7 ms·

AI Angst

183 points by AndrewDucker 1y ago

strict9 1y ago
Angst is the best way to put it. I use AI every day, I feel like it makes me more productive, and generally supportive of it. But the angst is something else. When nearly every tech related startup seems to be about making FTEs redundant via AI it leaves me with a bad feeling for the future. Same with the impact on students and learning. Not sure where we go from here. But this feels spot on: >I think that the best we can hope for is the eventual financial meltdown leaving a few useful islands of things that are actually useful at prices that make sense.
- bob1029 1y ago
  I agree that some kind of meltdown/crash would be the best possible thing to happen. There are too many players not adding any value to the ecosystem at this point. MCP is a great example of this - Complexity merchants inventing new markets to operate in. We need something severe to scare off the bullshit artists for a while. How many civil engineering projects could we have completed ahead of schedule and under budget if we applied the same amount of wild-eyed VC and genius tier attention to the problems at hand?
  - pzo 1y ago
    MCP is now only used by really power users and mostly only in software dev settings but I see them used by users in the future. There is no decent mcp client for non tech savvy users yet. But I think if browsers will have build in better implementation of them they will be used. Think what perplexity comet or browser company dia trying to do. It's still very early for MCP.
- fellowniusmonk 1y ago
  All the angst is 100% manufactured by policy, LLMs wouldn't be hated if it didn't dovetail with the end of ZIRP, Section 174 specifically targeting engineer roles to be tax losers so others could be other tax winners, Macro Economic Uncertainty (which compounds the problems of 174.) If ours roles hadn't been specifically targeted by government policy for reduction as a way to buoy government revenues and prop up the budgetary bottom line, in the face of decreasing taxes for favored parties. This is simply policy induced multifactorial collapse. And LLMs get to take the blame from engineers because that is the excuse being used. Pretty much every old school hacker who has played around with them recognizes that LLMs are impressive and sci-fi, it's like my childhood dream come true for interface design. I cannot begin to say how fucking stupid the people in charge of these policies are, I'm an old head, I know exactly the type of 80s executives that actively likes to see the nerds suffer because we're all irritating poindexters to them. The pattern of actively attacking the freedoms and sabotaging incomes of knowledge workers is not remotely a rare pattern, and it's often done this stupidly and at the expense of an countries economic footing and ability to innovate.
perplex 1y ago
> I really don’t think there’s a coherent pro-genAI case to be made in the education context My own personal experience is that Gen AI is an amazing tool to support learning, when used properly. Seems likely there will be changes in higher education to work with gen AI instead of against it, and it could be a positive change for both teachers and students.
- Aperocky 1y ago
  Computer and internet has been around for 20 years and yet the evaluation systems of our education has largely remained the same. I don't hold my breath on this.
  - icedchai 1y ago
    Where are you located? The Internet boom in the US happened in the mid-90's. My first part-time ISP job was in 1994.
    - deleted 1y ago
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    - dowager_dan99 1y ago
      dial-up penetration in the mid-90's was still very thin, and high-speed access limited to universities and the biggest companies. Here's the numbers ChatGPT found for me: * 1990s: Internet access was rare. By 1995, only 14% of Americans were online. * 2000: Approximately 43% of U.S. households had internet access . * 2005: The number increased to 68% . * 2010: Around 72% of households were connected . * 2015: The figure rose to 75% . * 2020: Approximately 93% of U.S. adults used the internet, indicating widespread household access .
      - icedchai 1y ago
        Yes, it was thin, but 1995 - 96 was when "Internet" went mainstream. Depending on your area, you could have several dialup ISP options. Major metros like Boston had dozens. I remember hearing ISP ads on the radio! 1995 was when Windows 95 launched, and with its built in dialup networking support, allowed a "normal" person to easily get online. 1995 was the Netscape IPO, which kicked off the dot-com bubble. 1995 was when Amazon first launched their site.
sovietmudkipz 1y ago
Minor off-topic quibble about streams: I’ve been learning about network programming for realtime multiplayer games, specifically about input and output streams. I just want to voice that the names are a bit confusing due to the perspective I adopt when I think about them. Input stream = output from the perspective of the consumer. Things come out of this stream that I can programmatically react to. Output stream = input from the perspective of the producer. This is a stream you put stuff into. …so when this article starts “My input stream is full of it…” the author is saying they’re seeing output of fear and angst in their feeds. Am I alone in thinking this is a bit unintuitive?
- nemomarx 1y ago
  I think an input stream is input from the perspective of the consumer? Like it's things you are consuming or taking as inputs. Output is things you emit. Your input is ofc someone else's output, and vice versa, but you want to keep your description and thoughts to one perspective, and in a first person blog that's clearly the authors pov, right?
absurdo 1y ago
Poor HN. Is there a glimpse of the next hype train we can prepare to board once AI gets dulled down? This has basically made the site unusable.
- acedTrex 1y ago
  It has made large parts of the internet and frankly previously solid tools and products unusable. Just look at the Github product being transformed into absolute slop central its wild. Github universe was exclusively focused on useless LLM additions.
  - gh0stcat 1y ago
    I'm interested to see what the landscape of public code will look like in the next few years, with sites like StackOverflow dropping off and discussions moving to discord, plus code generation flooding github, writing your own high quality code in the open might become very valuable.
    - acedTrex 1y ago
      I am very bearish on that idea to be honest, I think the field will stagnate.
      - rightbyte 1y ago
        Giving away secret sauce for free is not the way of the new guilded era.
- yoz-y 1y ago
  At the moment 6 out of 30 front page articles are about AI. That’s honesty quite okay.
  - lagniappe 1y ago
    I use something called the Rust Index, where I compare a term or topic to the number of posts with "written in Rust" in the title.
draw_down 1y ago
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piker 1y ago
> I really don’t think there’s a coherent pro-genAI case to be made in the education context I use ChatGPT as an RNG of math problems to work through with my kid sometimes.
- Herring 1y ago
  I used it to generate SQL questions set in real-world scenarios. I needed to pick up joins intuitively, and the websites I could find were pretty dull.
lowsong 1y ago
> at the moment I’m mostly in tune with Thomas Ptacek’s My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts. It’s long and (fortunately) well-written and I (mostly) find it hard to disagree with. Ptacek has spent the past week getting dunked on in public for that article. I don't think it lends you a lot of credence to align with it. > If you’re interested in that thinking, here’s a sample; a slide deck by a Keith Riegert for the book-publishing business which, granted, is a bit stagnant and a whole lot overconcentrated these days. I suspect scrolling through it will produce a strong emotional reaction for quite a few readers here. It’s also useful in that it talks specifically about costs. You're not wrong here. I read the deck and the word that comes to mind is "disgusting". Then again, the morally bankrupt have always done horrible things to make a quick buck — AI is no different.
- icedchai 1y ago
  Getting "dunked" only means it's controversial, not necessarily wrong. Developers who don't embrace AI tools are going to get left behind.
  - bgwalter 1y ago
    Sure, tptacek will outprogram all of us. With his two GitHub repositories, one of which is a POC.
    - icedchai 1y ago
      Have you tried any of the tools, like Cursor or Zed? They increase productivity if you use them correctly. If you give them quality inputs like well written, spec-like prompts, instruct them to work in phases, provide feedback on testing, the results can be very, very good. Unsurprisingly, this is similar to what you need to give to a human to also get positive results.
  - kiitos 1y ago
    Then maybe replace "getting dunked on" with "getting ratio'd" -- underlying point is the same, the post was a bad take.
deleted 1y ago
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stevage 1y ago
I guess we're all trying to figure out where we sit along the continuum from anti-AI Luddite to all-in. My main issue with vibe coding etc is I simply don't enjoy it. Having a conversation with a computer to generate code that I don't entirely understand and then have to try to review is just not fun. It doesn't give me any of the same kind of intellectual satisfaction that I get out of actually writing code. I'm happy to use Copilot to auto-complete, and ask a few questions of ChatGPT to solve a pointy TypeScript issue or debug something, but stepping back and letting Claude or something write whole modules for me just feels sloppy and unpleasant.
- Garlef 1y ago
  > Having a conversation with a computer to generate code that I don't entirely understand and then have to try to review is just not fun. Same for me. But maybe that's ultimately an UX issue? And maybe things will straighten out once we figure out how to REALLY do AI assisted software development. As an anology: Most people wouldn't want to dig through machine code/compiler output. At least not without proper tooling. So: Maybe once we have good tools to understand the output it might be fun again. (I guess this would include advances in structuring/architecting the output)
  - bitwize 1y ago
    I think that AI assistance in coding will become enjoyable for me once the technology exists for AI to translate my brainwaves into text. Then I could think my code into computer, greatly speeding the OODA loop of programming. As it is, giving high-level directives to an LLM and debugging the output seems like a waste of my time and a hindrance to my learning process. But that's how professional coding will be done in the near future. 100% human written code will become like hand-writing a business letter in cursive: something people used to be taught in school, but no one actually does in the real world because it's too time-consuming. Ultimately, the business world only cares about productivity and what the stopwatch says is faster, not whether you enjoy or learn from the process.
  - cratermoon 1y ago
    Tim doesn't address this in his essay, so I'm going to harp on it: "AI will soon be able to...". That phrase is far too load-bearing. The part of AI hype that says, "sure, it's kinda janky now, but this is just the beginning" has been repeated for 3 years now, and everything has been just around the corner the entire time. It's the first step fallacy, saying that if we can build a really tall ladder now, surely we'll soon be able to build a ladder tall enough to reach the moon. The reality is that we've seen incremental and diminishing returns, and the promises haven't been met.
jplusequalt 1y ago
Wholeheartedly agree. I can't help but think that proponents of LLMs are not seriously considering the impact it will have on our ability to communicate with each other, or to reason on our own accord without the assistance of an LLM. It confounds me how these people would trust the same companies who fueled the decay of social discourse via the internet with the creation of AI models which aim to encroach on every aspect of our lives.
- soulofmischief 1y ago
  Some of us realize this technology was inevitable and are more focused on figuring out how society evolves from here instead of complaining and trying to legislate away math and prevent honest people from using these tools while criminals freely make use of them.
  - jplusequalt 1y ago
    >Some of us realize this technology was inevitable How was any of this inevitable? Point me to which law of physics demanded we reach this state of the universe. These companies actively choose to train these models, and by framing their development as "inevitable" you are helping absolve them of any of the negative shit they have/will cause. >figuring out how society evolves from here instead of complaining and trying to legislate away math Could you not apply this exact logic to the creation of nuclear weaponry--perhaps the greatest example of tragedy of the commons? >prevent honest people from using these tools while criminals freely make use of them What is your argument here? Should we suggest that everyone learn how to money launder to even the playing field against criminals?
    - deleted 1y ago
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    - soulofmischief 1y ago
      > Point me to which law of physics demanded we reach this state of the universe Gestures vaguely around at everything Intelligence is intelligence, and we are beginning to really get down to the fundamentals of self-organization and how order naturally emerges from chaos. > Could you not apply this exact logic to the creation of nuclear weaponry--perhaps the greatest example of tragedy of the commons? Yes, I can. Access to information is one thing (must be carefully handled, but information wants to be free, and there should be no law determining what one person can say to another, barring NDAs and government classification of national secrets (which doesn't include math and physics) but we absolutely have international treaties to limit nuclear proliferation, and we also have countries who do not participate in these treaties, or violate them, which illustrates my point that criminals will do whatever they want. > Should we suggest that everyone learn how to money launder to even the playing field against criminals? I have no interest in entertaining your straw mans. You're intelligent enough to understand context.
throwawaybob420 1y ago
It’s not angst to see the people who run the companies we work for “encourage” us to use Claude to write our code knowing full well it’s their attempt to see if they really can fire us without a hit in “productivity”. It’s not angst to see students throughout the entire spectrum end up using ChatGPT to write their papers, summarize 3 paragraphs, and use it to bypass any learning. It’s not angst to see people ask a question to an LLM and talk what it says as gospel. It’s not angst to understand the environmental impact of all this stupid fucking shit. It’s not angst to see the danger in generative AI not only just creating slop, but further blurring the lines of real and fake. It’s not angst to see the vast amount of non-consensual porn being generated of people without their knowledge. Feel like I’m going fucking crazy here, just day after day of people bowing down at the altar and legit not giving a single fuck about what happens after rofl
- bluefirebrand 1y ago
  Hey for what it's worth, you aren't alone This is a really wild and unpredictable time, and it's ok to see the problems looming and feel unsettled at how easily people are ignoring the potential oncoming train I would suggest taking some time for yourself to distance yourself from this as much as you can for your own mental health Ride this out as best you can until things settle down a bit. You aren't alone
timr 1y ago
> On the money side? I don’t see how the math and the capex work. And all the time, I think about the carbon that’s poisoning the planet my children have to live on. The "math and capex" are inextricably intertwined with "the carbon". If these tools have some value, then we can finally invest in forms of energy (i.e. nuclear) that will solve the underlying problem, and we'll all be better off. If the tools have no net value at a market-clearing price for energy (as purported), then it won't be a problem. I mean, maybe the productive way to say this is that we should more formally link the environmental cost of energy production to the market cost of energy. But as phrased (and I suspect, implied), it sounds like "people who use LLMs are just profligate consumers who don't care about the environment the way that I do," and that any societal advancement that consumes energy (as most do) is subject to this kind of generalized luddite criticism.
- lyu07282 1y ago
  > If these tools have some value, then we can finally invest in forms of energy (i.e. nuclear) that will solve the underlying problem I'm confused what you are saying, do you suggest "the market" will somehow do something to address climate change? By what mechanism? And what do LLMs have to do with that? The problem with LLMs is that they require exorbitant amounts of energy and fresh water to operate, driving a global increase in ecological destruction and carbon emissions. [ https://www.greenmemag.com/science-technology/googles-controversial-project-sparks-outrage-in-uruguay/ https://www.greenmemag.com/science-technology/googles-contro... ] That's not exactly a new thing, just making the problem worse. What is now different with LLMs as opposed to for example crypto mining?
  - timr 1y ago
    > I'm confused what you are saying, do you suggest "the market" will somehow do something to address climate change? By what mechanism? And what do LLMs have to do with that? No, I'm suggesting that the market will take care of the cost/benefit equation, and that the externalities are part of the costs. We could always do a better job of making sure that costs capture these externalities, but that's not the same thing as what the author seems to be saying. (Also I'm saying that we need to get on with nuclear already, but that's a secondary point.) > The problem with LLMs is that they require exorbitant amounts of energy and fresh water to operate, driving a global increase in ecological destruction and carbon emissions. They no more "require" this, than operating an electric car "requires" the same thing. While there may be environmental extremists who advocate for a wholesale elimination of cars, most sane people would be happy for the balance between cost and benfit represented by electric cars. Ergo, a similar balance must exist for LLMs.
schmichael 1y ago
> I really don’t think there’s a coherent pro-genAI case to be made in the education context. I think it’s simple: the reign of the essay is over. Educators must find a new way to judge a student’s understanding. Presentations, artwork, in class writing, media, discussions and debates, skits, even good old fashioned quizzes all still work fine for getting students to demonstrate understanding. As the son of two teachers I remember my parents spending hours in the evenings grading essays. While writing is a critical skill, and essays contain a good bit of information, I’m not sure education wasn’t overindexing on them already. They’re easy to assign and grade, but there’s so much toil on both ends unrelated to the core subject matter.
- thadt 1y ago
  I posit that of the various uses of student writing, the most important isn't communication or even assessment, but synthesis. Writing forces you to grapple with a subject in a way that clarifies your thinking. It's easy to think you understand something until you have to explain or apply it. Skipping that entirely, or using a LLM to do most of it for you, skips something rather important.
  - schmichael 1y ago
    > Writing forces you I agree entirely with you except for the word "forces." Writing can cause synthesis. It should. It should be graded to encourage that... ...but all of that is a whole lot of work for everyone involved: student and teacher alike. And that kind of synthesis is in no way unique to essays! All of the other mediums I mention can make synthesis more readily apparent then paragraphs of (often very low quality) prose. A clever meme lampooning the "mere merchant" status of the Medici family could demonstrate a level of understanding that would take paragraphs of prose to convey.
- ryandrake 1y ago
  I'd also say that the era of graded homework in general is over, and using "proof of toil" assignments as a meaningful measurement of a student's progress/mastery.
bgwalter 1y ago
I notice a couple of things in the pro-AI [1] posts: All start writing in a lengthy style like Steve Yegge in his peak. All are written by ex-programmers who are on the management/founder side now. All of them cite programmer friends who claim that AI is useful. It is very strange that no real open source project uses "AI" in any way. Perhaps these friends work on closed source and say what their manager wants them to say? Or they no longer care? Or they work in "AI" companies? [1] He does mention return on investment doubts and waste of energy, but claims that the agent nonsense works (without public evidence).
- bwfan123 1y ago
  There is a large number of wannabe hands-on coders who have moved on to become management - and they all either have coder-envy or coder-hatred. To them, gen-ai is a savior - Earlier, they felt out of the game - now, they feel like they can compete. Earlier they were wannabe coders. Now they are legit. But, this will last only until they accept a chunk of code put out by co-pilot and then spend the next 2 days wrangling with it. At that point, it dawns on them what these tools can actually do.
  - lezojeda 1y ago
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- orangecat 1y ago
  I'm a programmer, not a manager. I don't have a blog. AI is useful. It is very strange that no real open source project uses "AI" in any way. How do you know? Given the strong opposition that lots of people have I wouldn't expect its use to be actively publicized. But yes, I would expect that plenty of open source contributors are at the very least using Cursor-style tab completion or having AIs generate boilerplate code. Perhaps these friends work on closed source and say what their manager wants them to say? "Everyone who disagrees with me is paid to lie" is a really tiresome refrain.
- rjsw 1y ago
  At least in my main open source project, use of AI is prohibited due to potentially tainting the codebase with stuff derived from other GPL projects.
thadt 1y ago
On Learning: My wife, a high school teacher, remarked to me the other day “you know, it’s sad that my new students aren’t going to be able to do any of the fun online exercises that I used to run.” She’s all but entirely removed computers from her daily class workflow. Almost to a student, “research” has become “type it into Google and write down whatever the AI spits out at the top of the page” - no matter how much she admonishes them not to do it. We don’t even need to address what genAI does to their writing assignments. She says this is prevalent across the board, both in middle and high school. If educators don’t adapt rapidly, this is going to hit us hard and fast.
- MarkusQ 1y ago
  That's because research had already become "look up the answer somebody else found" years ago. If you want to force they to do real research, ask them things no AI knows because no one knows. Ask them to find the exact center of the classroom. Or how many peas the cafeteria throws away each year, on average. Or any of a thousand other questions that no one knows the answer to.
nikolayasdf123 1y ago
> Go programming language is especially well-suited to LLM-driven automation. It’s small, has a large standard library, and a culture that has strong shared idioms for doing almost anything +1 to this. thank you `go fmt` for uniform code. (even culture of uniform test style!). thank you culture of minimal dependencies. and of course go standard library and static/runtime tooling. thank you simple code that is easy to write for humans.. and as it turns out for AIs too.
- icedchai 1y ago
  I have found LLMs (mainly using Claude) are, indeed, excellent at spitting out Go boilerplate.
- zenlikethat 1y ago
  I found that bit slightly ironic because it always seems to produce slightly cringy Go code for me that might get the job done but skips over some of the usual design philosophies like use of interfaces, channels, and context. But for many parts, yeah, I’ve been very satisfied with Go code gen.
  - nikolayasdf123 1y ago
    of course. it is not there yet. same happens for me. AIs do not get full project view nor dynamics of classes, behavior, domains... probably that is soon coming for me it works well for small scope, isolated sub system or trivial code. unit tests, "given this example: A -> B, complete C -> ?" style transformation of classes (e.g. repositories, caches, etc.)
greybox 1y ago
This is probably the best opinion piece I've read so far on GenAI
- flufluflufluffy 1y ago
  Yep, basically sums up all of my thoughts about ai perfectly, especially the environmental impact.
greybox 1y ago
> horrifying survey of genAI’s impact on secondary and tertiary education. I agree with this. It's probably terrible for structured education for our children. The one and only one caveat: Self-Driven language learning The one and only actual use (outside of generating funny memes) I've had from any LLM so far, is language learning. That I would pay for. Not $30/pcm mind you . . . but something. I ask the model to break down a target language sentence for me, explaining each and every grammar point, and it does so very well. sometimes even going to explain the cultural relevance of certain phrases. This is great. I've not found any other use for it yet though. As a game engine programmer (C++) The code I write now a days quite deliberate and relatively little compared to a web-developer (I used to be one, I'm not pooping on web devs). so if we're talking about the time/cost of having me as a developer work on the game engine, I'm not saving any time or money by first asking Claude to type what I was going to type anyway. And it's not advanced enough yet to hold the context of our entire codebases spanning multiple components. Edit, Migaku [https://migaku.com/ https://migaku.com/] is a great language learning application that uses this As OP, I'm not sure it's worth all that CO2 we're pumping into our atmosphere.
- Alex-Programs 1y ago
  AI progress has also made high quality language translation a lot cheaper. When I started https://nuenki.app https://nuenki.app last year, the options were exorbitantly priced DeepL for decent quality low latency translation or Sonnet for slightly cheaper, much slower, but higher quality translation. Now, just a year later, DeepL is beaten by open models served by https://groq.com https://groq.com for most languages, and Claude 4 / GPT-4.1 / my hybrid LLM translator (https://nuenki.app/translator https://nuenki.app/translator) produce practically perfect translations. LLMs are also better at critiquing translations than producing them, but pre-thinking doesn't help at all, which is just fascinating. Anyway, it's a really cool topic that I'll happily talk at length about! They've made so much possible. There's a blog on the website, if anyone's curious.
Havoc 1y ago
> I think about the carbon that’s poisoning the planet my children have to live on. Tbh I think we’re going to need a big breakthrough to fix that anyway. Like fusion etc. A bit less proompting isnt going to save the day That’s not to say one shouldn’t be mindful. Just think it’s no longer enough
jillesvangurp 1y ago
I think the concerns about climate and CO2 emissions are valid but not a show stopper. The big picture here is that we are living through two amazing revolutions at the same time: 1) The emergence of LLMs and AIs that have turned the Turing test from science fiction into basically irrelevant. AI is improving at an absolutely mind boggling rate. 2) The transition from fossil fuel powered world to a world that will be net zero in few decades. The pace in the last five years has been amazing. China is basically rolling out amounts of solar and batteries that were unthinkable in even the most optimistic predictions a few years ago. The rest of the world is struggling to keep up and that's causing some issues with some countries running backward (mainly the US). It's true that a lot of AI is powered by mix of old coal plants, cheap Texan gas and a few other things that aren't sustainable (or cheap if you consider the cleanup cost). However, I live in the EU and we just got cut off from cheap Russian gas, are now running on imported expensive gas (e.g. from Texas) and have some pet peeves about data sovereignty that are causing companies like OpenAI, Meta, and Google to have to use local data centers for serving their European users. Which means that stuff is being powered with electricity that is locally supplied with a mix of old dirty legacy infrastructure and new more or less clean infrastructure. That mix is shifting rapidly towards renewables. The thing is that old dirty infrastructure has been on a downward trajectory for years. There are not a lot of new gas plants being built (LNG is not cheap) and coal plants are going extinct in a hurry because they are dirty and expensive to operate. And the few gas plants that are still being built are in stand by mode much of the time and losing money. Because renewables are cheaper. Power is expensive here but relatively clean. The way to get prices down is not to import more LNG and burn it but to do the opposite. What I like about things that increase demand for electricity is that they generate investments in providing solutions to clean energy and actually accelerate. The big picture here is that the transition to net zero is going to vastly increase demands on power grids. If you add up everything needed for industry, transport, domestic and industrial heating, aviation, etc. it's a lot. But the payoffs are also huge. People think of this as cost. That's short term thinking. The big picture here is long term. And the payoff is net zero and cheap power making energy intensive things both affordable and sustainable. We're not there yet but we're on a path towards that. For AI that means, yes, we need a lot of TW of power and some of the uses of AI seem frivolous and not that useful. But the big picture is that this is changing a lot of things as well. I see power needs as a challenge rather than a problem or reason to sit on our hands. It would be nice if that power was cheap. It so happens that currently the cheapest way to generate power happens to be through renewables. I don't think dirty power is long term smart, profitable, or necessary. And we could definitely do more to speed up its demise. But at the same time, this increased pressure on our grids is driving the very changes we need to make that happen.
swyx 1y ago
> Just to be clear, I note an absence of concern for cost and carbon in these conversations. Which is unacceptable. But let’s move on. hold on, its very simple. here's a oneliner even degrowthers would love: extra humans cost a lot more in money and carbon than it cost to have an llm spin up and down to do this work that would otherwise not get done.
spacephysics 1y ago
I disagree with genAI not having an education use case. I think a useful LLM for education would be one with heavy guardrails, which is “forced” to provide step-by-step back and forth tutoring instead of just giving out answers. Right now hallucinations would be problematic, but assuming its in a domain like Math (and maybe combined with something like Wolfram to verify outputs), i could see this theoretical tool being very helpful to learning mathematics, or even other sciences. For more open-ended subjects like english, history, etc then it may be less useful. Perhaps only as a demonstration, maybe an LLM is prompted to pretend to be a peasant from Medieval Europe, and with text to voice we could have students as a group interact with and ask questions of the LLM. In this case, maybe the LLM is only trained on historical text from specific time periods, with settings to be more deterministic and reduce hallucinations
prmph 1y ago
I finally tried Claude Code for most of last week on a toy Typescript project of moderate complexity. It's supposedly the pinnacle of agentic coding assistants, and I tend to agree, finding it far ahead of Copilot et al. Seeing it working was like a bit of magic, and it was very addictive. It successfully distracted me from my main projects that I code mostly by hand. That said, and it's kind of hard to express this well, not only is the actual productivity still far from what the hype suggests, but I regard agentic coding to be like a bad addictive drug right now. The promise of magic from the agent is always just seems around the corner: just one more prompt to finally fix the rough edges of what it has spat out, just one more helpful hint to put it on the right path/approach, just one more reminder for it to actually apply everything in CLAUDE.md each time... Believe it or not, I spent several days with it, crafting very clear and specific prompts, prodding with all kinds of hints, even supplying it with legacy code that mostly works (although written in CSharp), and at the end it had written a lot of that almost works, except a lot of simple things just wouldn't work, not matter how much time I spent with it. In the end, after a couple of hours of writing the code myself, I had a high a quality type design and basic logic, and a clear path to implementing the all the basic features. So, I don't know, for now even Claude seems mostly useful only as a sporadic helper within small contexts (drafting specific functions, code review of moderate amounts of code, relatively simple refactoring, etc). I believe knowing when AI would help vs slow you down is becoming key. For this tech to improve, maybe a genetic/evolutionary approach would be needed. Given a task, the agent should launch several models to work on the problem, with each model also launching several randomized approaches to working on the problem. Then the agent should evaluate all the responses and pick the "best" one to return.
keybored 1y ago
> My input stream is full of it: Fear and loathing and cheerleading and prognosticating on what generative AI means and whether it’s Good or Bad and what we should be doing. All the channels: Blogs and peer-reviewed papers and social-media posts and business-news stories. So there’s lots of AI angst out there, but this is mine. I think the following is a bit unique because it focuses on cost, working backward from there. As for the genAI tech itself, I guess I’m a moderate; there is a there there, it’s not all slop. Let’s see. > But, while I have a lot of sympathy for the contras and am sickened by some of the promoters, at the moment I’m mostly in tune with Thomas Ptacek’s My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts. It’s long and (fortunately) well-written and I (mostly) find it hard to disagree with. So the Moderate is a Believer. But it’s offset by being concerned about The Climate and The Education and The Investments. You can try to write a self-aware/moment-aware intro. It’s the same fodder for the front page.
- CaptainFever 1y ago
  As someone who is pretty strongly pro-AI, I felt that the article was leaning a bit on the anti side. So given our two opinions, I think "moderate" is a pretty good descriptor (people on both sides think you lean towards the other side).
  - keybored 1y ago
    The primary purpose[1] of flooding the frontpage with AI thinkpieces is to, more narrowly, champion the AI application towards software development. Being skeptical towards electricity use and uses in Education are not as important. [1] Which is an emergent phenomena
nicbou 1y ago
One aspect is missing: content creation. AI is completely destroying the economics of putting out free information. LLMs still relies on human beings to experience and document the real world, but they strip those humans of the reward. Creators lose the income, credit and community that come with having an audience. In the long term, I fear that a lot of the quality information will disappear because it's no longer worth creating. I wrote a bit about this earlier in a very relevant thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44099570 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44099570
enknee1 1y ago
The real value in vibe coding does not come to developers who are already out at the bleeding edge of technology. Vibe codings true value is for people who know very little about programming, who know just enough to be able to debug the a type issue, or who have the time to read and research the issues outside of the general structure provided by LLMs. I've never created an Android app before. But I can do that in 24 hours now. These tools are 2 years old. They're vastly superior to their versions from two years ago. As people continue to utilize and provide feedback these tools will continue to improve and become better and better at providing customers (non-programmers) access to features, tools, and technologies that they would otherwise have to rely on a team of developers for. Personally I cannot afford the thousands of dollars per hour required to retain a team of top shelf developers for some crazy hair brained Bluetooth automation for my house lighting scheme. I can, however, spend a weekend playing around with Claude (and chat GPT and...). And I can get close enough. I don't need a production tool. I just need the software to do the little thing, the two seconds of work, that I don't want to do every single day. Who's created a RAG pipeline? Not me! But I can walkthrough the BS necessary to get PostGRE, FastAPI, and Llama 3 set up so that I start automating email management. And that's the beauty: I don't have to know everything anymore! Not spend months trying to parse all the specialized language surrounding the tools I'll need to implement. I just need to ask the questions I don't have answers for, making sure that I ask enough that the answers tie back into what I do know. And LLM's and vibe coding do that just fine.

183 points by AndrewDucker 1y ago

Angst is the best way to put it. I use AI every day, I feel like it makes me more productive, and generally supportive of it. But the angst is something else. When nearly every tech related startup seems to be about making FTEs redundant via AI it leaves me with a bad feeling for the future. Same with the impact on students and learning. Not sure where we go from here. But this feels spot on: >I think that the best we can hope for is the eventual financial meltdown leaving a few useful islands of things that are actually useful at prices that make sense.

bob1029 1y ago
I agree that some kind of meltdown/crash would be the best possible thing to happen. There are too many players not adding any value to the ecosystem at this point. MCP is a great example of this - Complexity merchants inventing new markets to operate in. We need something severe to scare off the bullshit artists for a while. How many civil engineering projects could we have completed ahead of schedule and under budget if we applied the same amount of wild-eyed VC and genius tier attention to the problems at hand?
- pzo 1y ago
  MCP is now only used by really power users and mostly only in software dev settings but I see them used by users in the future. There is no decent mcp client for non tech savvy users yet. But I think if browsers will have build in better implementation of them they will be used. Think what perplexity comet or browser company dia trying to do. It's still very early for MCP.
fellowniusmonk 1y ago
All the angst is 100% manufactured by policy, LLMs wouldn't be hated if it didn't dovetail with the end of ZIRP, Section 174 specifically targeting engineer roles to be tax losers so others could be other tax winners, Macro Economic Uncertainty (which compounds the problems of 174.) If ours roles hadn't been specifically targeted by government policy for reduction as a way to buoy government revenues and prop up the budgetary bottom line, in the face of decreasing taxes for favored parties. This is simply policy induced multifactorial collapse. And LLMs get to take the blame from engineers because that is the excuse being used. Pretty much every old school hacker who has played around with them recognizes that LLMs are impressive and sci-fi, it's like my childhood dream come true for interface design. I cannot begin to say how fucking stupid the people in charge of these policies are, I'm an old head, I know exactly the type of 80s executives that actively likes to see the nerds suffer because we're all irritating poindexters to them. The pattern of actively attacking the freedoms and sabotaging incomes of knowledge workers is not remotely a rare pattern, and it's often done this stupidly and at the expense of an countries economic footing and ability to innovate.

perplex 1y ago

> I really don’t think there’s a coherent pro-genAI case to be made in the education context My own personal experience is that Gen AI is an amazing tool to support learning, when used properly. Seems likely there will be changes in higher education to work with gen AI instead of against it, and it could be a positive change for both teachers and students.

Aperocky 1y ago
Computer and internet has been around for 20 years and yet the evaluation systems of our education has largely remained the same. I don't hold my breath on this.
- icedchai 1y ago
  Where are you located? The Internet boom in the US happened in the mid-90's. My first part-time ISP job was in 1994.
  - deleted 1y ago
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  - dowager_dan99 1y ago
    dial-up penetration in the mid-90's was still very thin, and high-speed access limited to universities and the biggest companies. Here's the numbers ChatGPT found for me: * 1990s: Internet access was rare. By 1995, only 14% of Americans were online. * 2000: Approximately 43% of U.S. households had internet access . * 2005: The number increased to 68% . * 2010: Around 72% of households were connected . * 2015: The figure rose to 75% . * 2020: Approximately 93% of U.S. adults used the internet, indicating widespread household access .
    - icedchai 1y ago
      Yes, it was thin, but 1995 - 96 was when "Internet" went mainstream. Depending on your area, you could have several dialup ISP options. Major metros like Boston had dozens. I remember hearing ISP ads on the radio! 1995 was when Windows 95 launched, and with its built in dialup networking support, allowed a "normal" person to easily get online. 1995 was the Netscape IPO, which kicked off the dot-com bubble. 1995 was when Amazon first launched their site.

sovietmudkipz 1y ago

Minor off-topic quibble about streams: I’ve been learning about network programming for realtime multiplayer games, specifically about input and output streams. I just want to voice that the names are a bit confusing due to the perspective I adopt when I think about them. Input stream = output from the perspective of the consumer. Things come out of this stream that I can programmatically react to. Output stream = input from the perspective of the producer. This is a stream you put stuff into. …so when this article starts “My input stream is full of it…” the author is saying they’re seeing output of fear and angst in their feeds. Am I alone in thinking this is a bit unintuitive?

nemomarx 1y ago
I think an input stream is input from the perspective of the consumer? Like it's things you are consuming or taking as inputs. Output is things you emit. Your input is ofc someone else's output, and vice versa, but you want to keep your description and thoughts to one perspective, and in a first person blog that's clearly the authors pov, right?

absurdo 1y ago

Poor HN. Is there a glimpse of the next hype train we can prepare to board once AI gets dulled down? This has basically made the site unusable.

acedTrex 1y ago
It has made large parts of the internet and frankly previously solid tools and products unusable. Just look at the Github product being transformed into absolute slop central its wild. Github universe was exclusively focused on useless LLM additions.
- gh0stcat 1y ago
  I'm interested to see what the landscape of public code will look like in the next few years, with sites like StackOverflow dropping off and discussions moving to discord, plus code generation flooding github, writing your own high quality code in the open might become very valuable.
  - acedTrex 1y ago
    I am very bearish on that idea to be honest, I think the field will stagnate.
    - rightbyte 1y ago
      Giving away secret sauce for free is not the way of the new guilded era.
yoz-y 1y ago
At the moment 6 out of 30 front page articles are about AI. That’s honesty quite okay.
- lagniappe 1y ago
  I use something called the Rust Index, where I compare a term or topic to the number of posts with "written in Rust" in the title.

draw_down 1y ago

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piker 1y ago

> I really don’t think there’s a coherent pro-genAI case to be made in the education context I use ChatGPT as an RNG of math problems to work through with my kid sometimes.

Herring 1y ago
I used it to generate SQL questions set in real-world scenarios. I needed to pick up joins intuitively, and the websites I could find were pretty dull.

lowsong 1y ago

> at the moment I’m mostly in tune with Thomas Ptacek’s My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts. It’s long and (fortunately) well-written and I (mostly) find it hard to disagree with. Ptacek has spent the past week getting dunked on in public for that article. I don't think it lends you a lot of credence to align with it. > If you’re interested in that thinking, here’s a sample; a slide deck by a Keith Riegert for the book-publishing business which, granted, is a bit stagnant and a whole lot overconcentrated these days. I suspect scrolling through it will produce a strong emotional reaction for quite a few readers here. It’s also useful in that it talks specifically about costs. You're not wrong here. I read the deck and the word that comes to mind is "disgusting". Then again, the morally bankrupt have always done horrible things to make a quick buck — AI is no different.

icedchai 1y ago
Getting "dunked" only means it's controversial, not necessarily wrong. Developers who don't embrace AI tools are going to get left behind.
- bgwalter 1y ago
  Sure, tptacek will outprogram all of us. With his two GitHub repositories, one of which is a POC.
  - icedchai 1y ago
    Have you tried any of the tools, like Cursor or Zed? They increase productivity if you use them correctly. If you give them quality inputs like well written, spec-like prompts, instruct them to work in phases, provide feedback on testing, the results can be very, very good. Unsurprisingly, this is similar to what you need to give to a human to also get positive results.
- kiitos 1y ago
  Then maybe replace "getting dunked on" with "getting ratio'd" -- underlying point is the same, the post was a bad take.

deleted 1y ago

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stevage 1y ago

I guess we're all trying to figure out where we sit along the continuum from anti-AI Luddite to all-in. My main issue with vibe coding etc is I simply don't enjoy it. Having a conversation with a computer to generate code that I don't entirely understand and then have to try to review is just not fun. It doesn't give me any of the same kind of intellectual satisfaction that I get out of actually writing code. I'm happy to use Copilot to auto-complete, and ask a few questions of ChatGPT to solve a pointy TypeScript issue or debug something, but stepping back and letting Claude or something write whole modules for me just feels sloppy and unpleasant.

Garlef 1y ago
> Having a conversation with a computer to generate code that I don't entirely understand and then have to try to review is just not fun. Same for me. But maybe that's ultimately an UX issue? And maybe things will straighten out once we figure out how to REALLY do AI assisted software development. As an anology: Most people wouldn't want to dig through machine code/compiler output. At least not without proper tooling. So: Maybe once we have good tools to understand the output it might be fun again. (I guess this would include advances in structuring/architecting the output)
- bitwize 1y ago
  I think that AI assistance in coding will become enjoyable for me once the technology exists for AI to translate my brainwaves into text. Then I could think my code into computer, greatly speeding the OODA loop of programming. As it is, giving high-level directives to an LLM and debugging the output seems like a waste of my time and a hindrance to my learning process. But that's how professional coding will be done in the near future. 100% human written code will become like hand-writing a business letter in cursive: something people used to be taught in school, but no one actually does in the real world because it's too time-consuming. Ultimately, the business world only cares about productivity and what the stopwatch says is faster, not whether you enjoy or learn from the process.
- cratermoon 1y ago
  Tim doesn't address this in his essay, so I'm going to harp on it: "AI will soon be able to...". That phrase is far too load-bearing. The part of AI hype that says, "sure, it's kinda janky now, but this is just the beginning" has been repeated for 3 years now, and everything has been just around the corner the entire time. It's the first step fallacy, saying that if we can build a really tall ladder now, surely we'll soon be able to build a ladder tall enough to reach the moon. The reality is that we've seen incremental and diminishing returns, and the promises haven't been met.

jplusequalt 1y ago

Wholeheartedly agree. I can't help but think that proponents of LLMs are not seriously considering the impact it will have on our ability to communicate with each other, or to reason on our own accord without the assistance of an LLM. It confounds me how these people would trust the same companies who fueled the decay of social discourse via the internet with the creation of AI models which aim to encroach on every aspect of our lives.

soulofmischief 1y ago
Some of us realize this technology was inevitable and are more focused on figuring out how society evolves from here instead of complaining and trying to legislate away math and prevent honest people from using these tools while criminals freely make use of them.
- jplusequalt 1y ago
  >Some of us realize this technology was inevitable How was any of this inevitable? Point me to which law of physics demanded we reach this state of the universe. These companies actively choose to train these models, and by framing their development as "inevitable" you are helping absolve them of any of the negative shit they have/will cause. >figuring out how society evolves from here instead of complaining and trying to legislate away math Could you not apply this exact logic to the creation of nuclear weaponry--perhaps the greatest example of tragedy of the commons? >prevent honest people from using these tools while criminals freely make use of them What is your argument here? Should we suggest that everyone learn how to money launder to even the playing field against criminals?
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - soulofmischief 1y ago
    > Point me to which law of physics demanded we reach this state of the universe Gestures vaguely around at everything Intelligence is intelligence, and we are beginning to really get down to the fundamentals of self-organization and how order naturally emerges from chaos. > Could you not apply this exact logic to the creation of nuclear weaponry--perhaps the greatest example of tragedy of the commons? Yes, I can. Access to information is one thing (must be carefully handled, but information wants to be free, and there should be no law determining what one person can say to another, barring NDAs and government classification of national secrets (which doesn't include math and physics) but we absolutely have international treaties to limit nuclear proliferation, and we also have countries who do not participate in these treaties, or violate them, which illustrates my point that criminals will do whatever they want. > Should we suggest that everyone learn how to money launder to even the playing field against criminals? I have no interest in entertaining your straw mans. You're intelligent enough to understand context.

throwawaybob420 1y ago

It’s not angst to see the people who run the companies we work for “encourage” us to use Claude to write our code knowing full well it’s their attempt to see if they really can fire us without a hit in “productivity”. It’s not angst to see students throughout the entire spectrum end up using ChatGPT to write their papers, summarize 3 paragraphs, and use it to bypass any learning. It’s not angst to see people ask a question to an LLM and talk what it says as gospel. It’s not angst to understand the environmental impact of all this stupid fucking shit. It’s not angst to see the danger in generative AI not only just creating slop, but further blurring the lines of real and fake. It’s not angst to see the vast amount of non-consensual porn being generated of people without their knowledge. Feel like I’m going fucking crazy here, just day after day of people bowing down at the altar and legit not giving a single fuck about what happens after rofl

bluefirebrand 1y ago
Hey for what it's worth, you aren't alone This is a really wild and unpredictable time, and it's ok to see the problems looming and feel unsettled at how easily people are ignoring the potential oncoming train I would suggest taking some time for yourself to distance yourself from this as much as you can for your own mental health Ride this out as best you can until things settle down a bit. You aren't alone

timr 1y ago

> On the money side? I don’t see how the math and the capex work. And all the time, I think about the carbon that’s poisoning the planet my children have to live on. The "math and capex" are inextricably intertwined with "the carbon". If these tools have some value, then we can finally invest in forms of energy (i.e. nuclear) that will solve the underlying problem, and we'll all be better off. If the tools have no net value at a market-clearing price for energy (as purported), then it won't be a problem. I mean, maybe the productive way to say this is that we should more formally link the environmental cost of energy production to the market cost of energy. But as phrased (and I suspect, implied), it sounds like "people who use LLMs are just profligate consumers who don't care about the environment the way that I do," and that any societal advancement that consumes energy (as most do) is subject to this kind of generalized luddite criticism.

lyu07282 1y ago
> If these tools have some value, then we can finally invest in forms of energy (i.e. nuclear) that will solve the underlying problem I'm confused what you are saying, do you suggest "the market" will somehow do something to address climate change? By what mechanism? And what do LLMs have to do with that? The problem with LLMs is that they require exorbitant amounts of energy and fresh water to operate, driving a global increase in ecological destruction and carbon emissions. [ https://www.greenmemag.com/science-technology/googles-controversial-project-sparks-outrage-in-uruguay/ https://www.greenmemag.com/science-technology/googles-contro... ] That's not exactly a new thing, just making the problem worse. What is now different with LLMs as opposed to for example crypto mining?
- timr 1y ago
  > I'm confused what you are saying, do you suggest "the market" will somehow do something to address climate change? By what mechanism? And what do LLMs have to do with that? No, I'm suggesting that the market will take care of the cost/benefit equation, and that the externalities are part of the costs. We could always do a better job of making sure that costs capture these externalities, but that's not the same thing as what the author seems to be saying. (Also I'm saying that we need to get on with nuclear already, but that's a secondary point.) > The problem with LLMs is that they require exorbitant amounts of energy and fresh water to operate, driving a global increase in ecological destruction and carbon emissions. They no more "require" this, than operating an electric car "requires" the same thing. While there may be environmental extremists who advocate for a wholesale elimination of cars, most sane people would be happy for the balance between cost and benfit represented by electric cars. Ergo, a similar balance must exist for LLMs.

schmichael 1y ago

> I really don’t think there’s a coherent pro-genAI case to be made in the education context. I think it’s simple: the reign of the essay is over. Educators must find a new way to judge a student’s understanding. Presentations, artwork, in class writing, media, discussions and debates, skits, even good old fashioned quizzes all still work fine for getting students to demonstrate understanding. As the son of two teachers I remember my parents spending hours in the evenings grading essays. While writing is a critical skill, and essays contain a good bit of information, I’m not sure education wasn’t overindexing on them already. They’re easy to assign and grade, but there’s so much toil on both ends unrelated to the core subject matter.

thadt 1y ago
I posit that of the various uses of student writing, the most important isn't communication or even assessment, but synthesis. Writing forces you to grapple with a subject in a way that clarifies your thinking. It's easy to think you understand something until you have to explain or apply it. Skipping that entirely, or using a LLM to do most of it for you, skips something rather important.
- schmichael 1y ago
  > Writing forces you I agree entirely with you except for the word "forces." Writing can cause synthesis. It should. It should be graded to encourage that... ...but all of that is a whole lot of work for everyone involved: student and teacher alike. And that kind of synthesis is in no way unique to essays! All of the other mediums I mention can make synthesis more readily apparent then paragraphs of (often very low quality) prose. A clever meme lampooning the "mere merchant" status of the Medici family could demonstrate a level of understanding that would take paragraphs of prose to convey.
ryandrake 1y ago
I'd also say that the era of graded homework in general is over, and using "proof of toil" assignments as a meaningful measurement of a student's progress/mastery.

bgwalter 1y ago

I notice a couple of things in the pro-AI [1] posts: All start writing in a lengthy style like Steve Yegge in his peak. All are written by ex-programmers who are on the management/founder side now. All of them cite programmer friends who claim that AI is useful. It is very strange that no real open source project uses "AI" in any way. Perhaps these friends work on closed source and say what their manager wants them to say? Or they no longer care? Or they work in "AI" companies? [1] He does mention return on investment doubts and waste of energy, but claims that the agent nonsense works (without public evidence).

bwfan123 1y ago
There is a large number of wannabe hands-on coders who have moved on to become management - and they all either have coder-envy or coder-hatred. To them, gen-ai is a savior - Earlier, they felt out of the game - now, they feel like they can compete. Earlier they were wannabe coders. Now they are legit. But, this will last only until they accept a chunk of code put out by co-pilot and then spend the next 2 days wrangling with it. At that point, it dawns on them what these tools can actually do.
- lezojeda 1y ago
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orangecat 1y ago
I'm a programmer, not a manager. I don't have a blog. AI is useful. It is very strange that no real open source project uses "AI" in any way. How do you know? Given the strong opposition that lots of people have I wouldn't expect its use to be actively publicized. But yes, I would expect that plenty of open source contributors are at the very least using Cursor-style tab completion or having AIs generate boilerplate code. Perhaps these friends work on closed source and say what their manager wants them to say? "Everyone who disagrees with me is paid to lie" is a really tiresome refrain.
rjsw 1y ago
At least in my main open source project, use of AI is prohibited due to potentially tainting the codebase with stuff derived from other GPL projects.

thadt 1y ago

On Learning: My wife, a high school teacher, remarked to me the other day “you know, it’s sad that my new students aren’t going to be able to do any of the fun online exercises that I used to run.” She’s all but entirely removed computers from her daily class workflow. Almost to a student, “research” has become “type it into Google and write down whatever the AI spits out at the top of the page” - no matter how much she admonishes them not to do it. We don’t even need to address what genAI does to their writing assignments. She says this is prevalent across the board, both in middle and high school. If educators don’t adapt rapidly, this is going to hit us hard and fast.

MarkusQ 1y ago
That's because research had already become "look up the answer somebody else found" years ago. If you want to force they to do real research, ask them things no AI knows because no one knows. Ask them to find the exact center of the classroom. Or how many peas the cafeteria throws away each year, on average. Or any of a thousand other questions that no one knows the answer to.

nikolayasdf123 1y ago

> Go programming language is especially well-suited to LLM-driven automation. It’s small, has a large standard library, and a culture that has strong shared idioms for doing almost anything +1 to this. thank you `go fmt` for uniform code. (even culture of uniform test style!). thank you culture of minimal dependencies. and of course go standard library and static/runtime tooling. thank you simple code that is easy to write for humans.. and as it turns out for AIs too.

icedchai 1y ago
I have found LLMs (mainly using Claude) are, indeed, excellent at spitting out Go boilerplate.
zenlikethat 1y ago
I found that bit slightly ironic because it always seems to produce slightly cringy Go code for me that might get the job done but skips over some of the usual design philosophies like use of interfaces, channels, and context. But for many parts, yeah, I’ve been very satisfied with Go code gen.
- nikolayasdf123 1y ago
  of course. it is not there yet. same happens for me. AIs do not get full project view nor dynamics of classes, behavior, domains... probably that is soon coming for me it works well for small scope, isolated sub system or trivial code. unit tests, "given this example: A -> B, complete C -> ?" style transformation of classes (e.g. repositories, caches, etc.)

greybox 1y ago

This is probably the best opinion piece I've read so far on GenAI

flufluflufluffy 1y ago
Yep, basically sums up all of my thoughts about ai perfectly, especially the environmental impact.

greybox 1y ago

> horrifying survey of genAI’s impact on secondary and tertiary education. I agree with this. It's probably terrible for structured education for our children. The one and only one caveat: Self-Driven language learning The one and only actual use (outside of generating funny memes) I've had from any LLM so far, is language learning. That I would pay for. Not $30/pcm mind you . . . but something. I ask the model to break down a target language sentence for me, explaining each and every grammar point, and it does so very well. sometimes even going to explain the cultural relevance of certain phrases. This is great. I've not found any other use for it yet though. As a game engine programmer (C++) The code I write now a days quite deliberate and relatively little compared to a web-developer (I used to be one, I'm not pooping on web devs). so if we're talking about the time/cost of having me as a developer work on the game engine, I'm not saving any time or money by first asking Claude to type what I was going to type anyway. And it's not advanced enough yet to hold the context of our entire codebases spanning multiple components. Edit, Migaku [https://migaku.com/ https://migaku.com/] is a great language learning application that uses this As OP, I'm not sure it's worth all that CO2 we're pumping into our atmosphere.

Alex-Programs 1y ago
AI progress has also made high quality language translation a lot cheaper. When I started https://nuenki.app https://nuenki.app last year, the options were exorbitantly priced DeepL for decent quality low latency translation or Sonnet for slightly cheaper, much slower, but higher quality translation. Now, just a year later, DeepL is beaten by open models served by https://groq.com https://groq.com for most languages, and Claude 4 / GPT-4.1 / my hybrid LLM translator (https://nuenki.app/translator https://nuenki.app/translator) produce practically perfect translations. LLMs are also better at critiquing translations than producing them, but pre-thinking doesn't help at all, which is just fascinating. Anyway, it's a really cool topic that I'll happily talk at length about! They've made so much possible. There's a blog on the website, if anyone's curious.

Havoc 1y ago

> I think about the carbon that’s poisoning the planet my children have to live on. Tbh I think we’re going to need a big breakthrough to fix that anyway. Like fusion etc. A bit less proompting isnt going to save the day That’s not to say one shouldn’t be mindful. Just think it’s no longer enough

jillesvangurp 1y ago

I think the concerns about climate and CO2 emissions are valid but not a show stopper. The big picture here is that we are living through two amazing revolutions at the same time: 1) The emergence of LLMs and AIs that have turned the Turing test from science fiction into basically irrelevant. AI is improving at an absolutely mind boggling rate. 2) The transition from fossil fuel powered world to a world that will be net zero in few decades. The pace in the last five years has been amazing. China is basically rolling out amounts of solar and batteries that were unthinkable in even the most optimistic predictions a few years ago. The rest of the world is struggling to keep up and that's causing some issues with some countries running backward (mainly the US). It's true that a lot of AI is powered by mix of old coal plants, cheap Texan gas and a few other things that aren't sustainable (or cheap if you consider the cleanup cost). However, I live in the EU and we just got cut off from cheap Russian gas, are now running on imported expensive gas (e.g. from Texas) and have some pet peeves about data sovereignty that are causing companies like OpenAI, Meta, and Google to have to use local data centers for serving their European users. Which means that stuff is being powered with electricity that is locally supplied with a mix of old dirty legacy infrastructure and new more or less clean infrastructure. That mix is shifting rapidly towards renewables. The thing is that old dirty infrastructure has been on a downward trajectory for years. There are not a lot of new gas plants being built (LNG is not cheap) and coal plants are going extinct in a hurry because they are dirty and expensive to operate. And the few gas plants that are still being built are in stand by mode much of the time and losing money. Because renewables are cheaper. Power is expensive here but relatively clean. The way to get prices down is not to import more LNG and burn it but to do the opposite. What I like about things that increase demand for electricity is that they generate investments in providing solutions to clean energy and actually accelerate. The big picture here is that the transition to net zero is going to vastly increase demands on power grids. If you add up everything needed for industry, transport, domestic and industrial heating, aviation, etc. it's a lot. But the payoffs are also huge. People think of this as cost. That's short term thinking. The big picture here is long term. And the payoff is net zero and cheap power making energy intensive things both affordable and sustainable. We're not there yet but we're on a path towards that. For AI that means, yes, we need a lot of TW of power and some of the uses of AI seem frivolous and not that useful. But the big picture is that this is changing a lot of things as well. I see power needs as a challenge rather than a problem or reason to sit on our hands. It would be nice if that power was cheap. It so happens that currently the cheapest way to generate power happens to be through renewables. I don't think dirty power is long term smart, profitable, or necessary. And we could definitely do more to speed up its demise. But at the same time, this increased pressure on our grids is driving the very changes we need to make that happen.

swyx 1y ago

> Just to be clear, I note an absence of concern for cost and carbon in these conversations. Which is unacceptable. But let’s move on. hold on, its very simple. here's a oneliner even degrowthers would love: extra humans cost a lot more in money and carbon than it cost to have an llm spin up and down to do this work that would otherwise not get done.

spacephysics 1y ago

I disagree with genAI not having an education use case. I think a useful LLM for education would be one with heavy guardrails, which is “forced” to provide step-by-step back and forth tutoring instead of just giving out answers. Right now hallucinations would be problematic, but assuming its in a domain like Math (and maybe combined with something like Wolfram to verify outputs), i could see this theoretical tool being very helpful to learning mathematics, or even other sciences. For more open-ended subjects like english, history, etc then it may be less useful. Perhaps only as a demonstration, maybe an LLM is prompted to pretend to be a peasant from Medieval Europe, and with text to voice we could have students as a group interact with and ask questions of the LLM. In this case, maybe the LLM is only trained on historical text from specific time periods, with settings to be more deterministic and reduce hallucinations

prmph 1y ago

I finally tried Claude Code for most of last week on a toy Typescript project of moderate complexity. It's supposedly the pinnacle of agentic coding assistants, and I tend to agree, finding it far ahead of Copilot et al. Seeing it working was like a bit of magic, and it was very addictive. It successfully distracted me from my main projects that I code mostly by hand. That said, and it's kind of hard to express this well, not only is the actual productivity still far from what the hype suggests, but I regard agentic coding to be like a bad addictive drug right now. The promise of magic from the agent is always just seems around the corner: just one more prompt to finally fix the rough edges of what it has spat out, just one more helpful hint to put it on the right path/approach, just one more reminder for it to actually apply everything in CLAUDE.md each time... Believe it or not, I spent several days with it, crafting very clear and specific prompts, prodding with all kinds of hints, even supplying it with legacy code that mostly works (although written in CSharp), and at the end it had written a lot of that almost works, except a lot of simple things just wouldn't work, not matter how much time I spent with it. In the end, after a couple of hours of writing the code myself, I had a high a quality type design and basic logic, and a clear path to implementing the all the basic features. So, I don't know, for now even Claude seems mostly useful only as a sporadic helper within small contexts (drafting specific functions, code review of moderate amounts of code, relatively simple refactoring, etc). I believe knowing when AI would help vs slow you down is becoming key. For this tech to improve, maybe a genetic/evolutionary approach would be needed. Given a task, the agent should launch several models to work on the problem, with each model also launching several randomized approaches to working on the problem. Then the agent should evaluate all the responses and pick the "best" one to return.

keybored 1y ago

> My input stream is full of it: Fear and loathing and cheerleading and prognosticating on what generative AI means and whether it’s Good or Bad and what we should be doing. All the channels: Blogs and peer-reviewed papers and social-media posts and business-news stories. So there’s lots of AI angst out there, but this is mine. I think the following is a bit unique because it focuses on cost, working backward from there. As for the genAI tech itself, I guess I’m a moderate; there is a there there, it’s not all slop. Let’s see. > But, while I have a lot of sympathy for the contras and am sickened by some of the promoters, at the moment I’m mostly in tune with Thomas Ptacek’s My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts. It’s long and (fortunately) well-written and I (mostly) find it hard to disagree with. So the Moderate is a Believer. But it’s offset by being concerned about The Climate and The Education and The Investments. You can try to write a self-aware/moment-aware intro. It’s the same fodder for the front page.

CaptainFever 1y ago
As someone who is pretty strongly pro-AI, I felt that the article was leaning a bit on the anti side. So given our two opinions, I think "moderate" is a pretty good descriptor (people on both sides think you lean towards the other side).
- keybored 1y ago
  The primary purpose[1] of flooding the frontpage with AI thinkpieces is to, more narrowly, champion the AI application towards software development. Being skeptical towards electricity use and uses in Education are not as important. [1] Which is an emergent phenomena

nicbou 1y ago

One aspect is missing: content creation. AI is completely destroying the economics of putting out free information. LLMs still relies on human beings to experience and document the real world, but they strip those humans of the reward. Creators lose the income, credit and community that come with having an audience. In the long term, I fear that a lot of the quality information will disappear because it's no longer worth creating. I wrote a bit about this earlier in a very relevant thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44099570 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44099570

enknee1 1y ago

The real value in vibe coding does not come to developers who are already out at the bleeding edge of technology. Vibe codings true value is for people who know very little about programming, who know just enough to be able to debug the a type issue, or who have the time to read and research the issues outside of the general structure provided by LLMs. I've never created an Android app before. But I can do that in 24 hours now. These tools are 2 years old. They're vastly superior to their versions from two years ago. As people continue to utilize and provide feedback these tools will continue to improve and become better and better at providing customers (non-programmers) access to features, tools, and technologies that they would otherwise have to rely on a team of developers for. Personally I cannot afford the thousands of dollars per hour required to retain a team of top shelf developers for some crazy hair brained Bluetooth automation for my house lighting scheme. I can, however, spend a weekend playing around with Claude (and chat GPT and...). And I can get close enough. I don't need a production tool. I just need the software to do the little thing, the two seconds of work, that I don't want to do every single day. Who's created a RAG pipeline? Not me! But I can walkthrough the BS necessary to get PostGRE, FastAPI, and Llama 3 set up so that I start automating email management. And that's the beauty: I don't have to know everything anymore! Not spend months trying to parse all the specialized language surrounding the tools I'll need to implement. I just need to ask the questions I don't have answers for, making sure that I ask enough that the answers tie back into what I do know. And LLM's and vibe coding do that just fine.