Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

fly.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 1001 posts

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#311

Post by hooverd »

AnotherGoodName wrote: post #71

This happened with the introduction of smartphones too. Every slashdot post had a haughty and upvoted ‘why would i want such a thing!!!’. It was obviously huge. You could see it taking off. Yet a lot of people proudly displayed ignorance and backed each other up on it to the point that discussion around the topic was often drowned out by the opposition to change. Now today it takes minutes of playing with ai coding a…

Unfortunately, they were right. Smartphones are a menace, especially in terms of traffic violence.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#312

Post by cesarb »

This article does not touch on the thing which worries me the most with respect to LLMs: the dependence.

Unless you can run the LLM locally, on a computer you own, you are now completely dependent on a remote centralized system to do your work. Whoever controls that system can arbitrarily raise the prices, subtly manipulate the outputs, store and do anything they want with the inputs, or even suddenly cease to operate. And since, according to this article, only the latest and greatest LLM is acceptable (and I've seen that exact same argument six months ago), running locally is not viable (I've seen, in a recent discussion, someone mention a home server with something like 384G of RAM just to run one LLM locally).

To those of us who like Free Software because of the freedom it gives us, this is a severe regression.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#313

Post by stego-tech »

Finally, a proper good take from someone (seemingly) approaching it rationally and objectively, rather than blindly sitting on either side of the hype fence. LLMs are good tools, and even I, a decidedly-not-software-engineer, have been increasingly tinkering with locally-run tools to create applications and tooling that meets my own needs. The one thing that’s held me back from publishing has been the IPR angle, but I quite like this line on that topic:

> But if you’re a software developer playing this card? Cut me a little slack as I ask you to shove this concern up your ass. No profession has demonstrated more contempt for intellectual property.

The OP isn’t wrong. Some of the most brilliant minds in computer science have built tools to shatter DRM, enable widespread piracy, and repeatedly lift code wholesale from public repos if it helps them move a product forward. The modern crop of technologists (myself included) have long had a hypocritical view on IPR: “rights for me, not for thee” to oversimplify things. The entirety of the modern public cloud is built by trodding on the backs of open source projects while wearing lawn-aerating spikes. We steal shit from others so our Founders and Masters can reap billions in profit; to decry plagiarism now feels incredibly dishonest and insincere, at the very least.

Look, I’m an AI skeptic myself. On the whole, these tools are bad. They’re taking jobs, polluting the planet, and dumbing down a society that still can’t try rebooting something when it fails, let alone identify where their WiFi ends and the internet begins. They’re toxic walled gardens that can reauthor reality to the whims of the VCs and Billionaires funding them, locking you into subscriptions forever.

But even I will admit that modern LLMs, when it comes to writing code, are actually really good for the majority of C-tier devs and below. Are they as helpful to bleeding-edge engineers on the cusp of the future? Nah, not really, but if you’re just writing a checklist app for iOS to help you stay on task, or a Packer manifest to lay out some VM templates, they’re kinda awesome.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#314

Post by noobermin »

Tbf the dismissal of the IP argument is a bit disappointing. Just because you don't respect IP doesn't mean we all do. Some of the code I'm proudest of I'm considering never open sourcing now because I simply don't trust online repositories anymore. Granted I'm in a bit of a different field than most developers but still, open source as a concept seems less attractive in the wake of tools that scrape it and copy it automatically without attribution. Count me out from ever sharing my code ever again.

I used to believe in the stereotypical copyleft anti IP ethos. In the modern day of corporate LLMs and disrespectful scraping, the lay of the ground is different and people understandably should be less inclined to open source their code.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#315

Post by tymscar »

threePointFive wrote: post #305

Can someone comment on the cost of running agentic models? Not for a company but for an individual. I tried "vibe coding" a personal project I was struggling with and left even more frustrated because I kept running into token rate limits with Claude (used inside of Zed if it matters). Did I pick the wrong model, the wrong editor, or do I just need to not be so tight with my money?

It’s not you. The emperor does not have any clothes

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#316

Post by snickerbockers »

>People complain about LLM-generated code being “probabilistic”. No it isn’t. It’s code. It’s not Yacc output. It’s knowable

okay wtf is this weird jab at yacc supposed to be? I generally prefer to write my own LR parsers because it's really not that difficult but I never felt like yacc code was difficult to read or not "probabilistic".

AFAIK most serious compilers don't use yacc either because they need to be able to parse context-dependent grammars, and also reinventing wheels is often worth the effort when the wheel is 50 years old and forces you to make compromises because it also has to support use-cases you are not interested in. But again, it's not bad, it does the thing it is designed to do and it does save a lot of effort if you're fine dealing with its limitations.

Only serious complaint I have about Yacc is that the basic posix form has frustrating limitations such as not being able to have two separate yacc instances because they'll declare the same symbols, and I'm fairly certain it's not thread-safe either. Bison fixes some of these while still remaining "probabilistic".

Anyways I'd rather use Yacc+Lex (preferably Bison+flex) to generate my parser than have to go read everything your "agent" wrote with a fine-toothed comb to make sure it didn't introduce any crippling memory corruptions or dangerous ROPportunities.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#318

Post by ImaCake »

cesarb wrote: post #312

This article does not touch on the thing which worries me the most with respect to LLMs: the dependence . Unless you can run the LLM locally, on a computer you own, you are now completely dependent on a remote centralized system to do your work. Whoever controls that system can arbitrarily raise the prices, subtly manipulate the outputs, store and do anything they want with the inputs, or even suddenly cease to opera…

>the dependence.

Sure, but that is not the point of the article. LLMs are useful. The fact that you are dependent on someone else is a different problem like being dependent on microsoft for your office suite.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#319

Post by bigbuppo »

Ah yes, because it was garbage six months ago, all that was thrown away and now they latched on to the "agentic" thing. At best this is pre-alpha-quality software not fit for production use. After all, it has been less than six months. Next it's going to be the post-agentic world, and then all the companies are going to go bankrupt once the bills are actually due. Any company that pivoted to video, err, AI is also going to go bankrupt, while everyone they laid off is going to build the next big thing and they'll live the heads of the AI charlatans on pikes outside of town to warn off any AI stragglers.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#320

Post by the__alchemist »

grey-area wrote: post #169

I’d love to see the authors of effusive praise of generative AI like this provide the proof of the unlimited powers of their tools in code. If GAI (or agents, or whatever comes next …) is so effective it should be quite simple to prove that by creating an AI only company and in short order producing huge amounts of serviceable code to do useful things. So far I’ve seen no sign of this, and the best use case seems to…

I suspect it comes down to use case. Those you refer to use it for well-trodden areas; likely web UIs and servers using popular tools. The image they predict is extrapolated from these.
Post reply on HN