311–320 of 570 posts
My technical interests are varied, and it's so boring to come to HN and see that a third (or more) of the front page is about AI.
Enough already. Let's talk about other things! And yes, I know, I should be a part of the solution and submit more articles.
This might sound like snark, but I truly don’t mean it that way. I think what’s interesting about AI, and why there’s so much conversation, is that in order to be a good user of AI, you have to really understand software development. All the people I work with who are getting the most value out of using AI to deliver software are people who are already very high-skilled engineers, and the more years of real experienc…
> For them, AI is the ultimate power tool. Yup
AI seems great when you have no way of truly validating its output.
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Compare that to ~30% of all energy use for transportation. So approximately 40%*4% = 1.6% vs 30%. I find your correction to be more wrong that the initial statement. > And most of that new capacity will be natural gas. That increase would basically whipe out the reduction in CO2 emissions the USA has had since 2018. Emissions in 2018 were ~5250M metric ton and in 2024 it was 4750M. That is a reduction of 10% total em…
> Compare that to ~30% of all energy use for transportation. So approximately 40%*4% = 1.6% vs 30%. I find your correction to be more wrong that the initial statement. I don't follow. The comparison is 30% of energy use for transportation vs 4% for AI, and soon 30% for transportation vs 10% for AI.
And that leaves a 6:1 ratio assuming projections run true. It very well might be possible to get efficiency wins from the transportation sector that outweigh growth in AI.
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This summarizes mostly how I feel about it. It's a tool like any other tool we have advanced since the beginning of human civilization Machine tools replaced blacksmiths CNC machines replaced manual machines. Robots replaced CNC machine tenders CAD replaced draftsman (and also pushed that job onto engineers (grr)) P&P robots replaced human production lines. The steam train replaced the horse and cart This is a tale a…
Those were deterministic rather than stochastic
I think what's crazy is the desire to replicate current day corporate structures. Look at this multi agent Jira story reading bot that builds stuff cause we let it churn overnight. Like the whole idea that you don't need that nonsense to build something amazing.
And the desire to not want to understand things.
I'm old enough to remember being fatigued with so many people talking about making "apps". Programs that run on a phone. Before that everyone was excited about blogging. Web 2.0 ugh. Before that we were excited about the wheel and the creation of fire. All capital drained into those ephemeral fancies. The cycles cycle on.
Modern AI is a miracle. The math that makes it work is beautiful and really impressive. For example, if you wanted to map all knowledge on earth, how would you do it? AI answers that question by building a high dimensional vector space of embeddings, and traversing that space moves you through a topology of basically every concept that humans have. Or another thought; why is it that a stochastic parrot can solve logi…
It can't. As you say in the very next sentence. If it isn't solving any given puzzle with a 100% success rate, but randomly failing, then it isn't consistent.
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I'm not sure if this is a joke but the field is advancing so dramatically it's hard to stop talking about it. Every week at work I have to show a new AI feature to an executive, about how we can now write 1000's of lines of codes in minutes at a higher quality than the greatest engineers. This necessitates new tools and new purchases, as well as team and org shifts. If you're reading this and your life hasn't been th…
> If you're reading this and your life hasn't been thrown into disarray you're likely just behind the times. I'd love for discussions of the tech to stop with the genAI version of the cryptobro cry "have fun being poor". It's mildly insulting and adds literally nothing to the conversations. (Not meaning to single you out, just using it as an example. This is a very common rhetorical problem with most of the evangelis…
The detractors are so bizarre to me. I think it's because I work at a big tech that has so thoroughly wired AI into everything we do, and the benefits are so undeniable and totally perspective changing, that it's like arguing with someone that thinks the sun revolves around the earth.
So if you aren't doing something cool with AI, it's probably because you aren't empowered to at your company, or because you simply aren't taking the initiative. Seems like a pretty even split on HN.
AI is fine . The hype is annoying. What's even worse though are the incredible amounts of money and energy that are being thrown at it, with no regard for the consequences, in times of record inequality and looming climate apocalypse. AI is the red herring that'll waste all our attention until it's too late.
> AI is fine. The hype is annoying. I'm finding the detractors worse than the hype, because it seems like a certain subset of detractors [0] formed their opinion on AI in late 2022/early 2023 when ChatGPT came out (REALLY!? Over 3 years ago!?) and then never updated their opinions since then. They'll say things like "why would I want to consume X amount of energy and Y amount of water just to get a wrong answer?" In…
Well, I wouldn't go that far, but the hallucinations have moved up to being about more complicated things than they used to be.
Also, I've seen a few recent ones that "think" (for lack of a better word) that they know enough about politics to "know" they don't need to search for current events to, for example, answer a question about the consequences of the White House threatening military action to take Greenland. (The AI replied with something like "It is completely inconceivable that the US would ever do this").
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AI enthusiasts love to misuse and abuse the goalpost metaphor. It’s practically always an attempt to silence opponents.
It's easily abused by both sides of the debate because there's no strict widely accepted definition. I find it tiring because it's a largely inconsequential benchmark anyways (outside of Microsoft-OpenAI contract disputes).