Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser? • Hacker News Board

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#361

Post by awesome_dude » Mon, Sep 15, 2025, 8:03 PM UTC

ACCount37 wrote: post #352

awesome_dude wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, you can yell and scream all you like but everything, and I mean literally everything that we know was once "unknowable" "impossible" "complete chaos" "unpredictable" There is only one thing that a person can never know, and that is the limit of their ignorance and incompetence.

There are, in fact, things that are "unpredictable" and "complete chaos". You'd know that by now if you weren't so allergic to rectifying your own ignorance.

Then stop reading the current weather forecasts that are already accurate,

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#362

Post by DrewADesign » Mon, Sep 15, 2025, 8:03 PM UTC

_DeadFred_ wrote: post #358

fulafel wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was the other way around. See eg https://www.maximum-progress.com/p/the-printing-press-nfts-a... - "In 1843 alone 14,000 new works were published in Germany, close to the publication rate today in per capita terms." .. "Publishers knew that once a manuscript was out in public it could be cheaply copied by other printing press owners, so instead they sought out new manuscripts in pursuit of a first mover advantage…

That's 140 years after the point I made? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Anne

And four centuries after the Gutenberg printing press.

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#363

Post by catlifeonmars » Tue, Sep 16, 2025, 1:51 AM UTC

awesome_dude wrote: post #348

catlifeonmars wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You've done nothing but be personal, complaining that it's being returned is hypocritical. You started making personal comments, not me. I’m genuinely sorry you feel that way. It wasn’t my intention. > complaining that it's being returned is hypocritical I was just responding to your complaint about the downvoting.

> I’m genuinely sorry you feel that way. It wasn’t my intention. I really don't think you fully grasp anything at this point in the conversation > Then I don’t think you fully grasp the nature of weather. That aged well. /s

>> Then I don’t think you fully grasp the nature of weather.

Is that what you meant by making it personal?

> That aged well. /s

It aged perfectly fine.

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#364

Post by IAmGraydon » Tue, Sep 16, 2025, 2:17 AM UTC

LarsDu88 wrote: post #117

IAmGraydon wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm wondering a good way to create 2D sprite sheets with transparency via AI. That would be a game changer, but my research has led me to believe that there isn't a good tool for this yet. One sprite is kind of doable, but a sprite animation with continuity between frames seems like it would be very difficult. Have you figured out a way to do this?

I was literally experimenting with this today. Use Google Nano Banana to generate your sprite with a magenta background, then ask it to generate the final frame of the animation you want to create. Then use Google Flow to create an animation between the two frames with Veo3 Its astoundingly effective, but still rather laborious and lacking in ergonomics. For example the video aspect ratio has to be fixed, and you nee…

That’s great info. Thank you. I’ll give it a shot tomorrow.

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#365

Post by mattmanser » Tue, Sep 16, 2025, 12:12 PM UTC

kasey_junk wrote: post #202

mattmanser wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like all tech we've had recently, that won't last, it's always bait and switch. It will not remain cheap as soon as the competition is dead, which is simply a case of who's got the biggest VC supplied war chest.

Like with databases? There are none of those freely available now that Oracle won right?

Snark only works when you've got a valid point.

One person can write sqllite. You can iterate up to bigger opensource DBs like postgre.

One person cannot create a modern LLM model unless they have 10s of millions of dollars to burn on compute.

LLMs are a fundamental shift from what was achievable in software and OSS, and we're basically living off scraps from the big players releasing their old models. They're already trying to create regulatory moats too.

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#366

Post by topaz0 » Tue, Sep 16, 2025, 12:56 PM UTC

Den_VR wrote: post #337

topaz0 wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they get mad it's because you're saying this explicitly to be an asshole. The essence of art doesn't have much to do with the mechanical skills for assembling pieces into a whole, though that part isn't trivial. Rather, it's about expressing human thoughts and feeling in a way that inspires their human audience. That's why AI-generated "art" is different in kind from a skilled digital artist and why it really cann…

If you’ve read other threads you’ll see humans quite optimistic about how “ai” art tools have let them express themselves. And this is only the beginning of the commercialization of new tools, so I offer my wholehearted dissent that “AI-generated art” cannot be art. Style transfer has gone quiet but still my attention, for example.

I've seen nothing convincing along those lines -- just people fooling themselves with simulacra. But to be clear, even if I'm wrong about this, it's not worth the other costs.

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#367

Post by kasey_junk » Tue, Sep 16, 2025, 1:27 PM UTC

mattmanser wrote: post #365

kasey_junk wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like with databases? There are none of those freely available now that Oracle won right?

Snark only works when you've got a valid point. One person can write sqllite. You can iterate up to bigger opensource DBs like postgre. One person cannot create a modern LLM model unless they have 10s of millions of dollars to burn on compute. LLMs are a fundamental shift from what was achievable in software and OSS, and we're basically living off scraps from the big players releasing their old models. They're alread…

Oracle is far and away better than any of the open source databases. For a long time it wasn’t particularly close.

Db didn’t get parity with Oracle, they got good enough that you have to justify spending for Oracle and incurring the down sides of its company’s model.

Similarly, no db that competes with Oracle was written by one person, they were and are funded mostly by private companies and foundations.

There is a future where open weight models are good enough and the foundation labs are the truly luxury tier for a small subset of the user base.

That’s before talking about something like productivity software which Google _gives away_ while it’s a main business of Microsoft.

Blindly saying that there is only a future where the foundation llms capture all of the business is hyperbolic and ignores history. The llms look more db shaped to me than they look like car shares. Those truly are network effect dominated.

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#368

Post by ileonichwiesz » Tue, Sep 16, 2025, 2:58 PM UTC

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #242

ileonichwiesz wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do value self expression, that’s why I play multiple instruments, paint, draw, sculpt. I don’t really see how prompting a machine to make music for you is self expression, even if it’s to your exact specifications.

The "self" part clearly implies that someone else's self expression is under no obligation to be the same as your self expression.

It also implies that it can only really be done by oneself, not someone (or something) else on one’s behalf.

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#369

Post by PolicyPhantom » Tue, Sep 16, 2025, 3:51 PM UTC

I think the real challenge is not whether AI will “replace” people, but how we preserve the spaces where skills are actually practiced and refined. Entry-level jobs, internships, and junior projects have always been more about learning curves than efficiency. If AI shortcuts those too aggressively, we risk cutting off the very ladder that produces the next generation of capable engineers and creators.

Maybe the question isn’t “Will AI take jobs?” but “How do we redesign pathways so humans still get the training ground they need—while AI handles the repetitive load?”

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#370

Post by nayuki » Tue, Sep 16, 2025, 6:36 PM UTC

nostrademons wrote: post #215

chii wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ironic if AI actually ended up destroying economic activity that's not destroying economic activity - it's removing a less efficient activity and replace it with a more efficient version. This produces economic surplus. Imagine saying this for someone digging a hole, that if they use a mechanical digger instead of a hand shovel, they'd destroy economic activity since it now cost less to dig that hole!

It's not that it's replacing one form of activity with a cheaper one, it's that it removes the transaction . Which means that now there's nothing to tax, and nothing to measure. As far as GDP is concerned, economic activity will have gone down, even though the same work is being accomplished differently.

True. If you wanted to increase GDP and taxation in a nation, then: People should not cook their own food; they must pay someone to cook it in a legally documented transaction with sales taxes and income taxes. People should not take care of their own children; they must outsource it to a legitimately run daycare. People should not live in a house that they own; they must pay rent to a landlord. (People can still own homes but must rent it out to someone else for money; you just cannot occupy a home that you own.)

Actually, the last point gets pretty interesting. Let's say that you and your neighbor live in two houses with identical features. If you just swapped houses with each other and charged each other rent and legally paid all required sales/income taxes, then both of you would have less money at the end of the year than if you just lived in your own house. Yet physically speaking, nothing is different - you both still derive the same value from living in a house.

While that situation sounds stupid and contrived, it is very similar to something that can happen in real life. You can own a home in city A (let's say it's a condo apartment), but suddenly you need to leave and move to city B due to a better job opportunity. If you rent out your home in city A, you need to pay income taxes, so that will not completely offset your cost to rent a home to live in city B. And the rent you paid out in city B generally is not tax-deductible. It's like a one-way transaction where the government always wins.