Live data from Hacker News

I am against GenAI and everything it stands for

lpcvoid.com

31–40 of 51 posts

Re: I am against GenAI and everything it stands for

#31

The thing I don't like about AI doomerism posts is the intellectual dishonesty. We're going to cure cancers we haven't cured before, using AI. We're going to make better diagnoses faster. Adults will be able to accomplish more tasks due to the reduction in the barrier of specialized knowledge and skill. Kids that grow up today will be able to solve their own problems 100x faster and easier than we do today. Companies…

The author speaks about the benefits of ML image processing algorithms "which have been used in countless industries in numerous settings to solve hard, real world problems". So it doesn't seem fair to paint this person as someone ignoring the benefits completely, as you seem to be doing.

Having said that, expecting writers to devote equal time to the pros and cons of an argument can set up a false equivalence. It tells the reader that the benefits and drawbacks must be somewhat equal, even when they're not.

> If the only thing you can come up with is drawbacks, you're being willfully ignorant.

Does this also go the other way? If you can't come up with any drawbacks, you're being "wilfully ignorant"? You may want to amend your post!

Re: I am against GenAI and everything it stands for

#32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is an artistic element to coding but claiming it is some sort of unquantifiable abstract mystical thing is silly. There are many metrics, objective and easily measured, that AI can match humans on in code generation.

None of those 'objective' metrics matter as long as the outcomes is incredibly visible and damaging. You say that AI is matching humans, but what people see is apps getting worse with more bugs than ever, an inability to reach anyone that actually gives a shit and second order effects on things like general computing. It doesn't help that most of these 'metrics' are literally invented by and ran by the companies that…

The median != the frontier. When looking at all the crappy vibe coded apps and saying they’re worse than the normal expectations of pre-AI applications, you’re comparing some default app-generator model (Gemini flash or worse) with the security integrity of enterprise apps (which still have security flaws). This is very different from comparing Opus 4.8 to the median coder, given the same context, parameters, access to tools, time, and feedback loops.

Re: I am against GenAI and everything it stands for

#34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of those 'objective' metrics matter as long as the outcomes is incredibly visible and damaging. You say that AI is matching humans, but what people see is apps getting worse with more bugs than ever, an inability to reach anyone that actually gives a shit and second order effects on things like general computing. It doesn't help that most of these 'metrics' are literally invented by and ran by the companies that…

The median != the frontier. When looking at all the crappy vibe coded apps and saying they’re worse than the normal expectations of pre-AI applications, you’re comparing some default app-generator model (Gemini flash or worse) with the security integrity of enterprise apps (which still have security flaws). This is very different from comparing Opus 4.8 to the median coder, given the same context, parameters, access…

The frontier has been on the horizon for the past 5 years, where people say it's going to replace all engineers and we'll be in some sort of software heaven. Until when and IF we reach that point, the only thing that matters are the negative outcomes we currently experience as a result.

Re: I am against GenAI and everything it stands for

#35

> I am going to state a bet: In 5 to 10 years, once all the vibe coders get hooked into LLMs, there's going to be so much unmaintainable, wrongly architectured crap code in every codebase they touch, that by then they are unable to get any work done without consulting their LLM. And if that heap of collected technical debt becomes so large that even the LLM fails In 5-10 years AI is going to be so much better than ev…

> In 5-10 years AI is going to be so much better than even the best human coder

How, if it learns from humans?

Re: I am against GenAI and everything it stands for

#36

"If all of this was done to better humanity, AI development would be done in public, data would be legally obtained, models would be released for free, access wouldn't be gatekept behind ever increasing subscription costs." The vast majority of AI development is public. There are papers literally every single day to read. In fact everything you need to build Claude and GPT models is public. Thanks to Google, DeepSeek…

Is there any mainstream model that is actually open-source (not just open-weight)?

Re: I am against GenAI and everything it stands for

#37

The thing I don't like about AI doomerism posts is the intellectual dishonesty. We're going to cure cancers we haven't cured before, using AI. We're going to make better diagnoses faster. Adults will be able to accomplish more tasks due to the reduction in the barrier of specialized knowledge and skill. Kids that grow up today will be able to solve their own problems 100x faster and easier than we do today. Companies…

> We're going to cure cancers we haven't cured before

“You’re absolutely right – I applied the invasive treatment to the wrong leg. Would you like me to try again?”

> Kids that grow up today will be able to solve their own problems 100x faster and easier than we do today.

Not if they stop thinking on their own.

> We will likely spend less money

How exactly does the tool that costs hundreds of dollars per month help me spend less money?

Re: I am against GenAI and everything it stands for

#38
post #10
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try reading the article next time.

I generally try not to be outright dismissive of articles/blogposts, but I don't see a ton of value in reading about someone being against opening Pandora's Box after the box has been opened. It can never be shut and we are going to have to figure out how to live with the consequences of it. I gave the article a chance regardless and it's nothing I've not read before.

Indoor smoking in restaurants used to be legal, we made it illegal. Slavery used to be legal, we made it illegal. Don’t say that it’s not possible to stop bad things that are already happening.

Re: I am against GenAI and everything it stands for

#39

"If all of this was done to better humanity, AI development would be done in public, data would be legally obtained, models would be released for free, access wouldn't be gatekept behind ever increasing subscription costs." The vast majority of AI development is public. There are papers literally every single day to read. In fact everything you need to build Claude and GPT models is public. Thanks to Google, DeepSeek…

There are more ants than humans in the world, too.

But which one is driving major changes to the world?

Just because you can point to an absolute number of open source models doesn't mean much when the models that 99.9% of the world cares about aren't.

Re: I am against GenAI and everything it stands for

#40

The thing I don't like about AI doomerism posts is the intellectual dishonesty. We're going to cure cancers we haven't cured before, using AI. We're going to make better diagnoses faster. Adults will be able to accomplish more tasks due to the reduction in the barrier of specialized knowledge and skill. Kids that grow up today will be able to solve their own problems 100x faster and easier than we do today. Companies…

LLMs (what's being hyped up as "AI" by the likes of Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, etc) are not the same category of product as the kind of AI that's going to help cure cancers.

Trying to conflate them, and use that to defend LLMs, is what's intellectually dishonest.

Post reply on HN