15 ms·
Don't push AI down our throats
- DaveZale 10mo agotry watching a televised American football game. So many ads for AI. Of course ads appeal most to the gullible.
- skeeter2020 10mo agoHave you seen the Workday ads featuring all the washed-up rock stars? They're pushing managing people AND AI agents - using AI. sigh...
- eur0pa 10mo ago[flagged]
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- stack_framer 10mo agoAnd this is the new, fashionable, easy way to insult someone. Just say their work sounds like AI, and job done.
- jsheard 10mo agoIn this case they're not doing themselves any favors by leading their posts with obviously AI generated images. That just primes the reader to suspect the author is slopping it up before they even start reading.
- nutanc 10mo agoYou are right. And "work sounds like AI" is an insult says everything you need to know about the generations by AI :)
- poly2it 10mo agoDo you want AI pushed down your throat?
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- chasing0entropy 10mo ago[flagged]
- happytoexplain 10mo agoYou're implying they're the same in some way, but you haven't explained why.
- chasing0entropy 10mo agoDisable your script execution and cookie storage for the OP site and then attempt to view it. The page and content load fine; the host injecting coercing messages for enabling tracking cookies and scripts are the reason AI has been integrated into everything. You either comply of face unnecessary roadblocks. OP has complied by sharing the link. My right to choose tracking cookies and script execution is parallel to my right to not utilize or be forced to utilize AI. This issue has to be addressed universally as is not simple "no ai" on the web; it's freedom to use the web or compliance with violation of that freedom
- acedTrex 10mo agoCan you explain javascript and cookies similarity to LLMs?
- procaryote 10mo agoThe article renders well even if you block javascript though
- zahlman 10mo agoGP's point is that the page attempts to run unnecessary JS and that this is objectionable.
- procaryote 10mo agoI guess "I want to have javascript enabled but no one to use it" is a hill to die on, but it's pretty exotic
- Isamu 10mo agoThe AI push is not just hype, it’s a scramble for cash. For now the only game plan is to scale up massively with a giant investment gamble, to try to get beyond the obvious limitations that threaten to burst the bubble. Plus the general economy outlook is negative, AI is the bright spot. They are striving to keep growth up amid downward pressure.
- newsclues 10mo agoIf AI was amazing you wouldn’t need to push it, people would demand it! You need to push slop, because people don’t really want it.
- daft_pink 10mo agoThe real creepy thing is the way they force you to give up your data with these products. If it were just useful add ons, it wouldn’t bother me, but the fact that Gemini requires you to turn activity history off for paid plans for the promise they won’t train on your data or allow a person to view your prompts is insanity. If you’re paying $20 for Pro or 249.99 for Ultra, you should be able to get activity history without training or review or storing your data for several years.
- thomascgalvin 10mo agoI have a pixel watch, and my main use for it is setting reminders, like "reminder 3pm put the laundry in the dryer". It's worked fine since the day I bought it. Last week, they pushed an update that broke all of the features on the watch unless I agreed to allow Google to train their AI on my content.
- Teever 10mo agoInternational coordinated action by consumers taking a company to small claims court at the same time around the world to see redress about defective products would be an effective strategy.
- Y_Y 10mo agoAre you proposing a "World Sue A Tech Giant Day"? A global bonanza of micro-litigation that bleeds AI-leviathans dry by a thousand cuts? I'm in, but let's have it in October or something when I'm less busy.
- ryukoposting 10mo agoI like this idea, though I'm concerned about how we could make sure the courts are ready to handle the deluge of activity. Update: talked to some experts. IANAL, and they aren't either. This would be cataclysmic for the courts unless they knew it was coming AND every claim was filed correctly (fees paid, no errors, etc). Even if everything was done perfectly, it would be a ton of work and there's no way every case would be processed in a day. It's also likely that all the identical cases filed in a single jurisdiction would be heard together in a single trial. There's also weirdness when you consider where each claim is filed. Quote: "you may be in the right, but I can guarantee you would have a terrible time"
- andy99 10mo ago[flagged]
- dbalatero 10mo agoI think the author cares about both. Did that single sentence in this relatively short, 36 sentence post really make you flip the table as hard as you imply? That's surprising if so.
- 1shooner 10mo agoOn the contrary, cannibalizing the commercial viability of original content creation is possibly the most short-sighted aspect of the current AI push. That isn't 'political', it's just a relatively conservative assessment of the content market.
- nacozarina 10mo agoassume it is being ‘done wrong’, not due to the usual trifecta of greed/evil/stupidity, but due to socio-economic pressure that demands this approach. AI really needs R&D time, where we first figure out what it’s good for and how best to exploit it. But R&D for SW is dead. Users proved to be super-resilient to buggy or mis-matched sw. They adapt. ‘Good-enough’ often doesn’t look it. Private equity sez throw EVERYTHING at the wall and chase what sticks…
- zzzeek 10mo ago> We will work with the creators, writers, and artists, instead of ripping off their life's work to feed the model. i support this but the Smarter Than Me types say it's impossible. It's not possible to track down an adequate number of copyright holders, much less get their permission, much less afford to pay them, for the number of works required in order to get the LLM to achieve "liftoff". I would think that as I use Claude for coding, it would work just as well if it didnt suck down the last three years of NYT articles as if it did. There's a vast amount of content that is in the public domain, and if you're ChatGPT you can make deals with a bunch of big publishers to get more modern content too. But that's my know-nothing take. maybe the issue is more about the image content. Screw the image content (and definitely the music content, spotify pushing this slop is immensely offensive), pay the artists. My code OTOH is open source, MIT licensed. It's not art at all. Go get it (though throw me a few thousand bucks every year because you want to do the right thing).
- FLT8 10mo agoIt's not' impossible', it's economically unviable. There's a difference. We really should be mandating that companies that don't pay fair market prices for the data they use to train their models must open source everything as reparation to humanity.
- bgwalter 10mo agoIt is not an axiom that LLMs even have the right to achieve "liftoff". They are obvious instruments of plagiarism that often just reorder sentences so as not to get caught. They can be forbidden. If you don't mind the oligarchs stealing your code, that is your prerogative. Many other people do mind.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- NoraCodes 10mo agoWhy do AI companies get to do whatever they want in order to meet their business goals ("liftoff")?
- shmerl 10mo agoAs usual, those who spent too much money on it use it as a way to show their investors they didn't waste all that money and to get them to spend even more. That's why it's so messed up.
- bunjammin 10mo ago[dead]
- wasmainiac 10mo ago> I will not allow AI to be pushed down my throat just to justify your bad investment. Pretty much my sentiment too.
- exsomet 10mo agoThe neat thing about all this is that you don’t get a choice! Your favorite services are adding “AI” features (and raising prices to boot), your data is being collected and analyzed (probably incorrectly) by AI tools, you are interacting with AI-generated responses on social media, viewing AI-generated images and videos, and reading articles generated by AI. Business leaders are making decisions about your job and your value using AI, and political leaders are making policy and military decisions based on AI output. It’s happening, with you or to you.
- hansvm 10mo agoReasonably far off topic: Visa hasn't worked for online purchases for me for a few months, seemingly because of a rogue fraud-detection AI their customer service can't override. Is there any chance that's just a poorly implemented traditional solution rather than feeding all my data into an LLM?
- fragmede 10mo agoIf by "traditional solution" you mean a bunch of data is fed into creating an ML model and then your individual transaction is fed into that, and it spits out a fraud score, then no, they'd not using LLMs, but at this high a level, what's the difference? If their ML model uses a transformers-based architecture vs not, what difference does it make?
- esseph 10mo agoOne hallucinates data, one does not?
- hansvm 10mo ago> what difference does it make Traditional fraud-detection models have quantified type-i/ii error rates, and somebody typically chooses parameters such that those errors are within acceptable bounds. If somebody decided to use a transformers-based architecture in roughly the same setup as before then there would be no issue, but if somebody listened to some exec's hairbrained idea to "let the AI look for fraud" and just came up with a prompt/api wrapping a modern LLM then there would be huge issues.
- xnx 10mo ago[flagged]
- stego-tech 10mo agoReplace AI with Blockchain. With cloud. With big data. With ERP. With service models. With basically almost any fad since virtualization. It’s the same thing: over-hyped tools with questionable value being shoe-horned into every possible orifice so the investors can make money. I’m not opposed to any of the above, necessarily. I’ve just always been the type to want to adopt things as they are needed and bring demonstrable value to myself or my employer and not a moment before. That is the problem that capital has tried to solve through “founder mode” startups and exploitative business models: “It doesn’t matter whether you need it or not, what matters is that we’re forcing you to pay for it so we get our returns.”
- manphone 10mo agoThe difference is the level of investment and consumer application for each service - most customers would never be able to tell you what an erp is.
- aurareturn 10mo agoReplace AI with Blockchain. With cloud. With big data. With ERP. With service models. With basically almost any fad since virtualization. It’s the same thing: over-hyped tools with questionable value being shoe-horned into every possible orifice so the investors can make money. They said the exact same thing when electricity was invented too. Gas companies said electricity was a fad. Some doctors said electric light harms the eyes. It's too expensive for practical use. Need too much infrastructure investment. AC will kill people with shocks. Electrification will destroy jobs, said gas lamp unions. It's unnatural, said some clergy. And on and on and on...
- exasperaited 10mo agoThis post is just one multipurpose category error.
- drivebyhooting 10mo agoElectric light indeed harms the eyes.
- 10mo ago
- gosub100 10mo agoIf AI was as great as they pretend, there would be no need to force it on us.
- AGI-slop 10mo agoIts the only game in town, and reasonably expected to be close to the last.
- InexSquirrel 10mo agoWhat do you mean by that?
- AGI-slop 10mo agoA few days ago i took a photo of some water pipes, and asked chatgpt to review it . Unbeknownst to me that there was an issue. It pointed out multiple signs of slow leaks and then described what i should do to test and repair it easily. I see a lot of negative energy about the 'AI' tech we have today to the point where you will get mass downvoted for saying something positive.
- nateburke 10mo agoDid you follow through with the full repair? How long did it take? What was the materials cost?
- brazukadev 10mo agoA knowledgeable friend or family member could have helped with that too. AI is helpful, it is just not trillion dollars helpful.
- creata 10mo agoIf you did a writeup of this case, you could change some minds.
- DavidPiper 10mo ago
- arealaccount 10mo ago> We don't need to do it this quarter just because some startup has to do an earnings call. What startups are doing earning calls?
- collingreen 10mo agoAll the public ones?
- TZubiri 10mo agoI'd say at that point they are no longer startups, they've already started up
- crabmusket 10mo agoLots of businesses like to claim being a "startup" as it brings connotations of innovation, dynamism, coolness, being the "next big thing" etc. There are many senses of the word, and it can be used in different ways (e.g. I work at a small business which has some elements of startup culture, and it's not an incorrect way to give people a sense of what it's like here - but we're definitely well established) but I think often being one of the "cool kids" is part of the motivation.
- nutanc 10mo agoI would say in the AI age almost every business is a startup as per PGs definition [https://paulgraham.com/growth.html https://paulgraham.com/growth.html]
- nutanc 10mo agoWell not exactly earning calls in the classical sense, but haven't you heard about these startups announcing how they have scaled to $100 million in 3 months etc. Maybe revenue calls every quarter.
- osigurdson 10mo agoThe worst usage of AI is “content dilution” where you take a few bullet points and generate 5 paragraphs of nauseating slop. These days, I would gladly take badly written content from humans filled with grammatical errors and spelling mistakes over that.
- jjav 10mo ago> generate 5 paragraphs of nauseating slop Which then nobody will ever read, they'll just copy it into the AI bot to summarize into a few bullet points. The amount of waste is quite staggering in this back and forth game.
- andrei_says_ 10mo ago> Which then nobody will ever read, they'll just copy it into the AI bot to summarize into a few bullet points. Which more often than not will lose or distort the original intention behind the first 5 bullet points. Which is why I avoid using LLMs for writing.
- harvey9 10mo agoIt's pretty awesome that we now have nondeterministic .Zip
- collingreen 10mo ago/dev/yolo
- hackable_sand 10mo agoWe have non-deterministic compression at home
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- rvz 10mo agoOk fair enough, feel more of the AGI.
- AGI-slop 10mo agoAI will with certainty increase productivity of % and the rest will fall behind, perhaps dramatically. Effectiveness with AI can still be a grind, beyond simple prompting, we are getting lots of expensive AI tools heavily subsidized right now, that may not always be the case.
- snorbleck 10mo agoyeah, we're f&%^ed
- irusensei 10mo agoMicrosoft is all about this. You know how they also force stuff you don't want on the OS? Somewhere within Microsoft there might be a dashboard where they show their investors people are using Bing and Copilot. Borderline financial scam if you think about it.
- cons0le 10mo agoCopy and paste is not working reliably in in windows anymore; coincidentally it's breaking at the same time Msoft is moving to replace all copy/paste with OCR only. It's garbage
- dandelionv1bes 10mo agoGenuinely VSCode has been broken for me for with copying due to it desperately trying to vibe code for me. You’ve reminded me to fix that.
- dclowd9901 10mo agoHad the same issue switching to cursor. Cmd + k multiple selection skip is now no longer the key map. Drives me fucking nuts.
- TZubiri 10mo agoI haven't noticed this, also how exactly would OCR copy paste work? In order to copy text I would need to select text, which would mean it's already encoded as text.
- buildsjets 10mo agoEncoded as text, but converted to MS Comic Sans to introduce some OCR errors.
- ArcHound 10mo agoI can imagine, that instead of a text select, they instead take a screenshot. Round trip through recall and OCR, here's your "text" or image for pasting. Sounds dumb. I know.
- Duanemclemore 10mo agoThe Copilot button that comes on new laptops is the Darkest Pattern I have ever seen. UI exploitation that has jumped the software / hardware gap. A student will be showing me something on their laptop, their thumb accidentally grazes it because it's larger than the modifier keys and positioned so this happens as often as possible. The computer stops all other activity and shifts all focus to the Copilot window. Unprompted, the student always says something like "God, I hate that so much." If it was so useful they wouldn't have to trick you into using it.
- politelemon 10mo agoI'm having a hard time believing any of this, and am tempted to think this might be in bad faith. It's true it's a bit ambitious on their part that they replaced the right side key, but it isn't larger than normal and it's not positioned any differently than normal keys. Working with hundreds of laptops and humans, several ham fisted, on a daily basis I've not seen this at all. Further, a dark pattern is where you are led towards a specific outcome but are pulled insidiously towards another. This doesn't really fall into that definition.
- zahlman 10mo ago> Unprompted, the student always says something like "God, I hate that so much." ... Dare I ask how Copilot typically responds to that? (They're doing voice detection now, right?) > If it was so useful they wouldn't have to trick you into using it. They delude themselves that they're doing no such thing. Of course the feature is so useful that you'd want to be able to access it as easily as possible in any context.
- collingreen 10mo agoAnd the telemetry doesn't lie! Look how many people are clicking that button! KPIs go brrrrrrr
- sethops1 10mo agoWhat's sad is how real this is.
- mmastrac 10mo agoIs it possible to permanently disable Gemini on Android? I keep getting it inserted into my messages and other places, and it's horrible to think that I'm one misclick away from turning it on.
- Y_Y 10mo agoSorry, you've irrevocably consented by touching a button that appeared above what you were trying to tap half a millisecond earlier.
- withinboredom 10mo agoThat only happens with Apple, so it's fine.
- ajkjk 10mo agoMy feeling is we need laws to stop it
- rubyfan 10mo agoThe industry agrees with you, hence the regulatory capture.
- Yizahi 10mo agoToo big to fail now
- DavidPiper 10mo agoIf it only takes a few years for a private entity to become "too big to fail" and quasi-immune to government regulation, we have a real problem.
- fyrn_ 10mo agoAn yeah, and honestly we do seem to have a real problem. Here's hoping OpenAI doesn't get the bailout they seem to be angling for..
- cnees 10mo agoAmazon's Price History feature certainly doesn't need to open their AI assistant, but in addition to be graph I came for, I get a little summary of the graph. I really hope they aren't using an LLM for that when all it's doing is telling me it's the lowest price in 30 days.
- crabmusket 10mo agoThat's the kind of lazy bullshit idea that, to me, exemplifies the AI hype slop era we're in. The point of a chart is to communicate visually. If the chart isn't clear without a supplemental explanation, why is it there? If user research indicates your chart isn't clear enough, then improve the chart. But what are the odds they did any user research? They probably just ran an A/B test and saw number go up because of the novelty factor.
- 65 10mo agoOh how I'd like the AI bubble to pop already when ROIs don't justify the cost. I like AI for things like getting recommendations or classifying images. And yet execs feel the need to force every possible use case down our throats even if they don't make any sense or make quality worse. E.g. Programming - and I do judge not only those who use AI to code but execs who force people to use AI to code. Sorry, I'd like to know how my code works. Sorry, you're not an efficient worker, you're just making yourself dumber and churning out garbage software. It will be a competitive advantage for me when slop programmers don't know how to do anything and I can actually solve problems. Silicon Valley tech utopians cannot convince me otherwise. I don't think poorly socialized dweebs know much about anything other than their AI girlfriends providing them with a simulation of what it feels like to not be lonely.
- zahlman 10mo agoAs I click into this thread from the front page, "Writing a Good Claude.md" appears immediately above it. Sigh.
- Flipflip79 10mo agoWhat’s the problem there exactly? There’s nothing necessarily diametrically opposed in the two articles. They’re almost complimentary really
- protocolture 10mo ago"How to voluntarily use claude to get what you want" "I dont like being forced to use AI products" Whats the issue?
- brazukadev 10mo agoHN might be the one pushing AI down their users throat with so many top stories every dall, all day.
- rlt 10mo agoI don’t we’re at the “companies bought too many GPUs” stage yet. My understanding is they still can’t get enough GPUs, or data centers to put them in, or power to run them. Most companies don’t even own them, they rent from the clouds. We are, however, at the “we need an AI strategy” stage, so execs will throw anything and everything at the wall to see what sticks.
- bdbdbdb 10mo agoThey can't get enough GPUs right now, with VCs pumping money into them, but that can very quickly turn into "we're out of money, what do we do with all these GPUs?"
- protocolture 10mo ago>“companies bought too many GPUs” Nuance. They have insufficient GPUs for the amount of training going on. If you assume theres a plateau where the benefits of training constantly no longer outweigh the costs, then they probably have too many GPUs. The question is how far away is that plateau.
- brazukadev 10mo ago> My understanding is they still can’t get enough GPUs Enough for what? The adoption is slowing down fast, people are not willing to pay for a chatbox and a 10% better model won't change that.
- akomtu 10mo agoAI can be thought of as a parasitic lifeform: it feeds on truth and excretes slop. We know AI is no good for us, but those pushing it have a nefarious plan: make people dependent on it, so we can't get rid of this parasite without destroying our society.
- Waterluvian 10mo agoVSCode feels like it’s in the “brand withdrawal” phase of its lifespan. I’ve turned off the sneakily named “Chat” and yet it still shows the chat sometimes when I toggle the bottom bar visibility. > We will work with the creators, writers, and artists, instead of ripping off their life's work to feed the model. I’m not sure I have an idea of what this might look like. Do they want money? What might that model look like? Do they want credit? How would that be handled? Do they want to be consulted? How does that get managed?
- bloppe 10mo agoIt probably starts with a reexamination of copyright law, which has always been a pragmatic rather than a principled system, but has not noticeably changed since the digital revolution. Copyright is meant to encourage more publication by providing publishers with (temporary) control over their products after having released them to the public. Once the copyright expires, the work enters the public domain, which is really the end goal of copyright law. If publishers start to feel like LLMs are undermining that control, they might publish less original work, and therefore less stuff will eventually enter the public domain, which is considered bad for society. We're already seeing some effects of this as traffic (and ad revenue) to various websites has fallen significantly in the wake of LLM proliferation, which lowers the incentive to publish anything original in the first place. Anyway, I'm not sure how best to adapt copyright law to this new world. Some people have thought about it though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_alternatives https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_alternatives
- serial_dev 10mo agoJust like one of crypto’s biggest real world uses ended up being scams, LLMs are tools for bypassing copyright and enabling plagiarism with plausible deniability.
- ChrisMarshallNY 10mo agoThis seems like a fairly reasoned screed. I can't find much to disagree with. I am, personally, quite optimistic about the potential for "AI," but there's still plenty of warts. Just a few minutes ago, I was going through a SwiftUI debugging session with ChatGPT. SwiftUI View problems are notoriously difficult to debug, and the LLM got to the "let's try circling twice widdershins" stage. At that point, I re-engaged my brain, and figured out a much simpler solution than the one proposed. However, it gave me the necessary starting point to figure it out.
- mwkaufma 10mo ago>> It is time to do AI the right way. Some "No True Scotsman"-flavored cope.
- tim333 10mo agoIn addition to the annoyances mentioned, the pushing of AI may be leading to a massive waste of money and resources. I'm sure if, instead of AI being shoved in, want it or not, they said pay $1 if you want AI, the number of data centers needed would be reduced dramatically.
- burningChrome 10mo ago>> the pushing of AI may be leading to a massive waste of money and resources And massive amounts of energy to run these new fangled AI data centers. Not sure if you lumped that in with "resources", but yes we're already seeing it: A typical AI data center uses as much electricity as 100,000 households, and the largest under development will consume 20 times more, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). They also suck up billions of gallons of water for systems to keep all that computer hardware cool. https://www.npr.org/2025/10/14/nx-s1-5565147/google-ai-data-centers-growth-environment-electricity https://www.npr.org/2025/10/14/nx-s1-5565147/google-ai-data-...
- polynomial 10mo agoZero attractor would likely be a safe bet.
- btbuildem 10mo agoI mean, we're in the upslope stage of the hype/bubble cycle. Once this pops and 80% of invested people lose their shirts, the long-term adoption cycle will play out much more reasonably, more like OP wishes.
- qustrolabe 10mo agoWhat examples of AI integrations annoy you? Because I have such wonderful time randomly discovering AI integrations where they actually fit nicely: 1) marimo documentation has ask button to quickly get some help, kind of like way smarter RAG; 2) postman has AI that can write little scripts that visualize responses however you want (for example I turned bunch of user ids into profile links so that I could visit all of them); 3) Grok button on each Twitter post is just amazing to quickly get into what post even references and talks about. 4) Google's AI Mode saved me many clicks, even just Gemini that can quickly fetch when certain TV Show goes live and make reminder is amazing
- croes 10mo agoOn Windows: Notepad and Edge Developer Tools
- evil-olive 10mo ago> Grok button on each Twitter post is just amazing to quickly get into what post even references and talks about. when Charlie Kirk was shot, and the video was posted to Twitter, people asked Grok to "fact-check" it...and Grok told them the videos were fake and Kirk was alive. [0] Grok also spread misinformation about the identity of the shooter. [1] > On Friday morning, after Utah Gov. Spencer Cox announced that the suspect in custody was Robinson, Grok's replies to X users' inquiries about him were contradictory. One Grok post said Robinson was a registered Republican, while others reported he was a nonpartisan voter. Voter registration records indicate Robinson is not affiliated with a political party. and that's just one particularly egregious event in a long string of problems, such as the MechaHitler thing. [2] and the Elon Musk piss-drinking thing. [3] so if you're going to defend these "AI" integrations as being useful and helpful...I dunno, Grok is probably not a good example to point to. 0: https://www.engadget.com/ai/grok-claimed-the-charlie-kirk-assassination-video-was-a-meme-edit-175640641.html https://www.engadget.com/ai/grok-claimed-the-charlie-kirk-as... 1: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ai-false-claims-charlie-kirk-death/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ai-false-claims-charlie-kirk-de... 2: https://www.npr.org/2025/07/09/nx-s1-5462609/grok-elon-musk-antisemitic-racist-content https://www.npr.org/2025/07/09/nx-s1-5462609/grok-elon-musk-... 3: https://www.404media.co/elon-musk-could-drink-piss-better-than-any-human-in-history-grok-says/ https://www.404media.co/elon-musk-could-drink-piss-better-th...
- rmnclmnt 10mo ago> We don't need AGI (Artificial General Intelligence). We don't need a digital god. We just need software that works. Yeah, I think the days of working software are over (at least deterministically)
- netfortius 10mo agoSure! [1] [1] https://www.techspot.com/news/110418-nvidia-jensen-huang-urges-employees-automate-every-task.html https://www.techspot.com/news/110418-nvidia-jensen-huang-urg...
- firefoxd 10mo agoAI reminds me of the time Google+ was being shoved down our throats. If you randomly clicked on more that 7 hyperlinks on the internet, you'd magically sign up for google plus. Around that time, one of my employer's website had added google plus share buttons to all the links on the homepage. It wasn't a blog, but imagine a blog homepage with previews of the last 30 articles. Now each article had a google plus tag on it. I was called to help because the load time for the page had grown from seconds to a few minutes. For each article, they were adding a new script tag and a google plus dynamic tag. It was fixed, but so much resources were wasted for something that eventually disappeared. Ai will probably not disappear, but I'm tired of the busy work around it.
- LogicFailsMe 10mo agoThe difference was that Google Plus was actually kind of cool. I'm not excusing them shoving it down your throat, but at least it was well designed. Most of the AI efforts currently represent misadventures in software design at a time when my Fitbit charge can't even play nice with my pixel 7 phone. How does that even happen?
- chanux 10mo agoI remember believing Google+ will win because it was quite nicely done. But I guess it never caught on with the masses to be successful in Google's definition of success (Adsense?). PS: I was thinking that I didn't notice it being shoved down because I was high on the Koolaid. But I do remember when they shoved it in YouTube comments.
- iteria 10mo agoGoogle+ lost because when they launched, they didn't let everyone join. That means that people joined and couldn't bring their friends over, so they bounced off of it. By the time they opened it up to everyone it had a bad reputation of being "dead". And then of being obnoxious when Google refused to allow it natural growth. I think they intended to be like Facebook and have a selective group of people join, but they just allowed any random set of people to join and then said tou can bring 5 or some low number with you. That was never going to work for the rapid growth they wanted. I liked Google+, but it Google really mismanaged it.
- thih9 10mo agoWhat I also dislike about the AI is that it promotes a mainframe-like development workflow. Schedule your computation, pay for the usage, etc. Any chance this particular trend stops or reverses? Are we ever going to have local AI that is in practice comparable and sufficient?
- simianparrot 10mo agoYou don’t need it for development. Neither locally nor on the mainframe. Money saved.
- thih9 10mo agoI don’t need google either, I could read docs or source code and figure things out myself. I do need it if I want to skip parts of coding that are not my focus at the moment - AI is arguably similar.
- MinimalAction 10mo agoThis might be obvious but I think the only way forwards is to disengage in services offered by these mega-tech companies. Degoogling has become popular enough to foster open communities that prioritize their time and effort to keep softwares free from parasitic enterprises. For instance, I am fiddling with LineageOS on a Pixel (ironically enough) that minimizes my exposure to Google's AI antics. That doesn't mean to say it is easy or sustainable, but enough of us need to stop participating in their bad bets to force upon that realization.
- smt88 10mo agoNo one with a white-collar job in the US can get away from Google and Microsoft. We're forced to use one or the other, and some of us are forced to use both. That's not to mention all the other tech companies pushing AI (which is honestly all of them).
- MinimalAction 10mo agoAgreed. At the level of companies, it is hard to find any practical solution. Personally, I am trying to do what I can.
- encomiast 10mo agoI'm hoping "degoogle" is the 2026 word of the year.
- IlikeKitties 10mo agoMy Healthcare providers App in Germany refuses to work on anything that isn't a Phone running official Google^tm verified^(r) and hardware attested OS. Same with some banks.
- MinimalAction 10mo agoI feel things like these should be illegal. There must be other genuine ways to verify the end user.
- gorgoiler 10mo agoLots of things in life seem to be the majority having to go along with the decisions of the minority. I remember in 2012 when Facebook put white chevrons for previous- and next-photo in the web photo gallery product and thinking how this one product decision by a handful of punks has now been foisted on the world. At the time I was really into putting my photography on FB and, somewhat pretentiously, it really pissed me off to start having UI elements stuck on it! Car dashboards without buttons, TVs sold with 3D glasses (remember that phase?), material then flat design, larger and larger phones: the list is embarrasing to type because it feels like such a stereotypical nerd complaint list. I think it’s true though — the tech PMs are autocrats and have such a bizarrely outsized impact on our lives. And now with AI, too. I just interacted with duck.ai, duck duck go’s stab at a bot. I long for a little more conservatism.
- 8bitsrule 10mo ago>the tech PMs are autocrats and have such a bizarrely outsized impact on our lives. They're the ones who are just asking for it ... they, themselves need more forceful training. It's up to us to move slower and fix things.
- venturecruelty 10mo agoThis is what happens when you let companies become empires, with the tacit agreement of your "democratically-elected" government. In no sane world should my electricity bill go up because Google wants me to put glue on pizza. Unfortunately, I don't think we live in a sane world.
- atleastoptimal 10mo agoBoomers in the manager class love AI because it sells the promise of what they've longed for for decades: a perfect servant that produces value with no salary, no need for breaks, no pushback, no workers comp suits, etc. The thing is, AI did suck in 2023, and even in 2024, but recently the best AI models are veering into not sucking territory, which when you look at it from a distance makes sense, eventually if you throw the smartest researchers on the planet and billions of dollars at a problem, something eventually will give and the wheels will start turning. There is a strange blindness many people have on here, a steadfast belief that AI just will just never end up working or always be a scam, but the massive capex on AI now is predicated on the eventual turning of the fledgling LLM's into self-adaptive systems that can manage any cognitive task better than a human. I don't see how the improvements we've seen over the past few years in AI aren't surely heading in that direction.
- bkolobara 10mo agoIt still kinda sucks though. You can make it work, but you can also easily end up wasting a huge amount of time trying to make it do something that it's just incapable of. And it's impossible to know upfront if it will work. It's more like gambling. I personally think we have reached some kind of local maximum. I work 8 hours per day with claude code, so I'm very much aware of even subtle changes in the model. Taking into account how much money was thrown at it, I can't see much progress in the last few model iterations. Only the "benchmarks" are improving, but the results I'm getting are not. If I care about some work, I almost never use AI. I also watch a lot of people streaming online to pick up new workflows and often they say something like "I don't care much about the UI, so I let it just do its thing". I think this tells you more about the current state of AI for coding than anything else. Far from _not sucking_ territory.
- nephihaha 10mo agoIt's not a perfect servant by any means. And let's drop the generation game.
- DontForgetMe 10mo ago> recently the best AI models are veering into not sucking territory I agree with your assessment. I find it absolutely wild that 'it almost doesn't entirely suck, if you squint' is suddenly an acceptable benchmark for a technology to be unleashed upon the public. We have standards for cars, speakers, clothing, furniture, make up, even literature. Someone can't just type up a few pages of dross and put it though 100 letterboxes without being liable for littering and nuisance. The EU and UK don't allow someone to still phones with a pre-imstalled app that almost performs a function that some users might theoretically want. The public domain has quality standards. Or rather, it had quality standards. But it's apparently legal to put semi-functioning data-collectors in technologies where nobody asked for them, why isn't it legal to sell chairs that collapse unless you hold them a specific way, clothes that don't actually function as clothes but could be used to make actual clothes by a competent tailor, headphones that can be coaxed into sporadically producing round for minutes at a time? Either something works too a professional standard or it doesn't. If it doesn't, it is/was not legal to include it in consumer products. This is why people are more angry than is justified by a single unreliable program. I don't care that much whether LLM's perform the functions that are advertised (and they don't, half the time). I care that after many decades of living in a first world country with consumer protection and minimum standards, all of that seems to have been washed away in the AI wave. When it receeds, we will be left paying first world prices for third world enquiring, now the acceptable quality standard for everything seems to have dropped to 'it can almost certainly be used for its intended purpose at least some times, by some people, with a little effort'.
- hmans 10mo ago[dead]
- Aperocky 10mo ago> And let’s be clear: We don't need AGI (Artificial General Intelligence). In general, I think we want to have it, just like nuclear fusion, interplanetary and interstellar colonization, curing cancer, etc. etc. We don't "need" it similar to people in 1800s don't need electric cars or airports. Who owns AGI or what purpose the AGI believe it has is a separate discussion - similar to how airplanes can be used to transport people or fight wars. Fortunately today, most airplanes are made to transport people and connect the world.
- bluefirebrand 10mo ago> In general, I think we want to have it Outside of tech circles no one I talk to wants AI for anything
- dreamcompiler 10mo agoThere's a humorous vignette in season 2 of "A Man on the Inside": Our heroes are in the office of a tech billionaire who says "See that coffee machine? Just speak what you want. It can make any coffee drink." So one character says "Half caf latte" and the machine does nothing except open a small drawer. "You have to spit in the drawer so it can collect your DNA--then it will make your coffee" the billionaire says. This pretty much sums up the whole tech scene today. Any good engineer could build that coffee machine, but no VC would fund her company without the spit drawer.
- bentt 10mo agoThis is just another example of getting the actual problem wrong. When he says "billionaires making more billions" it's really off the mark. These people are not forcing AI down our throats to make billions. They are doing it so they can win. Winning means victory in a zero sum game. This is a game that is zero sum because the people that play it think that way. However, the point is not to make money. That's a side effect. They want to win so the other guys don't. That means power, growth, prestige, and winning. Winning just to win. Once people start to understand that this is the prime directive for the elite in the tech business, the easier it is for everyone to defend against it. The way you defend against it is to make it non-zero sum. Spread the ideas out. Give people choices. Act more like Tim Berners Lee and less like Zuck. This will mean less money, sure, but more to the point, it deprives anyone of being "the winner". We should all celebrate any moves that take power away from the few and redistribute it to many. Money will be made in the process, but that's okay.
- mrcsharp 10mo ago> And let’s be clear: We don't need AGI (Artificial General Intelligence). We don't need a digital god. We just need software that works. We (You and I) don't. Shareholders absolutely need it for that line to go further up. They love the idea of LLMs, AI, and AGI for the sole reason that it will help them reduce the cost of labour massively. Simple as that. > I will use what creates value for me. I will not buy anything that is of no use to me. If only everyone was thinking this way. So many around these parts have no self-preservation tendencies at all.
- input_sh 10mo agoI don't think any of the people at the top actually believe world's-most-average-answer generator is a path that leads us to AGI. It's just a marketing boogeyman and a handy excuse to remove any remnants of agency that the workforce currently has.
- seizethecheese 10mo agoNobody is using tools that create no value for them, that’s an absurd argument. Many are overclocking their AI use because of their self preservation instinct.
- callc 10mo agoA bit more nuanced: nobody is using tools that have a perceived negative value. People pushing AI desperately want to convince us the value is positive. 10x productivity! Fire all your humans! In reality, depending on the use-case, the value is much smaller. And can be negative thinking about the total value over long term (incomprehensible shoddy foundations of large / long running projects)
- seizethecheese 10mo agoYeah, that’s right. I’m reacting to the author’s statement (I won’t use tools that have negative value) to assert that it’s essentially a vapid statement. I wish the author made arguments such as yours.
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- ziggure 10mo agoI love that the picture in the article is AI-generated
- hermitcrab 10mo ago>I will not allow AI to be pushed down my throat just to justify your bad investment. Unfortunately these reckless investments are likely to cause massive collateral damage to us 'little people'. But I'm sure the billionaires will be just fine.
- analog31 10mo agoOne issue might just be money. "Forcing" us to buy new laptops every 3 years has to be planned well enough in advance for the new OS and hardware to be ready, but meanwhile, it may have occurred to a lot of people that hanging onto the old stuff for a few more years might make the most sense right now. Also, even many home users may be finding that they interact less and less with the "platform" now that everything including MS Office runs from a browser. I can barely remember when the differences between Windows and Linux were even relevant to my personal computer use. This was necessitated by having to find a good way to accommodate Windows, MacOS, iOS, and Android all at once.
- 1970-01-01 10mo agoThat's an interesting take. We really don't need TPUs and GPUs to run an OS, but that doesn't mean they won't try to sell it to us as a necessity.
- anonymouskimmer 10mo agoYep. My personal laptop is 12 years old and my work laptop is 6. A replacement battery, some extra RAM, and a replacement fan (kind of hard to get) for my personal laptop a few years ago and it still does everything I want it to do. I cracked the screen on my work laptop last year, but IT set me up with a replacement screen. It's so much nicer having discrete buttons than a clickable trackpad, so I skipped on an upgrade. Still does everything I need it to do for work (including working with Windows 11). And the vast majority of things I do on either laptop involves a web browser.
- jeffbee 10mo agoThis article has basically nothing to say, and all of the comments here on HN are just projecting their priors into the vacuum.
- mrcsharp 10mo agoIt is one more voice against the frantic nature of this topic and the corporations desperate to push for it. It is no different than one more post about Claude.md making it to the front page.
- winddude 10mo ago"But we bought too many GPUs! We spent billions on infrastructure! They have to be put to work!" right... none of them are saying that. They could probably use more GPUs considering the price of GPUs and memory are skyrocketing and the supply chain can't keep up. It's about experimentation, they need real users and real feedback to know how to improve the current generation of models, and figure out how to monetise them.
- seizethecheese 10mo agoThe author and more than half of the comments here are hallucinating reasons to be angry about AI. Ironic, really.
- venturecruelty 10mo agoAdd "patronizing proponents" to the pile.
- creata 10mo agoIn what universe is having things that you do not want shoved on you an invalid reason to be angry?
- seizethecheese 10mo agoThe comment I’m replying to is an example of one hallucination. Specifically that AI is being pushed because companies have too many GPUs when in reality they have too little. There are several other hallucinations in this thread.
- nutanc 10mo agoThis will need a separate blog post But when you give something for free, then you will run out of that resource. So yes, companies have too little GPUs to give their services for free, but too many GPUs for their paid services.
- hastily3114 10mo agoI think the reason AI is being pushed everywhere right now is simply that companies want to experiment with it. They want to explore what is possible and what sticks with users. The best way to do this is to just push it in their apps as many places as possible since 1. you get a nice list of real world problems to try and solve. 2. You have more pressure on devs to actually make something that works because it is going into production. 3. You get feedback from millions of users. Also, by working heavily with their AI, they will discover areas that can be improved and thus make the AI itself better. They don't care that it is annoying, unhelpful or uneconomical because the purpose is experimentation.
- protocolture 10mo agoMost of these companies have an advanced features usergroup. Leave it there until its desired.
- stephen_g 10mo agoOr they could beta test them first with users who opt in, and work out that most users hate the features there, instead of taking on AI nonsense everywhere and beta testing crappy features nobody wants on real users?
- hastily3114 10mo agoFor the record, I'm not saying that this is a good thing, or that i agree with it. I also find it very annoying.
- seizethecheese 10mo ago> Right now, the frantic pace of deployment isn't about utility; it's about liquidity. It’s being shoved down our throats because some billionaires need to make some more billions before they die. > We see the hallucinations. We see the errors. Let's pick the things which work and slowly integrate it into our lives. We don't need to do it this quarter just because some startup has to do an earnings call. Citation needed? To me this is a contentless rant. AI is about old billionaires getting richer before they die? It’s at least a lot more than that. Seems like some people tried AI in 2023, got negative affinity for it, then just never update with new information. In my personal use, hallucinations are way down, and it’s just getting more and more useful.
- gnarlouse 10mo agoAlso don’t shove it up our
- YmiYugy 10mo ago> I hear the complaints from the tech giants already: "But we bought too many GPUs! We spent billions on infrastructure! They have to be put to work!" > Not my problem. I don't know about the author specifically, but the bubble popping is a very bad thing for many people. People keep saying that this bubble isn't so bad because it's concentrated on the balance sheet of very deep pocketed tech companies who can survive the crash. I think that is basically true, but a lot is riding on the stock valuations of these big tech companies and lots of bad stuff will happen when these crash. It's obviously bad for the people holding these stocks, but I these tech stocks are so big that there is a real risk of widespread contagion.
- fhrhfhfhdj 10mo agoThe only thing worse than popping the AI bubble is trying to inflate it even larger with a government bailout. The longer the government tries to protect the bubble, the more extreme and destructive the level of capital misallocation is going to become. They should have popped it years ago before we were trying to build nuclear reactors to keep our internet chatbots from taking down the power grid.
- charlesabarnes 10mo agoI think the market forces that is supposed to constrain these companies are broken. Users don't have many other options to switch to. Even if they did, the b2b/advertising revenue they get makes up for any losses they may take on the consumer side.
- beefnugs 10mo agoThey have already proven they absolutely COULD tag everything with evidence of how much came from an original author/artist. Google's image generator has that hidden signature feature that can publicize ai generated, but they don't go the step further back to the real source. Just "it came from ai" aheeyuk pay us
- duxup 10mo agoI think the problem is, the folks in charge feel like they don't have a choices. They spent a ton of money and/or they see everyone's LinkedIn posts or fantastic news stories by someone selling BS and they're afraid to say the emperor has no clothes.
- nephihaha 10mo agoAll that Zoom and Skype during lockdown was to train AI. Those video calls weren't free.
- scdnc 10mo agoA tip: degoogle, demicrosoft, defacebook (and maybe also deapple)