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

The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public

honest-broker.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

331–340 of 421 posts

Re: The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public

#331

Post by const_cast »

handfuloflight wrote: post #317
const_cast wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but knowing how to read and write syntax is a required pre-requisite. Syntax, even before LLMs, is just an implementation detail. It's for computers to understand. Semantics is what humans care about.

*Was* a required pre-requisite. Natural language can be translated bidirectionally with any programming syntax. And so if syntax is just an implementation detail and semantics is what matters, then someone who understands the semantics but uses AI to handle the syntax implementation is still programming.

> Natural language can be translated bidirectionally with any programming syntax.

Sure, maybe, but it's a lossy conversion both ways. And that lossy-ness is what programming actually is. We get and formulate requirements from business owners, but translating that into code isn't trivial.

Re: The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public

#332

Post by SpaceNoodled »

jacquesm wrote: post #328
const_cast wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are investors so stupid? I mean this genuinely. Every time I hear about investors and what they want, it seems to me like they make dumb decisions that implode on themselves. I mean, you would think someone very rich who invests in companies would be somewhat smart. But, I'm convinced, a lot of them would do much better if they made no decisions at all and left everything up to entropy.

I could write a book on this. But it wouldn't make me any friends.

You can either be right, or have friends.

Re: The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public

#333

Post by jacquesm »

amelius wrote: post #103
cs702 wrote: post #95

Your may agree or disagree with the OP, but this passage is spot-on: "I don’t want AI customer service—but I don’t get a choice. I don’t want AI responses to my Google searches—but I don’t get a choice. I don’t want AI integrated into my software—but I don’t get a choice. I don’t want AI sending me emails—but I don’t get a choice. I don’t want AI music on Spotify—but I don’t get a choice. I don’t want AI books on Ama…

There are plenty of non AI books on Amazon.

Yes. But you can't tell which is which unless you cut off the data of writing at the release date of ChatGPT.

Re: The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public

#335

Post by handfuloflight »

const_cast wrote: post #331
handfuloflight wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

*Was* a required pre-requisite. Natural language can be translated bidirectionally with any programming syntax. And so if syntax is just an implementation detail and semantics is what matters, then someone who understands the semantics but uses AI to handle the syntax implementation is still programming.

> Natural language can be translated bidirectionally with any programming syntax. Sure, maybe, but it's a lossy conversion both ways. And that lossy-ness is what programming actually is. We get and formulate requirements from business owners, but translating that into code isn't trivial.

The lossiness and iteration you describe still happens in natural language programming, you're still clarifying requirements, handling edge cases, and refining solutions. The difference is doing that iterative work in natural language rather than syntax.

Re: The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public

#336

Post by tptacek »

ryandrake wrote: post #297
recursive wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The product I'm working on is privately owned. Hence no investors. We're still in the process of cramming AI into everything.

Even if your company is privately owned, it has at least 1 investor (possibly just the founder), and this urge to cram AI is no doubt coming from him.

Or, the owners and/or managers of the product just believe something you disagree with, and smooth execution of anything ambitious in computing is just difficult and takes lots of attempts.

Re: The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public

#337

Post by tptacek »

SpaceNoodled wrote: post #332
jacquesm wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could write a book on this. But it wouldn't make me any friends.

You can either be right, or have friends.

You can have both things. Just don't be a dick about what you believe (at least, not to everybody).

Re: The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public

#338

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

Planktonne wrote: post #279
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One recent thing I did was make cute little illustrations for an internal slide deck. I’m not even taking work away from an artist, there was no universe where I would have paid someone to do this, but now every presentation I give can be much more visually engaging than they would have been previously. The reason your bosses are being obnoxious about making people use the internal AI tool is to push them into thinki…

> now every presentation I give can be much more visually engaging than they would have been previously What about the impact on your audience? A lot of people are going to view your presentations more negatively based on their views about AI.

I've never heard of anyone having that reaction. Obviously hard to know if they're just not telling me, but I kinda doubt there's a large intersection between people who are vehemently anti-AI and people who assume that any clip art they don't recognize is AI.

Re: The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public

#339

Post by tom_m »

It's also heavily subsidized in products like Cursor and Windsurf. In fact, these tools are literally marketing vehicles for the LLMs if you do the math and look at who the investors are.

This stuff costs so much, they need mass adoption. ASAP. I didn't think about it before, but I wonder how quickly they need the adoption.

Re: The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public

#340

Post by encom »

jacquesm wrote: post #329

It's simply a money grab. You get this feature you don't need or want and hey, we're going to raise your price because of this. See for instance this - priceless - email: Dear administrator, We recently added the best of Google AI to Workspace plans to help your teams accomplish more, faster. In addition, we added new, simple to use security insights and controls to help you keep your business data safe. We also anno…

>subscription prices will be updated

That's such a horrific new-speak way of saying your subscription price has been raised. Just say it! This soft bullshitty choice of words is infuriating.

Post reply on HN