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> I find it particularly disillusioning to realize how deep the LLM brainworm is able to eat itself even into progressive hacker circles. That's the thing, hac

> I find it particularly disillusioning to realize how deep the LLM brainworm is able to eat itself even into progressive hacker circles. That's the thing, hacker circles didn't always have this 'progressive' luddite mentality. This is the culture that replaced hacker culture. I don't like AI, generally. I am skeptical of corporate influence, I doubt AI 2027 and so-called 'AGI'. I'm certain we'll be "five years away" from superintelligence for the forseeable future. All that said, the actual workday is absolutely filled with busy work that no one really wants to do, and the refusal of a loud minority to engage with that fact is what's leading to this. It's why people can't post a meme, quote, article, whatever could be interpreted (very often, falsely) as AI-generated in a public channel, or ask a chatbot to explain a hand-drawn image without the off chance that they get an earful from one of these 'progressive' people. These people bring way more toxicity to daily life than who they wage their campaigns against.

poszlem 11mo ago
> That's the thing, hacker circles didn't always have this 'progressive' luddite mentality. This is the culture that replaced hacker culture. People who haven't lived through the transition will likely come here to tell you how wrong you are, but you are 100% correct.
- codeflo 11mo ago
  You were proven right three minutes after you posted this. Something happened, I'm not sure what and how. Hacking became reduced to "hacktivism", and technology stopped being the object of interest in those spaces.
  - Blackthorn 11mo ago
    > and technology stopped being the object of interest in those spaces. That happened because technology stopped being fun. When we were kids, seeing Penny communicating with Brain through her watch was neat and cool! Then when it happened in real life, it turned out that it was just a platform to inject you with more advertisements. The "something" that happened was ads. They poisoned all the fun and interest out of technology. Where is technology still fun? The places that don't have ads being vomited at you 24/7. At-home CNC (including 3d printing, to some extent) is still fun. Digital music is still fun.
    - phil21 11mo ago
      >The "something" that happened was ads. They poisoned all the fun and interest out of technology. Disagree. Ads hurt, but not as much as technology being invaded by the regular masses who have no inherit interest in tech for the sake of tech. Ads came after this since they needed an audience first. Once that line was crossed, it all became far less fun for those who were in it for the sheer joy, exploration, and escape from the mundane social expectations wider society has. It may encompass both "hot takes" to simply say money ruined tech. Once future finance bros realized tech was easier than being an investment banker for the easy life - all hope was lost.
      - Blackthorn 11mo ago
        I don't think that just because something becomes accessible to a lot more people that it devalues the experience. To use the two examples I gave in this thread. Digital music is more accessible than ever before and it's going from strength to strength. While at-home subtractive CNC is still in the realm of deep hobbyists, 3d printing* and CNC cutting/plotting* (Cricut, others) have been accessible and interested by the masses for a decade now and those spaces are thriving! * Despite the best efforts of some of the sellers of these to lock down and enshittify the platforms. If this continues, this might change and fall into the general tech malaise, and it will be a great loss if that happens.
    - tekne 11mo ago
      It's not ads, honestly. It's quality. The tool being designed to empower the user. Have you ever seen something encrusted in ads be designed to empower the user? At least, it necessitates reducing the user's power to remove the ads. But it's fundamentally a correlation, and this observation is important because something can be completely ad-free and yet disempowering and hence unpleasant to use; it's just that vice-versa is rare.
      - SpicyLemonZest 11mo ago
        > It's not ads, honestly. It's quality. The tool being designed to empower the user. Have you ever seen something encrusted in ads be designed to empower the user? At least, it necessitates reducing the user's power to remove the ads. Yes, a number of ad-supported sites are designed to empower the user. Video streaming platforms, for example, give me nearly unlimited freedom to watch what I want when I want. When I was growing up, TV executives picked a small set of videos to make available at 10 am, and if I didn’t want to watch one of those videos I didn’t get to watch anything. It’s not even a tradeoff, TV shows had more frequent and more annoying ads.
  - benmmurphy 11mo ago
    my guess is something like detailed in this article: https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths
- dude250711 11mo ago
  The folks who love command-line and terminals had not been luddites all this time?
  - grayhatter 11mo ago
    lol, no. They're people who think faster. Someone who uses vscode will never produce code faster than someone proficient in vim. Someone who clicks through GUI windows will never be able to control their computer as fast as someone with a command prompt. I'm sure that there are some examples who enjoy it for the interface. I think CRT term/emulator is peak aesthetic. And a few who aren't willing to invest the time to use a gui an a terminal, and they learned the terminal first. Calling either group a luddite is stupid, but if I was forced to defend one side. Given most people start with a gui because it's so much easier. I'd rather make the argument that those who never progress onto the faster more powerful options deserve the insult of luddite.
    - esafak 11mo ago
      IDEs have keyboard shortcuts too, you know.
    - rkomorn 11mo ago
      > Someone who uses vscode will never produce code faster than someone proficient in vim. Is this an actually serious/honest take of yours? I've been using vim for 20 years and, while I've spent almost no time with VS Code, I'd say that a lot of JetBrains' IDEs' built in features have definitely made me faster than I ever was with vim. Oh wait. No true vim user would come to this conclusion, right?
      - grayhatter 10mo ago
        The take was supposed to be read as slightly hyperbolic. Because while the fastest user of an IDE, has never come close to the fastest I've seen in vim, as you pointed out, thats not really a reasonable comparison either. Here I'm intentionally only considering raw text editing speed, jumping across lines, switching files. If you're including IDE features, when you expect someone in vim to leave vim, you're comparing something that doesn't equate to my strawman. My larger point was it's absurd to say someone who's faster using [interface] is a luddite because they don't use [other interface] with nearly identical features. > Oh wait. No true vim user would come to this conclusion, right? I guess that's fitting insult, given I started with a strawman example too. edit: I can offer another equally absurd example, (and why I say it's only slightly hyperbolic because the following is true), I can write code much faster using vim, than I can with [IDE], I don't even use tab complete, or anything similar either. I, personally, am able to write better code, faster, when there's nothing but colored text to distract me. Does that make me a luddite? I've tried both, and this fits better for me. Or is it just how comfortable you are with a given interface? Because I know most people can find tab complete useful.
- jrm4 11mo ago
  No. You're both about 50% correct; what's making everything weird is that the things associated with "hacking" transitioned from "completely optional side hobby" to "fundamental basis of the economy, both bullshit and not." This is why I'm finding most of this discussion very odd.
bgwalter 11mo ago
Being anti "AI" has nothing to do with being progressive. Historically, hackers have always rejected bloated tools, especially those that are not under their control and that spy on them and build dossiers like ChatGPT. Hackers have historically derided any website generators or tools like ColdFusion[tm] or VisualStudio[tm] for that matter. It is relatively new that some corporate owned "open" source developers use things like VSCode and have no issues with all their actions being tracked and surveilled by their corporate masters. Please do no co-opt the term "hacker".
- Aurornis 11mo ago
  > Hackers have historically derided any website generators or tools like ColdFusion[tm] or VisualStudio[tm] for that matter. A lot of hackers, including the black hat kind, DGAF about your ideological purity. They get things done with the tools that make it easy. The tools they’re familiar with. Some of the hacker circles I was most familiar with in my younger days primarily used Windows as their OS. They did a lot of reverse engineering using Windows tools. They might have used .NET to write their custom tools because it was familiar and fast. They pulled off some amazing reverse engineering feats. Yet when I tell people they preferred Windows and not Linux you can tell who’s more focused on ideological purity than actual achievements because eww Windows. > Please do no co-opt the term "hacker". Right back at you. To me, hacker is about results, not about enforcing ideological purity about only using the acceptable tools on your computer. In my experience: The more time someone spends identifying as a hacker, gatekeeping the word, and trying to make it a culture war thing about the tools you use, the less “hacker” like they are. When I think of hacker culture I think about the people who accomplish amazing things regardless of the tools or whether HN finds them ideologically acceptable to use.
  - phil21 11mo ago
    > To me, hacker is about results Same to me as well. A hacker would "hack out" some tool in a few crazy caffeine fueled nights that would be ridiculed by professional devs who had been working on the problem as a 6 man team for a year. Only the hacker's tool actually worked and saved 8000 man-hours of dev time. Code might be ugly, might use foundational tech everyone sneers at - but the job would be done. Maintaining it left up to the normies to figure out. It implies deep-level expertise about a specific niche in the space they are hacking on. And it implies "getting shit done" - not making things full of design beauty. Of course there are different types of hackers everywhere - but that was the "scene" to me back in the day. Teenage kids running circles around the greybeards clucking at the kids doing it wrong.
otabdeveloper4 11mo ago
> is absolutely filled with busy work that no one really wants to do Well, LLMs don't fix that problem. (They fix the "need to train your classification model on your own data" problem, but none of you care about that, you want the quick sci-fi assistant dopamine hit.)
mattgreenrocks 11mo ago
> This is the culture that replaced hacker culture. Somewhere along the lines of "everybody can code," we threw out the values and aesthetics that attracted people in the first place. What began as a rejection of externally imposed values devolved into a mouthpiece of the current powers and principalities. This is evidenced by the new set of hacker values being almost purely performative when compared against the old set. The tension between money and what you make has been boiled away completely. We lean much more heavily on where someone has worked ("ex-Google") vs their tech chops, which (like management), have given up on trying to actually evaluate. We routinely devalue craftsmanship because it doesn't bow down to almighty Business Impact. We sold out the culture, which paved the way for it to be hollowed out by LLMs. There is a way out: we need to create a culture that values craftmanship and dignifies work done by developers. We need to talk seriously and plainly about the spiritual and existential damage done by LLMs. We need to stop being complicit in propagating that noxious cloud of inevitability and nihilism that is choking our culture. We need to call out the bullshit and extended psyops ("all software jobs are going away!") that have gone on for the past 2-3 years, and mock it ruthlessly: despite hundreds of billions of dollars, it hasn't fully delivered on its promises, and investors are starting to be a bit skeptical. In short, it's time to wake up.
- underlipton 11mo ago
  [flagged]
  - dugidugout 11mo ago
    Odd line to be dancing upon.
    - underlipton 11mo ago
      Just interested in seeing if it could tease out the portion of the HN crowd who go apoplectic any time they're forced to remember that black people exist, the portion that only know us in the abstract ("He's right! Black people DO 'keep it real!'"), and the tiny minority that will actually understand the point I'm trying to make. I suppose that's bad communication, but you could also say that the medium is (part of) the message. Suffice it to say, maybe now that DEI is gone, actual good-faith efforts to recognize the hacker ethos in disparate groups, and to bring those individuals into the culture, could take place. The corporate-ization of hacking couldn't have taken place (and could be undone) with an injection of some counterculture. (The post you replied to got flagged to death. That's gotta count for some Punk Points.)
amarant 11mo ago
It's Turing's Law: Any person who posts a sufficiently long text online will be mistaken for an AI.
pksebben 11mo ago
Likely progressive, but definitely not luddite [0]. Anti-capitalist for sure. I struggle with this discourse deeply. With many posters like OP, I align almost completely - unions are good, large megacorps are bad, death to facists etc. It's when we get to the AI issue that I do a bit of a double take. Right now, AI is almost completely in the hands of a few large corp entities, yes. But once upon a time, so was the internet, so were processing chips, so was software. This is the power of the byte - it shrinks progressively and multiplies infinitely - thus making it inherently diffuse and populist (at the end of the day). It's not the relationship to our cultural standards that causes this - it's baked right into the structure of the underlying system. Computing systems are like sand - you can melt them into a tower of glass, but those are fragile and will inevitably become sand once again. Sand is famously difficult to hold in a tight grasp. I won't say that we should stop fighting against the entrenchment of powers like OpenAI - fine, that's potentially a worthy fight and if that's what you want to focus on go ahead. However, if you really want to hack the planet, democratize power and distribute control, what you have to be doing is working towards smaller local models, distributed training, and finding an alternative to backprop that can compete without the same functional costs. We are this close to having a guide in our pocket that can help us understand the machine better. Forget having AI "do the work" for you, it can help you to grok the deeper parts of the system such that you can hack them better - and if we're to come out of this tectonic shift in tech with our heads above water, we absolutely need to create models that cannot be owned by the guy with the $5B datacenter. Deepseek shows us the glimmer of a way forward. We have to take it. The megacorp AI is already here to stay, and the only panacea is an AI that they cannot control. It all comes down to whether or not you genuinely believe that the way of the hacker can overcome the monolith. I, for one, am a believer. 0 - https://phrack.org/issues/7/3 https://phrack.org/issues/7/3
- billy99k 11mo ago
  How are unions any better than mega corps? My brother is part of a union and the leaders make millions. He's pigenholed at the same low pay rate and can't ever get a raise, until everyone in the same role also gets a raise (which will never happen). It traps people, because many union jobs can't or won't innovate, and when they look elsewhere, are underskilled (and stuck). You mention 'deepseek'. Are you joking? It's owned by the Chinese government..and you claim to hate fascism? Lol? Big companies only have the power now, because the processing power to run LLMs is expensive. Once there are break throughs, anyone can have the same power in their house. We have been in a tech slump for awhile now. Large companies will drive innovations for AI that will help everyone.
paganel 11mo ago
That's because AI-generated memes are lame, not saying that memes are smart, generally speaking, but the AI-generated ones are even lamer. And nothing wrong with being a luddite, to the contrary, in this day and age still thinking that technology is the way forward no matter what is nothing short of criminal.
nrclark 11mo ago
Ironically, the actual luddites weren't anti-technology at all. Mechanized looms at the time produced low-quality, low-durability cloth at low prices. The luddite pushback was more about the shift from durable to disposable. It's a message that's actually pretty relevant in an age of AI slop.
- CharlesW 11mo ago
  They were anti-technology in the sense that they destroyed the machines, because of the machines' negative effects on pay and quality. Maybe you could debate whether they were anti-technology absent its effects, but all technologies have effects. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite
- blackqueeriroh 10mo ago
  Show me AI slop and then I’ll immediately show you AI haute cuisine. If you think LLMs only produce low effort garbage, you truly haven’t been paying attention.
brendoelfrendo 11mo ago
> That's the thing, hacker circles didn't always have this 'progressive' luddite mentality. I think, by definition, Luddites or neo-Luddites or whatever you want to call them are reactionaries but I think that's kind of orthogonal to being "progressive." Not sure where progressive comes in. > All that said, the actual workday is absolutely filled with busy work that no one really wants to do, and the refusal of a loud minority to engage with that fact is what's leading to this. I think that's maybe part of the problem? We shouldn't try to automate the busy work, we should acknowledge that it doesn't matter and stop doing it. In this regard, AI addresses a symptom but does not cure the underlying illness caused by dysfunctional systems. It just shifts work over so we get to a point where AI generated output is being analyzed by an AI and the only "winner" is Anthropic or Google or whoever you paid for those tokens. > These people bring way more toxicity to daily life than who they wage their campaigns against. I don't believe for a second that a gaggle of tumblrinas are more harmful to society than a single Sam Altman, lol.
LocalH 11mo ago
A good start (albeit the most basic one) would be to encourage budding hackers to read through the Jargon File.
- Y_Y 11mo ago
  I think that's going to become like asking a child to read Shakespeare; surely valuable, but requiring a whole parallel text to give modern translation and context.
  - LocalH 10mo ago
    The Jargon File contains a lexicon. Thus, it contains its own such text.
chemotaxis 11mo ago
> It's why people can't post a meme, quote, article, whatever could be interpreted (very often, falsely) as AI-generated in a public channel, or ask a chatbot to explain a hand-drawn image without the off chance that they get an earful from one of these 'progressive' people. It happens, but I think it's pretty uncommon. What's a lot more common is people getting called out for offloading tasks to LLMs in a way that just breaches protocol. For example, if we're having an argument online and you respond with a chatbot-generated rebuttal to my argument, I'm going to be angry. This is because I'm putting an effort and you're clearly not interested in having that conversation, but you still want to come out ahead for the sake of internet points. Some folks would say it's fair game, but consider the logical conclusion of that pattern: that we both have our chatbots endlessly argue on our behalf. That's pretty stupid, right? By extension of this, there's plenty of people who use LLMs to "manage" their online footprint: write responses to friends' posts, come up with new content to share, generate memes, produce a cadence of blog posts. Anyone can ask an LLM to do that, so what's the point of generating this content in the first place? It's not yours. It's not you. So what's the game, other than - again - trying to come out on top for internet points? Another fairly toxic pattern is when people use LLMs to produce work output without the effort to proofread or fact-check it. Over the past year or so, I've gotten so many LLM-generated documents that simply made no sense, and the sender considered their job to be done and left the QA to me.
- bill3389 11mo ago
  unfortunately, it will be less and less purely human generated content any more. it will be more and more AI generated or AI assisted content in the future. We are angry because we grow up in an age that content are generated by human and computer bot are inefficient. however, for newer generation, AI generated content will be a new normal, like how we see people from a big flat box (TV)
- aprilthird2021 11mo ago
  I'm looking at code at my tech job right now where someone AI outsourced it, didn't proofread it, and didn't realize a comparison table it built is just running over the same dataset twice causing every comparison to look "identical" even when the data isn't
GrantMoyer 11mo ago
I largely agree with this, but at the same time, I empathize with the FA's author. I think it's because LLMs feel categorically different from other technological leaps I've been exited about. The recent results in LLMs and diffusion models are undeniably, incredibly impressive, even if they're not to the point of being universally useful for real work. However they fill me with a feeling of supreme dissapointment, because each is just this big black box we shoved an unreasonable amount of data into and now the black box is the best image processing/natural language processing system we've ever made, and depending on how you look at it, they're either so unimaginably complex that we'll never understand how they really work, or they're so brain-dead simple that there's nothing to really understand at all. It's like some cruel joke the universe decided to play on people who like to think hard and understand the systems around them.
- raincole 11mo ago
  > It's like some cruel joke the universe decided to play on people who like to think hard and understand the systems around them. Yeah. This cruel joke even has a name: The Bitter Lesson. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitter_lesson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitter_lesson But think about it: if digital painting were solved not by a machine learning model, but human-readable code, it would be an even more bleak and cruel joke, isn't it?
  - GrantMoyer 11mo ago
    > if digital painting were solved not by a machine learning model, but human-readable code, it would be an even more bleak and cruel joke, isn't it? On the contrary, I'm certain such a program would be filled with fascinating techniques, and I have no dread for the idea that humans aren't special.
  - Glemkloksdjf 11mo ago
    Interesting that people seem to have this assumption. "The lesson is considered "bitter" because it is less anthropocentric than many researchers expected and so they have been slow to accept it." I mean we are so many people on the planet, its easy to feel useless when you know you can get replaced by millions of other humans. How is that different being replaced by a computer? I was not sure how AGI would come to us, but I assumed there will be AGI in the future. Weirdest thing for me is mathematics and physics: I assumed that would be such an easy field to find something 'new' through brute force alone, im more shocked that this is only happening now. I realized with DeepMind and Alphafold that the smartest people with the best tools are in the industry and specificly in the it industry because they are a lot better using tools to help them than normal researchers who struggle writing code.
shadowgovt 11mo ago
Hackers in the '80s were taking apart phone hardware and making free long-distance calls because the phone company didn't deserve its monopoly purely for existing before they were born. Hackers in the '90s were bypassing copyright and wiping the hard drive of machines they cobbled together out of broken machines to install an open source OS on it so that Redmond, WA couldn't dictate their computing experience. I think there's a direct through-line from hacker circles to modern skepticism of the kind of AI discussed in this article: the kind where rules you don't control determine the behavior of the machine and where most of the training and operation of the largest and most successful systems can, currently, only be accessed via the cloud portals of companies with extremely questionable ethics. ... but I don't expect hackers to be anti-AI indefinitely. I expect them to be sorting out how many old laptops with still-serviceable graphics cards you have to glue together to build a training engine that can produce a domain-specific tool that rivals ChatGPT. If that task proves impossible, then I suspect based on history this may be the one place where hackers end up looking a little 'luddite' as it were. ... because "If the machine cannot be tamed it must be destroyed" is very hacker ethos.
- k6hkUZtLUM 11mo ago
  The whole point was to take these things apart, figure out how they work, and make them things we want them to do instead of being bound by arbitrary rules. Bypassing arbitrary (useless, silly, meaningless, etc) rules has always been a primary motiving factor for some of us :D
ronsor 11mo ago
The only thing more insufferable than the "AI do everything and replace everyone" crowd is the "AI is completely useless" crowd. It's useful for some things and useless for others, just like any other tool you'll encounter.
- musicale 11mo ago
  The proposition that AI is completely is trivially nullified. For example, it is provably useful for large-scale cheating on course assignments - a non-trivial task that had previously used human-operated "essay mills" and other services.
  - musicale 10mo ago
    s/completely/completely useless/
ukFxqnLa2sBSBf6 11mo ago
I consider myself progressive and my main issue with the technology is that it was created by stealing from people who have not been compensated in any way. I wouldn’t blame any artist that is fundamentally against this tech in every way. Good for them.
- musicale 11mo ago
  It's "unauthorized use" rather than "stealing", since the original work is not moved anywhere. It's more like using your creative work to train a software system that generates similar-looking, competing works, for pennies, at industrial scale and speed.
  - andrei_says_ 11mo ago
    Obtaining without payment or consent and then using to create derivative works at scale? And the pedantry matters only because the entities criming are too big and rich and financed by the right people. It is basically a display of the societal threshold beyond which laws are not enforced.
    - musicale 11mo ago
      > Obtaining without payment or consent Usually "obtaining" is just making a bunch of HTTP requests - which is kind of how the web is designed to work. The "consent" (and perhaps "desired payment" when there is no paywall) issue is the important bit and ultimately boils down to the use case. Is it a human viewing the page, a search engine updating its index, or OpenAI collecting data for training? It is annoying when things like robots.txt are simply ignored, even if they are not legally or technically binding. The legal situation is unsurprisingly murky at the moment. Copyright law was designed for a different use case, and might not be the right tool or regulatory framework to address GenAI. But as I think you are suggesting, it may be an example of regulatory entrepreneurship, where (AI) companies try to move forward quickly before laws and regulations catch up with them, while simultaneously trying to influence new laws and regulations in their favor. [Copyright law itself also has many peculiarities, for example not applying to recipes, game rules, or fashion designs (hence fast fashion, knockoffs, etc.) Does it, or should it, apply to AI training and GenAI services? Time will tell.]
anubistheta 11mo ago
I agree. I think this is what happens when a persons transitions from a progressive mindset to a conservative one, but has made being "progressive" a central tenant of their identity. Progressiveness is forward looking and a proponent of rapid change. So it is natural that LLM's are popular amongst that crowd. Also, progressivism should be accepting of and encouraging the evolution of concepts and social constructs. In reality, many people define "progressiveness" as "when things I like happen, not when things I don't like happen." When they lose control of the direction of society, they end up just as reactionary and dismissive as the people they claim to oppose. >AI systems exist to reinforce and strengthen existing structures of power and violence. They are the wet dream of capitalists and fascists. >Craft, expression and skilled labor is what produces value, and that gives us control over ourselves To me, that sums up the author's biases. You may value skilled labor, but generally people don't. Nor should they. Demand is what produces value. The later half of the piece falls into a diatribe of "Capitalism Bad".
- octorian 11mo ago
  Just seeing that sentence fragment about "structures of power and violence" told me so much about the author. Its the sort of language that brings with it a whole host of stereotypes, some of which were immediately confirmed with a little more digging (and others would require way too much effort to confirm, but likely could be). And yes, this whole "capitalism bad" mentality I see in tech does kinda irk me. Why? Because it was capitalism that gave them the tools to be who they are and the opportunities to do what they do.
  - thewebguyd 11mo ago
    > And yes, this whole "capitalism bad" mentality I see in tech does kinda irk me. Why? Because it was capitalism that gave them the tools to be who they are and the opportunities to do what they do. It's not hard to see why that mentality exists though. That same capitalism also gave rise to the behemoth, abusive monopolies we have today. It gave rise to the over financialization of the sector and declining product quality because you get richer doing stock buybacks and rent-seeking instead of making a better product. Early hacker culture was also very much not pro-capitalism. The core principle of "Information should be free" itself is a statement against artificial scarcity and anti-proprietary systems, directly opposed to the capitalist ethos of locking up knowledge for profit. The FOSS we use and love rose directly from this culture, which is fundamentally communal, not capitalist.
bravetraveler 11mo ago
In a way, the busy work is padding. If the day becomes entirely difficult, I want more reward or time away. I understand how LLMs may improve the situation for the employer, personally or with peers: no.
m000 11mo ago
I think you're missing that a lot of what we call "learning" would be categorized as "busy work" after the fact. If we replace this "busy work" with AI, we are becoming collectively more stupid. Which may be a goal on itself for our AI overlords. As mr Miyagi said: "Wax on. Wax off." This may turn out very profitable for the pre-AI generations, as the junior to senior pipeline won't churn seniors at the same rate. But following generations are probably on their way to digital serfdom if we don't act.
- thewebguyd 11mo ago
  > If we replace this "busy work" with AI, we are becoming collectively more stupid. I've seen this same thing said about Google. "If you outsource your memory to Google searching instead, you won't be able to do anything without and you'll become dumber." Maybe that did happen, but it didn't seem to result in any meaningful change on the whole. Instead, I got to waste less time memorizing things, or spending time leafing through thousand page reference manuals, to find something. We've been outsourcing parts of our brains to computers for decades now. That's what got me interested and curious about computers when I got my first machine as a kid (this was back in the late 90s/early 00s). "How can I automate as much of the boring stuff as possible to free myself up for more interesting things." LLMs are the next evolution of that to an extent, but I also think they do come with some harms and that we haven't really figured out best practices yet. But, I can't help but be excited at the prospect of being able to outsource even more to a computer.
  - jonas21 11mo ago
    Indeed, this line of reasoning goes all they way back to Socrates who argued that outsourcing your memory to writing would make you stupider [1]: > For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise. I, for one, am glad we have technologies -- like writing, the internet, Google, and LLMs -- that let us expand the limits of what our minds can do. [1] https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0174%3Atext%3DPhaedrus%3Apage%3D275 https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext...
andrei_says_ 11mo ago
I have only experienced the exact opposite - AI tools being forced on employees left and right, and infinite starry eyed fake enthusiasm amongst a rising ocean of slop poisoning all communication and written human knowledge at scale. I am yet to see issues caused by restrain. > It's why people can't post a meme, quote, article, whatever could be interpreted (very often, falsely) as AI-generated in a public channel, or ask a chatbot to explain a hand-drawn image without the off chance that they get an earful from one of these 'progressive' people. These people bring way more toxicity to daily life than who they wage their campaigns against.
- blackqueeriroh 10mo ago
  > I have only experienced the exact opposite - AI tools being forced on employees left and right, and infinite starry eyed fake enthusiasm amongst a rising ocean of slop poisoning all communication and written human knowledge at scale. > I am yet to see issues caused by restrain. Again, how is that the fault of the technology?
thewebguyd 11mo ago
> All that said, the actual workday is absolutely filled with busy work that no one really wants to do, and the refusal of a loud minority to engage with that fact is what's leading to this. The attitude and push back from this loud minority has always been weird to me. Ever since I got my hands on my first computer as a kid, I've been outsourcing parts of my brain to computing so that I can focus on more interesting things. I no longer have to remember phone numbers, I no longer have to carry a paper notepad, my bookshelf full of reference books that constantly needed to be refreshed became a Google search away instead. Intellisense/code completion meant I didn't have to waste time memorizing every specific syntax and keyword. Hell, IDEs have been generating code for a long time. I was using Visual Studio to automatically generate model classes from my database schema for as long as I can remember, and even generating CRUD pages. The opportunity to outsource even more of the 'busywork' is great. Isn't this was technology is supposed to do? Automate away the boring stuff? The only reasoning I can think of is that the most vocal opponents work in careers where that same busywork is actually most of their job, and so they are naturally worried about their future.
- Wowfunhappy 11mo ago
  > Ever since I got my hands on my first computer as a kid, I've been outsourcing parts of my brain to computing so that I can focus on more interesting things. I no longer have to remember phone numbers, I no longer have to carry a paper notepad, my bookshelf full of reference books that constantly needed to be refreshed became a Google search away instead. Intellisense/code completion meant I didn't have to waste time memorizing every specific syntax and keyword. Hell, IDEs have been generating code for a long time. I was using Visual Studio to automatically generate model classes from my database schema for as long as I can remember, and even generating CRUD pages. I absolutely agree with you, but I do think there's a difference in kind between a deterministic automation you can learn to use and get better at, and a semi-random coding agent. The thing I'm really struggling with is that unlike e.g. code completion, there doesn't seem to be a clear class of tasks that LLMs are good at vs bad at. So until the LLMs can do everything, how do I keep myself in the loop enough that I'll have the requisite knowledge to step in when the LLM fails? You mention how technology means we no longer have to remember phone numbers. But what if all digital contact lists had a very low chance of randomly deleting individual contacts over time? Do you keep memorizing phone numbers? I'm not sure!
kyle-rb 11mo ago
People assume programmers have the same motivations as luddites but "smashing the autolooms" presumably requires firebombing a whole bunch of datacenters, whereas it's pretty easy to download and run an open-source Chinese autoloom.
MetaWhirledPeas 11mo ago
Well there's more than just one hacker circle. That was never really the case and it's less and less the case as the earth's technologically-inclined population increases. Culture is emergent. The more you try to define it, the less it becomes culture and the more it becomes a cult. Instead of focusing on culture I prefer to focus on values. I value craftsmanship, so I'm inclined to appreciate normal coding more than AI-assisted coding, for sure. But there's also a craftsmanship to gluing a bunch of AI technologies together and observing some fantastic output. To willfully ignore that is silly. The OP's rant comes across as a wistful pining for the days of yore, pinning its demise on capitalists and fascists, as if they had this AI thing planned all along. Focusing on boogeymen isn't going to solve anything. You also can't reverse time by demanding compliance with your values or forming a union. AI is here to stay and we're going to have to figure out how to live with it, like it or not.
LPisGood 11mo ago
> hacker circles didn't always have this 'progressive' luddite mentality Richard Stallman has his email printed out on paper for him to read, and he only connects to the internet by using wget to fetch web pages and then has them printed off.
- ihaveajob 11mo ago
  You're probably thinking about Donald Knuth, not Stallman. https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html
  - jdiff 11mo ago
    Stallman does similar, just without the printing step, and he checks his email entirely within emacs. https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html
zemo 11mo ago
> This is the culture that replaced hacker culture. Breathless hustlecore tech industry culture is a place where finance bros have turned programmers into dogs that brag to one another about what a good dog they are. We should reject at every turn the idea that such a culture represents the totality of programming. Programming is so much more than that.
JohnBooty 11mo ago
This was very insightful. It made me think about how "hacker culture" has changed. I'm middle-aged. 30 years ago, hacker culture as I experienced it was about making cool stuff. It was also about the identity -- hackers were geeks. Intelligent, and a little (or a lot) different from the rest of society. Generally speaking, hackers could not avoid writing code. Whether it was shell scripts or HTML or Javascript or full-blown 3D graphics engines. To a large extent, coding became the distinguishing feature of "hackers" in terms of identity. Nearly anybody could install Linux or build a PC, but writing nontrivial code took a much larger level of commitment. There are legitimate functional and ethical concerns about AI. But I think a lot of "hackers" are in HUGE amounts of denial about how much of their opposition to AI springs from having their identities threatened.
- jimbokun 11mo ago
  Well there are a lot of us very clear that our identities are being threatened and scared shitless we will lose the ability to pay our rent or buy food because of it.
  - JohnBooty 11mo ago
    As somebody currently navigating the brutal job market, I'm scared shitless about that too. I have to tell you though, that the historical success rate of railing against "technologies that make labor more efficient" is currently at 0.0000000%. We've survived and thrived through inflection points like this before, though. So I'm doing my best to have an adapt-or-die mindset. "computers are taking away human jobs" "visual basic will eliminate the need for 'real coders'" "nobody will think any more. they'll 'just google it' instead of actually understanding things" "SQL is human readable. it's going to reduce the need for engineers" (before my time, admittedly) "offshoring will larely eliminate US-based software development" etc. Ultimately (with the partial exception of offshoring) these became productivity-enhancers that increased the expectations placed on the shoulders of engineers and expanded the profession, not things that replaced the profession. Admittedly, AI feels like our biggest challenge yet. Maybe.
  - yawnxyz 10mo ago
Perepiska 11mo ago
There's a simple solution: anyone who posts AI-generated content can label it as "AI-generated" and avoid misleading people.
oytis 11mo ago
IDK, to me it looks that hacker culture has always been progressive, it's just definition of what is progressive has changed somewhat. But hacker culture always sought to empower an individual (especially a smart, tech-savvy individual) against corporations, and rejection of gen AI seems reasonable in this light. If hacker culture wasn't luddite, it's because of the widespread belief that the new digital technology does empower the individual. It's very hard to believe the same about LLMs, unless your salary depends on it
- portana77 10mo ago
  Why do you have to reject LLMs? Wouldn’t a real hacker grab a local model and fiddle with it? Who are you people?
  - oytis 10mo ago
    Yes, that's a tiny bit of fun in all that. The performance you can get on consumer hardware is not making them too useful though.
johnnyanmac 10mo ago
>All that said, the actual workday is absolutely filled with busy work that no one really wants to do, and the refusal of a loud minority to engage with that fact is what's leading to this. And the dangerous part is that we are so hasty to remove that "busy work" that we fail to make sure it's done right. That willful ignorance seems counter to hacker culture which should encourage curiosity and a deeper understanding. >It's why people can't post a meme, quote, article, whatever could be interpreted (very often, falsely) as AI-generated in a public channel, or ask a chatbot to explain a hand-drawn image without the off chance that they get an earful from one of these 'progressive' people. In my experience, it's often is Ai generated more often than not. And yes, it is worth calling out. If you can't engage with the public, why do you expect them to engage with you? It's like being mad about being passed on the current round of a game, all while you clearly have a phone to your ear.
ghtbircshotbe 10mo ago
Hacker culture is the desire to understand complex technical fields. Outsourcing that to AI isn't quite the same thing.

poszlem 11mo ago

> That's the thing, hacker circles didn't always have this 'progressive' luddite mentality. This is the culture that replaced hacker culture. People who haven't lived through the transition will likely come here to tell you how wrong you are, but you are 100% correct.

codeflo 11mo ago
You were proven right three minutes after you posted this. Something happened, I'm not sure what and how. Hacking became reduced to "hacktivism", and technology stopped being the object of interest in those spaces.
- Blackthorn 11mo ago
  > and technology stopped being the object of interest in those spaces. That happened because technology stopped being fun. When we were kids, seeing Penny communicating with Brain through her watch was neat and cool! Then when it happened in real life, it turned out that it was just a platform to inject you with more advertisements. The "something" that happened was ads. They poisoned all the fun and interest out of technology. Where is technology still fun? The places that don't have ads being vomited at you 24/7. At-home CNC (including 3d printing, to some extent) is still fun. Digital music is still fun.
  - phil21 11mo ago
    >The "something" that happened was ads. They poisoned all the fun and interest out of technology. Disagree. Ads hurt, but not as much as technology being invaded by the regular masses who have no inherit interest in tech for the sake of tech. Ads came after this since they needed an audience first. Once that line was crossed, it all became far less fun for those who were in it for the sheer joy, exploration, and escape from the mundane social expectations wider society has. It may encompass both "hot takes" to simply say money ruined tech. Once future finance bros realized tech was easier than being an investment banker for the easy life - all hope was lost.
    - Blackthorn 11mo ago
      I don't think that just because something becomes accessible to a lot more people that it devalues the experience. To use the two examples I gave in this thread. Digital music is more accessible than ever before and it's going from strength to strength. While at-home subtractive CNC is still in the realm of deep hobbyists, 3d printing* and CNC cutting/plotting* (Cricut, others) have been accessible and interested by the masses for a decade now and those spaces are thriving! * Despite the best efforts of some of the sellers of these to lock down and enshittify the platforms. If this continues, this might change and fall into the general tech malaise, and it will be a great loss if that happens.
  - tekne 11mo ago
    It's not ads, honestly. It's quality. The tool being designed to empower the user. Have you ever seen something encrusted in ads be designed to empower the user? At least, it necessitates reducing the user's power to remove the ads. But it's fundamentally a correlation, and this observation is important because something can be completely ad-free and yet disempowering and hence unpleasant to use; it's just that vice-versa is rare.
    - SpicyLemonZest 11mo ago
      > It's not ads, honestly. It's quality. The tool being designed to empower the user. Have you ever seen something encrusted in ads be designed to empower the user? At least, it necessitates reducing the user's power to remove the ads. Yes, a number of ad-supported sites are designed to empower the user. Video streaming platforms, for example, give me nearly unlimited freedom to watch what I want when I want. When I was growing up, TV executives picked a small set of videos to make available at 10 am, and if I didn’t want to watch one of those videos I didn’t get to watch anything. It’s not even a tradeoff, TV shows had more frequent and more annoying ads.
- benmmurphy 11mo ago
  my guess is something like detailed in this article: https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths
dude250711 11mo ago
The folks who love command-line and terminals had not been luddites all this time?
- grayhatter 11mo ago
  lol, no. They're people who think faster. Someone who uses vscode will never produce code faster than someone proficient in vim. Someone who clicks through GUI windows will never be able to control their computer as fast as someone with a command prompt. I'm sure that there are some examples who enjoy it for the interface. I think CRT term/emulator is peak aesthetic. And a few who aren't willing to invest the time to use a gui an a terminal, and they learned the terminal first. Calling either group a luddite is stupid, but if I was forced to defend one side. Given most people start with a gui because it's so much easier. I'd rather make the argument that those who never progress onto the faster more powerful options deserve the insult of luddite.
  - esafak 11mo ago
    IDEs have keyboard shortcuts too, you know.
  - rkomorn 11mo ago
    > Someone who uses vscode will never produce code faster than someone proficient in vim. Is this an actually serious/honest take of yours? I've been using vim for 20 years and, while I've spent almost no time with VS Code, I'd say that a lot of JetBrains' IDEs' built in features have definitely made me faster than I ever was with vim. Oh wait. No true vim user would come to this conclusion, right?
    - grayhatter 10mo ago
      The take was supposed to be read as slightly hyperbolic. Because while the fastest user of an IDE, has never come close to the fastest I've seen in vim, as you pointed out, thats not really a reasonable comparison either. Here I'm intentionally only considering raw text editing speed, jumping across lines, switching files. If you're including IDE features, when you expect someone in vim to leave vim, you're comparing something that doesn't equate to my strawman. My larger point was it's absurd to say someone who's faster using [interface] is a luddite because they don't use [other interface] with nearly identical features. > Oh wait. No true vim user would come to this conclusion, right? I guess that's fitting insult, given I started with a strawman example too. edit: I can offer another equally absurd example, (and why I say it's only slightly hyperbolic because the following is true), I can write code much faster using vim, than I can with [IDE], I don't even use tab complete, or anything similar either. I, personally, am able to write better code, faster, when there's nothing but colored text to distract me. Does that make me a luddite? I've tried both, and this fits better for me. Or is it just how comfortable you are with a given interface? Because I know most people can find tab complete useful.
jrm4 11mo ago
No. You're both about 50% correct; what's making everything weird is that the things associated with "hacking" transitioned from "completely optional side hobby" to "fundamental basis of the economy, both bullshit and not." This is why I'm finding most of this discussion very odd.

bgwalter 11mo ago

Being anti "AI" has nothing to do with being progressive. Historically, hackers have always rejected bloated tools, especially those that are not under their control and that spy on them and build dossiers like ChatGPT. Hackers have historically derided any website generators or tools like ColdFusion[tm] or VisualStudio[tm] for that matter. It is relatively new that some corporate owned "open" source developers use things like VSCode and have no issues with all their actions being tracked and surveilled by their corporate masters. Please do no co-opt the term "hacker".

Aurornis 11mo ago
> Hackers have historically derided any website generators or tools like ColdFusion[tm] or VisualStudio[tm] for that matter. A lot of hackers, including the black hat kind, DGAF about your ideological purity. They get things done with the tools that make it easy. The tools they’re familiar with. Some of the hacker circles I was most familiar with in my younger days primarily used Windows as their OS. They did a lot of reverse engineering using Windows tools. They might have used .NET to write their custom tools because it was familiar and fast. They pulled off some amazing reverse engineering feats. Yet when I tell people they preferred Windows and not Linux you can tell who’s more focused on ideological purity than actual achievements because eww Windows. > Please do no co-opt the term "hacker". Right back at you. To me, hacker is about results, not about enforcing ideological purity about only using the acceptable tools on your computer. In my experience: The more time someone spends identifying as a hacker, gatekeeping the word, and trying to make it a culture war thing about the tools you use, the less “hacker” like they are. When I think of hacker culture I think about the people who accomplish amazing things regardless of the tools or whether HN finds them ideologically acceptable to use.
- phil21 11mo ago
  > To me, hacker is about results Same to me as well. A hacker would "hack out" some tool in a few crazy caffeine fueled nights that would be ridiculed by professional devs who had been working on the problem as a 6 man team for a year. Only the hacker's tool actually worked and saved 8000 man-hours of dev time. Code might be ugly, might use foundational tech everyone sneers at - but the job would be done. Maintaining it left up to the normies to figure out. It implies deep-level expertise about a specific niche in the space they are hacking on. And it implies "getting shit done" - not making things full of design beauty. Of course there are different types of hackers everywhere - but that was the "scene" to me back in the day. Teenage kids running circles around the greybeards clucking at the kids doing it wrong.

otabdeveloper4 11mo ago

> is absolutely filled with busy work that no one really wants to do Well, LLMs don't fix that problem. (They fix the "need to train your classification model on your own data" problem, but none of you care about that, you want the quick sci-fi assistant dopamine hit.)

mattgreenrocks 11mo ago

> This is the culture that replaced hacker culture. Somewhere along the lines of "everybody can code," we threw out the values and aesthetics that attracted people in the first place. What began as a rejection of externally imposed values devolved into a mouthpiece of the current powers and principalities. This is evidenced by the new set of hacker values being almost purely performative when compared against the old set. The tension between money and what you make has been boiled away completely. We lean much more heavily on where someone has worked ("ex-Google") vs their tech chops, which (like management), have given up on trying to actually evaluate. We routinely devalue craftsmanship because it doesn't bow down to almighty Business Impact. We sold out the culture, which paved the way for it to be hollowed out by LLMs. There is a way out: we need to create a culture that values craftmanship and dignifies work done by developers. We need to talk seriously and plainly about the spiritual and existential damage done by LLMs. We need to stop being complicit in propagating that noxious cloud of inevitability and nihilism that is choking our culture. We need to call out the bullshit and extended psyops ("all software jobs are going away!") that have gone on for the past 2-3 years, and mock it ruthlessly: despite hundreds of billions of dollars, it hasn't fully delivered on its promises, and investors are starting to be a bit skeptical. In short, it's time to wake up.

underlipton 11mo ago
[flagged]
- dugidugout 11mo ago
  Odd line to be dancing upon.
  - underlipton 11mo ago
    Just interested in seeing if it could tease out the portion of the HN crowd who go apoplectic any time they're forced to remember that black people exist, the portion that only know us in the abstract ("He's right! Black people DO 'keep it real!'"), and the tiny minority that will actually understand the point I'm trying to make. I suppose that's bad communication, but you could also say that the medium is (part of) the message. Suffice it to say, maybe now that DEI is gone, actual good-faith efforts to recognize the hacker ethos in disparate groups, and to bring those individuals into the culture, could take place. The corporate-ization of hacking couldn't have taken place (and could be undone) with an injection of some counterculture. (The post you replied to got flagged to death. That's gotta count for some Punk Points.)

amarant 11mo ago

It's Turing's Law: Any person who posts a sufficiently long text online will be mistaken for an AI.

pksebben 11mo ago

Likely progressive, but definitely not luddite [0]. Anti-capitalist for sure. I struggle with this discourse deeply. With many posters like OP, I align almost completely - unions are good, large megacorps are bad, death to facists etc. It's when we get to the AI issue that I do a bit of a double take. Right now, AI is almost completely in the hands of a few large corp entities, yes. But once upon a time, so was the internet, so were processing chips, so was software. This is the power of the byte - it shrinks progressively and multiplies infinitely - thus making it inherently diffuse and populist (at the end of the day). It's not the relationship to our cultural standards that causes this - it's baked right into the structure of the underlying system. Computing systems are like sand - you can melt them into a tower of glass, but those are fragile and will inevitably become sand once again. Sand is famously difficult to hold in a tight grasp. I won't say that we should stop fighting against the entrenchment of powers like OpenAI - fine, that's potentially a worthy fight and if that's what you want to focus on go ahead. However, if you really want to hack the planet, democratize power and distribute control, what you have to be doing is working towards smaller local models, distributed training, and finding an alternative to backprop that can compete without the same functional costs. We are this close to having a guide in our pocket that can help us understand the machine better. Forget having AI "do the work" for you, it can help you to grok the deeper parts of the system such that you can hack them better - and if we're to come out of this tectonic shift in tech with our heads above water, we absolutely need to create models that cannot be owned by the guy with the $5B datacenter. Deepseek shows us the glimmer of a way forward. We have to take it. The megacorp AI is already here to stay, and the only panacea is an AI that they cannot control. It all comes down to whether or not you genuinely believe that the way of the hacker can overcome the monolith. I, for one, am a believer. 0 - https://phrack.org/issues/7/3 https://phrack.org/issues/7/3

billy99k 11mo ago
How are unions any better than mega corps? My brother is part of a union and the leaders make millions. He's pigenholed at the same low pay rate and can't ever get a raise, until everyone in the same role also gets a raise (which will never happen). It traps people, because many union jobs can't or won't innovate, and when they look elsewhere, are underskilled (and stuck). You mention 'deepseek'. Are you joking? It's owned by the Chinese government..and you claim to hate fascism? Lol? Big companies only have the power now, because the processing power to run LLMs is expensive. Once there are break throughs, anyone can have the same power in their house. We have been in a tech slump for awhile now. Large companies will drive innovations for AI that will help everyone.

paganel 11mo ago

That's because AI-generated memes are lame, not saying that memes are smart, generally speaking, but the AI-generated ones are even lamer. And nothing wrong with being a luddite, to the contrary, in this day and age still thinking that technology is the way forward no matter what is nothing short of criminal.

nrclark 11mo ago

Ironically, the actual luddites weren't anti-technology at all. Mechanized looms at the time produced low-quality, low-durability cloth at low prices. The luddite pushback was more about the shift from durable to disposable. It's a message that's actually pretty relevant in an age of AI slop.

CharlesW 11mo ago
They were anti-technology in the sense that they destroyed the machines, because of the machines' negative effects on pay and quality. Maybe you could debate whether they were anti-technology absent its effects, but all technologies have effects. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite
blackqueeriroh 10mo ago
Show me AI slop and then I’ll immediately show you AI haute cuisine. If you think LLMs only produce low effort garbage, you truly haven’t been paying attention.

brendoelfrendo 11mo ago

> That's the thing, hacker circles didn't always have this 'progressive' luddite mentality. I think, by definition, Luddites or neo-Luddites or whatever you want to call them are reactionaries but I think that's kind of orthogonal to being "progressive." Not sure where progressive comes in. > All that said, the actual workday is absolutely filled with busy work that no one really wants to do, and the refusal of a loud minority to engage with that fact is what's leading to this. I think that's maybe part of the problem? We shouldn't try to automate the busy work, we should acknowledge that it doesn't matter and stop doing it. In this regard, AI addresses a symptom but does not cure the underlying illness caused by dysfunctional systems. It just shifts work over so we get to a point where AI generated output is being analyzed by an AI and the only "winner" is Anthropic or Google or whoever you paid for those tokens. > These people bring way more toxicity to daily life than who they wage their campaigns against. I don't believe for a second that a gaggle of tumblrinas are more harmful to society than a single Sam Altman, lol.

LocalH 11mo ago

A good start (albeit the most basic one) would be to encourage budding hackers to read through the Jargon File.

Y_Y 11mo ago
I think that's going to become like asking a child to read Shakespeare; surely valuable, but requiring a whole parallel text to give modern translation and context.
- LocalH 10mo ago
  The Jargon File contains a lexicon. Thus, it contains its own such text.

chemotaxis 11mo ago

> It's why people can't post a meme, quote, article, whatever could be interpreted (very often, falsely) as AI-generated in a public channel, or ask a chatbot to explain a hand-drawn image without the off chance that they get an earful from one of these 'progressive' people. It happens, but I think it's pretty uncommon. What's a lot more common is people getting called out for offloading tasks to LLMs in a way that just breaches protocol. For example, if we're having an argument online and you respond with a chatbot-generated rebuttal to my argument, I'm going to be angry. This is because I'm putting an effort and you're clearly not interested in having that conversation, but you still want to come out ahead for the sake of internet points. Some folks would say it's fair game, but consider the logical conclusion of that pattern: that we both have our chatbots endlessly argue on our behalf. That's pretty stupid, right? By extension of this, there's plenty of people who use LLMs to "manage" their online footprint: write responses to friends' posts, come up with new content to share, generate memes, produce a cadence of blog posts. Anyone can ask an LLM to do that, so what's the point of generating this content in the first place? It's not yours. It's not you. So what's the game, other than - again - trying to come out on top for internet points? Another fairly toxic pattern is when people use LLMs to produce work output without the effort to proofread or fact-check it. Over the past year or so, I've gotten so many LLM-generated documents that simply made no sense, and the sender considered their job to be done and left the QA to me.

bill3389 11mo ago
unfortunately, it will be less and less purely human generated content any more. it will be more and more AI generated or AI assisted content in the future. We are angry because we grow up in an age that content are generated by human and computer bot are inefficient. however, for newer generation, AI generated content will be a new normal, like how we see people from a big flat box (TV)
aprilthird2021 11mo ago
I'm looking at code at my tech job right now where someone AI outsourced it, didn't proofread it, and didn't realize a comparison table it built is just running over the same dataset twice causing every comparison to look "identical" even when the data isn't

GrantMoyer 11mo ago

I largely agree with this, but at the same time, I empathize with the FA's author. I think it's because LLMs feel categorically different from other technological leaps I've been exited about. The recent results in LLMs and diffusion models are undeniably, incredibly impressive, even if they're not to the point of being universally useful for real work. However they fill me with a feeling of supreme dissapointment, because each is just this big black box we shoved an unreasonable amount of data into and now the black box is the best image processing/natural language processing system we've ever made, and depending on how you look at it, they're either so unimaginably complex that we'll never understand how they really work, or they're so brain-dead simple that there's nothing to really understand at all. It's like some cruel joke the universe decided to play on people who like to think hard and understand the systems around them.

raincole 11mo ago
> It's like some cruel joke the universe decided to play on people who like to think hard and understand the systems around them. Yeah. This cruel joke even has a name: The Bitter Lesson. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitter_lesson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitter_lesson But think about it: if digital painting were solved not by a machine learning model, but human-readable code, it would be an even more bleak and cruel joke, isn't it?
- GrantMoyer 11mo ago
  > if digital painting were solved not by a machine learning model, but human-readable code, it would be an even more bleak and cruel joke, isn't it? On the contrary, I'm certain such a program would be filled with fascinating techniques, and I have no dread for the idea that humans aren't special.
- Glemkloksdjf 11mo ago
  Interesting that people seem to have this assumption. "The lesson is considered "bitter" because it is less anthropocentric than many researchers expected and so they have been slow to accept it." I mean we are so many people on the planet, its easy to feel useless when you know you can get replaced by millions of other humans. How is that different being replaced by a computer? I was not sure how AGI would come to us, but I assumed there will be AGI in the future. Weirdest thing for me is mathematics and physics: I assumed that would be such an easy field to find something 'new' through brute force alone, im more shocked that this is only happening now. I realized with DeepMind and Alphafold that the smartest people with the best tools are in the industry and specificly in the it industry because they are a lot better using tools to help them than normal researchers who struggle writing code.

shadowgovt 11mo ago

Hackers in the '80s were taking apart phone hardware and making free long-distance calls because the phone company didn't deserve its monopoly purely for existing before they were born. Hackers in the '90s were bypassing copyright and wiping the hard drive of machines they cobbled together out of broken machines to install an open source OS on it so that Redmond, WA couldn't dictate their computing experience. I think there's a direct through-line from hacker circles to modern skepticism of the kind of AI discussed in this article: the kind where rules you don't control determine the behavior of the machine and where most of the training and operation of the largest and most successful systems can, currently, only be accessed via the cloud portals of companies with extremely questionable ethics. ... but I don't expect hackers to be anti-AI indefinitely. I expect them to be sorting out how many old laptops with still-serviceable graphics cards you have to glue together to build a training engine that can produce a domain-specific tool that rivals ChatGPT. If that task proves impossible, then I suspect based on history this may be the one place where hackers end up looking a little 'luddite' as it were. ... because "If the machine cannot be tamed it must be destroyed" is very hacker ethos.

k6hkUZtLUM 11mo ago
The whole point was to take these things apart, figure out how they work, and make them things we want them to do instead of being bound by arbitrary rules. Bypassing arbitrary (useless, silly, meaningless, etc) rules has always been a primary motiving factor for some of us :D

ronsor 11mo ago

The only thing more insufferable than the "AI do everything and replace everyone" crowd is the "AI is completely useless" crowd. It's useful for some things and useless for others, just like any other tool you'll encounter.

musicale 11mo ago
The proposition that AI is completely is trivially nullified. For example, it is provably useful for large-scale cheating on course assignments - a non-trivial task that had previously used human-operated "essay mills" and other services.
- musicale 10mo ago
  s/completely/completely useless/

ukFxqnLa2sBSBf6 11mo ago

I consider myself progressive and my main issue with the technology is that it was created by stealing from people who have not been compensated in any way. I wouldn’t blame any artist that is fundamentally against this tech in every way. Good for them.

musicale 11mo ago
It's "unauthorized use" rather than "stealing", since the original work is not moved anywhere. It's more like using your creative work to train a software system that generates similar-looking, competing works, for pennies, at industrial scale and speed.
- andrei_says_ 11mo ago
  Obtaining without payment or consent and then using to create derivative works at scale? And the pedantry matters only because the entities criming are too big and rich and financed by the right people. It is basically a display of the societal threshold beyond which laws are not enforced.
  - musicale 11mo ago
    > Obtaining without payment or consent Usually "obtaining" is just making a bunch of HTTP requests - which is kind of how the web is designed to work. The "consent" (and perhaps "desired payment" when there is no paywall) issue is the important bit and ultimately boils down to the use case. Is it a human viewing the page, a search engine updating its index, or OpenAI collecting data for training? It is annoying when things like robots.txt are simply ignored, even if they are not legally or technically binding. The legal situation is unsurprisingly murky at the moment. Copyright law was designed for a different use case, and might not be the right tool or regulatory framework to address GenAI. But as I think you are suggesting, it may be an example of regulatory entrepreneurship, where (AI) companies try to move forward quickly before laws and regulations catch up with them, while simultaneously trying to influence new laws and regulations in their favor. [Copyright law itself also has many peculiarities, for example not applying to recipes, game rules, or fashion designs (hence fast fashion, knockoffs, etc.) Does it, or should it, apply to AI training and GenAI services? Time will tell.]

anubistheta 11mo ago

I agree. I think this is what happens when a persons transitions from a progressive mindset to a conservative one, but has made being "progressive" a central tenant of their identity. Progressiveness is forward looking and a proponent of rapid change. So it is natural that LLM's are popular amongst that crowd. Also, progressivism should be accepting of and encouraging the evolution of concepts and social constructs. In reality, many people define "progressiveness" as "when things I like happen, not when things I don't like happen." When they lose control of the direction of society, they end up just as reactionary and dismissive as the people they claim to oppose. >AI systems exist to reinforce and strengthen existing structures of power and violence. They are the wet dream of capitalists and fascists. >Craft, expression and skilled labor is what produces value, and that gives us control over ourselves To me, that sums up the author's biases. You may value skilled labor, but generally people don't. Nor should they. Demand is what produces value. The later half of the piece falls into a diatribe of "Capitalism Bad".

octorian 11mo ago
Just seeing that sentence fragment about "structures of power and violence" told me so much about the author. Its the sort of language that brings with it a whole host of stereotypes, some of which were immediately confirmed with a little more digging (and others would require way too much effort to confirm, but likely could be). And yes, this whole "capitalism bad" mentality I see in tech does kinda irk me. Why? Because it was capitalism that gave them the tools to be who they are and the opportunities to do what they do.
- thewebguyd 11mo ago
  > And yes, this whole "capitalism bad" mentality I see in tech does kinda irk me. Why? Because it was capitalism that gave them the tools to be who they are and the opportunities to do what they do. It's not hard to see why that mentality exists though. That same capitalism also gave rise to the behemoth, abusive monopolies we have today. It gave rise to the over financialization of the sector and declining product quality because you get richer doing stock buybacks and rent-seeking instead of making a better product. Early hacker culture was also very much not pro-capitalism. The core principle of "Information should be free" itself is a statement against artificial scarcity and anti-proprietary systems, directly opposed to the capitalist ethos of locking up knowledge for profit. The FOSS we use and love rose directly from this culture, which is fundamentally communal, not capitalist.

bravetraveler 11mo ago

In a way, the busy work is padding. If the day becomes entirely difficult, I want more reward or time away. I understand how LLMs may improve the situation for the employer, personally or with peers: no.

m000 11mo ago

I think you're missing that a lot of what we call "learning" would be categorized as "busy work" after the fact. If we replace this "busy work" with AI, we are becoming collectively more stupid. Which may be a goal on itself for our AI overlords. As mr Miyagi said: "Wax on. Wax off." This may turn out very profitable for the pre-AI generations, as the junior to senior pipeline won't churn seniors at the same rate. But following generations are probably on their way to digital serfdom if we don't act.

thewebguyd 11mo ago
> If we replace this "busy work" with AI, we are becoming collectively more stupid. I've seen this same thing said about Google. "If you outsource your memory to Google searching instead, you won't be able to do anything without and you'll become dumber." Maybe that did happen, but it didn't seem to result in any meaningful change on the whole. Instead, I got to waste less time memorizing things, or spending time leafing through thousand page reference manuals, to find something. We've been outsourcing parts of our brains to computers for decades now. That's what got me interested and curious about computers when I got my first machine as a kid (this was back in the late 90s/early 00s). "How can I automate as much of the boring stuff as possible to free myself up for more interesting things." LLMs are the next evolution of that to an extent, but I also think they do come with some harms and that we haven't really figured out best practices yet. But, I can't help but be excited at the prospect of being able to outsource even more to a computer.
- jonas21 11mo ago
  Indeed, this line of reasoning goes all they way back to Socrates who argued that outsourcing your memory to writing would make you stupider [1]: > For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise. I, for one, am glad we have technologies -- like writing, the internet, Google, and LLMs -- that let us expand the limits of what our minds can do. [1] https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0174%3Atext%3DPhaedrus%3Apage%3D275 https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext...

andrei_says_ 11mo ago

I have only experienced the exact opposite - AI tools being forced on employees left and right, and infinite starry eyed fake enthusiasm amongst a rising ocean of slop poisoning all communication and written human knowledge at scale. I am yet to see issues caused by restrain. > It's why people can't post a meme, quote, article, whatever could be interpreted (very often, falsely) as AI-generated in a public channel, or ask a chatbot to explain a hand-drawn image without the off chance that they get an earful from one of these 'progressive' people. These people bring way more toxicity to daily life than who they wage their campaigns against.

blackqueeriroh 10mo ago
> I have only experienced the exact opposite - AI tools being forced on employees left and right, and infinite starry eyed fake enthusiasm amongst a rising ocean of slop poisoning all communication and written human knowledge at scale. > I am yet to see issues caused by restrain. Again, how is that the fault of the technology?

thewebguyd 11mo ago

> All that said, the actual workday is absolutely filled with busy work that no one really wants to do, and the refusal of a loud minority to engage with that fact is what's leading to this. The attitude and push back from this loud minority has always been weird to me. Ever since I got my hands on my first computer as a kid, I've been outsourcing parts of my brain to computing so that I can focus on more interesting things. I no longer have to remember phone numbers, I no longer have to carry a paper notepad, my bookshelf full of reference books that constantly needed to be refreshed became a Google search away instead. Intellisense/code completion meant I didn't have to waste time memorizing every specific syntax and keyword. Hell, IDEs have been generating code for a long time. I was using Visual Studio to automatically generate model classes from my database schema for as long as I can remember, and even generating CRUD pages. The opportunity to outsource even more of the 'busywork' is great. Isn't this was technology is supposed to do? Automate away the boring stuff? The only reasoning I can think of is that the most vocal opponents work in careers where that same busywork is actually most of their job, and so they are naturally worried about their future.

Wowfunhappy 11mo ago
> Ever since I got my hands on my first computer as a kid, I've been outsourcing parts of my brain to computing so that I can focus on more interesting things. I no longer have to remember phone numbers, I no longer have to carry a paper notepad, my bookshelf full of reference books that constantly needed to be refreshed became a Google search away instead. Intellisense/code completion meant I didn't have to waste time memorizing every specific syntax and keyword. Hell, IDEs have been generating code for a long time. I was using Visual Studio to automatically generate model classes from my database schema for as long as I can remember, and even generating CRUD pages. I absolutely agree with you, but I do think there's a difference in kind between a deterministic automation you can learn to use and get better at, and a semi-random coding agent. The thing I'm really struggling with is that unlike e.g. code completion, there doesn't seem to be a clear class of tasks that LLMs are good at vs bad at. So until the LLMs can do everything, how do I keep myself in the loop enough that I'll have the requisite knowledge to step in when the LLM fails? You mention how technology means we no longer have to remember phone numbers. But what if all digital contact lists had a very low chance of randomly deleting individual contacts over time? Do you keep memorizing phone numbers? I'm not sure!

kyle-rb 11mo ago

People assume programmers have the same motivations as luddites but "smashing the autolooms" presumably requires firebombing a whole bunch of datacenters, whereas it's pretty easy to download and run an open-source Chinese autoloom.

MetaWhirledPeas 11mo ago

Well there's more than just one hacker circle. That was never really the case and it's less and less the case as the earth's technologically-inclined population increases. Culture is emergent. The more you try to define it, the less it becomes culture and the more it becomes a cult. Instead of focusing on culture I prefer to focus on values. I value craftsmanship, so I'm inclined to appreciate normal coding more than AI-assisted coding, for sure. But there's also a craftsmanship to gluing a bunch of AI technologies together and observing some fantastic output. To willfully ignore that is silly. The OP's rant comes across as a wistful pining for the days of yore, pinning its demise on capitalists and fascists, as if they had this AI thing planned all along. Focusing on boogeymen isn't going to solve anything. You also can't reverse time by demanding compliance with your values or forming a union. AI is here to stay and we're going to have to figure out how to live with it, like it or not.

LPisGood 11mo ago

> hacker circles didn't always have this 'progressive' luddite mentality Richard Stallman has his email printed out on paper for him to read, and he only connects to the internet by using wget to fetch web pages and then has them printed off.

ihaveajob 11mo ago
You're probably thinking about Donald Knuth, not Stallman. https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html
- jdiff 11mo ago
  Stallman does similar, just without the printing step, and he checks his email entirely within emacs. https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html

zemo 11mo ago

> This is the culture that replaced hacker culture. Breathless hustlecore tech industry culture is a place where finance bros have turned programmers into dogs that brag to one another about what a good dog they are. We should reject at every turn the idea that such a culture represents the totality of programming. Programming is so much more than that.

JohnBooty 11mo ago

This was very insightful. It made me think about how "hacker culture" has changed. I'm middle-aged. 30 years ago, hacker culture as I experienced it was about making cool stuff. It was also about the identity -- hackers were geeks. Intelligent, and a little (or a lot) different from the rest of society. Generally speaking, hackers could not avoid writing code. Whether it was shell scripts or HTML or Javascript or full-blown 3D graphics engines. To a large extent, coding became the distinguishing feature of "hackers" in terms of identity. Nearly anybody could install Linux or build a PC, but writing nontrivial code took a much larger level of commitment. There are legitimate functional and ethical concerns about AI. But I think a lot of "hackers" are in HUGE amounts of denial about how much of their opposition to AI springs from having their identities threatened.

jimbokun 11mo ago
Well there are a lot of us very clear that our identities are being threatened and scared shitless we will lose the ability to pay our rent or buy food because of it.
- JohnBooty 11mo ago
  As somebody currently navigating the brutal job market, I'm scared shitless about that too. I have to tell you though, that the historical success rate of railing against "technologies that make labor more efficient" is currently at 0.0000000%. We've survived and thrived through inflection points like this before, though. So I'm doing my best to have an adapt-or-die mindset. "computers are taking away human jobs" "visual basic will eliminate the need for 'real coders'" "nobody will think any more. they'll 'just google it' instead of actually understanding things" "SQL is human readable. it's going to reduce the need for engineers" (before my time, admittedly) "offshoring will larely eliminate US-based software development" etc. Ultimately (with the partial exception of offshoring) these became productivity-enhancers that increased the expectations placed on the shoulders of engineers and expanded the profession, not things that replaced the profession. Admittedly, AI feels like our biggest challenge yet. Maybe.
- yawnxyz 10mo ago

Perepiska 11mo ago

There's a simple solution: anyone who posts AI-generated content can label it as "AI-generated" and avoid misleading people.

oytis 11mo ago

IDK, to me it looks that hacker culture has always been progressive, it's just definition of what is progressive has changed somewhat. But hacker culture always sought to empower an individual (especially a smart, tech-savvy individual) against corporations, and rejection of gen AI seems reasonable in this light. If hacker culture wasn't luddite, it's because of the widespread belief that the new digital technology does empower the individual. It's very hard to believe the same about LLMs, unless your salary depends on it

portana77 10mo ago
Why do you have to reject LLMs? Wouldn’t a real hacker grab a local model and fiddle with it? Who are you people?
- oytis 10mo ago
  Yes, that's a tiny bit of fun in all that. The performance you can get on consumer hardware is not making them too useful though.

johnnyanmac 10mo ago

>All that said, the actual workday is absolutely filled with busy work that no one really wants to do, and the refusal of a loud minority to engage with that fact is what's leading to this. And the dangerous part is that we are so hasty to remove that "busy work" that we fail to make sure it's done right. That willful ignorance seems counter to hacker culture which should encourage curiosity and a deeper understanding. >It's why people can't post a meme, quote, article, whatever could be interpreted (very often, falsely) as AI-generated in a public channel, or ask a chatbot to explain a hand-drawn image without the off chance that they get an earful from one of these 'progressive' people. In my experience, it's often is Ai generated more often than not. And yes, it is worth calling out. If you can't engage with the public, why do you expect them to engage with you? It's like being mad about being passed on the current round of a game, all while you clearly have a phone to your ear.

ghtbircshotbe 10mo ago

Hacker culture is the desire to understand complex technical fields. Outsourcing that to AI isn't quite the same thing.