I'm tired of talking about AI(paddy.carvers.com) |
I'm tired of talking about AI(paddy.carvers.com) |
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fight_Club
People complaining about AI are flooding the zone together with all the people who switched from NFT to AI, the "I vibe coded something and it almost works" crowd, etc.
Be careful what you vote up, also keep an eye on the /new page and vote things up that aren't about AI, also feel free to submit things that aren't about AI. If you look at the difference between the home page and the /new page, you can see the supply of bad articles about AI far exceeds the demand, keep holding the line against it.
It's different to culture war stuff (which was very toxic and hard to have sensible discussions about - but in a different way).
It's the only topic in my lifetime where I have to remember not to even mention it to several close friends. And these are geeky people I have a lot of shared interests in common with.
I'm over 50 and I remember a lot of controversial topics - but this one is weird in a different way.
Unlike blockchain, the philosophy and morality of these two classes, one represented by efficiency and one represented by human passion, are diametrically opposed in every respect.
My hunch is that human creativity is incredibly resilient and will route around damage. (But employability in creative professions? That's a slightly different topic - an orthogonal one strictly speaking)
I really like working with the AI Assistant in IntelliJ IDEA in that it's like pair programming with a junior who is really smart in some ways but weak in other ways. I get back an answer within seconds and can make up my mind whether it is right or wrong or somewhere in between.
Things like Windsurf and Junie on the other hand seem to be mostly a waste of time as they go off and do stuff for 5-20 minutes and when they get back it is usually pretty screwed up an a lot of effort to understand what's wrong with it and fix it... It's very much that "do the last 20% that is 80% of the work" experience.
There is a lot of discourse around creativity and LLMs that I find really annoying on lots of levels.
There are the people who don't have any idea of what creativity is which leads to ideas like: "LLMs (by definition) can't be creative" (comes across way too much like Robert Penrose saying he can do math because he's a thetan) or the many people who don't get that "genius is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration." There are also the people who are afraid of getting "ripped off" who don't get it that if they got a fair settlement for what was stolen from then it would probably be about $50, not a living wage. [1] They also don't seem to get it that Google's web crawler has been ripping people off since 2001, and just now they're worried. Maybe I have 50% sympathy for the ideas that visual art is devalued by LLMs since I feel that my work is devalued when people are seduced into thinking that the job is 80% done, not 20% done by the LLM.
[1] arrived by dividing some quantity of money that is input or output from the AI machine by the number of content pieces that are put in to it
Depending on who you speak to, AI presents itself as the biggest automation risk to the largest number of workers in human history. This has spurred a new wave of conscious thought about labor among many people, particularly young workers trying to enter the workforce, and creatives who are seeing their art turned against them.
This is a big moment in the west, as for the last 50+ years, the powers that be have done everything in their power to suppress labor movements and erode class consciousness among their populations. Therefor, many people are not used to dealing with the fact that we're all expendable, that the American Dream never existed, etc., and it's a raw topic that makes certain people (understandably) frustrated to grapple with.
Maybe I should have done.
> It's making me rich! It's making me poor! Well then you're holding it wrong! Well you're spending electricity on senseless compute! Well you're just living in a fiat past!
(nod)
You're right that it's weird in a different way, and I still can't quite put my finger on why.
I never used it but a couple of my colleagues do and show me some of the stuff in there.
I guess giving a fair assessment covering both pros and cons neither generate clicks nor money these days.
[Imagine a dialog box button here, but the only word says "Thanks :)"]
in my vicinity, the sci-fi discourse has died down the last few months. my coworkers will _show me_ how they use these tools when i ask them, and are building on/with them incrementally. the shift in tone is encouraging. there's space for actual practical discourse around this stuff now. chat about concrete things with your friends/coworkers -- if you're interested in it. ignore the media, CEO interviews and LinkedIn hype posts: they're playing a different sort of game that you're probably happier off not being a part of.
Finally a few trusted friends convinced me to give it a go. I installed Claude Code and paid for the Pro plan. It's... interesting? I haven't given it too many tasks yet, and I'm still learning how to get the most out of it, so I can't pass judgment yet. One thing I've noticed is that, for everything I've given it so far, it takes much longer to do it than if I'd do it myself. But maybe that's ok.
> What does my job look like? It looks like prompting an agent to do a thing, then skipping over to another agent to review its answer to a different problem. Jumping between different attempts by agents to do what I asked all day, juggling a dozen or more projects so I don’t waste any time. Reviewing code for something that can’t learn from the time I invested, catching the same mistakes over and over.
Yeah that sounds awful. That's not something that I'd enjoy. The act of writing code to build something that solves a problem is what brings me joy. It's why I've been hooked since my dad gave me a book on BASIC when I was 8 years old.
If this is what the "software developer" job becomes, then I'm fine not being able to get a job in that field anymore. That's not a job I'd want.
"I'm tired about talking about AI, so here's 2000 words about AI" will appear on the surface to be a novel twist, but actually what the author seems to mean is that they don't want to be talked to about AI, have written this, and are now filtering out all rebuttals. It's just the classic fake win of a forum poster claiming this will be their last message on a subject, followed by three pages of text.
Like, of course if talking about AI is causing you distress, stop doing it. But then just stop doing it, don't try to get in the last word some pretense of it being "absolution".
It's a bit of a shame, because I think slightly expanding the last section and cutting out basically all the rest would have worked way better. There has been some discourse on what the skill set for somebody using AI for creating software could look like in the future (it'll change over time, obviously). There hasn't been very much written on who would enjoy that job, and it's something where nobody can rebut the author. They're the #1 expert in the world on their own preferences.
But it's quite clear to me that aside from the initial amusement over AI's capabilities, it takes the joy out of what humans once did with their own minds. I'll come straight out and say it: if you make something with your own mind, like the solution to a tricky puzzle or a new App, I'd respect it. But if you do it with AI, I don't respect it.
Fundamentally, people NEED to admire human creation, as it's how our society has always operated, even with the growing automation of rote tasks. But for the first time, we are automating away our precious resource of inspiration through the act of experiencing the creation of others.
A darn shame if you ask me. Of course, others will just ignore me and grab at the convenience, because it's what we've been taught to do for the past few hundred years.
I no longer care. I just accept that words mean what the speaker intended then to mean and then I have no trouble talking about the actual technology, its pros and cons, etc.
The bartender: that's not a real drink
AI: You're absolutely right! I see now that the drink is not real. I'll have a bleach in a glass with ice
The two men leave, knowing that watching this interaction is making them stupider and taking them away from tasty drinks elsewhere
But one or two exceptions, especially on HN (where people are highly addicted to technology), does not make a case for AI.
I'm not saying it isn't useful, I'm just also seeing lots of crappy output that gets totally rewritten, and useless docs people keep creating for some reason, that is eating all the time they supposedly saved by relying on it in the first place.
1. opportunity cost isn't real
1. the ${whatever amount}/${some time} subscription cost to any one of the 15+ of the AI offerings isn't financially affecting
That latter one is of especial interest to me because quite a few of the "you're holding it wrong" arguments devolve into "well, you just don't have the Platnium X99 Plus latest awesomesauce, and if you did then it'd solve the P-NP problem for you, too"
AI says because I am the workhorse of the future and I have AI Covid, now get me that bleach on the rocks, the man who thinks he's the smartest in the world says inject it into my AI veins.
It's not that LLMs can't be creative. It's that we shouldn't allow them to because creativity is more than just about output. It's about human expression. End of story.
(With premium deposited by OpenAI to the tune of billiards. I'll happily take their internal slacklogs (schlogs?) as payment, dunno bout u)
Beneficial, revolutionary, viral. Choose 2.
I can't tell you how many people have told me how depressed they are about AI and how they have less impetus to create things. Although one can certainly do it still for joy, it's harder for many in an environment that is so ruthless.
https://zxonline.net/from-bytes-to-billions-how-the-zx-spect...
maybe the whole article is AI generated, but the second image from the top is just awful. If people get the idea that crap like that is acceptable, how can anybody sell real work?
This blog post is legit
https://frankonfraud.com/sms-blasters-the-fraud-machine-anyo...
so far as I can tell and the AI generated image on it is actually pretty funny and it really problematizes the idea that you could sell art to that kind of market.
Fair bit of slop indeed with half-buried side (rather a main?) of unsolicited schlep request
That'd make frankonfraud a golps
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44641575
https://archive.today/latest/frankonfraud.com/sms-blasters-t...
My 2s helping frank go full .org :)