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It is an unusual list. Along with a list an AI websites it also blocks a handful of instagram, X and Pinterest profiles. It also blocks a number of specific pro

It is an unusual list. Along with a list an AI websites it also blocks a handful of instagram, X and Pinterest profiles. It also blocks a number of specific products on Amazon, such as a colouring book that presumably was generated with AI. This kind of reminds me Steam where indie devs need to exclaim loudly that they are not using AI, otherwise they face backlash. Meanwhile a significant percentage of devs are using GenAI for better tab completion, better search or generating tests. All things that do not impact the end user experience negatively.

ares623 10mo ago
I think the backlash comes from all the "AI-driven" layoffs that absolutely impact the end users negatively.
dexwiz 10mo ago
I think AI as a tool versus AI as a product are different. Even in coding you can see it with tab completion/agents v vibe coding. It's a spectrum and people are trying to find their personal divider on it. Additionally there are those out there that decry anything involving AI as heresy. (no thinking machines!)
- latexr 10mo ago
  > Additionally there are those out there that decry anything involving AI as heresy. (no thinking machines!) I don’t think anyone decrying the current crop of “AI” is against “thinking machines”. We’re not there yet, LLMs don’t think, despite the marketing.
  - WA 10mo ago
    And they don’t reason. They do prompt smoothing.
  - machinationu 10mo ago
    LLMs don't think, and planes don't fly.
    - noosphr 10mo ago
      LLMs think in the same way submarines swim.
      - nkmnz 10mo ago
        So... they do think? Or what is your position? Submarines obviously do swim, otherwise they'd either float or sink.
        noosphr 10mo ago
        Yes, submarines swim just like how people sail the breaststroke.
        jazzyjackson 10mo ago
        It's an old saying. The ability for submarines to move through water has nothing to do with swimming, and AIs ability to do generate content has nothing to do with thinking.
        fenomas 10mo ago
        Uh, kind of the opposite :D The quote (from Dijkstra) is that asking whether machines think is as uninteresting as asking whether submarines swim. He's not saying machines don't think, he's saying it's a pointless thing to argue about - an opinion about whether AIs think is an opinion about word usage, not about AIs.
  - Sabinus 10mo ago
    True. It's more like 'no creative machines' or 'no entry level middle class job machines'.
  - halJordan 10mo ago
    This is exactly the sort of refusal to comprehend so that you can get in an "um, ackshually" that the op is talking about. He's quoting a line from a book as a metaphor for a concept the book illustrates well.
    - dexwiz 10mo ago
      This guy gets it.
    - latexr 10mo ago
      You see someone who you think has missed a larger point, and all you can muster as a reply is a vague jab and unexplained reference? Do you not see the irony? Your whole comment is an “um, ackshually”, the very thing you are decrying. I didn’t enjoy Dune, by the way. No shade on those who did, of course, but I couldn’t bring myself to finish it. If you think there’s something there, explain your point. Make an argument. Maybe I have misunderstood something and will correct my thinking, or maybe you have misunderstood and will correct yours. But as it is, I don’t see your comment as providing any value to the discussion. It’s the equivalent of a hit and run, meant to insult the other person while remaining uncommitted enough to shield yourself from criticism.
    - rpdillon 10mo ago
      Yes, latexr managed to somehow sidestep the point entirely and make a pedantic correction. I notice this a lot in these discussions. The point is AI has lots of useful applications, even though there's also lots of detestable ones.
- TheJoeMan 10mo ago
  Are you hitting tab because it’s what you were about to type, or did it “generate” something you don’t understand? Seems a personalized distinguisher to me.
lpcvoid 10mo ago
Devs also shouldn't be using GenAI, it's inherently anti-worker and IMHO also anti-human. But I guess that's an unpopular opinion around here.
- snet0 10mo ago
  If a "C+++" was created that was so efficient that it would allow teams to be smaller and achieve the same work faster, would that be anti-worker? If an IDE had powerful, effective hotkeys and shortcuts and refactoring tools that allowed devs to be faster and more efficient, would that be anti-worker?
  - lpcvoid 10mo ago
    What part of c++ is inefficient? I can write that pretty quickly without having some cloud service hallucinate stuff. And no, a faster way to write or refactor code is not anti-worker. Corporations gobbling up tax payer money to build power hungry datacenters so billionaires can replace workers is.
    - snet0 10mo ago
      I never said C++ was inefficient, you don't have to prove anything. It's a hypothetical, try use your imagination. > Corporations gobbling up tax payer money to build power hungry datacenters so billionaires can replace workers is. Which part of this is important? If there was no taxpayer funding, would it be okay? If it was low power-consumption, would it be okay? I just want to understand what the precise issue is.
  - port11 10mo ago
    Was C+++ built by extensively mining other people's work, possibly creating an economic bubble, putting thousands out of work, creating spikes in energy demand, raising the price of electronic components and inflating the price of downstream products, abusing people's privacy,… hmm. Was it?
    - nkmnz 10mo ago
halyconWays 10mo ago
Given the political comments in what's supposed to be a filter, and how everything is prefaced with "shit" like "Pinterest shit," I bet the author had a personal political disagreement with those accounts. The list is also too specific to be useful in some cases, like, is it really important to you that you add 12 entries for specific Amazon products, like: ` duckduckgo.com,bing.com##a[href*="amazon.com/Rabbit-Coloring-Book-Rabbits-Lovers/dp/B0CV43GKGZ"]:upward(li):remove()`?
- GaryBluto 10mo ago
  It's bizarre that the list was even posted here. Why would anybody feel the need to share their own, personal blocklist with HN?
rjh29 10mo ago
Even if GenAI is helpful it's okay to morally reject using it. There are plenty of things that give you an advantage in your career but are morally wrong. Complaints include putting people out of jobs, causing a financial bubble, filling GitHub and the internet in general with AI slop, using tons of energy, increasing dram and GPU prices. And it's not even that apparent how much GenAI improves overall development speed, beyond making toy apps. Hallucinations, bugs, misreading your intentions, getting stuck in loops, wasting your time debugging and testing and it still doesn't help with the actual hard problems of devwork. Even the examples you mention can be fallible. On top of all that is AI even profitable? It might be fine now but what happens when it's priced to reflect its actual costs? Anecdotally it already feels like models are being quantised and dumbed down - I find them objectively less useful and I'm hitting usage limits quicker than before. Once the free ride is over, only rich people from rich countries will have access to them and of course only big tech companies control the models. It could be peer pressure but many people genuinely object to AI universally. You can't get the useful parts without the rest of it.
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
NotGMan 10mo ago
Indie game devs aren't really facing any real backslash. A smart loud minority is screaming a lot but actual paying customers don't care as long as the game is not trash.
- janice1999 10mo ago
  You're right it's about paying customers. No one is going to waste time campaigning against a $1.99 squid game knockoff on Steam if it uses AI (many are just Unity assets flips already). The backlash I've seen is against large studies leaving AI slop in 60+ dollar games. Sure, it might just be some background textures or items at the moment, but the reasoning is that if studies know they can get away with it, quality decline is inevitable. I tend to agree. AI tooling is useful but it can't be at the expense of the product quality.

ares623 10mo ago

I think the backlash comes from all the "AI-driven" layoffs that absolutely impact the end users negatively.

dexwiz 10mo ago

I think AI as a tool versus AI as a product are different. Even in coding you can see it with tab completion/agents v vibe coding. It's a spectrum and people are trying to find their personal divider on it. Additionally there are those out there that decry anything involving AI as heresy. (no thinking machines!)

latexr 10mo ago
> Additionally there are those out there that decry anything involving AI as heresy. (no thinking machines!) I don’t think anyone decrying the current crop of “AI” is against “thinking machines”. We’re not there yet, LLMs don’t think, despite the marketing.
- WA 10mo ago
  And they don’t reason. They do prompt smoothing.
- machinationu 10mo ago
  LLMs don't think, and planes don't fly.
  - noosphr 10mo ago
    LLMs think in the same way submarines swim.
    - nkmnz 10mo ago
      So... they do think? Or what is your position? Submarines obviously do swim, otherwise they'd either float or sink.
      - noosphr 10mo ago
        Yes, submarines swim just like how people sail the breaststroke.
      - jazzyjackson 10mo ago
        It's an old saying. The ability for submarines to move through water has nothing to do with swimming, and AIs ability to do generate content has nothing to do with thinking.
        fenomas 10mo ago
        Uh, kind of the opposite :D The quote (from Dijkstra) is that asking whether machines think is as uninteresting as asking whether submarines swim. He's not saying machines don't think, he's saying it's a pointless thing to argue about - an opinion about whether AIs think is an opinion about word usage, not about AIs.
- Sabinus 10mo ago
  True. It's more like 'no creative machines' or 'no entry level middle class job machines'.
- halJordan 10mo ago
  This is exactly the sort of refusal to comprehend so that you can get in an "um, ackshually" that the op is talking about. He's quoting a line from a book as a metaphor for a concept the book illustrates well.
  - dexwiz 10mo ago
    This guy gets it.
  - latexr 10mo ago
    You see someone who you think has missed a larger point, and all you can muster as a reply is a vague jab and unexplained reference? Do you not see the irony? Your whole comment is an “um, ackshually”, the very thing you are decrying. I didn’t enjoy Dune, by the way. No shade on those who did, of course, but I couldn’t bring myself to finish it. If you think there’s something there, explain your point. Make an argument. Maybe I have misunderstood something and will correct my thinking, or maybe you have misunderstood and will correct yours. But as it is, I don’t see your comment as providing any value to the discussion. It’s the equivalent of a hit and run, meant to insult the other person while remaining uncommitted enough to shield yourself from criticism.
  - rpdillon 10mo ago
    Yes, latexr managed to somehow sidestep the point entirely and make a pedantic correction. I notice this a lot in these discussions. The point is AI has lots of useful applications, even though there's also lots of detestable ones.
TheJoeMan 10mo ago
Are you hitting tab because it’s what you were about to type, or did it “generate” something you don’t understand? Seems a personalized distinguisher to me.

lpcvoid 10mo ago

Devs also shouldn't be using GenAI, it's inherently anti-worker and IMHO also anti-human. But I guess that's an unpopular opinion around here.

snet0 10mo ago
If a "C+++" was created that was so efficient that it would allow teams to be smaller and achieve the same work faster, would that be anti-worker? If an IDE had powerful, effective hotkeys and shortcuts and refactoring tools that allowed devs to be faster and more efficient, would that be anti-worker?
- lpcvoid 10mo ago
  What part of c++ is inefficient? I can write that pretty quickly without having some cloud service hallucinate stuff. And no, a faster way to write or refactor code is not anti-worker. Corporations gobbling up tax payer money to build power hungry datacenters so billionaires can replace workers is.
  - snet0 10mo ago
    I never said C++ was inefficient, you don't have to prove anything. It's a hypothetical, try use your imagination. > Corporations gobbling up tax payer money to build power hungry datacenters so billionaires can replace workers is. Which part of this is important? If there was no taxpayer funding, would it be okay? If it was low power-consumption, would it be okay? I just want to understand what the precise issue is.
- port11 10mo ago
  Was C+++ built by extensively mining other people's work, possibly creating an economic bubble, putting thousands out of work, creating spikes in energy demand, raising the price of electronic components and inflating the price of downstream products, abusing people's privacy,… hmm. Was it?
  - nkmnz 10mo ago

halyconWays 10mo ago

Given the political comments in what's supposed to be a filter, and how everything is prefaced with "shit" like "Pinterest shit," I bet the author had a personal political disagreement with those accounts. The list is also too specific to be useful in some cases, like, is it really important to you that you add 12 entries for specific Amazon products, like: ` duckduckgo.com,bing.com##a[href*="amazon.com/Rabbit-Coloring-Book-Rabbits-Lovers/dp/B0CV43GKGZ"]:upward(li):remove()`?

GaryBluto 10mo ago
It's bizarre that the list was even posted here. Why would anybody feel the need to share their own, personal blocklist with HN?

rjh29 10mo ago

Even if GenAI is helpful it's okay to morally reject using it. There are plenty of things that give you an advantage in your career but are morally wrong. Complaints include putting people out of jobs, causing a financial bubble, filling GitHub and the internet in general with AI slop, using tons of energy, increasing dram and GPU prices. And it's not even that apparent how much GenAI improves overall development speed, beyond making toy apps. Hallucinations, bugs, misreading your intentions, getting stuck in loops, wasting your time debugging and testing and it still doesn't help with the actual hard problems of devwork. Even the examples you mention can be fallible. On top of all that is AI even profitable? It might be fine now but what happens when it's priced to reflect its actual costs? Anecdotally it already feels like models are being quantised and dumbed down - I find them objectively less useful and I'm hitting usage limits quicker than before. Once the free ride is over, only rich people from rich countries will have access to them and of course only big tech companies control the models. It could be peer pressure but many people genuinely object to AI universally. You can't get the useful parts without the rest of it.

deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]

NotGMan 10mo ago

Indie game devs aren't really facing any real backslash. A smart loud minority is screaming a lot but actual paying customers don't care as long as the game is not trash.

janice1999 10mo ago
You're right it's about paying customers. No one is going to waste time campaigning against a $1.99 squid game knockoff on Steam if it uses AI (many are just Unity assets flips already). The backlash I've seen is against large studies leaving AI slop in 60+ dollar games. Sure, it might just be some background textures or items at the moment, but the reasoning is that if studies know they can get away with it, quality decline is inevitable. I tend to agree. AI tooling is useful but it can't be at the expense of the product quality.