[HN Gopher] It's been a very hard year
___________________________________________________________________
It's been a very hard year
Author : surprisetalk
Score : 363 points
Date : 2025-12-01 05:36 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (bell.bz)
(TXT) w3m dump (bell.bz)
| Swizec wrote:
| I've seen Picallilli's stuff around and it looks extremely solid.
| But you can't beat the market. You either have what they want to
| buy, or you don't.
|
| > Landing projects for Set Studio has been extremely difficult,
| especially as we won't work on product marketing for AI stuff,
| from a moral standpoint, but the vast majority of enquiries have
| been for exactly that
|
| The market is speaking. Long-term you'll find out who's wrong,
| but the market can usually stay irrational for much longer than
| you can stay in business.
|
| I think everyone in the programming education business is feeling
| the struggle right now. In my opinion this business died 2 years
| ago - https://swizec.com/blog/the-programming-tutorial-seo-
| industr...
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| what happen if the market is right and this is "new
| normal"?????
|
| same like StackOverflow down today and seems like not everyone
| cares anymore, back then it would totally cause breakdown
| because SO is vital
| indemnity wrote:
| I haven't visited StackOverflow for years.
| nrhrjrjrjtntbt wrote:
| I stopped using it much even before the AI wave.
| ido wrote:
| Ive honestly never _intentionally_ visited it (as in, went
| to the root page and started following links) - it was just
| where google sent me when searching answers to specific
| technical questions.
| jv22222 wrote:
| It became as annoying as experts exchange the very thing
| it railed against!
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| What was annoying about it?
| forgetfulness wrote:
| They SEOd their way into being a top search result by
| showing crawlers both questions and answers, but when you
| visited the answer would be paywalled
|
| Stack Overflow's moderation is overbearing and all, but
| that's nowhere near at the same level as Expert
| Exchange's baiting and switching
| rkachowski wrote:
| the gatekeeping, gaming the system, capricious moderation
| (e.g. flagged as duplicate), and general attitude led it
| to be quite an insufferable part of the internet. There
| was a meme about how the best way to get a response is to
| answer your own question in an obviously incorrect
| fashion, because people want to tell you why you're wrong
| rather than actively help.
| nxor wrote:
| Why do you think those people behave that way?
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| Unpaid labor finds a variety of impulses to satisfy
| 12_throw_away wrote:
| Memories of years ago on Stack Overflow, when it seemed
| like every single beginner python question was answered
| by one specific guy. And all his answers were streams of
| invective directed at the question's author. Whatever
| labor this guy was doing, he was clearly getting a lot of
| value in return by getting to yell at hapless beginners.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Often the answer to the question was simply wrong, as it
| answered a different question that nobody made. A lot of
| times you had to follow a maze of links to related
| questions, that may have an answer or may lead to a
| different one. The languages that it was most useful (due
| to bad ecosystem documentation) evolved in a rate way
| faster than SO could update their answers, so most of the
| answers on those were outdated...
|
| There were more problems. And that's from the point of
| view of somebody coming from Google to find questions
| that already existed. Interacting there was another
| entire can of worms.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| That despite their url's claim, they didn't actually have
| and sex change experts.
| theamk wrote:
| Nope. The main problem with expertsexchange was their SEO
| + paywall - they'd sneak into top Google hits by showing
| crawler full data, then present a paywall when actual
| human visits. (Have no idea why Google tolerated them
| btw...)
|
| SO was never that bad, even with all their moderation
| policies, they had no paywalls.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| I don't get these comments. I'm not here to shill for SO,
| but it is a damn good website, if only for the archive.
| Can't remember how to iterate over entries in JavaScript
| dictionary (object)? SO can tell you, usually much better
| than W3Schools can, which attracts so much scorn. (I love
| that site: So simple for the simple stuff!)
|
| When you search programming-related questions, what sites
| do you normally read? For me, it is hard to avoid SO
| because it appears in so many top results from Google. And
| I swear that Google AI just regugitates most of SO these
| days for simple questions.
| wonderwonder wrote:
| I think that's OP's point though, Ai can do it better
| now. No searching, no looking. Just drop your question
| into Ai with your exact data or function and 10 seconds
| later you have a working solution. Stackoverflow is great
| but Ai is just better for most people.
|
| Instead of running a google query or searching in
| Stackoverflow you just need a chatGPT, Claude or your Ai
| of choice open in a browser. Copy and paste.
| indemnity wrote:
| It's not a pejorative statement, I used to live in Stack
| Overflow.
|
| But the killer feature of an LLM is that it can
| synthesize something based on my exact ask, and does a
| great job of creating a PoC to prove something, and it's
| cheap from time investment point of view.
|
| And it doesn't downvote something as off-topic, or try to
| use my question as a teaching exercise and tell me I'm
| doing it wrong, even if I am ;)
| m463 wrote:
| buggywhips are having a temporary setback.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| I had a "milk-up-the-nose" laughter moment when I read this
| comment.
| balamatom wrote:
| leaded gasoline is making a killing, though
| vkou wrote:
| The coach drivers found other work, their horses got turned
| into glue.
| lmm wrote:
| > what happen if the market is right and this is "new
| normal"?????
|
| Then there's an oversupply of programmers, salaries will
| crash, and lots of people will have to switch careers. It's
| happened before.
| yungwarlock wrote:
| I'm young, please when was that and in what industry
| forgetfreeman wrote:
| .com implosion, tech jobs of all kinds went from "we'll
| hire anyone who knows how to use a mouse" to the tech
| jobs section of the classifieds was omitted entirely for
| 20 months. There have been other bumps in the road since
| then but that was a real eye-opener.
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| well same like covid right??? digital/tech company
| overhiring because everyone is home and at the same time
| the rise of AI reduce the number of headcount
|
| covid overhiring + AI usage = massive layoff we ever see
| in decades
| short_sells_poo wrote:
| It was nothing like covid. The dot com crash lasted years
| where tech was a dead sector. Equity valuations kept
| declining year after year. People couldn't find jobs in
| tech at all.
|
| There are still plenty of tech jobs these days, just less
| than there were during covid, but tech itself is still in
| a massive expansionary cycle. We'll see how the AI bubble
| lasts, and what the fallout of it bursting will be.
|
| The key point is that the going is still _exceptionally_
| good. The posts talking about experienced programmers
| having to flip burgers in the early 2000s is not an
| exaggeration.
| nradov wrote:
| After the first Internet bubble popped, service levels in
| Silicon Valley restaurants suddenly got a lot better.
| Restaurants that had struggled to hire competent,
| reliable employees suddenly had their pick of applicants.
|
| History always repeats itself in the tech industry. The
| hype cycle for LLMs will probably peak within the next
| few years. (LLMs are legitimately useful for many things
| but some of the company valuations and employee
| compensation packages are totally irrational.)
| habibur wrote:
| After the year 2000. dot com burst.
|
| An tech employee posted he looked for job for 6 months,
| found none and has joined a fast food shop flipping
| burgers.
|
| That turned tech workers switching to "flipping burgers"
| into a meme.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| I used to watch all of the "Odd Todd" episodes
| religiously. Does anyone else remember that Adobe Flash-
| based "TV show" (before YouTube!)?
| kevstev wrote:
| What was a little different then was that tech jobs paid
| about 30% more than other jobs, it wasn't anything like
| the highs we have seen the last few years. I used to
| describe it as you used to have the nicer house on the
| block, but then in the 2010s+ F _NG salaries had people
| living in whole other neighborhoods. So switching out of
| the industry, while painful was not as traumatic.
| Obviously though having to actually flip burgers was a
| move of desperation and traumatic. The .com bust was
| largely centered around SV as well, in NYC (where I live)
| there was some fallout, but there was still a tailwind of
| businesses of all sorts expanding their tech footprint,
| so while you may not have been able to land at a hot
| startup and dream of getting rich in an IPO, by the end
| of 2003 it was mostly stabilized and you could likely
| have landed a somewhat boring corporate job even if it
| was just building internal apps.
|
| I feel like there are a lot of people in school or
| recently graduated though that had F_NG dreams and never
| considered an alternative. This is going to be very
| difficult for them. I now feel, especially as tech has
| gone truly borderless with remote work, that this
| downturn is now way worse than the .com bust. It has just
| dragged on for years now, with no real end in sight.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| The defense industry in southern California used to be
| huge until the 1980s. Lots and lots of ex-defense
| industry people moved to other industries. Oil and gas
| has gone through huge economic cycles of massive
| investment and massive cut-backs.
| gloosx wrote:
| It's not as simple as putting all programmers into one
| category. There can be oversupply of web developers but at
| the same time undersupply of COBOL developers. If you are a
| very good developer, you will always be in demand.
| ben_w wrote:
| > If you are a very good developer, you will always be in
| demand.
|
| "Always", in the same way that five years ago we'd
| "never" have an AI that can do a code review.
|
| Don't get me wrong: I've watched a decade of promises
| that "self driving cars are coming real soon now honest",
| latest news about Tesla's is that it can't cope with
| leaves; I certainly *hope* that a decade from now will
| still be having much the same conversation about AI
| taking senior programmer jobs, but "always" is a long
| time.
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| waymo and tesla already operate in certain areas, even if
| tech is ready
|
| regulation still very much a thing
| ben_w wrote:
| Leaves: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46095867
| afavour wrote:
| "certain areas" is a very important qualifier, though.
| Typically areas with very predictable weather. Not
| discounting the achievement just noting that we're still
| far away from ubiquity.
| duderific wrote:
| Waymo is doing very well around San Francisco, which is
| certainly very challenging city driving. Yes, it doesn't
| snow there. Maybe areas with winter storms will never
| have autonomous vehicles. That doesn't mean there isn't a
| lot of utility created even now.
| marcelr wrote:
| ai can do code review? do people actually believe this?
| we have a mr llm bot, it is wrong 95% of the time
| ben_w wrote:
| I have _used it_ for code review.
|
| Like everything else they do, it's amazing how far you
| can get even if you're incredibly lazy and let it do
| everything itself, though of course that's a bad idea
| because it's got all the skill and quality of result
| you'd expect if I said "endless hoarde of fresh grads
| unwilling to say 'no' except on ethical grounds".
| pb7 wrote:
| I've been taking self-driving cars to get around
| regularly for a year or more.
| nradov wrote:
| Five years ago we had pretty good static analysis tools
| for popular languages which could automate certain
| aspects of code reviews and catch many common defects.
| Those tools didn't even use AI, just deterministic
| pattern matching. And yet due to laziness and
| incompetence many developers didn't even bother taking
| full advantage of those tools to maximize their own
| productivity.
| ben_w wrote:
| The devs themselves can still be lazy, claude and copilot
| code review can be automated on all pull requests by
| demand of the PM -- and the PM can be lazy and ask the
| LLMs to integrate themselves.
|
| And the LLMs can use the static analysis tools.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| Some people will lose their homes. Some marriages will fail
| from the stress. Some people will chose to exit life
| because of it all.
|
| It's happened before and there's no way we could have
| learned from that and improved things. It has to be just
| life changing, life ruining, career crippling. Absolutely
| no other way for a society to function than this.
| jakelazaroff wrote:
| That's where the post-scarcity society AI will enable
| comes in! Surely the profits from this technology will
| allow these displaced programmers to still live
| comfortable lives, not just be hoarded by a tiny number
| of already rich and powerful people. /s
| _zoltan_ wrote:
| you mixed up "is dead" with "is vital" :-)
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| This is the type of business that's going to be hit hard by AI.
| And the type of businesses that survive will be the ones that
| integrate AI into their business the most successfully. It's an
| enabler, a multiplier. It's just another tool and those
| wielding the tools the best, tend to do well.
|
| Taking a moral stance against AI might make you feel good but
| doesn't serve the customer in the end. They need value for
| money. And you can get a lot of value from AI these days;
| especially if you are doing marketing, frontend design, etc.
| and all the other stuff a studio like this would be doing.
|
| The expertise and skill still matter. But customers are going
| to get a lot further without such a studio and the remaining
| market is going to be smaller and much more competitive.
|
| There's a lot of other work emerging though. IMHO the software
| integration market is where the action is going to be for the
| next decade or so. Legacy ERP systems, finance, insurance,
| medical software, etc. None of that stuff is going away or at
| risk of being replaced with some vibe coded thing. There are
| decades worth of still widely used and critically important
| software that can be integrated, adapted, etc. for the modern
| era. That work can be partly AI assisted of course. But you
| need to deeply understand the current market to be credible
| there. For any new things, the ambition level is just going to
| be much higher and require more skill.
|
| Arguing against progress as it is happening is as old as the
| tech industry. It never works. There's a generation of new
| programmers coming into the market and they are not going to
| hold back.
| wartywhoa23 wrote:
| > Taking a moral stance against AI might make you feel good
| but doesn't serve the customer in the end. They need value
| for money. And you can get a lot of value from AI these days;
| especially if you are doing marketing, frontend design, etc.
| and all the other stuff a studio like this would be doing.
|
| So let's all just give zero fucks about our moral values and
| just _multiply_ monetary ones.
| senordevnyc wrote:
| It's completely reasonable to take a moral stance that
| you'd rather see your business fail and shut down than do
| X, even if X is lucrative.
|
| But don't expect the market to care. Don't write a blog
| post whining about your morals, when the market is telling
| you loud and clear they want X. The market doesn't give a
| shit about your idiosyncratic moral stance.
|
| Edit: I'm not arguing that people shouldn't take a moral
| stance, even a costly one, but it makes for a really poor
| sales pitch. In my experience this kind of desperate post
| will hurt business more than help it. If people don't want
| what you're selling, find something else to sell.
| easyThrowaway wrote:
| > when the market is telling you loud and clear they want
| X
|
| Does it tho? Articles like [1] or [2] seem to be at odd
| with this interpretation. If it were any different we
| wouldn't be talking about the "AI bubble" after all.
|
| [1]https://www.pcmag.com/news/microsoft-exec-asks-why-
| arent-mor...
|
| [2]https://fortune.com/2025/08/18/mit-report-95-percent-
| generat...
| classified wrote:
| Exactly. Microsoft for instance got a noticeable backlash
| for cramming AI everywhere, and their future plans in
| that direction.
| simianwords wrote:
| 1) it was failure of specific implementation
|
| 2) if you had read the paper you wouldn't use it as an
| example here.
|
| Good faith discussion on what the market feels about LLMs
| would include Gemini, ChatGPT numbers. Overall market cap
| of these companies. And not cherry picked misunderstood
| articles.
| easyThrowaway wrote:
| No, I picked those specifically. When Pets.com[1] went
| down in early 2000 it wasn't neither the idea, nor the
| tech stack that brought the company down, it was the
| speculative business dynamics that caused its collapse.
| The fact we've swapped technology underneath doesn't mean
| we're not basically falling into ".com Bubble -
| Remastered HD Edition".
|
| I bet a few Pets.com exec were also wondering why people
| weren't impressed with their website.
|
| [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pets.com
| simianwords wrote:
| Do you actually want to get into the details on how
| frequently do markers get things right vs get things
| wrong? It would make the priors a bit more lucid so we
| can be on the same page.
| Glemkloksdjf wrote:
| He is right though:
|
| "Jeez there so many cynics! It cracks me up when I hear
| people call AI underwhelming,"
|
| ChatGPT can listen to you in real time, understands
| multiply languages very well and responds in a very
| natural way. This is breath taking and not on the horizon
| just a few years ago.
|
| AI Transcription of Videos is now a really cool and
| helpful feature in MS Teams.
|
| Segment Anything literaly leapfroged progress on image
| segmentation.
|
| You can generate any image you want in high quality in
| just a few seconds.
|
| There are already human beings being shitier in their
| daily job than a LLM is.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Some people maintain that JavaScript is evil too, and
| make a big deal out of telling everyone they avoid it on
| moral grounds as often as they can work it into the
| conversation, as if they were vegans who wanted everyone
| to know that and respect them for it.
|
| So is it rational for a web design company to take a
| moral stance that they won't use JavaScript?
|
| Is there a market for that, with enough clients who want
| their JavaScript-free work?
|
| Are there really enough companies that morally hate
| JavaScript enough to hire them, at the expense of their
| web site's usability and functionality, and their own
| users who aren't as laser focused on performatively not
| using JavaScript and letting everyone know about it as
| they are?
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| The age old question: do people get what they want, or do
| they want what they (can) get?
|
| Put differently, is "the market" shaped by the desires of
| consumers, or by the machinations of producers?
| simianwords wrote:
| >So let's all just give zero fucks about our moral values
| and just multiply monetary ones.
|
| You are misconstruing the original point. They are simply
| suggesting that the moral qualms of using AI are simply not
| that high - neither to vast majority of consumers, neither
| to the government. There are a few people who might
| exaggerate these moral issues for self service but they
| wouldn't matter in the long term.
|
| That is not to suggest there are absolutely no legitimate
| moral problems with AI but they will pale in comparison to
| what the market needs.
|
| If AI can make things 1000x more efficient, humanity will
| collectively agree in one way or the other to ignore or
| work around the "moral hazards" for the greater good.
|
| You can start by explaining what your specific moral value
| is that goes against AI use? It might bring to clarity
| whether these values are that important at all to begin
| with.
| vkou wrote:
| > If AI can make things 1000x more efficient,
|
| Is that the promise of the faustian bargain we're
| signing?
|
| Once the ink is dry, should I expect to be living in a
| 900,000 sq ft apartment, or be spending $20/year on
| healthcare? Or be working only an hour a week?
| ovi256 wrote:
| While humans have historically mildly reduced their
| working time to today's 40h workweek, their consumption
| has gone up enormously, and whole new categories of
| consumption were opened. So my prediction is while you'll
| never live in a 900,000sqft apartment (unless we get
| O'Neill cylinders from our budding space industry) you'll
| probably consume a lot more, while still working a full
| week
| rightbyte wrote:
| 40h is probably up from pre-industrial times.
|
| Edit: There is some research covering work time estimates
| for different ages.
| infecto wrote:
| We could probably argue to the end of time about the
| qualitative quality of life between then and now. In
| general a metric of consumption and time spent gathering
| that consumption has gotten better over time.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| I don't think a general sentiment matters much here when
| the important necessitate are out of reach. The hierarchy
| of needs is outdated, but the inversion of it is very
| concerning.
|
| We can live without a flat screen TV (which has gotten
| dirt cheap). We can't live without a decent house. Or
| worse, while we can live in some 500 sq ft shack we can't
| truly "live" if there's no other public amenities to
| gather and socialize without nickel-and-diming us.
| fastball wrote:
| What was all this free time spent doing in the pre-
| industrial era?
| rightbyte wrote:
| Alternating between grinding your knife and making wood
| sculptures.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| pre-industrial? Lots of tending to the farm, caring for
| family, and managing slaves I suppose. Had some free time
| between that to work with your community for bonding or
| business dealings or whatnot.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| I don't _want_ to "consume a lot more". I want to work
| less, and for the work I do to be valuable, and to be
| able to spend my remaining time on other valuable things.
| infecto wrote:
| So you are agreeing with the parent? If consumption has
| gone up a lot and input hours has gone down or stayed
| flat, that means you are able to work less.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Not unless rent is cheap, it doesn't. It might mean my
| _boss_ is able to work less.
| ghaff wrote:
| Rent can be pretty cheap depending upon where you live.
| If you want to live in a high cost of living area, that's
| a form of consumption.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| If I live somewhere, and maintain the building myself,
| what's being consumed?
| ipdashc wrote:
| The spot of land is being consumed, no? If it's HCoL,
| clearly that's land that a lot of people wish they could
| live on but can't.
| ipdashc wrote:
| > or stayed flat
|
| But that's not what they said, they said they want to
| work less. As the GP post said, they'd still be working a
| full week.
|
| I do think this is an interesting point. The trend for
| most of history seems to have been vastly increasing
| consumption/luxury while work hours _somewhat_ decrease.
| But have we reached the point where that 's not what
| people want? I'd wager most people in rich developed
| countries don't particularly want _more_ clothes,
| gadgets, cars, or fast food. If they can get the current
| typical middle class share of those things (which to be
| fair is a big share, and not environmentally
| sustainable), along with a modest place to live, they
| (we) mainly want to work less.
| Kerrick wrote:
| You can consume a lot less on a surprisingly small
| salary, at least in the U.S.
|
| But it requires giving up things a lot of people don't
| want to, because consuming less once you are used to
| consuming more _sucks_. Here is a list of things people
| can cut from their life that are part of the
| "consumption has gone up" and "new categories of
| consumption were opened" that ovi256 was talking about:
|
| - One can give up cell phones, headphones/earbuds, mobile
| phone plans, mobile data plans, tablets, ereaders, and
| paid apps/services. That can save $100/mo in bills and
| amortized hardware. These were a luxury 20 years ago.
|
| - One can give up laptops, desktops, gaming consoles,
| internet service, and paid apps/services. That can save
| another $100/months in bills and amortized hardware.
| These were a luxury 30 years ago.
|
| - One can give up imported produce and year-round
| availability of fresh foods. Depending on your family
| size and eating habits, that could save almost nothing,
| or up to hundreds of dollars every month. This was a
| luxury 50 years ago.
|
| - One can give up restaurant, take-out, and home pre-
| packaged foods. Again depending on your family size and
| eating habits, that could save nothing-to-hundreds every
| month. This was a luxury 70 years ago.
|
| - One can give up car ownership, car rentals, car
| insurance, car maintenance, and gasoline. In urban areas,
| walking and public transit are much cheaper options. In
| rural areas, walking, bicycling, and getting rides from
| shuttle services and/or friends are much cheaper options.
| That could save over a _thousand dollars a month_ per
| 15,000 miles. This was a luxury 80 years ago.
|
| I could keep going, but by this point I've likely
| suggested cutting something you now consider _necessary_
| consumption. If you thought one "can't just give that up
| nowadays," I'm not saying you're right or wrong. I'm just
| hoping you acknowledge that what people consider optional
| consumption has changed, which means _people consume a
| lot more_.
| malfist wrote:
| This didn't say they wanted to consume less, presumably
| their consumption is the right level for them.
| jimbokun wrote:
| > - One can give up cell phones, headphones/earbuds,
| mobile phone plans, mobile data plans, tablets, ereaders,
| and paid apps/services. That can save $100/mo in bills
| and amortized hardware. These were a luxury 20 years ago.
|
| It's not clear that it's still possible to function in
| society today with out a cell phone and a cell phone
| plan. Many things that were possible to do before without
| one now require it.
|
| > - One can give up laptops, desktops, gaming consoles,
| internet service, and paid apps/services. That can save
| another $100/months in bills and amortized hardware.
| These were a luxury 30 years ago.
|
| Maybe you can replace these with the cell phone + plan.
|
| > - One can give up imported produce and year-round
| availability of fresh foods. Depending on your family
| size and eating habits, that could save almost nothing,
| or up to hundreds of dollars every month. This was a
| luxury 50 years ago.
|
| It's not clear that imported food is cheaper than locally
| grown food. Also I'm not sure you have the right time
| frame. I'm pretty sure my parents were buying imported
| produce in the winter when I was a kid 50 years ago.
|
| > - One can give up restaurant, take-out, and home pre-
| packaged foods. Again depending on your family size and
| eating habits, that could save nothing-to-hundreds every
| month. This was a luxury 70 years ago.
|
| Agreed.
|
| > - One can give up car ownership, car rentals, car
| insurance, car maintenance, and gasoline. In urban areas,
| walking and public transit are much cheaper options. In
| rural areas, walking, bicycling, and getting rides from
| shuttle services and/or friends are much cheaper options.
| That could save over a thousand dollars a month per
| 15,000 miles. This was a luxury 80 years ago.
|
| Yes but in urban areas whatever you're saving on cars you
| are probably spending on higher rent and mortgage costs
| compared to rural areas where cars are a necessity. And
| if we're talking USA, many urban areas have terrible
| public transportation and you probably still need Uber or
| the equivalent some of the time, depending on just how
| walkable/bike-able your neighborhood is.
| Kerrick wrote:
| > rural areas where cars are a necessity
|
| > It's not clear that it's still possible to function in
| society today with out a cell phone
|
| Like I said... I've likely suggested cutting something
| you now consider _necessary_ consumption. If you thought
| one "can't just give that up nowadays," I'm not saying
| you're right or wrong. I'm just hoping you acknowledge
| that what people consider optional consumption has
| changed, which means people consume a lot more.
|
| ---
|
| As an aside, I live in a rural area. The population of my
| county is about 17,000 and the population of its county
| seat is about 3,000. We're a good 40 minutes away from
| the city that centers the Metropolitan Statistical Area.
| A 1 bedroom apartment is $400/mo and a 2 bedroom
| apartment is $600/mo. In one month, minimum wage will be
| $15/hr.
|
| Some folks here _do_ live without a car. It is possible.
| They get by in exactly the ways I described (except some
| of the Amish /Mennonites, who also use horses). It's not
| preferred (except by some of the Amish/Mennonites), but
| one can make it work.
| ncruces wrote:
| And certainly, in 1945 (80 years ago), people would've
| made due with fewer cars in those areas.
|
| This idea that increased consumption over the past
| century has been irrelevant to quality of life is just
| absurd.
| ipdashc wrote:
| > on a surprisingly small salary
|
| But if we take "surprisingly small salary" to literally
| mean salary, most (... all?) salaried jobs require you to
| work full time, 40 hours a week. Unless we consider cushy
| remote tech jobs, but those are an odd case and likely to
| go away if we assume AI is taking over there.
|
| Part time / hourly work is largely less skilled and much
| lower paid, and you'll want to take all the hours you can
| get to be able to afford outright necessities like rent.
| (Unless you're considering rent as consumption/luxury,
| which is fair)
|
| It does seem like there's a gap in terms of
| skilled/highly paid but hourly/part time work.
|
| (Not disagreeing with the rest of your post though)
| simianwords wrote:
| you can consume as much as an average person from 1950's
| by working just a few days a week.
| jimbokun wrote:
| It's not always possible to live like a person from the
| 1950s due to societal changes. And many jobs that pay
| well do not allow you to work part time.
| mythrwy wrote:
| Not cigarettes I can't!
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Save up and then FIRE; retire early by moving to a lower
| cost of living area.
| amrocha wrote:
| That sounds like a nightmare. Let's sell out a generation
| so that we can consume more. Wow.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Boomers in a nutshell. Do a bunch of stuff to keep from
| building more housing to prop up housing prices (which is
| much of their net worth), and then spend until you're
| forced to spend the last bit to keep yourselves alive.
|
| Then the hospital takes the house to pay off the rest of
| the debts. Everybody wins!
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >you'll probably consume a lot more, while still working
| a full week
|
| There's more to cosume than 50 years ago, but I don't see
| that trend continuing. We shifted phone bills to cell
| phone bills and added internet bills and a myriad of
| subscriptions. But that's really it. everything was "turn
| one time into subscrition".
|
| I don't see what will fundamentally shift that current
| consumption for the next 20-30 years. Just more
| conversion of ownership to renting. In entertainment
| we're already seeing revolts against this as piracy
| surges. I don't know how we're going to "consume a lot
| more" in this case.
| arthurfirst wrote:
| They signed it for you as there will be 1000x less
| workers needed so they didn't need to ask anymore.
| neutronicus wrote:
| You will probably be dead.
|
| But _somebody_ will be living in a 900,000 sq ft
| apartment and working an hour a week, and the concept of
| money will be defunct.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >They are simply suggesting that the moral qualms of
| using AI are simply not that high - neither to vast
| majority of consumers, neither to the government.
|
| And I believe they (and I) are suggesting that this is
| just a bad faith spin on the market, if you look at
| actual AI confidence and sentiment and don't ignore it as
| "ehh just the internet whining". Consumers having less
| money to spend doesn't mean they are adopting AI en
| masse, nor are happy about it.
|
| I don't think using the 2025 US government for a moral
| compass is helping your case either.
|
| >If AI can make things 1000x more efficient
|
| Exhibit A. My observations suggest that consumers are
| beyond tired of talking about the "what ifs" while they
| struggle to afford rent or get a job in this economy,
| right now. All the current gains are for corporate
| billionaires, why would they think that suddenly changes
| here and now?
| ako wrote:
| AI is just a tool, like most other technologies, it can be
| used for good and bad.
|
| Where are you going to draw the line? Only if it effects
| you, or maybe we should go back to using coal for
| everything, so the mineworkers have their old life back? Or
| maybe follow the Amish guidelines to ban all technology
| that threatens sense of community?
|
| If you are going to draw a line, you'll probably have to
| start living in small communities, as AI as a technology is
| almost impossible to stop. There will be people and
| companies using it to it's fullest, even if you have laws
| to ban it, other countries will allow it.
| georgemcbay wrote:
| > AI is just a tool, like most other technologies, it can
| be used for good and bad.
|
| The same could be said of social media for which I think
| the aggregate bad has been far greater than the aggregate
| good (though there has certainly been _some_ good
| sprinkled in there).
|
| I think the same is likely to be true of "AI" in terms of
| the negative impact it will have on the humanistic side
| of people and society over the next decade or so.
|
| However like social media before it I don't know how
| useful it will be to try to avoid it. We'll all be
| drastically impacted by it through network effects
| whether we individually choose to participate or not and
| practically speaking those of us who still need to
| participate in society and commerce are going to have to
| deal with it, though that doesn't mean we have to be
| happy about it.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > The same could be said of social media
|
| Yes, absolutely.
|
| Just because it's monopolized by evil people doesn't mean
| it's inherently bad. In fact, mots people here have seen
| examples of it done in a good way.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| > _In fact, mots people here have seen examples of it
| done in a good way._
|
| Like this very website we're on, proving the parent's
| point in fact.
| nradov wrote:
| Regardless of whether you use AI or social media, your
| happiness (or lack thereof) is largely under your own
| control.
| jpadkins wrote:
| I was told that Amish (elders) ban technology that
| separates you from God. Maybe we should consider that?
| (depending on your personal take on what God is)
| Throaway1985232 wrote:
| The Amish don't ban all tech that can threaten community.
| They will typically have a phone or computer in a public
| communications house. It's being a slave to the tech that
| they oppose (such as carrying that tech with you all the
| time because you "need" it).
| jimbokun wrote:
| You are thinking too small.
|
| The goal of AI is NOT to be a _tool_. It 's to replace
| human labor completely.
|
| This means 100% of economic value goes to capital,
| instead of labor. Which means anyone that doesn't have
| sufficient capital to live off the returns just starves
| to death.
|
| To avoid that outcome requires a complete rethinking of
| our economic system. And I don't think our institutions
| are remotely prepared for that, assuming the people
| runnign them care at all.
| _heimdall wrote:
| If it is just a tool, it isn't AI. ML algorithms are
| tools that are ultimately as good or bad as the person
| using them and how they are used.
|
| AI wouldn't fall into that bucket, it wouldn't be driven
| entirely by the human at the wheel.
|
| I'm not sold yet whether LLMs are AI, my gut says no and
| I haven't been convinced yet. We can't lose the
| distinction between ML and AI though, its extremely
| important when it comes to risk considerations.
| _heimdall wrote:
| Silent down votes, any explanations or counter points?
| idiotsecant wrote:
| That's how it works. You can be morally righteous all you
| want, but this isn't a movie. Morality is a luxury for the
| rich. Conspicuous consumption. The morally righteous poor
| people just generally end up righteously starving.
| dripdry45 wrote:
| This seems rather black and white. Defining the morals
| probably makes sense, then evaluating whether they can be
| lived or whether we can compromise in the face other
| priorities?
| tjwebbnorfolk wrote:
| What parent is saying is that what works is what will
| matter in the end. That which works better than something
| else will become the method that survives in competition.
|
| You not liking something on purportedly "moral" grounds
| doesn't matter if it works better than something else.
| malfist wrote:
| Oxycontin certainly worked, and the markets demanded more
| and more of it. Who are we to take a moral stand and
| limit everyone's access to opiates? We should just focus
| on making a profit since we're filling a "need"
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Using LLMs doesn't kill people, I'm sure there are some
| exceptions like OpenAI's suicide that was in the news,
| but not to the degree of oxycontin.
| tinfoilhatter wrote:
| Not yet maybe... Once we factor in the environmental
| damage that generative AI, and all the data centers being
| built to power it, will inevitably cause - I think it
| will become increasingly difficult to make the assertion
| you just did.
| senordevnyc wrote:
| Totally agree, but I'd state it slightly differently.
|
| This type of _business_ isn't going to be hit hard by AI;
| this type of business _owner_ is going to be hit hard by AI.
| alextingle wrote:
| I think it's just as likely that business who have gone all-
| in on AI are going to be the ones that get burned. When that
| hose-pipe of free compute gets turned off (as it surely
| must), then any business that relies on it is going to be
| left high and dry. It's going to be a massacre.
| simonw wrote:
| The latest DeepSeek and Kimi open weight models are
| competitive with GPT-5.
|
| If every AI lab were to go bust tomorrow, we could still
| hire expensive GPU servers (there would suddenly be a glut
| of those!) and use them to run those open weight models and
| continue as we do today.
|
| Sure, the models wouldn't ever get any better in the future
| - but existing teams that rely on them would be able to
| keep on working with surprisingly little disruption.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| AI is not a tool, it is an oracle.
|
| Prompting isn't a skill, and praying that the next prompt
| finally spits out something decent is not a business
| strategy.
| classified wrote:
| Seeing how many successful businesses are a product of pure
| luck, using an oracle to roll the dice is not significantly
| different.
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| "praying that the next prompt finally spits out something
| decent is not a business strategy."
|
| well you just describing an chatgpt is, one of the most
| fastest growing user acquisition user base in history
|
| as much as I agree with your statement but the real world
| doesn't respect that
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| > one of the most fastest growing user acquisition user
| base in history
|
| By selling a dollar of compute for 90 cents.
|
| We've been here before, it doesn't end like you think it
| does.
| rob74 wrote:
| Do you remember the times when "cargo cult programming" was
| something negative? Now we're all writing incantations to
| the great AI, hoping that it will drop a useful nugget of
| knowledge in our lap...
| danielbln wrote:
| Hot takes from 2023, great. Work with AIs has changed since
| then, maybe catch up? Look up how agentic systems work, how
| to keep them on task, how they can validate their work etc.
| Or don't.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| > if you combine the Stone Soup strategy with Clever Hans
| syndrome you can sell the illusion of not working for 8
| billable hours a day
|
| No thanks, I'm good.
| BenGosub wrote:
| I understand that website studios have been hit hard, given
| how easy it is to generate good enough websites with AI
| tools. I don't think human potential is best utilised when
| dealing with CSS complexities. In the long term, I think this
| is a positive.
|
| However, what I don't like is how little the authors are
| respected in this process. Everything that the AI generates
| is based on human labour, but we don't see the authors
| getting the recognition.
| classified wrote:
| > we don't see the authors getting the recognition.
|
| In that sense AI has been the biggest heist that has ever
| been perpetrated.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| Only in exactly the same sense that portrait painters
| were robbed of their income by the invention of
| photography. In the end people adapted and some people
| still paint. Just not a whole lot of portraits. Because
| people now take selfies.
|
| Authors still get recognition. If they are decent authors
| producing original, literary work. But the type of author
| that fills page five of your local news paper, has not
| been valued for decades. But that was filler content long
| before AI showed up. Same for the people that do the
| subtitles on soap operas. The people that create the
| commercials that show at 4am on your TV. All fair game
| for AI.
|
| It's not a heist, just progress. People having to adapt
| and struggling with that happens with most changes. That
| doesn't mean the change is bad. Projecting your rage,
| moralism, etc. onto agents of change is also a constant.
| People don't like change. The reason we still talk about
| Luddites is that they overreacted a bit.
|
| People might feel that time is treating them unfairly.
| But the reality is that sometimes things just change and
| then some people adapt and others don't. If your party
| trick is stuff AIs do well (e.g. translating text, coming
| up with generic copy text, adding some illustrations to
| articles, etc.), then yes AI is robbing you of your job
| and there will be a lot less demand for doing these
| things manually. And maybe you were really good at it
| even. That really sucks. But it happened. That cat isn't
| going back in the bag. So, deal with it. There are plenty
| of other things people can still do.
|
| You are no different than that portrait painter in the
| 1800s that suddenly saw their market for portraits
| evaporate because they were being replaced by a few
| seconds exposure in front of a camera. A lot of very
| decent art work was created after that. It did not kill
| art. But it did change what some artists did for a
| living. In the same way, the gramophone did not kill
| music. The TV did not kill theater. Etc.
|
| Getting robbed implies a sense of entitlement to
| something. Did you own what you lost to begin with?
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Photography takes pictures of objects, not of paintings.
| By shifting the frame to "robbed of their income", you
| completely miss the point of the criticism you're
| responding to... but I suspect that's deliberate.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| I don't think it's a meaningful distinction.
|
| Robbing implies theft. The word heist was used here to
| imply that some crime is happening. I don't think there
| is such a crime and disagree with the framing. Which is
| what this is, and which is also very deliberate. Luddites
| used a similar kind of framing to justify their actions
| back in the day. Which is why I'm using it as an analogy.
| I believe a lot of the anti AI sentiment is rooted in
| very similar sentiments.
|
| I'm not missing the point but making one. Clearly it's a
| sensitive topic to a lot of people here.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Reasonable people disagree about whether _copying_ is
| theft, but everyone agrees that _plagiarism_ is theft.
| JambalayaJimbo wrote:
| Portrait photography works whether or not there is a
| painting of the subject... LLMs cannot exist unless
| specifically consuming previous works! The authors of
| those works have every right to be upset about not being
| financially compensated, unlike painters.
| dripdry45 wrote:
| But DID the Luddites overreact? They sought to have
| machines serve people instead of the other way around.
|
| If they had succeeded in regulation over machines and
| seeing wealth back into the average factory worker's
| hands, of artisans integrated into the workforce instead
| of shut out, would so much of the bloodshed and mayhem to
| form unions and regulations have been needed?
|
| Broadly, it seems to me that most technological change
| could use some consideration of people
| BenGosub wrote:
| it's not the "exactly same sense". If an AI generated
| website is based on a real website, it's not like
| photography and painting, it is the same craft being
| compared.
| BenGosub wrote:
| It's also important that most of AI content created is
| slop. On this website most people stand against AI
| generated writing slop. Also, trust me, you don't want a
| world where most music is AI generated, it's going to
| drive you crazy. So, it's not like photography and
| painting it is like comparing good and shitty quality
| content.
| jimbokun wrote:
| The claim of theft is simple: the AI companies stole
| intellectual property without attribution. Knowing how
| AIs are trained and seeing the content they produce, I'm
| not sure how you can dispute that.
| senordevnyc wrote:
| In the exact same way that it's not theft if an artist-
| in-training goes to a museum to look at how other
| painters created their works.
| jamietanna wrote:
| False equivalence - a random person can't go to a museum
| and then immediately go and paint exactly like another
| artist, but that's what the current LLM offerings allow
|
| See Studio Ghibli's art style being ripped off, Disney
| suing Midjourney, etc
| b3ing wrote:
| Website building started dying off when SquareSpace
| launched and Wix came around. WordPress copied that and its
| been building blocks for the most part since then. There
| are few unique sites around these days.
| classified wrote:
| > And the type of businesses that survive will be the ones
| that integrate AI into their business the most successfully.
|
| I am an AI skeptic and until the hype is supplanted by actual
| tangible value I will prefer products that don't cram AI
| everywhere it doesn't belong.
| balamatom wrote:
| Sure, and it takes five whole paragraphs to have a nuanced
| opinion on what is very obvious to everyone :-)
|
| >the type of business that's going to be hit hard by AI [...]
| will be the ones that integrate AI into their business the
| most
|
| There. Fixed!
| rob74 wrote:
| I don't know about you, but I would rather pay some money for
| a course written thoughtfully by an actual human than waste
| my time trying to process AI-generated slop, even if it's
| free. Of course, programming language courses might seem
| outdated if you can just "fake it til you make it" by asking
| an LLM everytime you face a problem, but doing that won't
| actually lead to "making it", i.e. developing a deeper
| understanding of the programming environment you're working
| with.
| ako wrote:
| But what if the AI generated course was actually good,
| maybe even better than the human generated course? Which
| one would you pick then?
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| When a single such "actually good" AI-generated course
| actually _exists_ , this question might be worth engaging
| with.
| ako wrote:
| Actually, I already prefer AI to static training
| materials these days. But instead of looking for a static
| training material, I treated it like a coach.
|
| Recently I had to learn SPARQL. What I did is I created
| an MCP server to connect it to a graph database with
| SPARQL support, and then I asked the AI: "Can you teach
| me how to do this? How would I do this in SQL? How would
| I do it with SPARQL?" And then it would show me.
|
| With examples of how to use something, it really helps
| that you can ask questions about what you want to know at
| that moment, instead of just following a static tutorial.
| neutronicus wrote:
| The answer is "the highest-ranked free one in a Google
| Search".
| Towaway69 wrote:
| > Arguing against progress as it is happening is as old as
| the tech industry. It never works.
|
| I still wondering why I'm not doing my banking in Bitcoins.
| My blockchain database was replaced by postgres.
|
| So some tech can just be hypeware. The OP has a legitimate
| standpoint given some technologies track record.
|
| And the doctors are still out on the affects of social media
| on children or why are some countries banning social media
| for children?
|
| Not everything that comes out of Silicon Valley is
| automatically good.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| it is totally valid to NOT play the game - Joshua taught us
| this way back in the 80's
| jimmydddd wrote:
| Not wanting to help the rich get richer means you'll be
| fighting an uphill battle. The rich typically have more money
| to spend. And as others have commented, not doing anything AI
| related in 2025-2026 is going to further limit the business.
| Good luck though.
| Aurornis wrote:
| Rejecting clients based on how you wish the world would be is
| a strategy that only works when you don't care about the
| money or you have so many clients that you can pick and
| choose.
|
| Running a services business has always been about being able
| to identify trends and adapt to market demand. Every small
| business I know has been adapting to trends or trying to stay
| ahead of them from the start, from retail to product to
| service businesses.
| bluGill wrote:
| Rejecting clients when you have enough is a sound business
| decision. Some clients are too annoying to serve. Some
| clients don't want to pay. Sometimes you have more work
| than you can do... It is easy to think when things are bad
| that you must take any and all clients (and when things are
| bad enough you might be forced to), but that is not a good
| plan and to be avoided. You should be choosing your
| clients. It is very powerful when you can afford to tell
| someone I don't need your business.
| tacker2000 wrote:
| Sure, but it seems here that they are rejecting
| everything related to AI, which is probably not a smart
| business move, as they also remark, since this year was
| much harder for them.
|
| The fact is, a lot of new business is getting done in
| this field, with or without them. If they want to take
| the "high road", so be it, but they should be prepared to
| accepts the consequences of worse revenues.
| bluGill wrote:
| Is it though? We don't know the future. Is this just a
| dip in a growing business, or sign of things to come?
| Even if AI does better than the most optimistic
| projections it could still be great for a few people to
| be anti-ai if they are in the right place selling to the
| right people.
|
| Without knowing the future I cannot answer.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| People who make products with AI are not necessarily rich,
| often it's solo "vibe coders."
| arthurfirst wrote:
| I get the moral argument and even agree with it but we are a
| minority and of course we expect to be able sell our
| professional skills -- but if you are 'right' and out of
| business nobody will know. Is that any better than 'wrong' and
| still in business?
|
| You might as well work on product marketing for ai because that
| is where the client dollars are allocated.
|
| If it's hype at least you stayed afloat. If it's not maybe u
| find a new angle if you can survive long enough? Just survive
| and wait for things to shake out.
| trial3 wrote:
| > but if you are 'right' and out of business nobody will
| know. Is that any better than 'wrong' and still in business?
|
| yes [0]
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raytheon
| anonymars wrote:
| Can you... elaborate?
| jfindper wrote:
| Not the parent.
|
| I believe that they are bringing up a moral argument.
| Which I'm sympathetic too, having quit a job before
| because I found that my personal morals didn't align with
| the company, and the cognitive dissonance to continue
| working there was weighing heavily on me. The money
| wasn't worth the mental fight every day.
|
| So, yes, in some cases it is better to be "right" and be
| forced out of business than "wrong" and remain in
| business. But you have to look beyond just revenue
| numbers. And different people will have different ideas
| of "right" and "wrong", obviously.
| arthurfirst wrote:
| Moral arguments are a luxury of thinkers and only a small
| percentage of people can be reasoned with that way
| anyways. You can manipulate on morals but not reason in
| most cases.
|
| Agreed that you cannot be in a toxic situation and not
| have it affect you -- so if THAT is the case -- by all
| means exit asap.
|
| If it's perceived ethical conflict the only one you need
| to worry about is the golden rule -- and I do not mean
| 'he who has the gold makes the rules' I mean the real
| one. If that conflicts with what you are doing then also
| probably make an exit -- but many do not care trust me...
| They would take everything from you and feel justified as
| long as they are told (just told) it's the right thing.
| They never ask themselves. They do not really think for
| themselves. This is most people. Sadly.
| anonymars wrote:
| But the parent didn't really argue anything, they just
| linked to a Wikipedia article about Raytheon. Is that
| supposed to intrinsically represent "immorality"?
|
| Have they done more harm than, say, Meta?
| jfindper wrote:
| > _they just linked to a Wikipedia article about
| Raytheon_
|
| Yeah, that's why I took a guess at what they were trying
| to say.
|
| > _Is that supposed to intrinsically represent
| "immorality"?_
|
| What? The fact that they linked to Wikipedia, or
| specifically Raytheon?
|
| Wikipedia does not intrinsically represent immorality,
| no. But missile manufacturing is a pretty typical
| example, if not _the_ typical example, of a job that
| conflicts with morals.
|
| > _Have they done more harm than, say, Meta?_
|
| Who? Raytheon? The point I'm making has nothing to do
| with who sucks more between Meta and Raytheon.
| buildsjets wrote:
| Here are Raytheon part markings on the tail kit of a
| GBU-12 Paveway glide bomb that Raytheon sold to a corrupt
| third word dictator, who used that weapon to murder the
| attendees of an innocent wedding in a country he was
| feuding with.
|
| https://www.bellingcat.com/news/middle-
| east/2018/04/27/ameri...
|
| I know the part number of every airplane part I have ever
| designed by heart, and I would be horrified to see those
| part numbers in the news as evidence of a mass murder.
|
| So, what is your moral justification for defending one of
| the world's largest and despised weapons manufacturers?
| Are you paid to do it or is it just pro-bono work?
| order-matters wrote:
| Yes, actually - being right and out of business is much
| better than being wrong and in business when it comes to
| ethics and morals. I am sure you could find a lot of moral
| values you would simply refuse to compromise on for the sake
| of business. the line between moral value and heavy
| preference, however, is blurry - and is probably where most
| people have AI placed on the moral spectrum right now. Being
| out of business shouldn't be a death sentence, and if it is
| then maybe we are overlooking something more significant.
|
| I am in a different camp altogether on AI, though, and would
| happily continue to do business with it. I genuinely do not
| see the difference between it and the computer in general. I
| could even argue it's the same as the printing press.
|
| What exactly is the moral dilemma with AI? We are all reading
| this message on devices built off of far more ethically
| questionable operations. that's not to say two things cant
| both be bad, but it just looks to me like people are using
| the moral argument as a means to avoid learning something new
| while being able to virtue signal how ethical they are about
| it, while at the same time they refuse to sacrifice things
| they are already accustomed to for ethical reasons when they
| learn more about it. It just all seems rather convenient.
|
| the main issue I see talked about with it is in unethical
| model training, but let me know of others. Personally, I
| think you can separate the process from the product. A
| product isnt unethical just because unethical processes were
| used to create it. The creator/perpetrator of the unethical
| process should be held accountable and all benefits taken
| back as to kill any perceived incentive to perform the
| actions, but once the damage is done why let it happen in
| vain? For example, should we let people die rather than use
| medical knowledge gained unethically?
|
| Maybe we should be targeting these AI companies if they are
| unethical and stop them from training any new models using
| the same unethical practices, hold them accountable for their
| actions, and distribute the intellectual property and profits
| gained from existing models to the public, but models that
| are already trained can actually be used for good and I
| personally see it as unethical not to.
|
| Sorry for the ramble, but it is a very interesting topic that
| should probably have as much discussion around it as we can
| get
| arthurfirst wrote:
| > Yes, actually - being right and out of business is much
| better than being wrong and in business when it comes to
| ethics and morals.
|
| Yes, but since you are out of business you no longer have
| an opportunity to fix that situation or adapt it to your
| morals. It's final.
|
| Turning the page is a valid choice though. Sometimes a
| clean slate is what you need.
|
| > Being out of business shouldn't be a death sentence, and
| if it is then maybe we are overlooking something more
| significant.
|
| Fair point! It feels like a death sentence when you put so
| much into it though -- a part of you IS dying. It's a
| natural reflex to revolt at the thought.
|
| > For example, should we let people die rather than use
| medical knowledge gained unethically?
|
| Depends if you are doing it 'for their own good' or not.
|
| Also the ends do not justify the means in the world of
| morals we are discussing -- that is pragmatism /
| utilitarianism and belongs to the world of the material not
| the ideal.
|
| Finally - Who determines what is ethical? beyond the
| 'golden rule'? This is the most important factor. I'm not
| implying ethics are ALL relative, but beyond the basics
| they are, and who determines that is more important than
| the context or the particulars.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >It's final.
|
| You should tell that to all the failed businesses Jobs
| had or was ousted out of. Hell, Trump hasn't really had a
| single successful business in his life.
|
| Nothing is final until you draw your last breath.
|
| >Who determines what is ethical? beyond the 'golden
| rule'?
|
| To be frank, you're probably not the audience being
| appealed to in this post if you have to suggest "ethics
| can be relative". This is clearly a group of craftsmen
| offering their hands and knowledge. There are entire
| organizations who have guidelines if you need some
| legalese sense of what "ethical" is here.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >but if you are 'right' and out of business nobody will know.
| Is that any better than 'wrong' and still in business?
|
| Depends. Is it better to be "wrong" and burn all your
| goodwill for any future endeavors? Maybe, but I don't think
| the answer is clear cut for everyone.
|
| I also don't fully agree with us being the "minority". The
| issue is that the majority of investors are simply not
| investing anymore. Those remaining are playing high stakes
| roulette until the casino burns down.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| markets are not binary though, and this is also what it looks
| like when you're early (unfortunately similar to when you're
| late too). So they may totally be able to carve out a valid &
| sustainable market exactly because theyu're not doing what
| everyone else is doing right now. I'm currently taking online
| Spanish lessons with a company that uses people as teachers,
| even though this area is under intense attack from AI. There is
| no comparison, and what's really great is using many tools
| (including AI) to enhance a human product. So far we're a long
| way from the AI tutor that my boss keeps envisioning. I
| actually doubt he's tried to learn anything deep lately, let
| alone validated his "vision".
| kagevf wrote:
| I think your post pretty well illustrates how LLMs can and
| can't work. Favoriting this so I can point people to it in the
| future. I see so many extreme opinions on it like from how LLM
| is basically AGI to how it's "total garbage" but this is a
| good, balanced - and concise! - overview.
| jimbokun wrote:
| Has anyone considered that the demand for web sites and
| software in general is collapsing?
|
| Everyone and everything has a website and an app already. Is
| the market becoming saturated?
| Aperocky wrote:
| The demand is massively increasing, but filled by less people
| and more GPUs.
| oldandboring wrote:
| I know a guy who has this theory, in essence at least.
| Businesses use software and other high-tech to make
| efficiency gains (fewer people getting more done). The
| opportunities for developing and selling software were
| historically in digitizing industries that were totally
| analog. Those opportunities are all but dried up and we're
| now several generations into giving all those industries new,
| improved, but ultimately incremental efficiency gains with
| improved technology. What makes AI and robotics interesting,
| from this perspective, is the renewed potential for large-
| scale workforce reduction.
| xnx wrote:
| > In my opinion this business died 2 years ago
|
| It was an offshoot bubble of the bootcamp bubble which was
| inflated by ZIRP.
| jumploops wrote:
| > we won't work on product marketing for AI stuff, from a moral
| standpoint, but the vast majority of enquiries have been for
| exactly that
|
| Although there's a ton of hype in "AI" right now (and most
| products are over-promising and under-delivering), this seems
| like a strange hill to die on.
|
| imo LLMs are (currently) good at 3 things:
|
| 1. Education
|
| 2. Structuring unstructured data
|
| 3. Turning natural language into code
|
| From this viewpoint, it seems there is a lot of opportunity to
| both help new clients as well as create more compelling courses
| for your students.
|
| No need to buy the hype, but no reason to die from it either.
| ttiurani wrote:
| > imo LLMs are (currently) good at 3 things
|
| Notice the phrase "from a moral standpoint". You can't argue
| against a moral stance by stating solely what _is_ , because
| the question for them is what _ought to be_.
| weird-eye-issue wrote:
| I think some people prefer living in reality
| strken wrote:
| Really depends what the moral objection is. If it's "no
| machine may speak my glorious tongue", then there's little to
| be said; if it's "AI is theft", then you can maybe make an
| argument about hypothetical models trained on public domain
| text using solar power and reinforced by willing volunteers;
| if it's "AI is a bubble and I don't want to defraud
| investors", then you can indeed argue the object-level facts.
| ttiurani wrote:
| Indeed, facts are part of the moral discussion in ways you
| outlined. My objection was that just listing some
| facts/opinions about what AI can do right now is not enough
| for that discussion.
|
| I wanted to make this point here explicitly because lately
| I've seen this complete erasure of the moral dimension from
| AI and tech, and to me that's a very scary development.
| p2detar wrote:
| > because lately I've seen this complete erasure of the
| moral dimension from AI and tech, and to me that's a very
| scary development.
|
| But that is exactly what the "is ought problem"
| manifests, or? If morals are "oughts", then oughts are
| goal-dependent, i.e. they depend on personally-defined
| goals. To you it's scary, to others it is the way it
| should be.
| crabmusket wrote:
| Get with the program dude. Where we're going, we don't
| need morals.
| anovikov wrote:
| Interesting. I agree that this has been a hard year, hardest in a
| decade. But comparison with 2020 is just surprising. I mean, in
| 2020 crazy amounts of money were just thrown around left and
| right no? For me, it was the easiest year of my career when i
| basically did nothing and picked up money thrown at me.
| nrhrjrjrjtntbt wrote:
| Why would your company or business suddenly require no effort
| due to covid.
| anovikov wrote:
| Too much demand, all of a sudden. Money got printed and i
| went from near bankruptcy in mid-Feb 2020 to being awash with
| money by mid-June.
|
| And it continued growing nonstop all the way through ~early
| Sep 2024, and been slowing down ever since, by now coming to
| an almost complete stop - to the point i ever fired all sales
| staff because they were treading water with no even calls let
| alone deals, for half a year before being dismissed in mid-
| July this year.
|
| I think it won't return - custom dev is done. The myth of
| "hiring coders to get rich" is over. No surprise it did,
| because it never worked, sooner or later people had to
| realise it. I may check again in 2-3 years how market is
| doing, but i'm not at all hopeful.
|
| Switched into miltech where demand is real.
| _ttg wrote:
| I want to sympathize but enforcing a moral blockade on the "vast
| majority" of inbound inquiries is a self-inflicted wound, not a
| business failure. This guy is hardly a victim when the bottleneck
| is explicitly his own refusal to adapt.
| nrhrjrjrjtntbt wrote:
| I wonder if there is a pivot where they get to keep going but
| still avoid AI. There must be for a small consultancy.
| venturecruelty wrote:
| Survival is easy if you just sell out.
| _ttg wrote:
| if the alternative to 'selling out' is making your business
| unviable and having to beg the internet for
| handouts(essentially), then yes, you should "sell out" every
| time.
| owenthejumper wrote:
| The guy won't work with AI, but works with Google...
| averageRoyalty wrote:
| Thank you. I would imagine the entire Fortune 500 list
| passes the line of "evil", drawing that line at AI is
| weird. I assume it's a mask for fear people have of their
| industry becoming redundant, rather than a real morality
| argument.
| aylmao wrote:
| It's unfair to place all the blame on the individual.
|
| By that metric, everyone in the USA is responsible for the
| atrocities the USA war industry has inflicted all over the
| world. Everyone pays taxes funding Israel, previously the war
| in Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, etc.
|
| But no one believes this because sometimes you just have to
| do what you have to do, and one of those things is pay your
| taxes.
| amrocha wrote:
| Honestly yeah. You are complicit and it is your fault.
| Either donate significant amounts, protest, or move.
| wonderwonder wrote:
| Selling out is easy when your children have no food.
| rglover wrote:
| Bingo. Moral grandstanding only works during the boom, not
| the come down. And despite being as big an idealist as they
| come, sometimes you just gotta do what you gotta do. You
| _can_ crusade, but you 're just making your future self
| more miserable trying to pretend that _you_ are more
| important than you think. Not surprising in an era of
| unbridled narcissism, but hey, that 's where we are. People
| who have nothing to lose fail to understand this, whereas
| if you have a family, you don't have time for drum circles
| and bullshit: you've got mouths to feed.
| voiper1 wrote:
| Surely there's AI usage that's not morally reprehensible.
|
| Models that are trained only on public domain material. For
| value add usage, not simply marketing or gamification
| gimmicks...
| qingcharles wrote:
| How many models are only trained on legal[0] data? Adobe's
| Firefly model is one commercial model I can think of.
|
| [0] I think the data can be licensed, and not just public
| domain; e.g. if the creators are suitably compensated for
| their data to be ingested
| Eisenstein wrote:
| > How many models are only trained on legal[0] data?
|
| None, since 'legal' for AI training is not yet defined, but
| Olma is trained on the Dolma 3 dataset, which is
|
| 1. Common crawl
|
| 2. Github
|
| 3. Wikipedia, Wikibooks
|
| 4. Reddit (pre-2023)
|
| 5. Semantic Scholar
|
| 6. Project Gutenberg
|
| * https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.00159
| austinjp wrote:
| Nice, I hadn't heard of this. For convenience, here are
| HuggingFace models trained on Olma:
|
| https://huggingface.co/datasets/allenai/dolma
|
| https://huggingface.co/models?dataset=dataset:allenai/dol
| ma
| sddhrthrt wrote:
| > "a self-inflicted wound"
|
| "AI products" that are being built today are amoral, even by
| capitalism's standards, let alone by good business or
| environmental standards. Accepting a job to build another LLM-
| selling product would be soul-crushing to me, and I would
| consider it as participating in propping up a bubble economy.
|
| Taking a stance against it is a perfectly valid thing to do,
| and the author is not saying they're a victim due to no doing
| of their own by disclosing it plainly. By not seeing past that
| caveat and missing the whole point of the article, you've
| successfully averted your eyes from another thing that is
| unfolding right in front of us: majority of American GDP is AI
| this or that, and majority of it has no real substance behind
| it.
| aylmao wrote:
| I too think AI is a bubble, and besides the way this
| recklessness could crash the US economy, there's many other
| points of criticism to what and how AI is being developed.
|
| But I also understand this is a design and web development
| company. They're not refusing contracts to build AI that will
| take people's jobs, or violate copyright, or be used in
| weapons. They're refusing product marketing contracts;
| advertising websites, essentially.
|
| This is similar to a bakery next to the OpenAI offices
| refusing to bake cakes for them. I'll respect the decision,
| sure, but it very much is an inconsequential self-inflicted
| wound. It's more amoral to fully pay your federal taxes if
| you live in the USA for example, considering a good chunk are
| ultimately used for war, the CIA, NSA, etc, but nobody judges
| an average US-resident for paying them.
| AIorNot wrote:
| Sorry for them- after I got laid off in 2023 I had a devil of a
| time finding work to the point my unemployment ran out - 20 years
| as a dev and tech lead and full stack, including stints as a EM
| and CTO
|
| Since then I pivoted to AI and Gen AI startups- money is tight
| and I dont have health insurance but at least I have a job...
| wickedsight wrote:
| Come to Europe. Salaries are (much) lower, but we can use good
| devs and you'll have vacation days and health care.
| klardotsh wrote:
| Moving to Europe is anything but trivial. Have you looked at
| y'all's immigration processes recently? It can be a real
| bear.
| nothrabannosir wrote:
| If you have a US or Japanese passport and want to try NL:
| https://expatlaw.nl/dutch-american-friendship-treaty aka
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DAFT . It applies to
| freelancers.
| wickedsight wrote:
| Yeah, I'm in NL, so this is my frame of reference. Also,
| in many companies English is the main language, so that
| helps.
| AIorNot wrote:
| Interesting thanks!
| kergonath wrote:
| Yeah. It is much harder now than it used to be. I know a
| couple of people who came from the US ~15 to 10 years ago
| and they had it easy. It was still a nightmare with banks
| that don't want to deal with US citizens, though.
|
| As Americans, getting a long-term visa or residency card is
| not too hard, provided you have a good job. It's getting
| the job that's become more difficult. For other
| nationalities, it can range from very easy to very hard.
| trinix912 wrote:
| Yeah it depends on which countries you're interested in.
| Netherlands, Ireland, and the Scandinavian ones are on
| the easier side as they don't require language fluency to
| get (dev) jobs, and their languages aren't too hard to
| learn either.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| Do you count Finland? I heard that Finnish is very hard
| to learn.
| nxor wrote:
| Finnish people are probably nice when people try to learn
| their language. Hahaha. Can't say that about the other
| places.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Most Scandinavians would rather speak English than listen
| to a foreigner try to speak their language.
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| Luckily a certain American to Finland HN:er has been
| making it slightly easier ... :^)
|
| https://finnish.andrew-quinn.me/
|
| ... But, no, it's still a very forbidding language.
| nicbou wrote:
| I made a career out of understanding this. In Germany it's
| quite feasible. The only challenge is finding affordable
| housing, just like elsewhere. The other challenge is the
| speed of the process, but some cities are getting better,
| including Berlin. Language is a bigger issue in the current
| job market though.
| komali2 wrote:
| Counter: come to Taiwan! Anyone with a semi active GitHub
| can get a Gold Cars Visa. 6 months in you're eligible for
| national health insurance (about 30$ usd/month). Cost of
| living is extremely low here.
|
| However salaries are atrocious and local jobs aren't really
| available to non mandarin speakers. But if you're looking
| to kick off your remote consulting career or bootstrap some
| product you wanna build, there's not really anywhere on
| earth that combines the quality of life with the cost of
| living like Taiwan does.
| Rover222 wrote:
| +1, Taiwan is a great place
| alecco wrote:
| The tech sector in UK/EU is bad, too. And the cost of living
| in big cities is terrible for the salaries.
|
| They are outsourcing just as much as US Big Tech. And never
| mind the slow-mo economic collapse of UK, France, and
| Germany.
| 0xy wrote:
| Taking a 75% pay cut for free Healthcare that costs 1k a
| month anyway doesn't math. Not to mention the higher taxes
| for this privilege. European senior developers routinely get
| paid less than US junior developers.
| groundzeros2015 wrote:
| It would be worth it mathematically to be unemployed in the
| US for up to 3-5 years in hopes of landing another US job.
| jimbokun wrote:
| What's the unemployment rate like?
|
| I'm not sure the claim "we can use good devs" is true from
| the perspective of European corporations. But would love to
| learn otherwise?
|
| And of course: where in Europe?
| AIorNot wrote:
| Thanks - my wife and I actually have a long term plan to
| shift to the EU
|
| Applied to quite a few EU jobs via LinkedIn but nothing came
| of it- I suspected they wanted people already in EU countries
|
| Both of us are US Citizens but we don't want to retire in the
| US it seems to be becoming a s*hole esp around healthcare
| averageRoyalty wrote:
| > 20 years as a dev and tech lead and full stack, including
| stints as a EM and CTO
|
| > Since then I pivoted to AI and Gen AI startups- money is
| tight and I dont have health insurance but at least I have a
| job...
|
| I hope this doesn't come across as rude, but why? My
| understanding is American tech pays very well, especially on
| the executive level. I understand for some odd reason your
| country is against public healthcare, but surely a year of big
| tech money is enough to pay for decades of private health
| insurance?
| Aurornis wrote:
| Not parent commenter, but in the US when someone's employment
| doesn't include health insurance it's commonly because
| they're operating as a contractor for that company.
|
| Generally you're right, though. Working in tech, especially
| AI companies, would be expected to provide ample money for
| buying health insurance on your own. I know some people who
| choose not to buy their own and prefer to self-pay and hope
| they never need anything serious, which is obviously a risk.
|
| A side note: The US actually does have public health care but
| eligibility is limited. Over one quarter of US people are on
| Medicaid and another 20% are on Medicare (program for older
| people). Private self-pay insurance is also subsidized on a
| sliding scale based on your income, with subsidies phasing
| out around $120K annual income for a family of four.
|
| It's not equivalent to universal public health care but it's
| also different than what a lot of people (Americans included)
| have come to think.
| AIorNot wrote:
| As CTO I wasnt in a big tech company, it was a 50 person
| digital studio in the south my salary as was 275k at the
| highest point in my career- so I never made FAANG money
| amrocha wrote:
| That's 1% money. At that point the issue isn't how much
| money you made but what you did with it.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46070842
| frankhsu wrote:
| I agree that this year has been extremely difficult, but as far
| as I know, a large number of companies and individuals still made
| a fortune.
|
| Two fundamental laws of nature: the strong prey on the weak, and
| survival of the fittest.
|
| Therefore, why is it that those who survive are not the strong
| preying on the weak, but rather the "fittest"?
|
| Next year's development of AI may be even more astonishing,
| continuing to kill off large companies and small teams unable to
| adapt to the market. Only by constantly adapting can we survive
| in this fierce competition.
| paulsutter wrote:
| > we won't work on product marketing for AI stuff, from a moral
| standpoint
|
| Can someone explain this?
| powerclue wrote:
| Some folks have moral concerns about AI. They include:
|
| * The environmental cost of inference in aggregate and training
| in specific is non-negligible
|
| * Training is performed (it is assumed) with material that was
| not consented to be trained upon. Some consider this to be akin
| to plagiarism or even theft.
|
| * AI displaces labor, weakening the workers across all
| industries, but especially junior folks. This consolidates
| power into the hands of the people selling AI.
|
| * The primary companies who are selling AI products have, at
| times, controversial pasts or leaders.
|
| * Many products are adding AI where it makes little sense, and
| those systems are performing poorly. Nevertheless, some
| companies shove short AI everywhere, cheapening products across
| a range of industries.
|
| * The social impacts of AI, particularly generative media and
| shopping in places like YouTube, Amazon, Twitter, Facebook, etc
| are not well understood and could contribute to increased
| radicalization and Balkanization.
|
| * AI is enabling an attention Gish-gallop in places like search
| engines, where good results are being shoved out by slop.
|
| Hopefully you can read these and understand why someone might
| have moral concerns, even if you do not. (These are not my
| opinions, but they are opinions other people hold strongly.
| Please don't downvote me for trying to provide a neutral answer
| to this person's question.)
| lukan wrote:
| "Please don't downvote me for trying to provide a neutral
| answer to this person's question"
|
| Please note, that there are some accounts downvoting any
| comment talking about downvoting by principle.
| simianwords wrote:
| These points are so wide and multi dimensionsal that one must
| really wonder whether they were looking for reasons for
| concern.
| stonogo wrote:
| I'm not sure it's helpful to accuse "them" of bad faith,
| when "them" hasn't been defined and the post in question is
| a summary of reasons many individual people have expressed
| over time.
| simianwords wrote:
| i have noticed this pattern too frequently
| https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Council/AI_policy
|
| see the diversity of views.
| crabmusket wrote:
| Let's put aside the fact that the person you replied to was
| trying to represent a diversity of views and not attribute
| them all to one individual, including the author of the
| article.
|
| Should people _not_ look for reasons to be concerned?
| simianwords wrote:
| I can show you many instances of people or organisations
| representing diversity of views. Example:
| https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Council/AI_policy
| averageRoyalty wrote:
| I'm fairly sure all the first three points are true for each
| new human produced. The environmental cost vs output is
| probably significantly higher per human, and the population
| continues to grow.
|
| My experience with large companies (especially American Tech)
| is that they always try and deliver the product as cheap as
| possible, are usually evil and never cared about social
| impacts. And HN has been steadily complaining about the
| lowering of quality of search results for at least a decade.
|
| I think your points are probably a fair snapshot of peoples
| moral issue, but I think they're also fairly weak when you
| view them in the context of how these types of companies have
| operated for decades. I suspect people are worried for their
| jobs and cling to a reasonable sounding morality point so
| they don't have to admit that.
| powerclue wrote:
| Plenty of people have moral concerns with having children
| too.
|
| And while some might be doing what you say, others might
| genuinely have a moral threshold they are unwilling to
| cross. Who am I to tell someone they don't actually have a
| genuinely held belief?
| raincole wrote:
| Explanation: this article is a marketing piece trying to appeal
| to anti-AI group.
| Simon321 wrote:
| >especially as we won't work on product marketing for AI stuff,
| from a moral standpoint, but the vast majority of enquiries have
| been for exactly that.
|
| I intentionally ignored the biggest invention of the 21st century
| out of strange personal beliefs and now my business is going
| bankrupt
| hutattedonmyarm wrote:
| I don't think it's fair to call them "strange" personal beliefs
| averageRoyalty wrote:
| It probably depends on your circle. I find those beliefs
| strange, seems like moral relativism.
| Glemkloksdjf wrote:
| I personally would call them ignorant beliefs.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| Yes I find this a bit odd. AI is a tool, what specific part of
| it do you find so objectionable OP? For me, I know they are
| never going to put the genie back in the bottle, we will never
| get back the electricity spent on it, I might as well use it.
| We finally got a pretty good Multivac we can talk to and for me
| it usually gives the right answers back. It is a once in a
| lifetime type invention we get to enjoy and use. I was king of
| the AI haters but around Gemini 2.5 it just became so good that
| if you are hating it or criticizing it you aren't looking at it
| objectively anymore.
| senordevnyc wrote:
| It's ironic that Andy calls himself "ruthlessly pragmatic", but
| his business is failing because of a principled stand in turning
| down a high volume of inbound requests. After reading a few of
| his views on AI, it seems pretty clear to me that his objections
| are not based in a pragmatic view that AI is ineffective (though
| he claims this), but rather an ideological view that they should
| not be used.
|
| Ironically, while ChatGPT isn't a great writer, I was even more
| annoyed by the tone of this article and the incredible overuse of
| italics for emphasis.
| Magmalgebra wrote:
| Yeah. For all the excesses of the current AI craze there's a
| lot of real meat to it that will obviously survive the hype
| cycle.
|
| User education, for example, can be done in ways that don't
| even _feel_ like gen AI in ways that can drastically improve
| activation e.g. recommendation to use feature X based on
| activity Y, tailored to their use case.
|
| If you won't even lean into things like this you're just
| leaving yourself behind.
| qingcharles wrote:
| Andy Bell is absolute top tier when it comes to CSS + HTML, so
| when even the best are struggling you know it's starting to get
| hard out there.
| senordevnyc wrote:
| Being absolute top tier at what has become a commodity skillset
| that can be done "good enough" by AI for pennies for 99.9999%
| of customers is not a good place to be...
| brazukadev wrote:
| When 99.99% of the customers have garbage as a website, 0.01%
| will grow much faster and topple the incumbents, nothing
| changed.
| nkmnz wrote:
| Lots of successful companies have garbage as a website
| (successful in whatever sense, from Fortune 500 to
| neighbourhood stores).
| alecco wrote:
| Amazon has "garbage as a website" and they seem to be doing
| just fine.
| dewey wrote:
| A lesson many developers have to learn is that code quality
| / purity of engineering is not a thing that really moves
| the needle for 90% of companies.
|
| Having the most well tested backend and beautiful frontend
| that works across all browsers and devices and not just on
| the main 3 browsers your customers use isn't paying the
| bills.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > When 99.99% of the customers have garbage as a website
|
| When you think 99.99% of company websites are garbage, it
| might be your rating scale that is broken.
|
| This reminds me of all the people who rage at Amazon's web
| design without realizing that it's been obsessively
| optimized by armies of people for years to be exactly what
| converts well and works well for their customers.
| groundzeros2015 wrote:
| Hmm. This is hand made clothes and furniture vs factory
| mass production.
|
| Nobody doubts the prior is better and some people make
| money doing it, but that market is a niche because most
| people prioritize price and 80/20 tradeoffs.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > Nobody doubts the prior is better
|
| Average mass produced clothes are better than average
| hand made clothing. When we think of hand made clothing
| now, we think of the boutique hand made clothing of only
| the finest clothing makers who have survived in the new
| market by selling to the few who can afford their niche
| high-end products.
| groundzeros2015 wrote:
| > we think of the boutique hand made clothing of only the
| finest clothing makers
|
| This one. Inferred from context about this individual's
| high quality above LLMs.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| Quality also varied over time, if I recall correctly.
| Machine made generally starts worse, but with refinement
| ends up better from superhuman specialization of machines
| to provide fine detail with tighter tolerances than even
| artisans can manage.
|
| The only perk artisans enjoy then is uniqueness of the
| product as opposed to one-size fits all of mass
| manufacturing. But the end result is that while we still
| have tailors for when we want to get fancy, our clothes
| are nearly entirely machine made.
| jimbokun wrote:
| Which describes a gigantic swath of the labor market.
| nkmnz wrote:
| How do you measure ,,absolute top tier" in CSS and HTML? Honest
| question. Can he create code for difficult-to-code designs? Can
| he solve technical problems few can solve in, say, CSS build
| pipelines or rendering performance issues in complex
| animations? I never had an HTML/CSS issue that couldn't be
| addressed by just reading the MDN docs or Can I Use, so maybe
| I've missed some complexity along the way.
| myaccountonhn wrote:
| Look at his work? I had a look at the studio portfolio and
| it's damn solid.
| nkmnz wrote:
| If one asks you "Why do you consider Pablo Picasso's work
| to be outstanding", then "Look at his work?" is not a
| helpful answer. I've been asking about parent's way to
| judge the outstandingness of HTML/CSS work. Just writing
| "damn solid" websites isn't distinguishing.
| Aurornis wrote:
| I don't doubt it at all, but CSS and HTML are also about as
| commodity as it gets when it comes to development. I've never
| encountered a situation where a company is stuck for months on
| a difficult CSS problem and felt like we needed to call in a
| CSS expert, unlike most other specialty niches where top tier
| consulting services can provide a huge helpful push.
|
| HTML + CSS is also one area where LLMs do surprisingly well.
| Maybe there's a market for artisanal, hand-crafted, LLM-free
| CSS and HTML out there only from the finest experts in all the
| land, but it has to be small.
| jimbokun wrote:
| I think it's more likely that software training as an
| industry is dead.
|
| I suspect young people are going to flee the industry in
| droves. Everyone knows corporations are doing everything in
| their power to replace entry level programmers with AI.
| replwoacause wrote:
| I'm afraid of what the future will look like 10+ years down
| the line after we've gutted humans from the workforce and
| replaced them with AI. Companies are going to be more
| faceless than they've ever been. Nobody will be
| accountable, you won't be able to talk to anyone with a
| pulse to figure out a problem (that's already hard enough).
| And we'll be living in a vibe coded nightmare governed by
| executives who were sold on the promise of a better bottom
| line due to nixing salaries/benefits/etc.
| shubhamjain wrote:
| > Landing projects for Set Studio has been extremely difficult,
| especially as we won't work on product marketing for AI stuff,
| from a moral standpoint, but the vast majority of enquiries have
| been for exactly that
|
| I started TextQuery[1] with same moralistic standing. Not in
| respect of using AI or not, but that most software industry is
| suffering from rot that places more importance on making money,
| forcing subscription vs making something beautiful and detail-
| focused. I poured time in optimizing selections, perfecting
| autocomplete, and wrestling with Monaco's thin documentation.
| However, I failed to make it sustainable business. My motivation
| ran out. And what I thought would be fun multi-year journey,
| collapsed into burnout and a dead-end project.
|
| I have to say my time was better spent on building something
| sustainable, making more money, and optimizing the details once
| having that. It was naive to obsess over subtleties that only a
| handful of users would ever notice.
|
| There's nothing wrong with taking pride in your work, but you
| can't ignore what the market actually values, because that's what
| will make you money, and that's what will keep your business and
| motivation alive.
|
| [1]: https://textquery.app/
| nicbou wrote:
| That is a beautiful product. How unfortunate!
| doug_durham wrote:
| Software is a means to an end. It always has been. There are a
| privileged few who have the luxury of being able to
| thoughtfully craft software. The attention to detail needs to
| go into what people see, not in the code underneath.
| BrenBarn wrote:
| In contrast to others, I just want to say that I applaud the
| decision to take a moral stance against AI, and I wish more
| people would do that. Saying "well you have to follow the market"
| is such a cravenly amoral perspective.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| No, of course you don't have to - but don't torture yourself.
| If the market is all AI, and you are a service provider that
| does not want to work with AI _at all_ then get out of the
| business.
|
| If you found it unacceptable to work with companies that used
| any kind of digital database (because you found centralization
| of information and the amount of processing and analytics this
| enables unbecoming) then you should probably look for another
| venture instead of finding companies that commit to pen and
| paper.
| bayindirh wrote:
| > If the market is all AI, and you are a service provider
| that does not want to work with AI at all then get out of the
| business.
|
| Maybe they will, and _I bet_ they 'll be content doing that.
| I personally don't work with AI and try my best to not to
| train it. I left GitHub & Reddit because of this, and not
| uploading new photos to Instagram. The jury is still out on
| how I'm gonna share my photography, and _not sharing_ it is
| on the table, as well.
|
| I may even move to a cathedral model or just stop sharing the
| software I write with the general world, too.
|
| Nobody has to bend and act against their values and
| conscience _just because others are doing it, and the system
| is demanding to betray ourselves for its own benefit_.
|
| Life is more nuanced than that.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| Good on you. Maybe some future innovation will afford
| everyone the same opportunity.
| balamatom wrote:
| Maybe one day we will all become people again!
|
| (But only all of us simultaneously, otherwise won't
| count! ;))))
|
| The number of triggered Stockholm Syndrome patients in
| this comment section is terminally nauseating.
| fragmede wrote:
| How large an audience do you want to share it to? Self host
| photo album software, on hardware you own, behind a
| password, to people you trust.
| bayindirh wrote:
| Before that AI craze, I liked the idea of having a CC BY-
| NC-ND[0] public gallery to show what I took. I was not
| after any likes or anything. If I got professional
| feedback, that'd be a bonus. I even allowed EXIF-intact
| high resolution versions to be downloaded.
|
| Now, I'll probably install a gallery webapp to my
| webserver and put it behind authentication. I'm not
| rushing because I don't crave any interaction from my
| photography. The images will most probably be optimized
| and resized to save some storage space, as well.
|
| [0]: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
| _ttg wrote:
| nobody is against his moral stance. the problem is that he's
| playing the "principled stand" game on a budget that cannot
| sustain it, then externalizing the cost like a victim. if
| you're a millionaire and can hold whatever moral line you want
| without ever worrying about rent, food, healthcare, kids, etc.
| then "selling out" is optional and bad. if you're joe schmoe
| with a mortgage and 5 months of emergency savings, and you
| refuse the main kind of work people want to pay you for (which
| is not even _that_ controversial), you're not some noble hero,
| you're just blowing up your life.
| BrenBarn wrote:
| > he's playing the "principled stand" game on a budget that
| cannot sustain it, then externalizing the cost like a victim
|
| No. It is the AI companies that are externalizing their costs
| onto everyone else by stealing the work of others, flooding
| the zone with garbage, and then weeping about how they'll
| never survive if there's any regulation or enforcement of
| copyright law.
| wonderwonder wrote:
| The ceo of every one of those Ai companies drives an
| expensive car home to a mansion at the end of the workday.
| They are set. The average person does not and they cannot
| afford to play the principled stand game. Its not a
| question of right or wrong for most, its a question of
| putting food on the table
| averageRoyalty wrote:
| I'm not sure I understand this view. Did seamstresses see
| sewing machines as amoral? Or carpenters with electric and air
| drills and saws?
|
| AI is another set of tooling. It can be used well or not, but
| arguing the morality of a tooling type (e.g drills) vs maybe a
| specific company (e.g Ryobi) seems an odd take to me.
| hackable_sand wrote:
| Man, y'all gotta stop copying each other homework.
| ikamm wrote:
| It's said often because it's very true. It's telling that
| you can't even argue against it and just have to attack the
| people instead.
| DamnInteresting wrote:
| Plagiarism is also "another set of tooling." Likewise
| slavery, and organized crime. Tools can be immoral.
| aylmao wrote:
| I understand this stance, but I'd personally differentiate
| between taking the moral stand as a consumer, where you
| actively become part of the growth in demmand that fuels
| further investment, and as a contractor, where you're a
| temporary cost, especially if you and people who depend on you
| necessitate it to survive.
|
| A studio taking on temporary projects isn't investing into AI--
| they're not getting paid in stock. This is effectively no
| different from a construction company building an office
| building, or a bakery baking a cake.
|
| As a more general commentary, I find this type of moral crusade
| very interesting, because it's very common in the rich western
| world, and it's always against the players but rarely against
| the system. I wish more people in the rich world would channel
| this discomfort as general disdain for the neoliberal free-
| market of which we're all victims, not just specifically AI,
| for example.
|
| The problem isn't AI. The problem is a system where new
| technology means millions fearing poverty. Or one where
| profits, regardless of industry, matter more than
| sustainability. Or one where rich players can buy their way
| around the law-- in this case copyright law for example. AI is
| just the latest in a series of products, companies, characters,
| etc. that will keep abusing an unfair system.
|
| IMO over-focusing on small moral cursades against specific
| players like this and not the game as a whole is a distraction
| bound to always bring disappointment, and bound to keep moral
| players at a disadvantage constantly second-guessing
| themselves.
| A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote:
| << over-focusing on small moral cursades against specific
| players like this and not the game as a whole
|
| Fucking this. What I tend to see is petty 'my guy good, not
| my guy bad' approach. All I want is even enforcement of
| existing rules on everyone. As it stands, to your point, only
| the least moral ship, because they don't even consider
| hesitating.
| probably_wrong wrote:
| > _This is effectively no different from a construction
| company building an office building, or a bakery baking a
| cake._
|
| A construction company would still be justified to say no
| based on moral standards. A clearer example would be refusing
| to build a bridge if you know the blueprints/materials are
| bad, but you could also make a case for agreeing or not to
| build a detention center for immigrants. But the bakery
| example feels even more relevant, seeing as a bakery refusing
| to bake a cake base on the owner's religious beliefs ended up
| in the US Supreme Court [1].
|
| I don't fault those who, when forced to choose between their
| morals and food, choose food. But I generally applaud those
| that stick to their beliefs at their own expense. Yes, the
| game is rigged and yes, the system is the problem. But
| sometimes all one can do is refuse to play.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterpiece_Cakeshop_v._Col
| ora...
| BrenBarn wrote:
| > As a more general commentary, I find this type of moral
| crusade very interesting, because it's very common in the
| rich western world, and it's always against the players but
| rarely against the system. I wish more people in the rich
| world would channel this discomfort as general disdain for
| the neoliberal free-market of which we're all victims, not
| just specifically AI, for example.
|
| I totally agree. I still think opposing AI makes sense in the
| moment we're in, because it's the biggest, baddest example of
| the system you're describing. But the AI situation is a
| symptom of that system in that it's arisen because we already
| had overconsolidation and undue concentration of wealth. If
| our economy had been more egalitarian before AI, then even
| the same scientific/technological developments wouldn't be
| hitting us the same way now.
|
| That said, I do get the sense from the article that the
| author is trying to do the right thing overall in this sense
| too, because they talk about being a small company and are
| marketing themselves based on good old-fashioned values like
| "we do a good job".
| tim333 wrote:
| Yeah but the business seems to be education for web front end.
| If you are going to shun new tech you should really return to
| the printing press or better copying scribes. If you are going
| to do modern tech you kind of need to stick with the most
| modern tech.
| Dumblydorr wrote:
| Printing press and copying scribes is a sarcastic comment,
| but these web designers are still actively working and their
| industry is 100s of years from the state of those old techs.
| The joke isn't funny enough nor is the analogy apt enough to
| make sense.
| infecto wrote:
| No it is a pretty good comparison. There is absolutely AI
| slop but you have to be sticking your head in the sand if
| you don't think AI will not continue to shape this
| industry. If you are selling learning courses and are
| sticking your head in the sand, well that's pretty
| questionable.
| Glemkloksdjf wrote:
| I find this very generic what you are saying and they.
|
| What stance against AI? Image generation is not the same as
| code generation.
|
| There are so many open source projects out there, its a huge
| difference than taking all the images.
|
| AI is also just ML so should i not use image bounding box
| algorithm? Am i not allowed to take training data online or are
| only big companies not allowed to?
| Aurornis wrote:
| > Saying "well you have to follow the market" is such a
| cravenly amoral perspective.
|
| You only have to follow the market if you want to continue to
| stay relevant.
|
| Taking a stand and refusing to follow the market is always an
| option, but it might mean going out of business for ideological
| reasons.
|
| So practically speaking, the options are follow the market or
| find a different line of work if you don't like the way the
| market is going.
| afavour wrote:
| I still don't blame anyone for _trying_ to chart a different
| course though. It's truly depressing to have to accept that
| the only way to make a living in a field is to compromise
| your principles.
|
| The ideal version of my job would be partnering with all the
| local businesses around me that I know and love, elevating
| their online facilities to let all of us thrive. But the
| money simply isn't there. Instead their profits and my
| happiness are funnelled through corporate behemoths. I'll
| applaud anyone who is willing to step outside of that.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > It's truly depressing to have to accept that the only way
| to make a living in a field is to compromise your
| principles.
|
| Of course. If you want the world to go back to how it was
| before, you're going to be very depressed in any business.
|
| That's why I said your only real options are going with the
| market or finding a different line of work. Technically
| there's a third option where you stay put and watch bank
| accounts decline until you're forced to choose one of the
| first two options, but it's never as satisfying in
| retrospect as you imagined that small act of protest would
| have been.
| afavour wrote:
| I don't think we're really disagreeing here. You're
| saying "this is the way things are", I'm saying "I salute
| anyone who tries to change the way things are".
|
| Even in the linked post the author isn't complaining that
| it's not fair or whatever, they're simply stating that
| they are losing money as a result of their moral choice.
| I don't think they're deluded about the cause and effect.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| > It's truly depressing to have to accept that the only way
| to make a living in a field is to compromise your
| principles.
|
| Isn't that what money is though, a way to get people to
| stop what they're doing and do what you want them to
| instead? It's how Rome bent its conquests to its will and
| we've been doing it ever since.
|
| It's a deeply broken system but I think that acknowledging
| it as such is the first step towards replacing it with
| something less broken.
| afavour wrote:
| > Isn't that what money is though, a way to get people to
| stop what they're doing and do what you want them to
| instead?
|
| It doesn't have to be. Plenty of people are fulfilled by
| their jobs and make good money doing them.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| Some users might not mind the lack of control, but beyond
| a certain point it stops making sense to strive to be in
| that diminishing set and starts making sense to fix the
| bug.
|
| We've always tolerated a certain portion of society who
| finds the situation unacceptable, but don't you suspect
| that things will change if that portion is most of us?
|
| Maybe we're not there yet, idk, but the article is about
| the unease vs the data, and I think the unease comes from
| the awareness that that's where we're headed.
| BrenBarn wrote:
| I don't think that's necessarily what money is, but it is
| kind of what sufficiently unregulated capitalism is,
| which is what we've had for a while now.
| brooke2k wrote:
| > it might mean going out of business for ideological reasons
|
| taking a moral stance isn't inherently ideological
| ryanmcbride wrote:
| Sometimes companies become irrelevant while following the
| market, while other companies revolutionize the market by NOT
| following it.
|
| It's not "swim with the tide or die", it's "float like a
| corpse down the river, or swim". Which direction you swim in
| will certainly be a different level of effort, and you can
| end up as a corpse no matter what, but that doesn't mean the
| only option you have is to give up.
| tenacious_tuna wrote:
| I was talking to a friend of mine about a related topic when
| he quipped that he realized he started disliking therapy when
| he realized they effectively were just teaching him coping
| strategies for an economic system that is inherently amoral.
|
| > So practically speaking, the options are follow the market
| or find a different line of work if you don't like the way
| the market is going.
|
| You're correct in this, but I think it's worth making the
| explicit statement that that's also true because we live in a
| system of amoral resource allocation.
|
| Yes, this is a forum centered on startups, so there's a
| certain economic bias at play, but on the subject of morality
| I think there's a fair case to be made that it's reasonable
| to want to oppose an inherently unjust system _and to be
| frustrated_ that doing so makes survival difficult.
|
| We shouldn't have to choose between principles and food on
| the table.
| jayd16 wrote:
| By not following the market you change the market.
| wonderwonder wrote:
| Its cravenly amoral until your children are hungry. The market
| doesn't care about your morals. You either have a product
| people are willing to pay money for or you don't. If you are
| financially independent to the point it doesn't matter to you
| then by all means, do what you want. The vast majority of
| people are not.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Well if they're going to go out of business otherwise...
| Aperocky wrote:
| AI is amoral is an opinion.
|
| Following the market is also not cravenly amoral, AI or not.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| > Landing projects for Set Studio has been extremely difficult,
| especially as we won't work on product marketing for AI stuff
|
| If all of "AI stuff" is a "no" for you, then I think you just
| signed out off working in most industries to some important
| degree going forward.
|
| This is also not to say that service providers should not have
| any moral standards. I just don't understand the expectation in
| this particular case. You ignore what the market wants and where
| a lot/most of new capital turns up. What's the idea? You are a
| service provider, you are not a market maker. If you refuse
| service with the market that exists, you don't have a market.
|
| Regardless, I really like their aesthetics (which we need more of
| in the world) and do hope that they find a way to make it work
| for themselves.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| > what the market wants
|
| Pretty sure the market doesn't want more AI slop.
| nicbou wrote:
| I understand it as the market wanting more content about
| competing in an AI world
| Geste wrote:
| Sora's app has a 4.8 rating on the app store with 142K
| rating. It seems to me that the market does not care about
| slop or not, whether I like it or not.
| Ocerge wrote:
| I don't understand why you're being downvoted, you're not
| wrong. I think Suno being successful bums me out, I really
| hate it, but people that are not me love it. I can't do
| anything about that.
| infecto wrote:
| There is absolutely AI slop out there. Many companies rushed
| to add AI, a glorified chat bot to their existing product,
| and have marketed it as AI.
|
| There is also absolutely very tasteful products that add
| value using LLM and other more recent advancements.
|
| Both can exist at the same time.
| ikamm wrote:
| Nobody that actually understands the market right now would
| say that
| adventured wrote:
| The market wants a lot more high quality AI slop and that's
| going to be the case perpetually for the rest of the time
| that humanity exists. We are not going back.
|
| The only thing that's going to change is the quality of the
| slop will get better by the year.
| DamnInteresting wrote:
| > _The market wants a lot more high quality AI slop_
|
| "High quality AI slop" is a contradiction in terms. The
| relevant definitions[1] are "food waste (such as garbage)
| fed to animals", "a product of little or no value."
|
| By definition, the best slop is only a _little_ terrible.
|
| [1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/slop
| Aurornis wrote:
| Pretty sure HN has become completely detached from the market
| at this point.
|
| Demand for AI anything is incredible high right now. AI
| providers are constantly bouncing off of capacity limits. AI
| apps in app stores are pulling incredible download numbers.
| monkaiju wrote:
| > If all of "AI stuff" is a "no" for you, then I think you just
| signed out off working in most industries to some important
| degree going forward.
|
| I'm not sure the penetration of AI, especially to a degree
| where participants must use it, is all that permanent in many
| of these industries. Already the industry where it is arguably
| the most "present" (forced in) is SWE and its proving to be
| quite disappointing... Where I work the more senior you are the
| less AI you use
| doug_durham wrote:
| Just the opposite where I work. Seniors are best positioned
| to effectively use AI and are using it enthusiastically.
| tokioyoyo wrote:
| Yeah, gotta disagree with this one. Every senior and above
| around me have figured a workflow that makes their job
| faster. Internal usage dashboards say the same thing.
| Havoc wrote:
| Everyone gets to make their own choices and take principled
| stances of their choosing. I don't find that persuasive as a buy
| my course pitch though
| otikik wrote:
| On this thread what people are calling "the market" is just 6
| billionaire guys trying to hype their stuff so they can pass the
| hot potato to someone else right before the whole house of cards
| collapses.
| fzeroracer wrote:
| It's very funny reading this thread and seeing the exact same
| arguments I saw five years ago for the NFT market and the
| metaverse.
|
| All of this money is being funneled and burned away on AI shit
| that isn't even profitable nor has it found a market niche
| outside of enabling 10x spammers, which is why companies are
| literally trying to force it everywhere they can.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| It's also the exact same human beings who were doing the NFT
| and metaverse bullshit and insisting they were the next best
| things and had to jump ship to the next "Totally going to
| change everything" grift because the first two reached the
| end of their runs.
|
| I wonder what their plan was before LLMs seemed promising?
|
| These techbros got rich off the dotcom boom hype and lax
| regulation, and have spent 20 years since attempting to force
| themselves onto the throne, and own everything.
| flag_fagger wrote:
| > On this thread what people are calling "the market" is just 6
| billionaire guys trying to hype their stuff so they can pass
| the hot potato to someone else right before the whole house of
| cards collapses.
|
| Careful now, if they get their way, they'll be both the market
| and the government.
| 0x3f wrote:
| That might well be the current 'market' for SWE labor though. I
| totally agree it's a silly bubble but I'm not looking forward
| to the state of things when it pops.
| bobjordan wrote:
| Man, I definitely feel this, being in the international trade
| business operating an export contract manufacturing company from
| China, with USA based customers. I can't think of many shittier
| businesses to be in this year, lol. Actually it's been pretty
| difficult for about 8 years now, given trade war stuff actually
| started in 2017, then we had to survive covid, now trade war two.
| It's a tough time for a lot of SMEs. AI has to be a handful for
| classic web/design shops to handle, on top of the SMEs that
| usually make up their customer base, suffering with trade wars
| and tariff pains. Cash is just hard to come by this year. We've
| pivoted to focus more on design engineering services these past
| eight years, and that's been enough to keep the lights on, but
| it's hard to scale, it is just a bandwidth constrained business,
| can only take a few projects at a time. Good luck to OP
| navigating it.
| theiz wrote:
| I had a discussion yesterday with someone that owns a company
| creating PowerPoints for customers. As you might understand, that
| is also a business that is to be hit hard by AI. What he does is
| offer an AI entry level option, where basically the questions he
| asks the customer (via a Form) will lead to a script for running
| AI. With that he is able to combine his expertise with the AI
| demand from the market, and gain a profit from that.
| popalchemist wrote:
| Interesting how someone can clearly be brilliant in one area and
| totally have their head buried under the sand in another, and not
| even realize it.
| gregjor wrote:
| > ... we won't work on product marketing for AI stuff, from a
| moral standpoint, but the vast majority of enquiries have been
| for exactly that
|
| I don't use AI tools in my own work (programming and system
| admin). I won't work for Meta, Palantir, Microsoft, and some
| others because I have to take a moral stand somewhere.
|
| If a customer wants to use AI or sell AI (whatever that means), I
| will work with them. But I won't use AI to get the work done, not
| out of any moral qualm but because I think of AI-generated code
| as junk and a waste of my time.
|
| At this point I can make more money fixing AI-generated vibe
| coded crap than I could coaxing Claude to write it. End-user
| programming creates more opportunity for senior programmers, but
| will deprive the industry of talented juniors. Short-term
| thinking will hurt businesses in a few years, but no one counting
| their stock options today cares about a talent shortage a decade
| away.
|
| I looked at the sites linked from the article. Nice work. Even so
| I think hand-crafted front-end work turned into a commodity some
| time ago, and now the onslaught of AI slop will kill it off.
| Those of us in the business of web sites and apps can appreciate
| mastery of HTML and CSS and Javascript, beautiful designs and
| user-oriented interfaces. Sadly most business owners don't care
| that much and lack the perspective to tell good work from bad.
| Most users don't care either. My evidence: 90% of public web
| sites. No one thinks WordPress got the market share it has
| because of technical excellence or how it enables beautiful
| designs and UI. Before LLMs could crank out web sites we had an
| army of amateur designers and business owners doing it with
| WordPressl, paying $10/hr or less on Upwork and Fiverr.
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| Maybe they dont need to "create" website anymore, fixing other
| website that LLM generated is the future now
|
| we say that wordpress would kill front end but years later people
| still employ developer to fix wordpress mess
|
| same thing would happen with AI generated website
| baggachipz wrote:
| > same thing would happen with AI generated website
|
| Probably even moreso. I've seen the shit these things put out,
| it's unsustainable garbage. At least Wordpress sites have a
| similar starting point. I think the main issue is that the
| "fixing AI slop" industry will take a few years to blossom.
| nicbou wrote:
| I feel like this person might be just a few bad months ahead of
| me. I am doing great, but the writing is on the wall for my
| industry.
|
| We should have more posts like this. It should be okay to be
| worried, to admit that we are having difficulties. It might reach
| someone else who otherwise feels alone in a sea of successful
| hustlers. It might also just get someone the help they need or
| form a community around solving the problem.
|
| I also appreciate their resolve. We rarely hear from people being
| uncompromising on principles that have a clear price. Some people
| would rather ride their business into the ground than sell out. I
| say I would, but I don't know if I would really have the guts.
| Glemkloksdjf wrote:
| Its a global industry shift.
|
| You can either hope that this shift is not happening or that
| you are one of these people surviving in your niche.
|
| But the industry / world is shifting, you should start shifting
| with.
|
| I would call that being innovative, ahead etc.
| nicbou wrote:
| The industry is not really shifting. It's not shifting to
| anything. It's just that the value is being captured by
| parasitic companies. They still need people like me to feed
| them training data while they destroy the economics of
| producing that data.
| Glemkloksdjf wrote:
| They pay people in Malaysia to solve issues.
|
| Google has a ton of code internal.
|
| And million of people happily thumb down or up for their RL
| / Feedback.
|
| The industry is still shifting. I use LLMs instead of
| StackOverflow.
|
| You can be as dismissive as you want, but that doesn't
| change the fact that millions of people use AI tools every
| single day. People start using AI based tools.
|
| The industry overall is therefore shifting money and goals
| etc. into direction of AI.
|
| And the author has an issue because of that.
| nicbou wrote:
| Do you know what my industry is? It might be worth
| showing curiosity before expressing judgement.
| lijok wrote:
| > especially as we won't work on product marketing for AI stuff,
| from a moral standpoint, but the vast majority of enquiries have
| been for exactly that
|
| Sounds like a self inflicted wound. No kids I assume?
| didacusc wrote:
| Isn't this a bit of an ad?
| Glemkloksdjf wrote:
| Completly agree
| xdc0 wrote:
| This article was posted a few days ago, it was flagged and
| removed within an hour or two. I don't know what is different
| this time.
| sceptic123 wrote:
| I'm glad I wasn't the only one that thought that!
| josfredo wrote:
| A "bit"? This is self-immolation as an ad, posing as moral
| superiority.
| arathis wrote:
| This thread has some serious dickheads
| ramon156 wrote:
| My post had the privilege of being on front page for a few
| minutes. I got some very fair criticism because it wasn't really
| a solid article and was written when traveling on a train when I
| was already tired and hungry. I don't think I was thinking
| rationally.
|
| I'd much rather see these kind of posts on the front page.
| They're well thought-out and I appreciate the honesty.
|
| I think that, when you're busy following the market, you lose
| what works for you. For example, most business communication
| happens through push based traffic. You get assigned work and you
| have x time to solve all this. If you don't, we'll have some
| extremely tedious reflection meeting that leads to nowhere. Why
| not do pull-based work, where you get done what you get done?
|
| Is the issue here that customers aren't informed about when a
| feature is implemented? Because the alternative is promising date
| X and delaying it 3 times because customer B is more important
| jalapenos wrote:
| Corrected title: "we have inflicted a very hard year on ourselves
| with malice aforethought".
|
| The equivalent of that comic where the cyclist intentionally
| spoke-jams themselves and then acts surprised when they hit the
| dirt.
|
| But since the author puts moral high horse jockeying above money,
| they've gotten what they paid for - an opportunity to pretend
| they're a victim and morally righteous.
|
| Par for the course
| mono442 wrote:
| His business seems to be centered around UI design and front-end
| development and unfortunately this is one of the things that AI
| can do decently well. The end result is worse than a proper
| design but from my experience people don't really care about
| small details in most cases.
| ramon156 wrote:
| I can definitely tell. Some sites just seem to give zero fucks
| about usability, just that it looks pretty. It's a shame
| hexbin010 wrote:
| Tough crowd here. Though to be expected - I'm sure a lot of
| people have a fair bit of cash directly or indirectly invested in
| AI. Or their employer does ;)
|
| We Brits simply don't have the same American attitude towards
| business. A lot of Americans simply can't understand that chasing
| riches at any cost is not a particularly European trait. (We
| understand how things are in the US. It's not a matter of just
| needing to "get it" and seeing the light)
| ausbah wrote:
| some would say historically that isn't quite the case lol
| hexbin010 wrote:
| LOL. Some would say it's been beaten out of us too...which
| makes Americans telling us to be enterprising even funnier.
| billy99k wrote:
| "especially as we won't work on product marketing for AI stuff,
| from a moral standpoint, but the vast majority of enquiries have
| been for exactly that."
|
| You will continue to lose business, if you ignore all the 'AI
| stuff'. AI is here to stay, and putting your head in the sand
| will only leave you further behind.
|
| I've known people over the years that took stands on various
| things like JavaScript frameworks becoming popular (and they
| refused to use them) and the end result was less work and
| eventually being pushed out of the industry.
| infecto wrote:
| I simply have a hard time following the refusal to work on
| anything AI related. There is AI slop but also a lot of
| interesting value add products and features for existing
| products. I think it makes sense to be thoughtful of what to work
| on but I struggle with the blanket no to AI.
| vaylian wrote:
| I'm critical of AI because of climate change. Training and
| casual usage of AI takes a lot of resources. The electricity
| demand is way too high. We have made great progress in bringing
| a lot of regenerative energy to the grid, but AI eats up a huge
| part of it, so that other sectors can't decarbonize as much.
|
| We are still nowhere near to get climate change under control.
| AI is adding fuel to the fire.
| rckt wrote:
| Wishing these guys all the best. It's not just about following
| the market. It's about the ability to just be yourself. When
| everyone around you is telling you that you just have to start
| doing something and it's not even about the moral side of that
| thing. You simply just don't want to do it. Yeah, yeah, it's a
| cruel world. But this doesn't mean that we all need to victim
| blame everyone who doesn't feel comfortable in this trendy
| stream.
|
| I hope things with the AI will settle soon and there will be
| applications that actually make sense and some sort of new
| balance will be established. Right now it's a nightmare. Everyone
| wants everything with the AI.
| Octoth0rpe wrote:
| > Everyone wants everything with the AI.
|
| All the _investors_ want everything with AI. Lots of people -
| non-tech workers even - just want a product that works and
| often doesn't work differently than it did last year. That goal
| is often at odds with the ai-everywhere approach du jour.
| arthurfirst wrote:
| I did not look for a consulting contract for 18 years. Through my
| old network more quality opportunities found me than I could take
| on.
|
| That collapsed during the covid lockdowns. My financial services
| client cut loose all consultants and killed all 'non-essential'
| projects, even when mine (that they had already approved) would
| save them 400K a year, they did not care! Top down the word came
| to cut everyone -- so they did.
|
| This trend is very much a top down push. Inorganic. People with
| skills and experience are viewed by HR and their AI software as
| risky to leave and unlikely to respond to whatever pressures they
| like to apply.
|
| Since then it's been more of the same as far as consulting.
|
| I've come to the conclusion I'm better served by working on
| smaller projects I want to build and not chasing big consulting
| dollars. I'm happier (now) but it took a while.
|
| An unexpected benefit of all the pain was I like making things
| again... but I am using claude code and gemini. Amazing tools if
| you have experience already and you know what you want out of
| them -- otherwise they mainly produce crap in the hands of the
| masses.
| zwnow wrote:
| They also produce crap once you leave the realm of basic CRUD
| web apps... Try using it with Microsofts Business Central
| bullshit, does not work well.
| arthurfirst wrote:
| I have worked with a lot of code generation systems.
|
| LLMs strike me as mainly useful in the same way. I can get
| most of the boilerplate and tedium done with LLM tools. Then
| for core logic esp learning or meta-programming patterns etc.
| I need to jump in.
|
| Breaking tasks down to bite size, and writing detailed
| architecture and planning docs for the LLM to work from, is
| critical to managing increasing complexity and staying within
| context windows. Also critical is ruthlessly throwing away
| things that do not fit the vision and not being afraid to
| throw whole days away (not too often tho!)
|
| For ref I have built stuff that goes way beyond CRUD app with
| these tools in 1/10th of the time it previously took me or
| less -- the key though is I already knew how to do and how to
| validate LLM outputs. I knew exactly what I wanted a priori.
|
| Code generation technically always 'replaced' junior devs and
| has been around for ages, the results of the generation are
| just a lot better now., whereas in the past it was mixed bag
| of benefits/hassles doing code generation regularly, now it
| works much better and the cost is much less.
|
| I started my career as a developer and the main reasons I
| became a solutions systems guy were money and that I hated
| the tedium boilerplate phase of all software development
| projects over a certain scale. I never stoped coding because
| I love it -- just not for large enterprise soul destroying
| software projects.
| dboreham wrote:
| Quick note that this has not been my experience. LLMs have
| been very useful with codebases as far from crud web apps as
| you can get.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| This is consistent pattern.
|
| Two engineers use LLM-based coding tools; one comes away
| with nothing but frustration, the other one gets useful
| results. They trade anecdotes and wonder what the other is
| doing that is so different.
|
| Maybe the other person is incompetent? Maybe they chose a
| different tool? Maybe their codebase is very different?
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I would imagine it has a lot to do with the programming
| language and other technologies in the project. The LLMs
| have tons of training data on JS and React. They probably
| have relatively little on Erlang.
| neilv wrote:
| It's like when your frat house has a filing cabinet full
| of past years' essays.
|
| Protestant Reformation? Done, 7 years ago, different
| professor. Your brothers are pleased to liberate you for
| Saturday's house party.
|
| Barter Economy in Soviet Breakaway Republics? Sorry, bro.
| But we have a Red Square McDonald's feasibility study;
| you can change the names?
| Blackarea wrote:
| Mass of learning material doesn't equal quality though.
| The amount of poor react code out there is not to
| underestimate. I feel like llm generated gleam code was
| way cleaner (after some agentic loops due to syntactic
| misunderstanding) than ts/react where it's so biased to
| produce overly verbose slob.
| stickfigure wrote:
| Even if you're using JS/React, the level of
| sophistication of the UI seems to matter a lot.
|
| "Put this data on a web page" is easy. Complex
| application-like interactions seem to be more
| challenging. It's faster/easier to do the work by hand
| than it is to wait for the LLM, then correct it.
|
| But if you aren't already an expert, you probably aren't
| looking for complex interaction models. "Put this data on
| a web page" is often just fine.
| nathanlied wrote:
| This has been my experience, effectively.
|
| Sometimes I don't care for things to be done in a very
| specific way. For those cases, LLMs are acceptable-to-
| good. Example: I had a networked device that exposes a
| proprietary protocol on a specific port. I needed a
| simple UI tool to control it; think toggles/labels/timed
| switches. With a couple of iterations, the LLM produced
| something good enough for my purposes, even if it wasn't
| particularly doted with the best UX practices.
|
| Other times, I very much care for things to be done in a
| very specific way. Sometimes due to regulatory
| constraints, others because of visual/code consistency,
| or some other reasons. In those cases, getting the AI to
| produce what I need specifically feels like an exercise
| in herding incredibly stubborn cats. It will get done
| faster (and better) if I do it myself.
| parliament32 wrote:
| There was actually a good article about this the other
| day which makes sense to me, it comes down to function vs
| form kinda: https://www.seangoedecke.com/pure-and-impure-
| engineering/
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| >> even when mine (that they had already approved) would save
| them 400K a year
|
| You learn lessons over the years and this is one I learned at
| some point: you want to work in revenue centers, not cost
| centers. Aside from the fixed math (i.e. limit on savings vs.
| unlimited revenue growth) there's the psychological component
| of teams and management. I saw this in the energy sector where
| our company had two products: selling to the drilling side was
| focused on helping get more oil & gas; selling to the
| remediation side was fulfill their obligations as cheaply as
| possible. IT / dev at a non-software company is almost always a
| cost center.
| hylaride wrote:
| > You learn lessons over the years and this is one I learned
| at some point: you want to work in revenue centers, not cost
| centers.
|
| The problem is that many places don't see the cost portions
| of revenue centers as investment, but still costs. The world
| is littered with stories of businesses messing about with
| their core competencies. An infamous example was Hertz(1)
| outsourcing their website reservation system to Accenture to
| comically bad results. The website/app is how people reserve
| cars - the most important part of the revenue generating
| system.
|
| 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32184183
| georgeecollins wrote:
| > You learn lessons over the years and this is one I
| learned at some point: you want to work in revenue centers,
| not cost centers.
|
| Best advice I got in school is -- at least early in your
| career-- work in the main line of business for your
| company. So if you are in marketing, work for a marketing
| firm, an accountant, work for an accounting firm.. etc.
| Video game designer: work for a video game developer.
|
| Later you can have other roles but you make your mark doing
| the thing that company really depends on.
| biztos wrote:
| I would go further and say that even at software companies,
| even for dev that goes directly into the product, engineering
| is often seen as a cost center.
|
| The logic is simple, if unenlightened: "What if we had
| cheaper/fewer nerds, but we made them nerd harder?"
|
| So while working in a revenue center is advantageous, you
| still have to be in one that doesn't view _your kind_ as too
| fungible.
| mosura wrote:
| Yeah these days if it isn't ops to bring in revenue it is
| seen as cost.
| jacquesm wrote:
| This is golden career advice. Heed it well.
| arthurfirst wrote:
| It really is.
| arthurfirst wrote:
| >> even when mine (that they had already approved) would save
| them 400K a year You learn lessons over the years and this is
| one I learned at some point: you want to work in revenue
| centers
|
| Totally agree. This is a big reason I went into solutions
| consulting.
|
| In that particular case I mentioned it was a massive risk
| management compliance solution which they had to have in
| place, but they were getting bled dry by the existing vendor,
| due to several architectural and implementation mistakes they
| had made way back before I ever got involved, that they were
| sort of stuck with.
|
| I had a plan to unstuck them at 1/5 the annual operating cost
| and better performance. Presented it to executives, even
| Amazon who would have been the infr vendor, to rave reviews.
|
| We had a verbal contract and I was waiting for paperwork to
| sign... and then Feb 2020... and then crickets.
| wesammikhail wrote:
| I work as a consultant and tend to focus on helping startups
| grow their revenue. And what you're saying here is almost
| word for word what I often recommend as the *first thing*
| they should do.
|
| In many cases I've seen projects increase their revenue
| substantially by making simple messaging pivots. Ex. Instead
| of having your website say "save X dollars on Y" try "earn X
| more dollars using Y". It's incredible how much impact simple
| messaging can have on your conversion rates.
|
| This extends beyond just revenue. Focusing on revenue centers
| instead of cost centers is a great career advice as well.
| suchoudh wrote:
| Very few people suspected that github is being used to train
| the ai when we were all pushed the best practice of doing
| frequent commit.
|
| a little earlier very few suspected that our mobile phone is
| not only listening to our conversations and training some ai
| model but also all its gyrometers are being used to profile our
| daily routine. ( keeping mobile for charging near our pillow)
| looking at mobile first thing in morning.
|
| Now when we are asked to use ai to do our code. I am quite
| anxious as to what part of our life are we selling now ..
| perhaps i am no longer their prime focus. (50+) but who knows.
|
| Going with the flow seems like a bad advice. going Analog as in
| iRobot seems the most sane thing.
| burningChrome wrote:
| >> Going with the flow seems like a bad advice. going Analog
| as in iRobot seems the most sane thing.
|
| I've been doing a lot of photography in the last few years
| with my smartphone and because of the many things you
| mentioned, I've forgone using it now. I'm back to a
| mirrorless camera that's 14 years old and still takes amazing
| pictures. I recently ran into a guy shutting down his motion
| picture business and now own three different Canon HDV
| cameras that I've been doing some interesting video work
| with.
|
| Its not easy transferring miniDV film to my computer, but the
| standard resolution has a very cool retro vibe that I've
| found a LOT of people have been missing and are coming back
| around too.
|
| I'm in the same age range and couldn't fathom becoming a
| developer in the early aughts and being in the midst of a
| gold rush for developer talent to suddenly seeing the entire
| tech world contract almost over night.
|
| Strange tides we're living in right now.
| arthurfirst wrote:
| If I had gone with the flow in 1995 I would have got my MCSE
| and worked for a big government bureaucracy.
|
| Instead I found Linux/BSD and it changed my life and I ended
| up with security clearances writing code at defense
| contractors, dot com startups, airports, banks, biotech/hpc,
| on and on...
|
| Exactly right about Github. Facebook is the same for training
| on photos and social relationships. etc etc
|
| They needed to generate a large body of data to train our
| future robot overlords to enslave us.
|
| We the 'experienced' are definitely not their target -- too
| much independence of thought.
|
| To your point I use an old flip phone an voip even though I
| have written iOS and android apps. My home has no wifi. I do
| not use bluetooth. There are no cameras enabled on any device
| (except a camera).
| wonderwonder wrote:
| "Landing projects for Set Studio has been extremely difficult,
| especially as we won't work on product marketing for AI stuff,
| from a moral standpoint, but the vast majority of enquiries have
| been for exactly that"
|
| The market is literally telling them what it wants and potential
| customers are asking them for work but they are declining it from
| "a moral standpoint"
|
| and instead blaming "a combination of limping economies, tariffs,
| even more political instability and a severe cost of living
| crisis"
|
| This is a failure of leadership at the company. Adapt or die,
| your bank account doesn't care about your moral redlines.
| evantbyrne wrote:
| Being broadly against AI is a strange stance. Should we all turn
| off swipe to type on our phones? Are we supposed to boycott
| cancer testing? Are we to forbid people with disabilities reading
| voicemail transcriptions or using text to speech? Make it make
| sense.
| blamestross wrote:
| Intentionally or not, you are presenting a false equivalency.
|
| I trust in your ability to actually differentiate between the
| machine learning tools that are generally useful and the
| current crop of unethically sourced "AI" tools being pushed on
| us.
| evantbyrne wrote:
| How am I supposed to know what specific niche of AI the
| author is talking about when they don't elaborate? For all I
| know they woke up one day in 2023 and that was the first time
| they realized machine learning existed. Consider my comment a
| reminder that ethical use of AI has been around of quite some
| time, will continue to be, and even that much of that will be
| with LLMs.
| blamestross wrote:
| You have reasonably available context here. "This year"
| seems more than enough on it's own.
|
| I think there is ethical use cases for LLMs. I have no
| problem leveraging a "common" corpus to support the
| commons. If they weren't over-hyped and almost entirely
| used as extensions of the weath-concentration machine, they
| could be really cool. Locally hosted llms are kinda
| awesome. As it is, they are basically just theft from the
| public and IP laundering.
| rosslh wrote:
| One person's unethical AI product is another's accessibility
| tool. Where the line is drawn isn't as obvious as you're
| implying.
| th0ma5 wrote:
| It is unethical to me to provide an accessibility tool that
| lies.
| fastball wrote:
| So provide one that "makes a mistake" instead.
| Legend2440 wrote:
| LLMs do not lie. That implies agency and intentionality
| that they do not have.
|
| LLMs are approximately right. That means they're
| sometimes wrong, which sucks. But they can do things for
| which no 100% accurate tool exists, and maybe could not
| possibly exist. So take it or leave it.
| blamestross wrote:
| If it was actually being given away as an accessiblity
| tool, then I would agree with you.
|
| It kind of is that clear. It's IP laundering and oligarchic
| leveraging of communal resources.
| mmcromp wrote:
| There's a moral line that every person has to make about what
| work they're willing to do. Things aren't always so black and
| white, we straddle that line The impression I got reading the
| article is that they didn't want to work for bubble ai
| companies trying to generate for the sake of generate. Not that
| they hated anything with a vector db
| ausbah wrote:
| i think when ppl mean AI they mean "LLMs in every consumer
| facing production"
| evantbyrne wrote:
| You might be right, and I think tech professionals should be
| expected to use industry terminology correctly.
| 63stack wrote:
| There is not a single person in this thread that thinks of
| swiping on phones when the term "AI" is mentioned, apart
| from people playing the contrarian.
| dkdcio wrote:
| counter example: me! autocorrect, spam filters, search
| engines, blurred backgrounds, medical image processing,
| even revenue forecasting with logistic regression are
| "AI" to me and others in the industry
|
| I started my career in AI, and it certainly didn't mean
| LLMs then. some people were doing AI decades ago
|
| I would like to understand where this moral line gets
| drawn -- neural networks that output text? that
| specifically use the transformer architecture? over some
| size?
| fragmede wrote:
| You take a pile of input data, use a bunch of code on it
| to create a model, which is generally a black box, and
| then run queries against that black box. No human really
| wrote the model. ML has been in use for decades, in
| various places. Google Translate was an "early" convert.
| Credit card fraud models as well.
|
| The industry joke is: What do you call AI that works?
| Machine Learning.
| marcelr wrote:
| > Make it make sense.
|
| Ok. They are not talking about AI broadly, but LLMs which
| require insane energy requirements and benefit off the unpaid
| labor of others.
| doug_durham wrote:
| These arguments are becoming tropes with little influence.
| Find better arguments.
| marcelr wrote:
| haha this sounds like a slave master saying "again, free
| the slaves? really? i've heard that 100s of times, be more
| original"
| devilsdata wrote:
| Definitely a head scratcher.
| jimbokun wrote:
| Does the truth of the arguments have no bearing?
| Aperocky wrote:
| An argument can both be true and irrelevant.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| What do LLMs have to do with typing on phones, cancer research,
| or TTS?
|
| Deciding not to enable a technology that is proving to be
| destructive except for the very few who benefit from it, is a
| fine stance to take.
|
| I won't shop at Walmart for similar reasons. Will I save money
| shopping at Walmart? Yes. Will my not shopping at Walmart bring
| about Walmart's downfall? No. But I refuse to personally be an
| enabler.
| Legend2440 wrote:
| I don't agree that Walmart is a similar example. They benefit
| a great many people - their customers - through their large
| selection and low prices. Their profit margins are
| considerably lower than the small businesses they displaced,
| thanks to economies of scale.
|
| I wish I had Walmart in my area, the grocery stores here
| suck.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| It is a similar example. Just like you and I have different
| options about whether Walmart is a net benefit or net
| detriment to society, people have starkly different
| opinions as to whether LLMs are a net benefit or net
| detriment to society.
|
| People who believe it's a net detriment don't want to be a
| part of enabling that, even at cost to themselves, while
| those who think it's a net benefit or at least neutral,
| don't have a problem with it.
| Tokkemon wrote:
| All the AI-brained people are acting like the very AIs they
| celebrate.
|
| That's horrifying.
| paxiscivlab wrote:
| I don't think they're unique. They're simply among the first to
| run into the problems AI creates.
|
| Any white-collar field--high-skill or not--that can be solved
| logically will eventually face the same pressure. The deeper
| issue is that society still has no coherent response to a
| structural problem: skills that take 10+ years to master can now
| be copied by an AI almost overnight.
|
| People talk about "reskilling" and "personal responsibility," but
| those terms hide the fact that surviving the AI era doesn't just
| mean learning to use AI tools in your current job. It's not that
| simple.
|
| I don't have a definitive answer either. I'm just trying, every
| day, to use AI in my work well enough to stay ahead of the wave.
| smileson2 wrote:
| ceaseless AI drama aside, this blog and the set-studio website
| look and feel great
|
| I hope things turn around for them it seems like they do good
| work
| rglover wrote:
| Not a big fan of his these days but Gary Vaynerchuk has my
| favorite take on this:
|
| "To run your business with your personal romance of how things
| should be versus how they are is literally the great
| vulnerability of business."
| SoftTalker wrote:
| It's very likey the main reason that small businesses like
| local restaurants, bakeries, etc. fail. People start them based
| on a fantasy and don't know how to watch the hard realities of
| expenses and income. But like gravity, there's no escaping
| those unless you are already wealthy enough for it all to just
| be a hobby.
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| Maybe you're not the biggest fan precisely because the endgame
| of that statement is to develop a business without any moral
| grounding.
| engineer_22 wrote:
| Gary's point is: sell what people are buying. But you think:
| that's immoral.
|
| What about a functioning market is immoral?
| munificent wrote:
| You're still responsible for the consequences of what you
| produce and sell.
|
| Surely you would agree that making landmines simply because
| there are people who want to buy them would be an immoral
| choice.
| engineer_22 wrote:
| gary's point: embrace reality
|
| your argument: but what about this hypothetical?
| rglover wrote:
| That's a choice. I can fish where the fish are without having
| to bait the hook with my soul.
| Aperocky wrote:
| Not just about business, but almost everything professional.
| manicennui wrote:
| So we should cater to those with the lowest ethical standards
| instead?
| vicnov wrote:
| > we won't work on product marketing for AI stuff, from a moral
| standpoint, but the vast majority of enquiries have been for
| exactly that. Our reputation is everything, so being associated
| with that technology as it increasingly shows us what it really
| is, would be a terrible move for the long term. It is such an
| "interesting" statement in on many levels.
|
| Market has changed -> we disagree -> we still disagree ->
| business is bad.
|
| It is indeed hard to swim against the current. People have
| different principles and I respect that, I just rarely - have so
| much difficulty understanding them - see such clear impact on the
| bottom line
| doug_durham wrote:
| The author has painted themselves into a corner. They refuse to
| do business with companies that use AI, and they try to support
| their business with teaching courses, which is also being
| impacted by AI.
|
| They have a right to do business with whomever they wish. I'm not
| suggesting that they change this. However they need to face
| current reality. What value-add can they provide in areas not
| impacted by AI?
| seanw265 wrote:
| After reading the post I kept thinking about two other pieces,
| and only later realized it was Taylor who had submitted it. His
| most recent essay [0] actually led me to the Commoncog piece "Are
| You Playing to Play, or Playing to Win?" [1], and the idea of
| sub-games felt directly relevant here.
|
| In this case, running a studio without using or promoting AI
| becomes a kind of sub-game that can be "won" on principle, even
| if it means losing the actual game that determines whether the
| business survives. The studio is turning down all AI-related
| work, and it's not surprising that the business is now
| struggling.
|
| I'm not saying the underlying principle is right or wrong, nor do
| I know the internal dynamics and opinions of their team. But in
| this case the cost of holding that stance doesn't fall just on
| the owner, it also falls on the people who work there.
|
| Links:
|
| [0] https://taylor.town/iq-not-enough
|
| [1] https://commoncog.com/playing-to-play-playing-to-win/
| scrozier wrote:
| I'm sure author's company does good work, but the marketplace
| doesn't respond well to, "we're really, _really_ good,", "trust
| me," "you won't be disappointed." It not only feels desperate,
| but is proof-free. Show me your last three great projects and
| have your customers tell me what they loved about working with
| you. Anybody can say, "seriously, we're really good."
| etchalon wrote:
| They have a website. With a portfolio. That does that.
| A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote:
| 'I wouldn't personally be able to sleep knowing I've contributed
| to all of that, too.'
|
| I think this is the crux of the entire problem for the author.
| The author is certain, not just hesitant, that any contribution
| they would make to project involving AI equals contribution to
| some imagined evil ( oddly, without explictly naming what they
| envision so it is harder to respond to ). I have my personal
| qualms, but run those through my internal ethics to see if there
| is conflict. Unless author predicts 'prime intellect' type of
| catastrophe, I think the note is either shifting blame and just
| justifying bad outcomes with moralistic: 'I did the right thing'
| while not explaining the assumptions in place.
| balamatom wrote:
| >I have my personal qualms, but run those through my internal
| ethics to see if there is conflict
|
| Do you "run them through" _actual_ ethics, too?
| A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote:
| See.. here is a problem. You say 'actual' ethics as if those
| were somehow universal and not ridiculously varied across the
| board. And I get it, you use the term, because a lot of
| readers will take it face value AND simply use their own
| value system to translate them into what agrees with them
| internally. I know, because I do the same thing when I try to
| not show exactly what I think to people at work. I just say
| sufficiently generic stuff to make people on both sides agree
| with a generic statement.
|
| With that said, mister ants in the pants, what does actual
| mean to you in this particular instance?
| balamatom wrote:
| I don't know about ants (or pants) but
|
| > I try to not show exactly what I think to people at work.
| I just say sufficiently generic stuff to make people on
| both sides agree with a generic statement.
|
| basically the ethics of anyone who doesn't this
| nharada wrote:
| I don't really take your point here? You're saying you feel the
| author should justify the reasoning behind their moral
| position?
| A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote:
| :D no, but it would help if I knew what that moral objection
| is
| nickjj wrote:
| As someone who has sold video tech courses since 2015, I don't
| know about the future.
|
| I don't want to openly write about the financial side of things
| here but let's just say I don't have enough money to comfortably
| retire or stop working but course sales over the last 2-3 years
| have gotten to not even 5% of what it was in 2015-2021.
|
| It went from "I'm super happy, this is my job with contracting on
| the side as a perfect technical circle of life" to "time to get a
| full time job".
|
| Nothing changed on my end. I have kept putting out free blog
| posts and videos for the last 10 years. It's just traffic has
| gone down to 20x less than it used to be. Traffic dictates sales
| and that's how I think I arrived in this situation.
|
| It does suck to wake up most days knowing you have at least 5
| courses worth of content in your head that you could make but
| can't spend the time to make them because your time is allocated
| elsewhere. It takes usually 2-3 full time months to create a
| decent sized course, from planning to done. Then ongoing
| maintenance. None of this is a problem if it generates income
| (it's a fun process), but it's a problem given the scope of time
| it takes.
| csa wrote:
| Were most of your sales coming via your site and/or organic
| search?
|
| It sounds like you have a solid product, but you need to update
| your marketing channels.
| engineer_22 wrote:
| I noticed a phenomenon on this post - many people are tying this
| person's business decisions to some sort of moral framework, or
| debating the morality of their plight.
|
| "Moral" is mentioned 91 times at last count.
|
| Where is that coming from? I understand AI is a large part of the
| discussion. But then where is /that/ coming from? And what do
| people mean by "moral"?
|
| EDIT: Well, he mentions "moral" in the first paragraph. The rest
| is pity posting, so to answer my question - morals is one of the
| few generally interesting things in the post. But in the last
| year I've noticed a lot more talking about "morals" on HN. "Our
| morals", "he's not moral", etc. Anyone else?
| civilian wrote:
| Software people are such a "DIY" crowd, that I think selling
| courses to us (or selling courses to our employers) is a crappy
| prospect. The hacker ethos is to build it yourself, so paying for
| courses seems like a poor mismatch.
|
| I have a family member that produces training courses for
| salespeople; she's doing fantastic.
|
| This reminds me of some similar startup advice of: don't sell to
| musicians. They don't have any money, and they're well-versed in
| scrappy research to fill their needs.
|
| Finally, if you're against AI, you might have missed how good of
| a learning tool LLMs can be. The ability to ask _any_ question,
| rather than being stuck-on-video-rails, is huge time-saver.
| consumer451 wrote:
| I'm just some random moron, but I just clicked on TFA, and it
| looks like a very pretty ad.
|
| What am I missing?
| capyba wrote:
| I feel for the author. I do both mechanical and software
| engineering and I'm in this career(s) because I love making
| things and learning how to do that really well. Been having the
| most difficult time accepting the idea that there isn't a good
| market for people like us - artisans, craftsmen, whatever the
| term might be - who are obsessive about exceptional quality and
| the time and effort it takes to get there. In this day and age,
| and especially when LLMs look ever more like they can produce at
| least a cheap, dollar store approximation of the real deal,
| "doing things really well" is going to be relegated to an ever
| more niche market.
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