[HN Gopher] Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?
___________________________________________________________________
Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?
Author : jakelsaunders94
Score : 370 points
Date : 2026-03-24 20:31 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.jakesaunders.dev)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.jakesaunders.dev)
| Siah wrote:
| Not me
| guywithahat wrote:
| I'm not sure if this is a joke but the field is advancing so
| dramatically it's hard to stop talking about it. Every week at
| work I have to show a new AI feature to an executive, about how
| we can now write 1000's of lines of codes in minutes at a
| higher quality than the greatest engineers. This necessitates
| new tools and new purchases, as well as team and org shifts.
|
| If you're reading this and your life hasn't been thrown into
| disarray you're likely just behind the times. There are a lot
| of people who are deep in tech who still don't understand what
| agents and LLM's can do
| JohnFen wrote:
| > If you're reading this and your life hasn't been thrown
| into disarray you're likely just behind the times.
|
| I'd love for discussions of the tech to stop with the genAI
| version of the cryptobro cry "have fun being poor". It's
| mildly insulting and adds literally nothing to the
| conversations.
|
| (Not meaning to single you out, just using it as an example.
| This is a very common rhetorical problem with most of the
| evangelism.)
| jimjimjim wrote:
| "higher quality than the greatest engineers". right...
|
| and why do so many articles or comments have a general
| approach of 'It's great and if you don't think it is it's
| because you don't understand it.'
| bena wrote:
| Talking about how you are bored about talking about the thing is
| still talking about the thing.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| How do I answer this without spamming: Yes, very much.
|
| Everyone is in their own place adapting (or not) to AI. The
| disconnect b/w even folks on the same team is just crazy. At
| least it's gotten more concrete (here's what works for me, what
| do you do) vs catastrophizing jobpocolypse or "teh singularity",
| at least on day to day conversations.
| zer00eyz wrote:
| I'm sure as hell bored of the current conversations people are
| having about ai.
|
| > here's what works for me, what do you do
|
| This is at least progress... but many want to remain in denial,
| and cant even contemplate this portion of the conversation.
|
| We're also ignoring the light AI shines on our industry, and
| how (badly) we have been practicing our craft. As an example
| there is a lot of gnashing of teeth right now about the VOLUME
| of code generated and how to deal with it... how were you
| dealing with code reviews? How were you reviewing the
| dependencies in your package manager? (Another supply chain
| attack today so someone is looking but maybe not you). Do you
| look at your DB or OS? Does the 2 decades of leet code, brain
| teaser fang style interview qualify candidates who are skilled
| at reading code? What is good code? Because after close to 30
| years working in the industry, let me tell you the sins of the
| LLM have nothing on what I have seen people do...
| peruvian wrote:
| Yeah maybe some workplaces are starting to get more organized
| but in general there's teams with anti-LLM engineers still and
| some that have Claude Code running all day.
| scorpioxy wrote:
| Yes, extremes which seems to fit the general sentiment of the
| world right now.
|
| For a while, it felt like I'm in a minority when I was saying
| that it can be a useful tool for certain things but it's not
| the magic that the sales guys are saying it is. Instead, all
| the hype and the "get rid of your programmers" messaging made
| it into this provocative issue.
|
| HN was not immune to this phenomenon with certain HN accounts
| playing an active part in this. LLMs are/were supposed to be
| an iteration of machine learning/AI tools in general, instead
| they became a religion.
| thrill wrote:
| only of people constantly complaining about it like they have
| some special insight
| ternera wrote:
| It's just a buzzword that draws more attention and more clicks. I
| also use AI for some projects, but it can be annoying when
| companies try to incorporate it in places it doesn't belong.
| asd198 wrote:
| I'm kind of bored by AI promotion posts that pretend to be about
| something else.
| ppqqrr wrote:
| yes. it's like a giant finger pointing at the moon, and
| everyone's talking about the finger.
| IshKebab wrote:
| I wish there was an option to hide AI stories on HN, and AI-
| related repos on Github's trending page.
|
| You could use AI to do it! Fight fire with fire.
|
| I'm neutral on AI - so far it seems useful but flawed. But I
| don't want to hear about it _constantly_.
| mervz wrote:
| 100% this; GitHub is littered with a bunch of AI shit projects
| that pollute the trending page.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| I think it's kinda double whammy, one the one hand working with
| AI leaves a lot of 5-15 minute breaks perfect for squeezing in a
| comment on a HN thread, while also supplanting the sort of work
| that would typically lead to interesting ideas or projects,
| substituting it with work that isn't that interesting to talk
| about (or at least hasn't been thought about for long enough to
| have interesting things to say).
| buzarchitect wrote:
| This resonates. I build products on top of LLMs, and the most
| interesting work I do has nothing to do with AI; it's designing
| structured methodologies, figuring out what data to feed in
| before a conversation starts, deciding what to do when the
| model gives a weak answer. The AI is plumbing.
|
| But nobody wants to hear about prompt calibration or pipeline
| architecture. They want to hear "I replaced my whole team with
| agents." The boring, useful work is invisible, and the flashy
| stuff gets all the oxygen
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Now do it with knowledge or causal graphs
| buzarchitect wrote:
| Causal graphs are interesting, but in my experience, the
| bottleneck isn't the representation; it's getting the model
| to actually follow through on weak signals instead of
| moving on to the next topic. A graph won't help if the
| system doesn't know what to do when it hits a node that
| doesn't resolve cleanly. What's your experience been with
| them?
| paxys wrote:
| So then...don't talk about it? Do your job. Go home. Spend time
| with family. Find some non-tech hobbies. The solution isn't to
| change the world but to break your social media addiction (and
| yes, HN/Linkedin/X are included).
| mememememememo wrote:
| Yes. Go to Mastodon. I accidently stumbled on Mastodon last night
| (I knew about it of course but largely ignored it). Of the 100 or
| so posts they were all cool stuff. Only one was AI related and it
| was more a researchy geeky thing than the brainrot "I fired all
| my staff an hour ago. They were not happy. CRLF. CRLF. I have an
| agentic circus and I am the ringmaster of 666 agents. CRLF....."
| crap you get on Linked in.
| augusto-moura wrote:
| I think you meant Mastodon[1]
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastodon_(social_network)
| mememememememo wrote:
| Thanks. Edited. I have a mental block for some reason
| spelling it!
| jakelsaunders94 wrote:
| I've been meaning to try Mastodon for a long time (I was never
| really a Twiiter user). As others have said elsewhere though,
| I'm not sure where to start. Did you just download the app and
| join mastodon.social?
| mememememememo wrote:
| I did much less. Just went to mastodon.social in my browser
| and read what is there. I think you can create an account
| from there. You can also choose another instance to read and
| create the account from.
| mlhpdx wrote:
| Yes -- talking and hearing/reading about it. I don't fault folks
| for being excited when first getting into ut, but it's rare to
| hear anything new said. And what is new is increasingly niche and
| unlikely to have any application to what I do.
| mrbonner wrote:
| Yes, my wife asks me to shut up when I mention AI. Hah
| WorldPeas wrote:
| I'm largely bored of wrappers, what still interests me are the
| new modalities of models being released and progressed on like
| small local VLMs, voice to voice and tts
| monknomo wrote:
| I deeply wish to hear about other tech trends; I get enough of
| use more ai, do more with less, and ship faster at work. I'd
| rather hear about new tools and techniques here
| vrganj wrote:
| AI is _fine_. The hype is annoying. What 's even worse though are
| the incredible amounts of money and energy that are being thrown
| at it, with no regard for the consequences, in times of record
| inequality and looming climate apocalypse.
|
| AI is the red herring that'll waste all our attention until it's
| too late.
| oulipo2 wrote:
| It's not _fine_ at all.
|
| It's a capitalistic device, which in its current form is going
| to increase even more the inequalities.
|
| We should fight against capitalism before it ruins our planet
| emp17344 wrote:
| No, it's... fine. Useful in a limited capacity. Not the
| machine god, but not machine Satan either. The reality is
| kind of boring.
| vablings wrote:
| This summarizes mostly how I feel about it. It's a tool
| like any other tool we have advanced since the beginning of
| human civilization
|
| Machine tools replaced blacksmiths
|
| CNC machines replaced manual machines.
|
| Robots replaced CNC machine tenders
|
| CAD replaced draftsman (and also pushed that job onto
| engineers (grr))
|
| P&P robots replaced human production lines.
|
| The steam train replaced the horse and cart
|
| This is a tale as old as time itself
| kerblang wrote:
| Those were deterministic rather than stochastic
| datsci_est_2015 wrote:
| What do LLMs replace, pray tell? More like moving from a
| screwdriver to a drill, rather than replacing the
| carpenter all together.
|
| Also note that there are inventions that may "replace"
| some part of a process, but actually induce a greater
| demand for labor in that process. Take the cotton gin,
| for example, which exploded the number of slaves required
| to pick cotton.
| bitwize wrote:
| This isn't even our first AI hype cycle. That happened in
| the late 70s-80s. Every lab and agency _needed_ Lisp
| machines to teach computers how to identify Russian
| missiles--or targets. The "GOFAI" techniques did not live
| up to the expectations of them, but they settled into
| niches where they were tremendously useful, and life went
| on. The same will happen with today's matmul-as-a-service
| AI.
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| I don't see the threat from AI as capitalist at all, but more
| so feudalist. I mean, if things go in the direction of the
| worst-case scenario. It seems like the power potential
| transcends the problems of capitalism entirely.
|
| But for now it's strictly hypothetical. Nothing I'm doing
| with AI matters enough to really make any statements about a
| broader scale in my field, let alone in entire economies.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Capitalism is just feudalism that works for the merchant
| class
| plagiarist wrote:
| Capitalism is feudalism but with raw generational wealth
| instead of generational wealth with divine right
| characteristics.
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| I see some overlap, but I think it's more complex than
| that. If we conflate the two so easily they lose meaning.
| Certainly, some people have that experience under
| capitalism. I think there are systemic failures which
| lead to life experiences that are probably not all that
| different from some peoples' experiences in feudal
| society, both at the top and bottom of the hierarchy.
|
| The more I think about it though, I'm not sure feudalism
| is the right analogy. Serfs had a purpose and were
| depended upon. In a society where AGI is in the hands of
| a few, it seems reasonable to believe that there wouldn't
| be a need for serfs at all. Labour would become utterly
| irrelevant. You'd have no lord to be bound to. You'd be
| unnecessary.
|
| I imagine the transition there would be some brutal form
| of capitalism, but the destination would not be
| fuedalism. I don't think we have a historical analog for
| that hypoethical destination.
| vrganj wrote:
| If we wanna go full-on Marxist analysis it is an attempt of
| the capitalist class to finally rid themselves of their
| dependence on labor and their pesky demands like sick leave
| and fair wages.
|
| Through that analysis, one can also explain why the
| managerial caste is so obsessed with it - it is nothing less
| than an ideological device. One can also see this in the
| actual deification happening in some VC cycles and their
| belief in AGI as some sort of capitalist savior figure.
|
| I see the point and don't disagree with it, but I find that
| framing is not the most compelling to the audience here...
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| Yeah. Oftentimes get crickets here when I talk along those
| lines. Can't tell if apathy, learned helplessness, or
| obliviousness. Regardless, devs seem like an extremely
| docile labor group based on how they react to this and
| other economic pressures.
| plagiarist wrote:
| We will all be shocked at the rug pull after it has
| finished training on all our high-quality feedback for
| code it has written.
| Human-Cabbage wrote:
| This is correct at the firm level and breaks down at the
| aggregate level, which is where it gets interesting.
|
| At the firm level, automating away labor costs is obviously
| rational. But capital _in aggregate_ can 't actually rid
| itself of labor, since labor is where surplus value comes
| from. A fully automated economy would be insanely
| productive and generate basically no profit. So the
| capitalist class pursuing this logic collectively is,
| without knowing it, pursuing the dissolution of the system
| that makes them the capitalist class.
|
| You don't have to buy any of that to notice the more
| immediate mechanism though: AI doesn't need to actually
| replace workers to discipline them. The credible _threat_
| of replacement is enough to suppress wages, justify
| restructuring, and extract more from whoever 's left.
| That's already happening and requires no AGI.
| brookst wrote:
| AI is more likely to destroy capitalism than it is to
| increase inequality.
|
| Ten years ago, what would it have cost you to build a Jira
| clone / competitor? Today one person can do it in a week, at
| least for the core tech.
|
| In a year, only the very largest companies will pay for that
| kind of infrastructure tooling.
|
| We've just started seeing the democratization of software and
| the capitalists are terrified.
| plagiarist wrote:
| I just don't know how to explain that you won't be
| destroying capitalism with AI. You have a subscription.
| lpcvoid wrote:
| AI is one of the _causes_ that climate change is accelerating,
| which is another in a long list of reasons to hate it.
| tonmoy wrote:
| Im not sure I follow. AI barely consumes energy compared to
| other industries and instead of focusing on the heavy hitters
| first wasting time on the climate impact on AI doesn't seem
| useful
| Insanity wrote:
| Pretty large amounts of energy go towards training large
| language models. Running them is also a non-negligible
| energy cost at scale.
|
| But yeah, there's way worse industries out there when it
| comes to climate change impact.
| datsci_est_2015 wrote:
| ? Am I misunderstanding the push for nuclear energy and
| record energy prices in locales with new "data centers"?
| hirako2000 wrote:
| Before large models things were starting to move to micro
| VM, lean hardware, firecracker cloud platforms running thin
| containers.
|
| Ai buzz and now we are building giga factories. It stands
| for gigawatt usage, no less target.
| elbasti wrote:
| This is wrong. AI uses ~4% of the US grid, and projections
| are that it will grow to 10%+ in the next 6 years.
|
| And most of that new capacity will be natural gas. That
| increase would basically whipe out the reduction in CO2
| emissions the USA has had since 2018.
| thethirdone wrote:
| Compare that to ~30% of all energy use for
| transportation. So approximately 40%*4% = 1.6% vs 30%. I
| find your correction to be more wrong that the initial
| statement.
|
| > And most of that new capacity will be natural gas. That
| increase would basically whipe out the reduction in CO2
| emissions the USA has had since 2018.
|
| Emissions in 2018 were ~5250M metric ton and in 2024 it
| was 4750M. That is a reduction of 10% total emissions.
| Without going into calculations of green electricity and
| such, its still safe to say AI using 10% of the grid
| would not completely wipe out the reduction.
|
| [0]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/183943/us-
| carbon-dioxide...
| graypegg wrote:
| > Compare that to ~30% of all energy use for
| transportation
|
| Transportation, especially ALL transportation, does a
| LOT. You're looking for ROI not the absolute values. I
| think it's undeniable that the positive economic effect
| of every car, truck, train, and plane is unfathomably
| huge. That's trains moving minerals, planes moving
| people, trucks transporting goods, and hundreds of
| combinations thereof, all interconnected. Literally no
| economic activity would happen without transportation,
| including the transition to green energy sources, of
| which would improve the emissions from transportation.
|
| I think it might be more emissions-efficient at
| generating value than AI by a factor exceeding the 7.5x
| energy use. Moving rocks from (place with rocks) to
| (place that needs rocks) continues to be just an insanely
| good thing for humanity.
|
| Also, I'm not sure about your math. 4% would be 4% of the
| whole like in a pie chart, not 4% of the remainder after
| removing one slice. 4% AI, 30% transportation, 66% other.
| I don't know where that 40% is from.
| elbasti wrote:
| > Compare that to ~30% of all energy use for
| transportation. So approximately 40%*4% = 1.6% vs 30%. I
| find your correction to be more wrong that the initial
| statement.
|
| I don't follow. The comparison is 30% of energy use for
| transportation vs 4% for AI, and soon 30% for
| transportation vs 10% for AI.
| surgical_fire wrote:
| Which is why talk about AI datacenters typically involve
| energy supply constraints, and possibly the need to build
| power plants along with it.
|
| It is, of course, because it barely uses any energy.
| xvector wrote:
| Seeing this kind of populist misinformation/bikeshedding on
| HN is particularly disappointing.
| lpcvoid wrote:
| So then explain to me where I wrote misinformation?
| proc0 wrote:
| People sure don't care about it anymore and it coincided with
| rise of AI. There's barely any mention of climate change
| compared to 5+ years ago. I really think this is all about
| how to keep the capitalist system from imploding because of
| so much debt (so the next big thing needs to happen to keep
| the growth).
| sharemywin wrote:
| climate change was an important issue when they were trying
| to peddle EVs and solar.
| lpcvoid wrote:
| They == the lizard people, I assume?
| amelius wrote:
| > AI is one of the causes that climate change is
| accelerating, which is another in a long list of reasons to
| hate it.
|
| If you want to point at causes of climate change, look no
| further than adtech. It's the driving force behind our
| overconsumption.
|
| And it has perhaps an even longer list of reasons to hate it.
| mostertoaster wrote:
| The EPA repealed its 2009 conclusion that greenhouse gases
| warm the Earth and endanger human health and well-being.
|
| So this is not a good reason to oppose AI. Now the sheer
| energy it requires does mean we might want to go nuclear
| though.
|
| Natural gas is nice though because it does pollute the air
| far less than coal.
|
| You might argue the EPA only repealed that because of
| political agendas, but the same argument could be made for
| why it was passed.
|
| A lot of people got very rich off the fear mongering from
| climate alarmists.
| computerdork wrote:
| Hmm, it seems pretty clear that climate is getting hotter,
| so it seems natural for some people to be worried about
| what will happen to the planet in a few decades (me for
| one).
|
| And, you may be right, it may not be that big a deal and
| that we're being alarmists, but it seems like we currently
| have the tools to slow it down greatly. Why not be on the
| safe side and use them?
|
| ... but to be honest, guessing my opinion won't sway you in
| any way, still thought I'd try. thanks!
| dvt wrote:
| > incredible amounts of ... energy
|
| So tired of seeing this trope. Data center energy expenditure
| is like less than 1% of worldwide energy expenditure[1]. Have
| you heard of mining? Or agriculture? Or cars/airplanes/ships?
| It's just factually wrong and alarmist to spread the fake news
| that AI has any measurable effect on climate change.
|
| [1] https://www.iea.org/reports/energy-and-ai/energy-supply-
| for-...
| vrganj wrote:
| It's not just the absolute expenditure. It's the type of
| expenditure.
|
| https://www.selc.org/news/resistance-against-elon-musks-
| xai-...
| runarberg wrote:
| 1% of worldwide energy expenditure is massive, incredible
| amounts of energy in fact.
| paulsutter wrote:
| How did HN become this kind of website?
| iwontberude wrote:
| I went to a conference and people were suggesting
| nationalizing AI companies so it's basically everywhere.
| tartoran wrote:
| Same way we turned internet into a public utility? Wait,
| did we do that?
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| Because AI is attacking, plagiarizing, competing with, and
| destroying the most common industry of people here on HN, so
| suddenly it mattered more to people who were previously
| unaffected.
|
| Some people have been concerned with this kind of politics
| all along. Some people are realizing they should be now,
| _because_ of AI. And that 's okay; both groups can still work
| together.
| emp17344 wrote:
| The parent comment is a pretty measured take. What's your
| problem with it?
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| > AI is fine. The hype is annoying.
|
| I'm finding the detractors worse than the hype, because it
| seems like a certain subset of detractors [0] formed their
| opinion on AI in late 2022/early 2023 when ChatGPT came out
| (REALLY!? Over 3 years ago!?) and then never updated their
| opinions since then. They'll say things like "why would I want
| to consume X amount of energy and Y amount of water just to get
| a wrong answer?"
|
| In other words, the people who think generative AI is an
| absolutely worthless and useless product are more annoying than
| the ones that think it's going to solve all the world's
| problems. They have no idea how much AI has improved since it
| reached center stage 3 years ago. Hallucinations are
| exceptionally rare now, since they now rely on searching for
| answers rather than what was in its training data.
|
| We got Claude Desktop at work and it's been a godsend. It works
| so much better to find information from Confluence and present
| it to me in a digestible format than having to search by hand
| and combing through a dozen irrelevant results to find the one
| bit of information I need.
|
| [0] For the purpose of this comment, this subset is meant to be
| detraction based on the quality of the product, not the other
| criticisms like copyright/content theft concerns, water/energy
| usage, whether or not Sam Altman is a good person, etc.
| jackie293746 wrote:
| Claude Opus 4.6 regularly makes up shit and hallucinates. I'm
| not a detractor by any means but "exceptionally rare" is
| fantasyland.
| thrawa8387336 wrote:
| Can vouch for this, plus, when it does work, stuff can take
| forever. Then, if I let it unsupervised, higher risk of
| doing the wrong thing. If I supervise it, then I become
| agent nanny.
| surgical_fire wrote:
| I have been experiencing it too.
|
| I honestly am finding Codex considerably better, as much as
| I despise OpenAI.
| beej71 wrote:
| I don't think it's worthless. It can greatly speed up coding.
| And learning foreign languages. And many other things.
|
| But I do think humanity is worse off because of it. So I'm a
| detractor in that way. :)
| arcxi wrote:
| This very comment is measurably more harmful than any AI
| criticism that annoys you - someone will read this and assume
| it's appropriate to accept whatever bullshit Claude generates
| at face value, with terrible consequences.
|
| In contrast, what harm do those detractors cause? They don't
| generate as much code per hour?
| xvector wrote:
| By that logic we should all live in air-filtered bubbles.
| Anyone denying this is _causing harm_. After all, people
| might die if you let them out of their air-filtered bubble!
|
| The "harm" (if you can call it that) is clear, detractors
| slow the pace of progress with meaningless and incorrect
| hand-wringing. A lack of progress harms everyone (as
| evidenced our amazing QoL today compared to any historical
| lens.)
| slopinthebag wrote:
| That's a pretty poor straw man - the issue is the amount
| of harm caused, not that there is a potential for some
| minuscule amount.
|
| Also we need detractors because if we race into any
| technological advance too quickly we may cause
| unnecessary harm. Not all progress is without harms, and
| we need to be responsible about implementing it as risk-
| free as possible.
| dijit wrote:
| that's a stretch and taking a measured approach to change
| is valid
| arcxi wrote:
| > detractors slow the pace of progress
|
| Considering our climate, political and economic
| situation, I'd say not only is slowing the pace of
| progress not harmful, it's actually imperative for our
| long-term survival.
| surgical_fire wrote:
| The detractors are a lot less numerous and certainly a lot
| less preachy than the ones on the hype train.
|
| AI is alright. It's moderately useful, in certain contexts it
| speeds me up a lot, in other contexts not so much.
|
| I also think that the economics of it make no sense and that
| it is, generally, a destructive technology. But it's not up
| to me to fix anything, I just try to keep on top of best
| practices while I need to pay bills.
|
| The economics bit is not my problem though. If all AI
| companies go bust and AI services disappear I can 100% manage
| without it.
| jarjoura wrote:
| On the flip side, if all this slop is floating around, and
| AI services do become untenable, think of all the immediate
| jobs that will open up to fix and maintain all the slop
| that's being thrown around right now. The millions of
| dollars of contracts spent to use these LLMs will be
| redirected back to hiring.
|
| Though, my cynical take is that the investor class seemed
| dead-set on forcing us all to weave LLMs deep into our
| corporate infrastructures in a way that I'm not too sure it
| will ever "disappear" now. It'll cost just as much to
| detangle it as it was to adopt it.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| > _The economics bit is not my problem though. If all AI
| companies go bust and AI services disappear I can 100%
| manage without it._
|
| We're in "too big to fail" territory, if we handled the
| recession we were heading towards/in years ago, instead of
| letting AI hype distract and redirect massive amounts of
| investment, attention and labor from elsewhere, we might
| have been in a better position.
| jarjoura wrote:
| You do realize though that using Claude Desktop to "search"
| through confluence is like paying a world class architect on
| the hour just to give you some tips on how to layout your
| small loft to maximize sunlight.
|
| This is such a perfect example of the mania behind this
| rollout.
|
| There's no way you can make the financials work here compared
| to JetBrains spending the same millions spent on AI
| infrastructure and instead building better search in
| Confluence. Confluence search SUCKS, but that's just a lack
| of focus (or resources) on building a more complex, more
| robust solution. It's a wiki.
|
| Either way, making a more robust search is a one time cost
| that benefits everyone. Instead, you're running a piece of
| software that goes directly to Anthropic's bank account, and
| to the data centers and to hyper scalers. Every single query
| must be re-run from scratch, costing your company a fortune,
| that if not managed properly will come out of spending that
| money elsewhere.
| lukevp wrote:
| And what is using Confluence in the first place? Your
| MacBook Pro is faster than a supercomputer from 20 years
| ago. As we make compute cheaper, we find ways to use it
| that are less efficient in an absolute sense but more
| efficient for the end user. A graphical docs portal like
| Confluence is a hell of a lot easier to use than EMacs and
| SSH to edit plain text files on an 80 character terminal.
| But it uses thousands of times more compute.
|
| It seems ridiculous right now because we don't have
| hardware to accelerate the LLMs, but in 5 years this will
| be trivial to run.
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| > You do realize though that using Claude Desktop to
| "search" through confluence is like paying a world class
| architect on the hour just to give you some tips on how to
| layout your small loft to maximize sunlight.
|
| If I could pay a world class architect $1.50 to give me
| tips on how to maximize sunlight in my loft I would.
|
| Would it be nice if confluence just had a robust search
| that had a one time cost and then benefited everyone
| thereafter? Sure, but that's not the current reality, and I
| do not have control over their actions. I can only control
| mine.
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| This is going to sound flippant, but truly, I imagine most
| people find the group that disagrees with their take annoying
| as well.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| > a certain subset of detractors [0] formed their opinion on
| AI in late 2022/early 2023 when ChatGPT came out (REALLY!?
| Over 3 years ago!?) and then never updated their opinions
| since then.
|
| On the contrary. I update my opinion all the time, but every
| time I try the latest LLM _it still sucks just as much_. That
| is why it sounds like my opinion hasn 't changed.
| onemoresoop wrote:
| Follow closely on what the detractors say. Most of them are
| using AI themselves and are just pushing back on the hype or
| other ludicrous claims and that's a good thing. Is the
| current crop of Gen AI anything near AGI? Is it worth the
| current valuation? Can a company fire most staff and run on
| gen AI? We may see the economy completely crash and not
| because AI takes over but because of bad investments, hype
| and greed.
| lovasoa wrote:
| I use the latest codex with gpt5.4 and Claude opus every day.
| they hallucinate every day. If you think they don't, you are
| probably being gaslighted by the models.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| > _certain subset of detractors [0] formed their opinion on
| AI in late 2022 /early 2023 when ChatGPT came out (REALLY!?
| Over 3 years ago!?) _
|
| I mean, you can get mad at people you made up in your head,
| that's a thing people do, but this caricature falls in the
| same comforting bucket as "anyone who doesn't like <thing I
| like> is just ignorant/stupid" and "if you don't like me
| you're just jealous".
|
| Maybe non-straw people have criticisms that aren't all
| butterflies and rainbows for good reasons, but you won't get
| to engage with them honestly and critically if you're telling
| yourself they're just ignorant from the start.
|
| For example, I will bet that non-straw people will take issue
| with this, and for good reasons:
|
| > _Hallucinations are exceptionally rare now_
| doug_durham wrote:
| On reddit there are two sub-Reddits that are mirrors,
| /accelerate and /betteroffline. The people in the subs go
| there for dopamine hits. One for how AI is going to transform
| their lives and lead to a work-free future. The other how AI
| is worthless and how everyone (except them) is being fooled.
| They are the same people with opposite views. The people in
| either sub don't recognize this.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| > Hallucinations are exceptionally rare now
|
| The way we talk about "hallucinations" is extremely
| unproductive. _Everything_ an LLM outputs is a hallucination.
| Just like how human perception is hallucination. These days I
| pretty much only hear this word come up among people that are
| ignorant of how LLMs work or what they 're used for.
|
| I've been asked why LLMs hallucinate. As if omniscient
| computer programs are some achievable goal and we just need
| to hammer out a few kinks to make our current crop of
| english-speaking computers perfect.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| I personally believe that LLMs have advanced immeasurably
| since ChatGPT came out, which was itself a world-historical
| event. I use AI daily in ways that enhance my productivity.
|
| I say all of that to establish that I'm not a reflexive
| critic when I tell you, hallucinations are _absolutely not_
| exceptionally rare now. On multiple occasions this week (and
| it 's only Tuesday!) I've had to disprove a LLM hallucination
| a smart, dedicated person at work presented to me as fact.
| They're just not as fun to talk about anymore, both because
| they're no longer new and because straightforward guardrails
| are effective at blocking the funny ones.
| 01100011 wrote:
| It's a hail mary dash towards AGI. If we get computers to think
| for us, we can solve a lot of our most pressing issues. If not,
| well we've accelerated a lot of our worst problems(global
| warming, big tech, wealth inequality, surveillance state, post-
| truth culture, etc).
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| > It's a hail mary dash towards AGI. If we get computers to
| think for us, we can solve a lot of our most pressing issues.
|
| All but one of them simultaneously, in fact. The one being
| left out: wanting to keep existing.
| xvector wrote:
| What are you talking about? AGI is practically a
| prerequisite for transhumanism, and, well, _not dying._
|
| If you want to "keep existing" AGI happening is probably
| your only hope.
| slopinthebag wrote:
| I highly doubt OP was talking about _immortality_
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| Aligned AGI, yes. Unaligned AGI is a fast way to die.
|
| If you want to keep existing, slow down, make sure AGI is
| _aligned_ first, and go into cryo if necessary.
|
| If you don't want to keep existing, that doesn't mean you
| get to risk the rest of us.
| yladiz wrote:
| This sounds just like the idea that quantum computing will
| solve a lot of computational issues, which we know isn't
| true. Why would AGI be any different?
| idle_zealot wrote:
| > If we get computers to think for us, we can solve a lot of
| our most pressing issues
|
| How, exactly, does more and better tech help with the
| fundamentally sociological issues of power distribution,
| wealth inequality, surveillance, etc? Are you operating on
| the assumption that a machine superintelligence will ignore
| the selfish orders of whoever makes it and immediately work
| to establish post-scarcity luxury space communism?
| gastonf wrote:
| > If we get computers to think for us, we can solve a lot of
| our most pressing issues
|
| If AGI is born from these efforts, it will likely be
| controlled by people who stand to lose the most from solving
| those issues. If an OpenAI-built AGI told Sam Altman that
| reducing wealth inequality requires taxing his own wealth,
| would he actually accept that? Would systems like that get
| even close to being in charge?
| nisten wrote:
| In 2-3 decades 30% of the world population will be over 60
| years old (~3 BILLION seniors).We don't have an economic model
| for it, nor does gen-z want to all be Personal Support Workers
| while paying rent. Nvidia only makes 6million data center GPUs
| a year. Huawei makes 900k. We need 10 to 100x more to be able
| to automate enough just to hold civilization together. Amazon
| built datacenters with near 0 water use but it used 35% more
| electricity overall. So tha problem can be solved however we
| need to change out of the whole scarcity mentality if we're
| going to actually make the planet nice.
| sarchertech wrote:
| > 30%
|
| Thats not accurate. The estimate is about 2 billion in 25
| years.
|
| https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/ageing-
| and-...
|
| We also have models for how that works at a country level
| because we have countries that have far exceeded that.
|
| And the vast majority of 60 year olds are still self
| sufficient and economically productive.
|
| Average global retirement age is around 65 and in most
| countries it's creeping towards 70. And percent of world
| population over 70 looks much more manageable over the time
| span we can realistically model.
| matusp wrote:
| Very much so. I wouldn't mind some interesting projects or
| results. But it's very basic opinions or parables all over again.
| internet2000 wrote:
| Not really? It's kind of a big deal.
| schaefer wrote:
| > Not really? It's kind of a big deal.
|
| Why on earth is the parent comment downvoted? the title of the
| TFA asks a question. This statement directly answers that
| question. Seems very on-topic.
| rbanffy wrote:
| I am. To keep talking about it I might just deploy a chatbot to
| do that for me.
| tapoxi wrote:
| It's a black box that thinks for me, sometimes it's good,
| sometimes it's bad, sometimes it times out.
|
| I am extremely skeptical of AI products anyone builds. It's just
| using one black box to build scaffolding around another black box
| and then typically want to charge money for it. I don't see any
| value there.
| d675 wrote:
| depends on if they're selling you an AI wrapper or if they
| built something useful.
|
| Also, depends on who target user is.
|
| AI can be used to build deterministic software
| scuff3d wrote:
| I've been sick of it since 2022.
| ekropotin wrote:
| No, because what most people miss about AI is that...
|
| I'm just kidding. LinkedIn feed became so unbearable, that I had
| to install an extension to turn it off.
| smartmic wrote:
| AI has become a commodity- for the better or worse. And yes, we
| should treat it as such, especially no more big ideas from
| (C-level) managers, please.
| PowerElectronix wrote:
| AI is an ok tool.
| jimmyjazz14 wrote:
| I think the advancements around models and such are still
| somewhat interesting but its all the hype around peripheral
| things like OpenClaw, agentic workflows and other hyped up AI-
| adjacent news that are getting pretty old.
| Aerroon wrote:
| I think the workflows can be really interesting to read about.
| The other week I read a reddit post how someone got Qwen3.5
| 35B-A3B to go from 22.2% on the 45 hard problems of swebench-
| verified to 37.8% (opus 4.6 gets 40%).
|
| All they essentially did was tell the LLM to test and verify
| whether the answer is correct with a prompt like the following:
|
| > _" You just edited X. Before moving on, verify the change is
| correct: write a short inline python -c or a /tmp test script
| that exercises the changed code path, run it with bash, and
| confirm the output is as expected."_
|
| Now whether this is true, I don't know, but I think talking
| about this kind of stuff is cool!
| SunshineTheCat wrote:
| I definitely get the comment about HN and seeing a billion posts
| about OpenClaw, Claude, or yet another post on an industry being
| disrupted by AI.
|
| Tack on to that the increasing number of political stuff on here
| as well just makes it less and less an interesting place to
| visit.
|
| Don't agree with the angry mob on the political stuff especially
| and you get downvoted/flagged into oblivion.
|
| Just another echo chamber looking to have viewpoints confirmed in
| yet another one of the disappearing places online that foster any
| level of intellectual curiosity.
| 1a527dd5 wrote:
| I don't think I'm quite bored. I'm exhausted/fatigued with the
| pace.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| This.
|
| I don't know how I'm burnt out from making this thing do work
| for me. But I am.
| computerdork wrote:
| AI Fatigue seems real: https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-
| fatigue-burnout-software-...
| AStrangeMorrow wrote:
| Yes it feels like a full time job just to try to keep up. And
| I've been in AI for close to 10 years so I feel like I have to
| keep up at least a minimum.
|
| An other thing for me is that it has gotten a lot harder for
| small teams with few ressources, let one person, to release
| anything that can really compete with anything the big player
| put out.
|
| Quite a few years back I was working on word2vec models /
| embeddings. With enough time and limited ressources I was able
| to, through careful data collection and preparation, produce
| models that outperformed existing embeddings for our fairly
| generic data retrieval tasks. You could download from models
| Facebook (fasttext) or other models available through gensim
| and other tools, and they were often larger embeddings (eg 1000
| vs 300 for mine), but they would really underperform. And when
| evaluating on general benchmarks, for what existed back then,
| we were basically equivalent to the best models in English and
| French, if not a little better at times. Similarly later some
| colleagues did a new architecture inspired by BeRT after it
| came out, that outperformed again any existing models we could
| find.
|
| But these days I feel like there is nothing much I can do in
| NLP. Even to fine-tune or distillate the larger models, you
| need a very beefy setup.
| neerajk wrote:
| I'm just getting started ;)
| jimjimjim wrote:
| It feels like during the previous hype cycle of bitcoins,
| blockchains and NFTs. People are trying to find uses for new
| technologies but it seems like a lot of the conversations come
| from people (at this point I guess it's still people?) trying to
| increase the hype. Maybe they are trying to be thought leaders or
| maybe they are trying to boost some stock valuations.
| mtndew4brkfst wrote:
| The amount of questions I fielded about web3, coins, ledgers,
| etc as an IC speaking with customers or internal leadership was
| around an order of magnitude lower, and well-known brands
| weren't trying to sell me any of them. It was much rarer for it
| to get shoved into a product it wasn't helpful for, too.
|
| Never thought I'd feel nostalgic about that era...
| solenoid0937 wrote:
| The uses are there. They have been found. Anyone that hasn't
| "found" them is cooked, hate to say it.
| MrLeap wrote:
| I'm old enough to remember being fatigued with so many people
| talking about making "apps". Programs that run on a phone. Before
| that everyone was excited about blogging. Web 2.0 ugh.
|
| Before that we were excited about the wheel and the creation of
| fire. All capital drained into those ephemeral fancies.
|
| The cycles cycle on.
| mhitza wrote:
| Big Data, The Cloud, Quantum Computing, Web 3.0, and maybe a
| few I've forgotten about.
|
| Only thing that stuck thus far is the cloud. Though not for
| infinite scalability and resiliency, cause that just dumps big
| invoices in your lap.
| solenoid0937 wrote:
| Big Data absolutely became a thing
|
| The Cloud happened as well, as you've pointed out
|
| AI adoption is well past Quantum and Web 3. Comparing it to
| those two is nonsensical.
| mhitza wrote:
| It only is nonsensical if you create your own comparison
| dimension ("adoption") to construct your argument, to call
| what I said, nonsensical!
|
| All those listed and more, are part of the cycles that the
| parent comment mentioned and which I've continued.
|
| Same thing with Agile. Mostly sprint-based waterfall,
| iterative development is not something I've ever seen in
| practice. Or people over processes, remember those ideas?
|
| BigData, was another hype cycle where even smaller
| companies wanted a "piece of the action". I've worked at
| the time in a sub 50 developers company, and the higher ups
| where all about big data. When in fact our system was
| struggling with GB of data due to frugality in hardware.
|
| For a moment in time you couldn't spit in any direction
| without hiting a Domain Driven Design talk. And now we
| disable safeguards and LLMs write a mix of garbled ideas
| from across all the laundered open source training data.
|
| To early to tell where AI will land, and if it will bring
| down the economy with it, but spending rate doesn't deliver
| equal results for all, and we will have to see after the
| dust settles.
| matsemann wrote:
| Yeah. I don't mind AI, but I'm waiting for it to stabilize and
| a good work flow being replicable for non-toy problems that
| should survive and evolve for a long time. I don't think I lose
| out much by not having 10 agents doing my work for me right
| now. In 6 months or some years or whatever I can just learn the
| new way of doing it. It's just exhausting with how much it
| changes month to month. Do I use it? Yes. Probably
| suboptimally. I'll learn later, though.
|
| Like the new frontend frameworks coming every week after 2010
| sometime. Not jumping on every single one, and waiting until
| react was declared the winner and learn that worked well. Sure,
| someone that used it from day 1 had more experience, but one
| quickly catch up.
| delecti wrote:
| Yep, the hype will die, and some of the substance will remain.
| I mean, we're currently commenting on Web2.0 about a blog post.
| Both stopped being the next big thing, and are now just some
| things we use. Relevant anecdote: I most recently worked on the
| apps (ding) for a car company (double-ding, fire and wheels).
| nancyminusone wrote:
| Among non-programmers, you always hear about some fool that fell
| in love with an AI girlfriend or whatever, but you never hear
| about the people who open chatgpt up once, tried some things with
| it, said to themselves "huh, that's kind of neat" and then lost
| interest a day or two later, having conceived of no further items
| to which AI could provide assistance.
| olivia-banks wrote:
| I actually hear about this fairly often. In quite a few of my
| college classes, there's a large focus on AI (even outside the
| computer science department). I find it surprising the amount
| of non-technical people who don't even think to use it, or
| otherwise haven't interacted with it except when required.
| slfnflctd wrote:
| > having conceived of no further items to which AI could
| provide assistance
|
| For me, the issue isn't that I can't conceive of work AI could
| help with. It's that most of the work I currently need to be
| doing involves things AI is useless for.
|
| I look forward to using it when I have an appropriate task.
| However, I don't actually have a lot of those, especially in my
| personal life. I suspect this is a fairly common experience.
| JSR_FDED wrote:
| I'm sad that it's crowded out all the interesting stuff I used to
| love learning about on HN.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| I'm sad that it's crowding some of those things out of
| _existence_ , not just out of being talked about.
| mtndew4brkfst wrote:
| Not limited to here, of course. Net-new publications to ArXiv
| for some (most?) CS subcategories are >=90% about models,
| transformers, training, quantization, or some other directly
| related field, or how to apply these towards a different
| specialty.
| Kye wrote:
| This is completely normal when a new thing is in the third
| section of the technology adoption curve.[0] AI will either go
| away (unlikely) or become a footnote in posts about what people
| are doing with it in the next stage.
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_adoption_life_cycle
|
| Alternately: the trough of disillusionment.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle
| jonhuber wrote:
| I think what's crazy is the desire to replicate current day
| corporate structures. Look at this multi agent Jira story reading
| bot that builds stuff cause we let it churn overnight. Like the
| whole idea that you don't need that nonsense to build something
| amazing.
| jonhuber wrote:
| And the desire to not want to understand things.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| See also this insanity: https://github.com/garrytan/gstack/
| mhitza wrote:
| Pretty funny boasting about accelerated results, when his
| public contributions are only in two repositories (gstack
| itself and a rails bundle with 14 commits).
|
| Endlessly grooming the Agent reminds me of Gastown.
|
| Curios to see what he'll present, if, from his 700+
| contributions in private repositories.
| luxuryballs wrote:
| "it's all starting to feel a bit... routine" and that's how I
| know it's going to replace me if I stay an employee
| jimmyjazz14 wrote:
| I don't follow your logic, it was always either going to
| disappear or become routine much like any other tool you would
| use at work.
| sciencejerk wrote:
| I think that they mean that "routine" work like AI agent
| prompting and config is repetitive, predictable and somewhat
| thoughtless work. Human employees that perform repetitive,
| predictable, thoughtless work are easy to replace with AI
| lukev wrote:
| This is bad in tech. But at least we are (relatively) well
| equipped to deal with it.
|
| My partner teaches at a small college. These people are
| absolutely _lost_ , with administration totally sold on the idea
| that "AI is the future" while lacking any kind of coherent theory
| about how to apply it to pedagogy.
|
| Administrators are typically uncritically buying into the hype,
| professors are a mix of compliant and (understandably) completely
| belligerent to the idea.
|
| Students are being told conflicting information -- in one class
| that "ChatGPT is cheating" and in the very next class that using
| AI is mandatory for a good grade.
|
| Its an absolute disaster.
| chatmasta wrote:
| The wild part is they're having this reaction while using the
| most rigid and limited interfaces to the LLMs. Imagine when the
| capabilities of coding agents surface up to these professions.
| It's already starting to happen with Claude Cowork. I swear if
| I see another presentation with that default theme...
| iugtmkbdfil834 wrote:
| This. As annoying as all sorts of 'safety features' are, the
| sheer amount of effort that goes into further restricting
| that on the corporate wrapper side side makes llm nigh
| unusable. How can those kids even begin to get the idea of
| what it can do, when it seems like its severely locked down.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Could you provide an example of such a thing that is
| prevented?
| webdood90 wrote:
| > These people are absolutely lost, with administration totally
| sold on the idea that "AI is the future" ...
|
| Doesn't sound that different from my tech job
| jakelsaunders94 wrote:
| This is really interesting. I've been out of education for a
| long time, but I was wondering how they were dealing with the
| advent of AI. Are exams still a thing? Do people do coursework
| now that you can spew out competent sounding stuff in seconds?
| whattheheckheck wrote:
| When industrialization was taking root yes indeed the factory
| jobs sucked AND it was the future. Two things can be true
| metalliqaz wrote:
| By my understanding, the administrators at small colleges are
| among the least capable professionals one might find anywhere
| in the economy.
| tcdent wrote:
| The replies lol.
|
| "Yes" Proceeds to talk about AI.
| dgemm wrote:
| Kinda tired of being inundated with low quality AI slop
| absolutely everywhere.
| YmiYugy wrote:
| I'm bloody sick of it, but more exhausted than bored. My workflow
| that was pretty stable for years, keeps changing massively on an
| almost monthly basis and that means I'm already skipping the fads
| of the week. What's more annoying is that it feels actually worth
| it and thus keeps me churning.
| bilsbie wrote:
| I'm confused why the hype and the investment got so high. And why
| everyone treats it like a race. Why can't we gradually develop it
| like dna sequencing.
| dylan604 wrote:
| I assumed it was obvious. Being first is all that matters.
| Investors don't want to invest in second place. Obviously,
| first is achieving AGI and not some GPT bot. That's why so many
| people keep saying AGI is in _____ weeks away with some even
| being preposterous stating AGI might have already happened.
| They need to keep attracting investors. Same as Musk constantly
| saying FSD is ____ weeks away.
| olivia-banks wrote:
| To be fair, DNA sequencing was very hyped up (although not
| nearly as much as AI). The HGP finished two years ahead of
| schedule, which is sort of unheard of for something in it's
| domain, and was mainly a result of massive public interest
| about personalized medicine and the like. I will admit that a
| ton of foundational DNA sequencing stuff evolved over decades,
| but the massive leap forward in the early 2000s is comparable
| to the LLM hype now.
| keybored wrote:
| And this one will be different?
|
| > At serious risk of sounding like a heretic here, but I'm kinda
| bored of talking about AI.
|
| Umm.
|
| > I get it, AI is incredible. I use it every day, it's completely
| changed my workflow. I recently started a new role in a tricky
| domain working at web scale (hey, remember web scale?) and it's
| allowed me to go from 0-1 in terms of productivity in a matter of
| weeks.
|
| It's all positives. So what's the problem?
|
| There isn't a problem with AI. Of course. It's just the discourse
| around it is "boring". And the managers are lame about it.
|
| And what has been the AI discourse for the last few years. The
| same formula.
|
| - AI is either good
|
| - ... or it is the best thing to have happened to Me
|
| - But I have feelings[1] or concerns about everything _around_
| AI, like the discourse, or people having two-hundred concurrent
| AI agents mania
|
| It's all just grease for the AI Inevitabilism bytemill.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47487774
|
| > ... And yes, I'm painfully aware of the irony of a post about
| moaning about posts about AI. Sorry.
|
| OP can't even resign himself to being a Type. Sigh. "I know what
| I just did hehe"
|
| Very self-aware.
|
| And now 117 points and 53 comments in 23 minutes.
| jakelsaunders94 wrote:
| Hey :)
|
| > And this one will be different? I think you're talking about
| my blog post here, in which case no, I'm afraid not. Hence the
| admission at the bottom.
|
| >Umm. ??
|
| > It's all positives. So what's the problem? The article is
| trying to say that these things are great, but the level of
| conversation leads to a lack of novelty.
|
| > It's just the discourse around it is "boring". And the
| managers are lame about it. Exactly.
|
| > OP can't even resign himself to being a Type. Sigh. "I know
| what I just did hehe" Very self-aware.
|
| Is this sarcasm?
| keybored wrote:
| > I think you're talking about my blog post here, in which
| case no, I'm afraid not. Hence the admission at the bottom.
|
| Is anybody else bored of talking about AI? I'm beyond bored.
| korse wrote:
| Yepp.
| HoldOnAMinute wrote:
| Anything to distract from the real war, billionaires vs everyone
| else.
| cdrnsf wrote:
| It's ruined the sparkle emoji for everyone.
| themafia wrote:
| You can call an engineer a "product manager" but that does not
| make them one.
| cmollis wrote:
| yes, so bored. yada yada.. i've been 'obsolete' for 36 years and
| counting.
| peterlk wrote:
| Modern AI is a miracle. The math that makes it work is beautiful
| and really impressive. For example, if you wanted to map all
| knowledge on earth, how would you do it? AI answers that question
| by building a high dimensional vector space of embeddings, and
| traversing that space moves you through a topology of basically
| every concept that humans have.
|
| Or another thought; why is it that a stochastic parrot can solve
| logic puzzles consistently and accurately? It might not be 100%,
| but it's still much better than what you might expect from a
| markov model of ngrams.
|
| Openclaw is only sort of interesting. How to vibe code your first
| product is uninteresting. Claims about productivity increase from
| model usage are speculative and uninteresting. Endless think
| pieces on the effects of AI slop are uninteresting. There's a lot
| of hype and grift and bullshit that is downstream of this very
| interesting technology, and basically none of that is
| interesting. The cool parts are when you actually open the models
| up and try to figure out what's going on.
|
| So no, I'm not bored of talking about AI. I'm not sure I ever
| will be. My suspicion is that those who are bored of it aren't
| digging deep enough. With that said, that will likely only be
| interesting to people who think math is fun and cool. On the
| whole, AI is unlikely to affect our lives in proportion to the
| ink spilled by influencers.
| Chinjut wrote:
| Why is it that a stochastic parrot can solve logic puzzles
| consistently and accurately?
| peterlk wrote:
| Attention is all you need...?
|
| The short answer, as far as I'm aware, is that no one really
| knows. The longer answer is that we have a lot of partial
| answers that, in my mind, basically boil down to: model
| architectures draw a walk through the high dimensional vector
| space of concepts, and we've tuned them to land on the right
| answer. The fact that they do so consistently says something
| about how we encode logic in language and the effectiveness
| of these embedding/latent spaces.
| jakelsaunders94 wrote:
| This is a really intersting take, and maybe shows that I
| haven't been thorough enough with my reading. My guess is that
| the deep technical articles are few and far between and the
| higher level 'hot takes' are what fills the room. Do you have
| any recommendations for interesting places to start?
| peterlk wrote:
| My favorites are the micrograd series by Andrej Karpathy on
| youtube [0], and "Why Deep Learning Works Unreasonably Well"
| [1]
|
| The greats on youtube are also worth watching: 3B1B,
| numberphile, etc.
|
| [0] https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAqhIrjkxbuWI23v9cThsA
| 9Gv... [1] https://youtu.be/qx7hirqgfuU?si=8zmrbazuvnz379gk
| mondrian wrote:
| Let's get back to filling the front page with Web3, DeFi, NFTs.
| Oh the good ol' days.
| altairprime wrote:
| It's been almost two days since someone posted /e/OS, so those
| good ol' days aren't _entirely_ gone :)
| ogou wrote:
| Everything is fandom now. I grew up around people obsessed with
| Nascar and NFL. So much of the discourse sounds exactly the same.
| It beats listening to people talk about their dogs though.
| somewhereoutth wrote:
| My only hope is that it is such a disaster that it is effectively
| an extinction level event for this current technoscene (along the
| lines of the Permian-Triassic extinction event and others).
|
| Then we can get back to the unglamorous, boring, thankless task
| of delivering business value to paying clients, and the public
| discourse will no longer be polluted by our inane witterings.
| bmau5 wrote:
| The debate around "AGI" is the thing that gets me. People just
| moving goalposts and arbitrarily applying their own standards
| makes for a lot of wheel spinning
| emp17344 wrote:
| AI enthusiasts love to misuse and abuse the goalpost metaphor.
| It's practically always an attempt to silence opponents.
| bmau5 wrote:
| It's easily abused by both sides of the debate because
| there's no strict widely accepted definition. I find it
| tiring because it's a largely inconsequential benchmark
| anyways (outside of Microsoft-OpenAI contract disputes).
| MisterTea wrote:
| It is getting stuffy in the tech sector lately with all these AI
| postings but it's still a very new and very disruptive
| technology.
|
| I also have to say that I don't use AI in my personal or
| professional life. And that is simply because I haven't felt any
| need to use it.
| nicbou wrote:
| I'm not.
|
| At least I'm not tired of talking about how it's killing websites
| and filling everything with spam. I have spent most of a decade
| building a useful resource, and Google AI overviews has killed my
| traffic. It killed everyone's traffic. This thing gave me
| purpose, and I'm watching AI slowly strangle it.
|
| I mourn the death of the independent web, and it frightens me
| that this is still the happy stage. We haven't yet felt the
| effect of stiffing content creators, and the LLM tools haven't
| yet begun to enshittify.
|
| I am tired of discussions about agentic coding, but I would feel
| a lot better if we acknowledged all the harm being caused. Big
| tech went all in on this, stealing everything, putting everyone
| out of work, using up all resources with no regards for
| consequences, and they threaten to kill the economy if we don't
| let them have their way.
|
| I feel like we are heading for a much worse place as a society,
| and all we can talk about is how to 10x our bullshit jobs,
| because we're afraid of falling behind.
| tartoran wrote:
| AI isn't doing any of that, it's the companies that train their
| AI's or push their slop that are doing all the harm. We should
| always keep in mind who the villain is.
| mirekrusin wrote:
| Talking about AI being boring is boring as hell for sure.
| mr_bob_sacamano wrote:
| I wish there were a filter on Hacker News to hide all AI related
| posts.
| erikerikson wrote:
| This is hacker news. Somebody made that and uses it so they
| don't see this post to tell you about that but it exists.
| mr_bob_sacamano wrote:
| a Kafkaesque loop
| josefritzishere wrote:
| Bored is a nice way to say it. Never has a technology been so
| odious also been so ubiquitous.
| overgard wrote:
| I'm like 99% convinced that most of the AI conversation upvotes
| at this point is astroturfing. I just don't see the correlation
| with the sentiment I get from talking to people in the real world
| (mostly negative AI sentiment) vs what I see here
| miltonlost wrote:
| There's definitely some people working overtime to overhype AI
| on here. like 50% of the comments on this are from simianwords
| who only posts when people say negative AI sentiments.
| trigvi wrote:
| Not necessarily. Personally, I'm both in love with AI (likely
| to upvote a convo) and scared about the short/medium term
| societal changes its job displacement will bring.
| solenoid0937 wrote:
| I think some companies are just behind the curve, so this
| sentiment seems bizarre to some.
|
| At my big tech, AI is every conversation with everyone, every
| day. Becoming AI native is a huge deal for us. Literally
| everyone is making AI usage a core part of their job and it's
| been a big productivity accelerator.
|
| Perhaps it's different where you work, so you don't see the
| sentiment.
| SyneRyder wrote:
| Honestly, I think there's a big divide, and those of us who are
| using AI intensively might just be increasingly "going dark" &
| distancing ourselves from those "real world" people. It's
| becoming detrimental being around people who are so actively
| negative about AI. It feels like being around people who still
| insist the sun orbits the earth. Those people are actually
| happier believing what they believe, so why spend any more time
| trying to convince them they're wrong?
|
| I spent 2024 on Mastodon and I absorbed their groupthink that
| AI was useless... I wish I could get that year of my life back.
| I wish I had that extra year headstart on AI compared to where
| I am now. So much of my coding frustrations that year that
| might have been solved from using AI. I am reluctantly back on
| X - I hate what has been done to Twitter, but that's where so
| much of the useful information on using AI is being shared.
|
| Well, back to it. Claude has been building another local MCP
| server tool for me in the background.
| solenoid0937 wrote:
| > It feels like being around people who still insist the sun
| orbits the earth.
|
| 100% feeling this divide as well.
|
| People that deny the benefit of AI in 2026... I can't even
| engage with them anymore. I just move on with my life. These
| people are simply not living in reality, it will catch up to
| them eventually (unfortunately.)
| pesus wrote:
| I'm convinced that the majority of people hyping up AI don't
| actually interact with many people in real life, let alone
| people that aren't software engineers.
| TheOrange wrote:
| Yes!
|
| Sounds very much like this blog I read too... he laughs at AI in
| his workplace a lot Www.sometimesworking.com
| QubridAI wrote:
| Honestly, a bit but only because the hype cycle is louder than
| the genuinely interesting work.
| Garlef wrote:
| "Everything has already been said, but not yet by everyone." --
| Karl Valentin
|
| ---
|
| Personally, I'm still very interested in the topic.
|
| But since the tech is moving very fast, the discussion is just
| very very unevenly distributed: There's lots of interesting
| things to say. But a lot of takes that were relevant 6 months ago
| are still being digested by most.
| sodapopcan wrote:
| > "Everything has already been said, but not yet by everyone."
| -- Karl Valentin
|
| Never heard this and I like it very much. This is just an off-
| topic comment to say thanks!
| jakelsaunders94 wrote:
| This is a great saying, thank you for sharing it. Out of
| curiosity, do you have any links to intersting AI articles
| you've read recently? Maybe I'll change my mind.
| Garlef wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWzLPn164w0
|
| I don't like the hype language applied by the channel host
| one bit - and so this is not something where I expect someone
| tired of the hype to be swayed - but I think his perspective
| is sometimes interesting (if you filter through the BS): He
| seems to get that the real challenge is not LLM quality but
| organisational integration: Tooling, harnesses, data access,
| etc, etc. And so in this department there's sometimes good
| input.
| jwilliams wrote:
| It's the most transformative technology I've clocked in my
| lifetime (and that includes home computers and the Internet).
|
| Large organizations are making major decisions on the basis of
| it. Startups new and old will live and die by the shift that it's
| creating (is SaaS dead? Well investors will make it so). Mass
| engineering layoffs could be inevitable.
|
| Sure. I vibe coded a thing is getting pretty tired. The rest? If
| anything we're not talking about it enough.
| vincentabolarin wrote:
| Management spins up something on Lovable and believes that
| building any software is as easy as typing a few prompts.
|
| It's worse when there's a colleague of yours encouraging that by
| using AI blindly, piling up technical debt just to move at the
| pace that Management expects after signing you all up on some AI
| tool.
|
| At the end of the day, everyone is talking about AI. For AI or
| against AI, it doesn't really matter.
| chatmasta wrote:
| What I miss is people showing off their hand-crafted libraries or
| frameworks. That's become way less common now that everyone is
| building a layer up the stack. I fear we'll be stuck in a
| permanent state of using Tailwind and React and all the LLM-
| favored libraries as they were frozen in time at the beginning of
| 2025. Then again, that'll be the agent's problem, not mine...
|
| All that said, it's extremely exciting. I've been in tech, in one
| way or another, for 25 years. This is the most energizing (and
| simultaneously exhausting) atmosphere I've ever felt. The
| 2006-2011 years of early Facebook, Uber, etc. were exciting but
| nothing like this. The future is developing faster than we can
| process it.
| kehvyn wrote:
| If it helps, I've mostly been using AI to implement things in
| the craziest languages I can justify.
|
| I write Typescript and SQL by day, my last two personal
| projects were Rust and Perl.
|
| I do worry that I'm not learning them as deeply, but I am
| learning them and without AI as an accelerant I probably
| wouldn't be trying them at all.
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| Perhaps we're in an AI summer and a tech winter. Winter is
| always the time when people hole up, dream, and work on
| whatever big thing is next.
|
| We're about due for some new computing abstractions to shake
| things up I think. Those won't be conceived by LLMs, though
| they may aid in implementing them.
| zer00eyz wrote:
| We have 2 decades of abstraction.
|
| The stacks of turtles that we use to run everything are
| starting to show their bloat.
|
| The other day someone was lamenting dealign with an onslaught
| of bot traffic, and having to deal with blocking it. Maybe we
| need to get back to good old fashioned engineering and
| optimization. There was a thread on here the other day about
| PC gamer recommending RSS readers and having a 36gb webpage (
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47480507 )
| jakelsaunders94 wrote:
| > What I miss is people showing off their hand-crafted
| libraries or frameworks.
|
| Saame. I wonder if the use of AI will lead to less invention
| and adoption of new ideas in favour of ideas with lots of
| training data.
| keithnz wrote:
| No, well, I still enjoy the articles. The thing that always
| surprises me is the negativity in comment threads. I'm genuinely
| quite excited about AI based development. Yesterday I was playing
| around with developing a marketing plan for a market gap where we
| could leverage our product and finding what features in our
| product would need changing/adding to improve our offering. Quite
| interesting results!
| jakelsaunders94 wrote:
| I think in most places on the internet the negative comments
| are the ones that will win out. Same for AI I suppose. I tried
| not to bemoan the whole concept here, just the amount of
| 'airtime' it gets. Sort of like when something happens in the
| news (lately it's been the Epstein files for me), and you wish
| you could see a more balanced picture of world events.
| lwansbrough wrote:
| It seems some people in this thread are not :)
| kgwxd wrote:
| Oh great, we're at the stage of constantly talking about it, AND
| talking about how we're sick of talking about it. Now every
| article will be as long as before + a prefix paragraph explaining
| how they know we're all sick of talking about it, but...
| beej71 wrote:
| To answer the OP's question, apparently not! :)
| obsidianbases1 wrote:
| No, but definitely tired of the "influencer" takes. You would
| think that this AI thing has been all but figured out, when
| really, even with the biggest openest claws we are still barely
| scratching the surface of a new era human-computer interaction
| jakelsaunders94 wrote:
| Agreed, LinkedIn is a cesspit of this. But then it always has
| been so nothing new there.
| htx80nerd wrote:
| I'm bored of the everyday Claude spam. I've used Claude
| extensively and it was very sub par.
| d675 wrote:
| what did you try to make? how?
| johnea wrote:
| Yes!
|
| There are other interesting things in the world today, and HN is
| overwhelmed with pretend intelligence.
|
| Hype, detractors, ALL OF IT!
|
| Maybe a separate web page or RSS feed could be created that is
| dedicated to the subject...
| CrzyLngPwd wrote:
| Yup.
|
| Bored of hearing about it, bored of reading about it.
|
| I love using these LLM tools, but honestly, it feels like every
| man and his dog has something to say about it, and is angling to
| make a quick buck or two from it.
|
| And the slop, oh my goodness, it's never-ending on every site and
| service.
| Lerc wrote:
| Never tired of talking about AI. There are so many fascinating
| aspects to explore and papers delivering new ideas. It's a bit
| tiring keeping up with the new stuff but talking about what we've
| found is one of the things that makes it easier to keep up.
|
| I'm somewhat tired of seeing the same rehashed claims of future
| ability, non-ability, profit, loss.
|
| I actually like talking about the implications, future risks and
| challenges of AI. I have made submissions on ways AI should be
| regulated to benefit society. The problem is the assumption of
| what is happening and what will happen.
|
| To many people seem to enter the conversation feeling that the
| absence of doubt is the same thing as being informed.
|
| And especially people making claims based on premises that they
| seem to believe that if they build big enough towers on them,
| they will become true.
|
| The number one thing that bothers me in all this, is people
| assuming the contents of the minds of others.
|
| I find the pathologising of Sam Altman to be the most egregious
| form of this. It is one thing to disagree with someone's
| decisions, another thing to disagree with their stated opinions,
| but to decide upon a person's character based upon what you
| believe they are thinking in their private thoughts is simply
| projection.
|
| I know this is an opinion of little worth to many, but my
| impression of Sam Altman is just a person who has different
| perspectives to me. The capitalist tech world he lives in would
| inevitably shape different values to me. What I have seen of him
| is consistent with a sincere expression of values. I can accept
| that a person might do something different to what I would, even
| the opposite of what I want while believing that they can be
| doing so for reasons that seem to be morally the right thing to
| do.
|
| This also happened with cryptocurrency. Crypto advocates believe
| that it is a good thing for the world. Too many consider those
| who believe that crypto could benefit society to be evil. There
| is a difference between being wrong and being evil. No matter how
| certain you are you can still be wrong, in fact beyond a point I
| would say increased certancy would indicate a higher likelihood
| of being wrong.
|
| So I'm happy to talk about AI. I have plenty to learn. I wonder
| if others went in with the goal to learn whether they would find
| it less tiring.
| _doctor_love wrote:
| This might sound like snark, but I truly don't mean it that way.
|
| I think what's interesting about AI, and why there's so much
| conversation, is that in order to be a good user of AI, you have
| to really understand software development. All the people I work
| with who are getting the most value out of using AI to deliver
| software are people who are already very high-skilled engineers,
| and the more years of real experience they have, the better.
|
| I know some guys who were road warriors for many years ---
| everything from racking and cabling servers, setting up
| infrastructure, and getting huge cloud deployments going all the
| way to embedded software, video game backends, etc. These guys
| were already really good at automation, seeing the whole life
| cycle of software, and understanding all the pressure points. For
| them, AI is the ultimate power tool. They're just flying with it
| right now. (All of them also are aware that the AI vampire is
| very real.)
|
| There's still a lot to learn, and the tools are still very, very
| early on, but the value is clear.
|
| I think for quite a few people, engaging with AI is maybe the
| first time ever in their entire career they are having to engage
| with systems thinking in a very concrete and directed way.
| Consequently, this is why so many software engineers are having
| an identity crisis: they've spent most of their career focusing
| on one very small section of the overall SDLC, meanwhile
| believing that was mostly all there was that they needed to know.
|
| So I think we're going to keep talking for quite a while, and the
| conversation will continue to be very unevenly distributed.
| Paradoxically, I'm not bored of it, because I'm learning so much
| listening to intelligent people share their learnings.
| bengale wrote:
| Spot on take. The people I've noticed that say things like
| "it's not useful" are the ones who are doing so little they
| can't see the value.
|
| This isn't to say there's not hype. Just that if you're not
| seeing big productivity gains you need to make sure you really
| are an outlier and not just surplus to requirements.
| amelius wrote:
| This is really not true. There are stories of people who had no
| background in software engineering who now write entire
| applications using AI. And I have personally seen this happen.
| pojzon wrote:
| Its silly to say this but one such person is ,,pewdiepie"
| mikkupikku wrote:
| Smart people can hit the ground running if they're freed from
| the need to first learn the intricacies of a new language.
| We're going to see an explosion in the number of people
| writing software as clever people who invested their time in
| something other than learning to program are now able to
| write software for themselves.
| switchbak wrote:
| What is not true, that "so many software engineers are having
| an identity crisis"?
|
| I don't believe they said that folks new to AI can't make
| impressive use of it. They did however say that senior folks
| with lots of scrappy and holistic knowledge can do amazing
| things with it. Both can be true.
| d675 wrote:
| absolutely. as a early/mid level SDET/SRE, I can move so fast
| on prototyping full good apps now. That style of thinking is
| serving me well, knowing about queues, docker, basic infra
| knowledge, good coding practices, is plenty to produce decent
| code. Interesting time to be laid off.
|
| AI makes a ton of bad decisions too and it's up to you to work
| with it. If I had the knowledge of the dangers hidden in things
| I'm developing, I'd move even faster
|
| Was able to make a great full web app, which I think is
| hardened for prod but it had to be refactored to do so. Which
| it happily did.
|
| It's really about asking the right questions, breaking down
| tasks, and planning now. I'm going to tackle a huge project,
| hoping to share it here.
| gAI wrote:
| Agreed, though I prefer "Fae Folk" to vampires.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| Isn't that scary though: A bunch of people are going to be
| forced to use a tool that keeps them ignorant and they
| absolutely won't know if it's doing correct things, to the
| point that as you retire, the next crop is going to be much
| less involved in knowing whats going on.
|
| It's what happened with the internet and computer usage. As
| Apple made it easier to get online with zero computer
| knowledge, suddenly we're electing people like donald trump.
| _doctor_love wrote:
| Serious reply to this one: I truly don't find it any more
| scary than what's already taken place many times in human
| history.
|
| We have hundreds and thousands of years of history showing
| humans committing atrocities against each other well before
| the advent of computers, or even the introduction of
| electricity. So while the tool may become so ubiquitous that
| there's no option not to engage with it, I don't think it
| really fundamentally alters the dynamics of human behavior.
|
| Some people are motivated by greed. Others are motivated by
| nobility. It really just comes down to which wolf they're
| feeding.
|
| In terms of the tool keeping people ignorant, there's a part
| I agree with and a part that I don't. I think, in terms of
| information dissemination, AI is probably the autocrat's wet
| dream in terms of finally being able to achieve real-time
| redefinition of reality. That's pretty scary, and I'm not
| sure what to do about it.
|
| On the other hand, people have always been free to not really
| learn their craft and to just sort of get by and make a
| living. That was true a thousand years ago, and it's true
| today. There's always somebody who can do really a high-
| quality job, but they're very expensive, and then there's a
| vast population who will do a medium to terrible job for less
| money. You get what you pay for. There's a reason history is
| primarily written about people with power and wealth, they
| were the only ones with the means to do anything.
|
| I don't agree with the assertion about the internet and the
| election of someone like Donald Trump. Well before the
| internet existed, politicians were using communication
| mediums to influence things and get elected--whether it was
| the telegraph, the telephone, or the TV. JFK famously was the
| first TV president (notably, he didn't wear a hat).
|
| These technologies simply give politicians more reach, and
| they may change the dynamics of how voters are persuaded. But
| what's true today was true three hundred years ago: there's
| the face of power that you see publicly, and then there's
| what really happens behind the scenes.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > Serious reply to this one: I truly don't find it any more
| scary than what's already taken place many times in human
| history
|
| Spoken like someone who thinks they are going to be
| insulated from the fallout
| solenoid0937 wrote:
| Many of us are fine with the fallout because we
| understand the net benefit to humanity is going to be
| similar to the previous waves of automation.
|
| Sure, it might hurt me personally. I'm not selfish enough
| to put that over what will be an incredibly empowering
| development for our species.
| scorpioxy wrote:
| To me, it is very scary. I know people who have sort of
| "outsourced" their critical thinking to chatgpt. So to me
| it's extra scary when I see it outside technical circles.
| They'll just believe whatever that generation of LLM tells
| them because it is doing it so confidentially and never
| question or check the information. Maybe I'm naive but I
| thought easier access to knowledge was supposed to make us
| more intelligent, not less.
| jakelsaunders94 wrote:
| Hey, I don't think this sounded like snark at all. Super
| grounded take.
|
| > I think what's interesting about AI, and why there's so much
| conversation, is that in order to be a good user of AI, you
| have to really understand software development.
|
| This I agree with completely. You can see it in the difference
| between a prompt where you know exactly what you want and when
| things are a little woolley. A tool in the hands of a well
| trained craftsperson is always better used.
|
| > So I think we're going to keep talking for quite a while Me
| neither, and to be clear I'm okay with that. This was mostly a
| rant at the lack of diversity of discourse.
| _doctor_love wrote:
| Thanks friend! Appreciate it.
|
| Agree, the diversity of the discourse is not great. There's a
| lot of "omg I just got started waaauw" articles out there
| along with "we're all gonna die!" stuff. And then a few seams
| of very excellent insight.
|
| Deep research at least helps with dowsing for the
| knowledge...
| artur_makly wrote:
| your HN handle is one of my top 10 fav tracks:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2RSniyYNSc
|
| {heart}
| QuantumGood wrote:
| > I'm learning so much listening to intelligent people share
| their learnings.
|
| Me too. A key purpose of HN, and a bright time for that.
| LogicFailsMe wrote:
| Spot on, I am having the time of my life with AI, more fun than
| I've had in decades. But I was in the top 10% of engineering,
| and top 1% of the bits of engineering I do best, so it's easy
| for me to use AI to explore more ideas than I could have
| possibly explored by hand. And if I get replaced, cool bro, my
| investments are in compute, and compute's just getting started
| IMO.
| djeastm wrote:
| Any thoughts on what the next generation of software devs is
| going to look like without as much manual experience?
| _doctor_love wrote:
| Honestly, I think it will look pretty much like this one.
| There's a lot of manual experience that the current
| generation doesn't have.
|
| For example, I haven't racked and cabled a server in over 15
| years. That used to be a valuable skill.
|
| I also used to know how to operate Cisco switches and routers
| (on the original IOS!). I haven't thought about CIDR and the
| difference between a /24 and a /30 since the year 2008. A
| class IP addresses, how do those work? What subnet am I on?
| Is thing running on a different VLAN? Irrelevant to me these
| days. Some people still know it! But not as many as in the
| past.
|
| The late Dr. Richard Hamming observed that once a upon a
| time, "a good man knew how to implement square root in
| machine code." If you didn't know how to do that, you weren't
| legit. These days nobody would make such a claim.
|
| So some skills fade and others rise. And also, software has
| moved in predictable cycles for many decades at this point.
| We are still a very young field but we do have some history
| at this point.
|
| So things will remain the same the more they change on that
| front.
| eloisant wrote:
| When C arrived, programmers wonder how software devs would
| look like when they won't have assembly experience.
|
| Then the same happened with languages that managed memory.
|
| And with IDE that could refactor your code in a click and
| autocomplete API calls.
|
| And with Stack Overflow where people copy/pasted code they
| didn't understand.
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| And over and over time proves that, when you need it, ASM
| or C or generals system knowledge was handy. One example, I
| am not a "Windows" or "NT" guy, mostly working in various
| Unixes and Linux in my professional career. I had a client
| who had battered every resource trying to fix some horrible
| freeze/timeout in their application. So I rolled up my
| sleeves, first search " is there dtrace on windows", found
| some profiling tools, found the process was stuck in some
| dumb blocking call loop, resource was unavailable, and the
| rest was history.
|
| So yeah i mean - who cares how it works - but also if you
| have experience in how things _do_ work you can solve
| problems other people cannot.
| sigbottle wrote:
| The "AI Vampire", huh. Unironically, I've been feeling that
| way.
|
| Well, there was also a lot of unrelated things that happened as
| well around last November for me, but yes, getting into
| vibecoding for real was one of them, and man I feel
| _physically_ drained coming back from work and going to use
| more AI.
|
| Not sure what it is. I'm using AI personally to learn and
| bootstrap a lot of domain knowledge I _never_ would have
| learned otherwise (even got into philosophy!, but man is it
| exhausting keeping up with AI. I would burn through a week 's
| worth of credits in a day, and now I haven't vibe coded a week.
|
| I think, I will chill. One day at a time.
| _doctor_love wrote:
| AI Vampire is from Steve Yegge, credit where it's due.
|
| My take is that it's similar to what Amber Case described in
| _Calm Technology_ - with AI you are not steering one car, you
| 're really steering three cars _at the same time._ The human
| mind isn 't really designed for that.
|
| I am finding that really structuring my time helps in terms
| of fighting back. And adopting an hours restriction, even if
| I could rage for 4 more hours, I don't. Instead I stop and go
| outside.
| keybored wrote:
| A post supposedly about being bored of talking about AI. But
| psyche, it's the same AI talking points. And psyche, the top
| comment is the same sentiment about how the truly skilled will
| finally have their time to shine.
|
| I don't know if it's the Universe delivering this farce or it's
| the emergent LLM Singularity.
| _doctor_love wrote:
| _> how the truly skilled will finally have their time to
| shine._
|
| That's not what I said. I said that those who are already
| shining, are now shining even brighter. Give a great
| craftsman a new tool and he will find a way to apply it. If
| it is valueless, he will throw it away.
|
| For what it's worth, your comment is also an HN trope, the
| disaffected low-effort armchair keyboard warrior.
| keybored wrote:
| Expressing a negative sentiment is a trope now?
| heliumtera wrote:
| >They're just flying with it right now.
|
| Where are they flying and why software has gone to shit?
|
| Maybe this super stars programmers have to keep their reality
| breaking technology secret, but everything has not only
| degraded, but turned to absolute trash.
| hbarka wrote:
| > For them, AI is the ultimate power tool.
|
| Yup
| gojomo wrote:
| You may be bored of AI, but because AI is not yet bored of us,
| turning away may be dangerous.
| tartoran wrote:
| AI is neither bored or nor engaged with us. It's just a
| technology that we can use or abuse. I doubt it'll become
| conscious anytime soon though our the desire to invent God or
| deceive others will push us to invent many contraptions to make
| it appear conscious.
| mlsu wrote:
| Over the last couple of years I've realized how shitty and tiring
| it is to do anything at all on the computer. Reading something
| like Reddit was tiring before, because of spam, submarine
| advertising, etc. But it was still worth it because the signal to
| noise ratio was still there. Now? No way. Easily 50% of comments
| are AI generated.
|
| I used to have this idea that if I built something cool it would
| be valuable to donate it to the world for free. But now
| increasingly I'd be just making a donation to the training data,
| and on top of this I'm in competition with AI slop. Most people
| won't tell the difference and won't care. The noise floor for
| doing absolutely anything collaboratively on the computer is now
| 10x higher than it was before, and I'm basically checked out at
| this point. Even HN is becoming tiring to read since I think
| around 10-15% of comments that I read are AI generated. When that
| number reaches 30% I'm done forever, gone. My life is too short
| to waste time on this shit.
| delbronski wrote:
| AI is starting to look like a net negative for humanity. I
| remember the early days of OpenAI. I was super excited about it.
| There was a new space to uncover and learn about. I was hopeful.
|
| Now I have this love/hate relationship with it. Claude Code is
| amazing. I use it everyday because it makes me so much more
| efficient at my job. But I also know that by using it I'm
| contributing to making my job redundant one day.
|
| At the same time I see how much resources we are wasting on AI.
| And to what end? Does anybody really buy the BS that this will
| all make the world a better place one day? So many people we
| could shelter and feed, but instead we are spending it on trying
| to make your computer check and answer your emails for you. At
| what point do we just look up and ask... what is the damn purpose
| of all of this? I guess money.
| xvector wrote:
| > But I also know that by using it I'm contributing to making
| my job redundant one day.
|
| I don't see how this is the case if you're anything more than a
| junior engineer... it unlocks so many possibilities. You can do
| so much more now. We are more limited by our ideas at this
| point than anything else.
|
| Why is the reaction of so many people, once their menial work
| gets automated, "oh no, my menial work is automated." Why is it
| not "sweet, now I can do bigger/better/more ambitious things?"
|
| (You can go on about corporate culture as the cause, but I've
| worked at regular corporations and most of FAANG. Initiative is
| rewarded almost everywhere.)
|
| > Does anybody really buy the BS that this will all make the
| world a better place one day?
|
| Why is it BS? I'm shocked that anyone with a love and passion
| for technology can feel this way. Have you not seen the long
| history of automation and what it has brought humanity?
|
| There is a reason that we aren't dying of dysentery at the ripe
| age of 45 on some peasant field after a hard winter day's worth
| of hard labor. The march of automation and technology has
| already "made the world a better place."
| miltonlost wrote:
| Keep marching that automation and tehcnology to an acidified
| ocean. But hey, at least now we can code faster than we can
| review!
| solenoid0937 wrote:
| AI won't be what acidifies our ocean, but AGI might save us
| from it.
|
| Strangely enough, I don't see you calling to end the
| consumption of meat which would have a far larger
| environmental impact while not slowing global progress at
| all.
| palata wrote:
| > AI won't be what acidifies our ocean
|
| Tech is what got us where we are. AI allows us to use
| more energy to produce more of what is currently
| measurably killing us.
|
| > but AGI might save us from it.
|
| This is just faith. Some believe that prayers may save
| us.
| solenoid0937 wrote:
| "AI energy usage" is a convenient scapegoat not backed by
| data.
|
| Many things are orders of magnitude bigger than AI in the
| energy usage problem that bring less comparable value.
| delbronski wrote:
| And I'm shocked that anyone into tech can be so blind to the
| adverse effects the current tech industry is having on our
| world and our society.
|
| We owe it to the world, as the experts, to be critical. The
| march of automation and technology has made the world a
| better place in some ways. I sure love modern medicine, but
| those drones flying over Ukraine and Russia sure don't seem
| like they are making the world a better place. Nuclear bombs
| are not making the work a better place. Misinformation in
| social media is not making the world a better place.
|
| Any belief you drink blindly will eventually find a way to
| harm you.
| palata wrote:
| > There is a reason that we aren't dying of dysentery at the
| ripe age of 45 on some peasant field after a hard winter
| day's worth of hard labor.
|
| Tell that to the people who will die before 45 because of
| global instability and global warming, I guess?
| GeoAtreides wrote:
| >Why is the reaction of so many people, once their menial
| work gets automated, "oh no, my menial work is automated."
| Why is it not "sweet, now I can do bigger/better/more
| ambitious things?"
|
| because i have rent to pay? old age to prepare for?
|
| why is it so hard to understand most people are not rich,
| that the cost of living is high, and that most people are
| VERY afraid their jobs will be automated away? why is so hard
| to understand that most people haven't worked at FAANG, they
| don't have stocks or savings, and are squeezed harder with
| every new day and every new war?
|
| what world, what reality are you guys living in?!
| wrs wrote:
| Well, on the other hand, software isn't all about checking
| emails.
|
| I know someone who worked for a nonprofit that made pregnancy
| health software that worked over text messaging. Its clients
| were women in Africa who didn't have much, but they had a cell
| phone, so they could get reminders, track vitals, and so forth.
|
| They had to find enough funding to pay several software
| engineers to build and maintain that system. If AI allows a
| single person to do it, at much lower cost, is that bad?
| s_u_d_o wrote:
| Gosh how i miss the old HN Days... where one would actually code,
| read docs, and develop stuff and feel happy about it. Not write a
| prompt and watch a chatbox do all the work in a matter of
| seconds. It's like we're losing the meaning of building
| something... dk how to explain it more. But yeah, it's tech!
| Nothing stays the same
| axi0m wrote:
| The worst part in all that noise: ask your customers what they
| need ; they will tell you "AI features". No matter what it is, or
| even how it compares to more traditional approaches when it comes
| to solving their pains. These two letters got beyond obsession.
| amelius wrote:
| Of course talking about AI is boring.
|
| The analogy is someone from the 19th century talking about their
| slaves all day which is of course nonsense because they had other
| things to talk about.
| doug_durham wrote:
| Nope. It remains the most dynamic and impactful area in software
| today. I'm sure it will fade in to common practice over the next
| few years and become less talked about. I find it infinitely more
| interesting than yet another article talking about the
| wonders/horrors of the Rust borrow checker.
| tomjakubowski wrote:
| I'm becoming more bullish on AI, but it's still frustrating how
| much of the metaphorical oxygen it's taking. I feel like I'm
| hearing less about developments in software tech outside of AI
| fields.
| elorant wrote:
| I'm bored of using the AI for anything other than my work.
| Because with my work I can give very detailed and structured
| prompts and get the best results, while also being able to
| evaluate the answer. For everything else I'm kinda worn out by
| second guessing all the time or having to enter a long thread
| until I get a decent response.
| geldedus wrote:
| I am bored of Luddite people yelling at AI
| leontrolski wrote:
| Yes, AI or no AI, tell me about something actually interesting
| that you're working on.
|
| Currently it feels a bit like everyone is talking about what new
| editor they're using. I don't care about that type of developer
| tooling very much. AI isn't coming up with some exciting new
| database, type system, etc etc.
|
| "Look at how I'm able to web dev x% faster" because of LLMs is
| boring.
| johnbarron wrote:
| Yes, all this talk about AI is extremely distracting...
| https://www.youtube.com/shorts/LDPDDS3HaGo
| Insanity wrote:
| Yes, and I'm increasingly bored of talking about 'the internet'.
| AI definitely plays a part in that, I don't want to deal with
| randomly generated articles or content. But even regular content,
| like YouTube shorts, are unhealthy for the human brain.
|
| I'm currently reading non-things by Byung-Chul Han, which is an
| interesting exploration of internet's impact on humanity/humans.
| Haven't finished it yet, but enjoying it so far.
| nickphx wrote:
| i am tired of the desparation of the hype machine.
| aiwokz wrote:
| AI is the new woke - everything it touches turns to shit.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| Many of AI articles that I see on Hacker News just don't seem
| particularly interesting, and the comments end up heavily talking
| about AI in general, rather than the article.
|
| > seems to have devolved into three different people's (almost
| identical) Claude code workflow
|
| I do feel like I've seen a number of those articles.
| rarisma wrote:
| I love AI, think its super useful, I use claude daily and follow
| the industry closely but I would love to go a day without hearing
| about it
| acedTrex wrote:
| I am so over it, its not interesting and none of the people
| participating in it really have any noteworthy skills. I spend
| more time lurking in lobste.rs these days than here.
| rednafi wrote:
| [delayed]
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