thing as of 2026 is, frankly, not a great idea. We need to think hard ourselves how to adapt. Perhaps "jobs" will be the thing of the past, and governments will probably not manage to rule over it. What will be the new power structures? How do we gain a place t…

Of course the process can be stopped. That's just a lack of imagination.

By whom?

Well may be together with the full societal collapse, but as long as there are nation-states and competition, AI will be developed.

Re: I guess I kinda get why people hate AI

#240

Post by csa »

heraldgeezer wrote: post #164
SL61 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has been the message at the F100 that one of my relatives works at. The CEO's increasingly aggressive message to their hundreds of thousands of employees is that they should figure out how to get 10x faster with AI or their job is on the line. The average non-technical white collar employee doesn't know the details of how LLMs work or any of the day-to-day changes in tooling that we see in the tech industry. All…

I do love that. My career is built on people not knowing how to Google lmao (IT) To most people, AI is chatGTP. Maybe Gemini. Claude? No idea. VS Code, Cursor, Antigraivity, Claude Code? Blank stares. Same as when the computer came, some will fall behind. Excel monkeys copy pasting numbers will go, copywriters, written word jobs = already gone. Art for simple images = AI now all done by one person. Unless you want a…

> Unless you want a Soviet system where jobs are kept to keep people busy.

In $big_corp, everyone seems to have penis envy over “head count”, constantly checking whose is bigger.

If you want to see an executive have an existential crisis, ask them how many of those folks are necessary for the org to run.

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