7 ms·

Please stop the AI confidence theater

239 points by skadamat 3mo ago

gregoryl 3mo ago
The bullshit will continue until the grifters move on to something else. If you can figure out what that is, you'll make some serious bank!
- altmanaltman 3mo ago
  quantum computing in next 5-10 years for sure will be the next grift, the wheels are already turning
  - ben_w 3mo ago
    Quantum computing is soooo 2018, you want space data centres for the next 5-10 years (or "5-10 tears" as the apple keyboard gave me the first time).
  - im_down_w_otp 3mo ago
    Its zeitgeist appeal has been stuck for like 20 years. The problem with it is that unlike sell-side mortgage fraud, self-driving cars, crypto, and current AI… quantum computing doesn’t have a simple, approachable, mass appeal parlour trick to rally around. Until it gets one, it’s never going to facilitate the scale of grift and graft as the others.
    - pclmulqdq 3mo ago
      The threat of breaking all encryption has been a slow-burning $1 trillion or more grift for the field over the last 20-30 years. Not that anything has materialized from it. I am somewhat convinced that PQC is primarily being rolled out so that we can all stop funding those clowns (and because lattice-based cryptography is finally ready for prime time).
      - overgard 3mo ago
        I don't know if breaking encryption will even matter if we just keep handing over all our data anyway.
        ben_w 3mo ago
        Depends on machine availability. If all crypto can only be broken by a machine that can itself only be made by 3 companies all of which are very careful about who they sell to, we get a few governments spying on everyone (including each other), while keeping normal criminal hacking (and insufficiently important governments) locked out.
- MichaelZuo 3mo ago
  Yeah, there will always be some percentage of bozos and clowns in America… that’s never going to change. And it’s unrealistic to expect them to stay perfectly motionless, they will try to adapt to the changing landscape too.
  - atonse 3mo ago
    Bozos and clowns are a universal cultural phenomenon.
- overgard 3mo ago
  This stuff makes me nostalgic for NFTs and the metaverse which is pretty horrifying all things considered.
mschuster91 3mo ago
> Marketing, Finance, and HR were spared though, which I find ironic. Oh hell no. A lot of jobs were lost there as well. Marketing got demoted into "just prompt AI" across the board, everyone and their dog built "ingest paper receipts from arbitrary sources into ERP/travel expense programs" (because there still is no standard on "how to transform a paper bill into a QR code"), and HR... "I inserted unreadable white text into resume PDFs to cheat AI resume filters" is reality, not just a meme. > What I don’t like about it is that it creates a fake baseline. If everyone around you appears to have figured something out about AI that has transformed their work, then using AI to summarize meetings suddenly feels embarrassingly basic. Meetings themselves and emails have gone the full bullshit circle. AI agents fluff up prompts into Powerpoint slides so incoherent everyone forced to sit through it eventually nods off and reads the AI summary later on. For emails, similarly AI agents fluff up prompts, send it over the wire, only for another AI agent to distill it back into something consumable by a human. Humans creating engaging content by hand seems to be a lost art these days. Frankly... I can only recommend, leave for some sort of job that is not corporate BS or can otherwise be replaced by a human. Learn a classic trade, to operate heavy machinery or whatever else. Maybe join a firefighter or EMS corps, saving lives is an experience of its own class. Anything IT or corporate is a dead end. First, you can see at the end of the day with your eyes what you have accomplished (which is way better for your mental health), second, it will take quite some time until there's a robot physically capable of the required dexterity to pull and wire cable and an AI capable enough to coordinate that robot, or find and clean a clog in 100 meters of sewer line. Once AI is good enough to replace a clogged shitter... invest in a good gun and target practice, because the rate things are going, society will break down at that point. Or, move towards the countryside and raise some chicken, goats or whatever. A ton of tech people have done so in the last years, fed up with the bullshit.
- lstodd 3mo ago
  I recommend learning how to splice/fuse fibre. Knowing that you hold gigabits in your hands and only your skill matters is priceless.
  - mschuster91 3mo ago
deleted 3mo ago
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Avicebron 3mo ago
Please stop this linkedin relatability theater.
embedding-shape 3mo ago
What these discussions frequently seem to miss, is discussing the exact method, tool and model they're using. > Meanwhile, I’m over here asking ChatGPT to rewrite the same paragraph for the third time because it keeps defaulting me into ‘LinkedIn wisdom post’ mode. GARH. I'm not doubting the author this is their experience, but is this with the trash free/instant ChatGPT or something else? If even "Thinking" was working like that, together with proper prompting, then I'd be surprised by the author's experience. But until people start showing exact examples and exactly what they're using, all the navel-gazing around this, positive, negative or neutral, will all just be empty words we can't really know what to do with.
- ben_w 3mo ago
  > But until people start showing exact examples and exactly what they're using, I suspect the majority of users won't be aware of what their current setting is. Even though you're right, we can't know what to do with their words.
classified 3mo ago
> AI Confidence Theater That's a benign term for it. Actually, it's lies, damn lies, and fucking god-damn lies. It's the super-mega-overdrive version of every principle that ads are based on. Like they are afraid we still haven't understood what makes ads tick, so they give us the practical in-your-face demo. And they were successful. I'm not believing a single word anyone remotely related to that business says anymore.
dgellow 3mo ago
> Okay…. it’s useful. But show me something that has become so critical in your day that if I took it away tomorrow, your work would actually fall apart. Show me something truly life changing. If only journalists would ask similar questions to corporations. "Ok, you made your entire engineering department agentic. Show me how exactly that contributed positively to your bottom line"
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fercircularbuf 3mo ago
My broader team organized a 2 day hackathon and created teams of 4 each with a mix of engineers, designers, data scientists, admin, localization, and project managers from across the team and gave us 5 pain points our product was experiencing and let us loose. The amount of leverage AI tools give small interdisciplinary teams to apply their existing skill sets is kind of crazy. Lots of very impressive demos, several of which were nearly shippable and provided real value.
- cahaya 3mo ago
  I'm not disagreeing with the article, but I think you are right that if you use AI in the right setting it can do much more than the average ChatGP that outputs Linkedin like crap: interdisciplinary teams/person + SOTA AI + Right context (customer/ internal pain points, access to the code, focussed Hackathon) = amazing cool things.
  - throwaway219450 3mo ago
    The biggest benefit for me has been getting side projects done. Little bugs or todos that would take more time than I have to spare, but don’t detract from the project. I’ve had Claude do stuff like interrogate IoT devices, look into proprietary file formats and even assisted debugging electronics from a text description and datasheets. It has stupidly broad knowledge as long as you watch out for things like getting part numbers/boards correct. Have you ever tried to ask for help on an electronics forum full of miserable greybeards? $20/mo for getting ballpark answers immediately is excellent value. Do assess if you want the learning experience or not, and whether you care if the problem is solved for you. For writing I get the appeal to bloggers, but I can’t stand reading anything that has the hallmarks of generative AI.
    - fibonachos 3mo ago
      Same here. Little side projects and convenience tooling for $day_job that otherwise wouldn’t have gotten built for lack of time. Doesn’t need to be perfect, beautiful code for an audience of one. It just needs to work.
vikp 3mo ago
It's an interesting illustration of the state of the AI market that immediately after arguing that AI cannot do anything complex...we have an ad arguing that AI can actually do those things. Even the people telling you that AI is a hype cycle buy into the hype cycle. First, we have this section: But the noise continues on volume 11/10. So this is my desperate plea... Can we PUHLEASE stop this AI Confidence Theater, people? It’s doing more harm than good. Then immediately after: This post is sponsored by Firecrawl. Firecrawl is the web data API to search, scrape, and interact with the web at scale. Turn the live web into clean, structured data your agents can actually use. (P.S. I personally use Firecrawl in my Lovable apps all.the.time - most recently to scrape this very blog so my AI double could use my latest posts as context.)
algoth1 3mo ago
As someone who has worked closely to the marketing space, there’s a saying that goes something like: ‘then the marketers found about it and ruin everything’. Quick example: when amazon launched kindle self publishing, there was a golden age where wannabe writers could self-publish their books, and let the market dictate what survived and became successful. Eventually, some people got good money out of it. Then marketers found out about it. They realized they could game the system by hiring ghost writers to pump out low quality ebooks to fill every single niche. Then they found out how to game the reviews, even going as far as paying people to leave 5 star reviews on competitors to get amazon to flag the competitors for buying reviews! Forward a few years, and no matter what you search for, there’s a million low quality books fir a couple high quality high effort books who get lost in the sea of garbage. AI just made that problem 100x worse. The same thing is happening with higher effort content creation. These same mindless marketers found out how to exploit video creation, social media marketing, etc. so, the appeal this article is making for people to stop the hype will not be listen to, because once marketers find about something where there’s money to be made, they will absolutely find a way to go scorched earth on it
- radicalbyte 3mo ago
  Venture Capitalists are now even worse than the marketers.
  - ed_elliott_asc 3mo ago
    Marketeers for venture capitalists? Does that beat vc’s?
    - wongarsu 3mo ago
      Marketeers sounds like a great word for the worst of them. The ones that take over a functioning market and burn it for profit
- AaronAPU 3mo ago
  I’ve long considered marketing to be one of the purest forms of evil in existence. It truly does envelop and destroy everything good.
adi_pradhan 3mo ago
There is a lot of demand for articles like this. The sort of revenge of the humans. I do think a small number of people have totally transformed themselves and their business using AI. But that doesn't overlap with the people who are loudest about it on LinkedIn, X, and other channels.
- weego 3mo ago
  There are, they're all on the sell side though.
- dgellow 3mo ago
  Who are those people and businesses?
  - ambicapter 3mo ago
    I won’t tell you, you’re just gonna have to tokenmaxx in a vain attempt to chase the dragon.
  - munksbeer 3mo ago
    What sort of proof are you expecting from another poster on hn?
    - dgellow 3mo ago
      Blog posts, company names, or whatever. I'm not asking for a proof, I'm asking who are those unnamed people and businesses who transform themselves
    - intended 3mo ago
      Anything that someone would think answers the question or moves the needle forward. Sure, HN has changed over time, but this tends to be a place where people field technical questions and get technical answers.
  - meindnoch 3mo ago
    The people selling shovels.
axegon_ 3mo ago
It's somewhat ironic coming from someone that openly states they use AI all day, everyday. Regardless, the message is correct. I don't think that people have become dumber over the last 15 years. At large, they were always dumb. People got access to social media which exposed their stupidity and that was seen as a success(which I still find baffling). Until it wasn't: milking the influencer economy only gets you so far. The new wave is people who believe that slopping something together is them doing the work and that they are the smart ones. In practice, I constantly see people genuinely believing they know what they are doing while some slop machine floods their screens with text. Just go over some "I vibe coded this thing in a weekend", run some basic security tests on it and the results are almost always frightening. All of this is the whole plot of Idiocracy (holy shit, that movie was ahead of it's time and optimistic af for saying that was 500 years away). Slop that appears to work on the surface is quickly becoming the single point of failure for entire industries. And honestly, I am all for it: if the house has to burn down for things to get better, let it burn.
- supaflybanzai 3mo ago
  Amen! Let it burn…
john_strinlai 3mo ago
>Show me something truly life changing. i dont think there is any software on the planet that i would consider "truly life changing", so i find it a bit weird to hold ai up to that standard. as a note, i found this particularly funny: "It’s doing more harm than good." followed immediately by "This post is sponsored by Firecrawl. Firecrawl is the web data API to search, scrape, and interact with the web at scale."
- deleted 3mo ago
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- cautiouscat 3mo ago
  > i dont think there is any software on the planet that i would consider "truly life changing", so i find it a bit weird to hold ai up to that standard. I think the author made this point because earlier they mention how people tell them AI changed their life. > So I started asking a simple question whenever someone told me AI had changed their life: ‘Cool. Show me.’
  - john_strinlai 3mo ago
    >how people tell them AI changed their life yeah but people say that in casual conversation all the time. my wife, not long ago, said her new facewash changed her life. its a figure of speech.
    - intended 3mo ago
      People are chucking trillions into data centers and AI. It’s the end of work, or that they don’t write code anymore. Every week there is some new method to make LLMs produce code, ranging from Langchain, MCP, Agents, Ralph loops, gas town, just loops. You are stating its hyperbole, when people are walking around without closing their laptops, or are awake all night running agents.
- dgellow 3mo ago
  AI boosters talk about it as life changing. I think it's fair to ask them to substantiate
codeknight11 3mo ago
Sounds funny coming from someone at Lovable!
love0972 3mo ago
[flagged]
nailer 3mo ago
> But show me something that has become so critical in your day that if I took it away tomorrow, your work would actually fall apart. Show me something truly life changing. Descript. I edit video for work and I am not ever going back to manually seeking to edit video. I am about 8x faster with Descript. This isn’t even a raw praise post: Descript is wildly unstable and shitty at times but I STILL won’t use anything that doesn’t have transcription-based editing.
- Planktonne 3mo ago
  Do you earn 8 times as much now?
  - nailer 3mo ago
    I know the point you’re attempting to make but I’ll answer anyway: no but my work is vastly less tedious.
    - Planktonne 3mo ago
      That's good to hear. I do think you should benefit more from the increased value created, but it sounds like it's actually made a significant difference to you.
- no-name-here 3mo ago
  Link to the product, apparently has a free tier: https://www.descript.com https://www.descript.com (I'm unaffiliated with them.)
phillipcarter 3mo ago
Hard agree with the post overall, especially on LinkedIn and X. On Bluesky at least there's not nearly as much of this crap, but it's a small community of practitioners and not flooded with sellers and resellers peddling some AI products. For me, the big win is that it's very cheap to experiment with several approaches to something and pick what feels like a good winner. For UX work this is a boon because it shifts the bottleneck to evaluating designs, which is where the bottleneck should be. It has historically not been there.
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romaniv 3mo ago
The article has solid observations, but I would correct one important thing. It's not AI confidence, it's AI psychosis. A lot of people I know are forced to use AI at work. They universally tell me that their coworkers generate awful PRs with bugs, nonsensical code and fake unit tests. But they also universally tell me that they are different, have special workflows and prompts that create good code. The psychology behind this is obvious. Hype and the literal threat of being fired forces everyone to develop coping mechanisms. Bragging about your own adaptability is one of those mechanisms. Unfortunately, the scale and intensity of this and the fact that the mechanism is clearly weaponized for marketing means we're living in an increasingly deranged society.
- dan_i 3mo ago
  [dead]
- dofm 3mo ago
  That's "fundamental attribution error" as much as it is any form of psychosis, though I do agree it is at work. Also at work: the Dunning-Kruger hypothesis, Gell-Mann Amnesia and motivated reasoning.
  - fithisux 3mo ago
    The problem is that these people are left untreated because that is what people at power can exploit. This is social collapse.
- adam_arthur 3mo ago
  AI is clearly a force multiplier, both negative and positive. The truth is there are prolific developers like Antirez who have built quality new projects at an incredible pace (Dwarfstar 4, Redis features). But as unpopular as it is to say it, in the working world ~80% of developers pre-AI mostly just attended meetings, did a little busywork and committed small patches here and there. Probably around 20% really moved the needle and contributed the bulk of net new code. Those 80% were constrained in the volume they could output pre-AI, but now they are unleashed to do a large amount of net new work but many without the skills to structure it well+maintainably. It doesn't help that most management has been pushing on LoC over quality the past year. I truly believe most companies as they exist today are not structured for AI. The amount of technical debt that will be created at a rapid pace is basically time delayed self destruction for most codebases if you let people run amok with low contribution standards and rubber stamped approvals. If you treat each AI output as a small well-scoped, well-tested module, which interoperate with each other through well designed APIs, you can have high confidence in quality. But majority of people are pseudo-vibe coding and creating spaghetti monster codebases, and there's really no way to stop it without strong and tight technical oversight.
throw310822 3mo ago
> Show me something truly life changing Does the fact that I barely wrote any lines of code in the past six months while my job has been for the past 20 years (and still is) that of producing code, feels "life changing" enough?
- overgard 3mo ago
  Being unemployed can be life changing too, if it can do your job
- lstodd 3mo ago
  That only means those lines of code were devoid of meaning and arguably were best left unwritten. That your job was meaningless and superficial, that you were an unnecessary burden on society. It is life changing in the sense that suddenly you realise you did not exist for all those years.
  - throw310822 3mo ago
    Lol. No, I've always put a lot of care in what I made and strove to give people tools that really made them happy. And I still do, steering the AI left and right. But on the other hand yes, seeing the machine fast-forward through most of the reasoning, weighing, understanding, cross-checking, deciding that used to fill hours of my day is... vertiginous. It's real intelligence, and it makes us much less useful and relevant. If your refuge is that whatever the machine can do has never been worth of a human being, you will find yourself soon squeezed in some very narrow corner, and/ or you'll suffer some deep crisis of meaning.
    - lstodd 3mo ago
      > It's real intelligence It is not. It can shortcut only because it had been done before.
simianwords 3mo ago
People seem to think the world works like this: there’s an innovation committee and they plan innovations. Then they get the approval from the masses democratically. And it would involve debates and the innovation is promoted only until we convince everyone. And then we would have randomised controlled trials applied everywhere to prove adoption confidence. Hilarious! People think we are in a socialist economy lol. No: you don't need the broad masses for any confidence. Put your product to the free market and judge whether people like it. That's how it should work and that's how it always works. No one has to convince Jane Doe that AI enhances productivity by 20% and get her approval before deploying data centers.
tatsuya-tamaya 3mo ago
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_zoltan_ 3mo ago
I can e-mail wise now with my bill and pay it. it's AWESOME. I've used a bill that was in Hungarian for a EUR account in Austria. No issue. My swiss banks won't be able to do this in the next 5 years. I am not affiliated with wise, just a happy user.
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LogicFailsMe 3mo ago
As much as I grew up with and lived my useful working years around computers, if they went away tomorrow, there'd be a period of adjustment, and then I'd happily up my amateur game with power tools and automobiles. I have a need to tinker and build, but there are many ways to satisfy it. That said, as long as there's still technology, it's awfully nice and a bit gamechanging to have an effective junior engineer who follows orders and who's happy to wade through stack overflow and customize solutions for my problems. It's not that I couldn't do it myself, it's that doing so for one shot weird config issues and arbitrary UI/OS changes sucks the very life blood out of my soul. AI is a tool, an amazing tool IMO, your own personalized philosophical zombie ready to do your bidding. Social media and mobile devices OTOH, they both suck the life out of me moreso than chasing config issues. Unfortunately, some of the best sources of info about some of my interests are trapped on FB in a swamp of rage bait, sigh. Marketing has always been about overpromising and underdelivering, no? OK, show me when it wasn't. And if overpromising on hot tickets like the AGI and FSD didn't get people the big bucks and engagement, maybe they'd dial it back a notch, but that's just not how it's played out so far. See the current crop of contenders to disrupt the leading maker of AI HW with their noisemaking CEOs for the evidence thereof.
ProllyInfamous 3mo ago
As a hobbyist exploring LLMs since Summer 2022 (electrician by trade)... I've been as blown away by generative AI results/output as I've been left laughing at its hallucinations. My first forays were via CrAIyon & ThisWordDoesNotExist .com . Now, four years later: I've finally been able to purchase a 5070Ti (from a ~1080Ti~ – so, an upgrade). The past few days have been overwhelming as I explore the rights/wrongs of bigger offline models (more parameters, even if They're [only] Made Out of Weights). ---- My twin, an actual brilliant engineer (me: amateurhour), after playing with this new "toy" [discussing chessboard layout, electrical engineering concepts] deduced (accurately IMHO): "it's able to be wrong FASTER – don't let this be discouraging it's an incredible piece of hardware but I still cannot trust it for citing reference material." My general Qwen3:14b model was unable to troubleshoot a bespoke coding issue (as expected, it's not a code-er). I have minimal coding experience, but he is a professional hardware engineer; I've been self-tasked to play around with "any coding model that might solve a bug I'm having with a current piece of firmware" – so that should be an interesting conceptual experience for both me and twin. Anybody have a good coding model (it's whatever language Atmel Arduino uses, by default) that runs on a 5070Ti, best?
- skydhash 3mo ago
  > Anybody have a good coding model (it's whatever language Atmel Arduino uses, by default) that runs on a 5070Ti, best? Atmel Arduino is mostly assembly (rarely used and assembly is generic to everything) and C. But you can’t use the usual C libraries because they are tailored to OS like Linux or Windows and the hardware those run on (i386, amd64, arm,…). That’s the primary constraint you need to implement in whatever LLM tooling you’ll be using. The majority C examples are about Linux or Windows API, not the simpler AVR standard library (the gnu one). Other than that, on Linux and Windows, the hardware is abstracted away. For Linux, You don’t interact with the keyboard and mouse, you use libinput/x11. You don’t interact with soundcards, you use alsa/pulseaudio/pipewire,…. With AVR devices, most abstractions are only one layer deep and mostly help to avoid dealing with the boilerplate of bus protocols. You spend more time with datasheets and diagrams than with code.
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mikgp 3mo ago
I’ve started blogging about my experience with AI. I’m not special, my workflow isn’t supercharged. I’ve just started writing about a guy(me) interfacing with these tools as if I was leaning any technology like a programming language or a new cloud tool. And I agree with the authors thesis that the hype is actively harmful. Specifically (and this is a confession not a judgement) if you’re usage of AI is limited to mindlessly vibe coding tools all day long, your missing the actual process of just fumbling through the awkward stage of being consciously ineffective, so you can break through to eventual productivity. And the real productivity probably isn’t as exciting as the game or app you one shotted for fun.
hahahaa 3mo ago
But but but... 1000x engineer who can out compete your 50 person startup with their agent flow.
- lstodd 3mo ago
  hahaha this reads like a porn clip script.
bitwize 3mo ago
Remember, folks, AI is mainly just statistics. You know, as in what comes after "lies" and "damned lies".
aerhardt 3mo ago
AI can be used in classification, extraction, and synthesis quite effectively. Not to speak of code generation, or like the author says, for research and strategy. In enterprise workflows these are essentially super generalizable NLP and CV models that can be developed and deployed at a fraction of the cost. This is not what the tech bros promised but it’s still pretty damn good!
peteforde 3mo ago
I honestly believe that folks confuse disappointment with an inability to notice their own window for what should be considered impressive continues to shift further into legitimate sci-fi territory. Louis CK's wifi on a plane bit is funny because it's true.
ghusto 3mo ago
> But show me something that has become so critical in your day that if I took it away tomorrow, your work would actually fall apart. Show me something truly life changing. - I no longer look at log files. If there's an MCP that gets access, I don't even download them - I don't look up implementation details, just say "I want this bit to do X". In general, I don't concern myself with technical details anymore - I don't try to debug The way in which these examples are life changing, is that I now solve abstract problems, not technical ones. Of course I could still do my job if AI disappeared tomorrow, but a road sweeper could also do theirs if the sweeping trucks went away too.
- ModernMech 3mo ago
  > show me something that has become so critical in your day that if I took it away tomorrow, your work would actually fall apart > Of course I could still do my job if AI disappeared tomorrow So then you agree with TFA, it’s not so critical that if taken away your work would not fall apart.
  - its_ethan 3mo ago
    It feels a little disingenuous to ignore the second half of his final sentence/conclusion. Feels like you're trying to do some kind of "gotcha". The main thrust of what he was saying is in the second half: "a road sweeper could also do theirs if the sweeping trucks went away too" - you could do your job tomorrow without an IDE auto-completing common syntax, but it's a useful tool for many people. OP is saying that AI, for him, is similarly a very useful tool that he considers to be close to "critical in [his] day". Why not actually address that instead of playing word games?
    - ModernMech 3mo ago
      The original intent of TFA was "Show me something truly life changing" (emphasis mine). "No longer look at log files, or look up implementation details, or don't try to debug" are marginal improvements to already existing processes, not truly life changing. It's just more of the same but more efficient. The point is that with this AI technology, we're putting up with a lot of shit -- everything is getting worse across the board -- on the promise of incredible upsides, so where are they? "I'm X% better at my job" is not seriously responsive to "Show me something truly life changing." That kind of technological progress is routine, so why do we have to put up with all the shit for routine technical progress we could get in any number of other ways that don't enshittify everything.
postalcoder 3mo ago
Ok I'll take the bait. > Look: I work at an AI company. I use AI all day. Looks like OP works at dropbox. Dropbox is not an AI company. It's not remotely one. Why does this matter? Because it undermines the entire point of the post. Later: > And if you’re watching that kind of hyped content: You can be part of the solution, too. Hold your favorite creators accountable! Ask them to show you the receipts! If you know that something doesn’t work, don’t just let it slide. AI confidence theater for me, but not for thee.
- nikanj 3mo ago
  Dropbox is an AI-company, according to to Dropbox https://blog.dropbox.com/topics/product/introducing-AI-powered-tools https://blog.dropbox.com/topics/product/introducing-AI-power... The challenge in 2026 is finding the company that's not AI-powered (according to themself)
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- icedchai 3mo ago
  Haven't you heard? Every company is an "AI company" now.
- spmurrayzzz 3mo ago
  I had a similar reaction to the "I work at an AI company" and finding out it was Dropbox. And I agree with you, they are not in any way an AI company that would be relevant for someone making claims about frontier intelligence. I'm empathetic to their position though. It is entirely unsurprising to me that someone working in a growth role at Dropbox is unimpressed by the current state of AI relative to its broader claims in the market. They're not working on AI itself nor are they using applied AI where you see the biggest gains (e.g. SWE, ML, data science, etc.). We still have a significant capability overhang at the frontier for a big chunk of knowledge work task domains, so I think its understandable (given the above selection bias) why someone would think the confidence is overblown. They have a point in their own domain.
daishi55 3mo ago
What a no-content, useless (and sponsored) post. I am tired of the “AI isn’t changing anything” theater when my job went from manually writing code to Claude writing 100% of my code in less than a year.
CurbStomper 3mo ago
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ingvay7 3mo ago
> Marketing, Finance, and HR Having this hype ingested fully by finance is lethal. Ive witnessed CFOs fully believing a lot of the hype and that directly leads to massive chopping of random teams on a spreadsheet with 'use ai' directives.
heresalexandria 3mo ago
My observation is that a lot of folks still discounting the capabilities or impact of AI either aren't working with frontier intelligence or aren't using it right. While the coding horse has been beat within an inch of its life already, I'd recommend throwing Codex on 5.5 high thinking with Computer Use + auto approve at the next thing you're about to spend 5+ minutes on to start to get a feel for how well it handles a broad range of work across literally any surface you interact with today. Use voice mode & mobile app for remote control to seriously watch the friction break down. Is it always perfect? Maybe not - but for a dramatically increasingly slate of tasks it's becoming a no brainer to offload the busywork and raise the bar on what a single person can do. It's natural to have hype when you see where this already and where it's going.
- tines 3mo ago
  > no brainer An excellent epithet for people who depend on AI!
  - heresalexandria 3mo ago
    The same attitude has been directed at points through history for people "who depend on the internet," "who depend on computers," and "who depend on machines." I was told growing up "you won't always have a calculator in your pocket" and yet now my phone has an offline LLM on it.
    - tines 3mo ago
      And if you can’t see the difference between those things, you’ll probably never know.
    - skydhash 3mo ago
      > I was told growing up "you won't always have a calculator in your pocket" and yet now my phone has an offline LLM on it. But does your world stop when the phone is out of power? And does every task require a roundtrip to the internet?
cat_plus_plus 3mo ago
AI is like a therapist, it will only change your life if you want to change. I set up python scripts at work to automatically triage, assign and if straightforward fix bugs assigned to me so I have time for complex feature work. At home, I have a script that sends me daily invites to local events based on my interests. Also put together a Japanese voice tutor powered by several local models, can have long free form conversations to learn the language. Planning to go on a long trip around less visited corners of Japan once I feel I can enjoy conversations with locals. Speaking of trips, on my last vacation I had a coding agent find flights/hotels/activities for me using APIs and browser control and just clicked buy buttons. Agent then read my inbox for booking confirmations and added itenary to my Google calendar to stay organized. All in all pretty awesome. But you do have to explain what you want from AI in some detail, it can't decide how you want to live for you.
nojito 3mo ago
>And most of the time I see some basic workflows. Summarizing Slack. Answering emails. Doing scheduled scans. Performing research and booking something. Sending emails out of Claude. This alone will improve the lives of so many people. The real issue with AI commentary is that everyone is guilty of the hedonistic treadmill. We constantly need it to do more and more to get that sense of awe.
justonepost2 3mo ago
Most of the inhabitants of this forum myself included are now pulsating, leeching tumors off the side of human progress and the world would be better off without us. Those that think “they” have 10xed their output just have not realized it yet.
chrismorgan 3mo ago
> Cut it out. You’re only hurting yourself. Were it so, I wouldn’t mind so much. But they hurt others, too.
- overgard 3mo ago
  Yup, this is why I get so irritated with AI boosters. If it were just a matter of "I disagree", then I would be happy to ignore the people whom I believe to be deluded, but the problem is: layoffs are real, economic impacts are real, datacenter impacts are real, the impacts on education are real, the impacts on college graduates who can't find jobs are real, the impact of people suffering from psychosis is real. And most of these impacts are from _hype_, not because the technology does what was promised. e.g The CEO fires his workers and then has to rehire a few months later because it turns out the AI couldn't do the job. These people are causing SO MUCH harm, and for what purpose? To ingratiate themselves to billionaires who don't respect them anyway, or to get a retweet on twitter?
bebe9494i4 3mo ago
[flagged]
einpoklum 3mo ago
> Can we PUHLEASE stop this AI Confidence Theater? But then how will the investors justify having poured over a Trillion USD into AI? Confidence theater will continue until morale improves.
lspears 3mo ago
"Meanwhile, I’m over here asking ChatGPT to rewrite the same paragraph for the third time because it keeps defaulting me into ‘LinkedIn wisdom post’ mode. GARH." Did they tell it to write it differently? You can literally make it sound like a pirate if you want. You can also make it be conservative, non-hype. Just ask.
bronlund 3mo ago
Relax, AI is going to kill education and eliminate jobs, and changing lives, but you have to be patient. Let it cook.
harimau777 3mo ago
Can someone explain to me: I have big problems with how AI companies stole artist's art and I have big concerns with how AI might be overused or misused. However, I don't understand how people can still say that AI is useless. Everyday when I use AI I am impressed with everything it can do. Particularly in coding, AI is useful right now (this may or may not be due to how messy the codebase that I'm working in is). To be clear, this isn't a rhetorical question. I'm wondering what I am missing that other people are seeing.
- apsurd 3mo ago
  from a coding perspective, it’s about actual value creation. the llms cost money. The subscriptions are a great value subsidized by the frontier model companies. llms ability to output usable code is insane, I agree. It changed the industry and the shape of what the job means. But the ability to code 10 X more output doesn’t magically create more value. In fact, I am personally skeptical and I’m planning on the first few years of growing pains. These LLMs make the job hard harder, make coordination and collaboration harder. There’s going to be a lot of churn. I quit my last job over the AI mandates.
  - rnd33 3mo ago
    Subsidized from a capex perspective maybe, but the profit margins for API-priced inference tokens are likely very high. Also, a lot of people get stuck on the idea that the main use case of LLMs is to generate more production code. I don't see it like that at all anymore. It's just as useful or even more useful as a problem-solving partner, generating throw-away prototypes, conducting experiments, verifying assumptions against code and documentation, performing one-off UI or smoke testing.
- therealdrag0 3mo ago
  It’s constantly goalpost moving. “It’s totally useless” to “it hallucinates constantly” to “it’s not revolutionary” to “show me where it’s 100x productivity gains” to “if AI is so good then why isn’t OpenAI one shoting all its software and even cloning all software on the planet?”
Djrichsjdjdnxkd 3mo ago
She touches on the main problem but most everyone here seems to miss. Marketers exist because every company, every VC, and every stock holder (Wall St. and every person that has money invested for retirement or to pay for their kids college tuition, etc), demands perpetual growth. Till this changes, and it won't any time soon, marketers will exist. No one is working on changing that. Anyone? Startups are the worst. No one is hiring a marketer at a startup to drive 25% yearly revenue growth, the expectation is 10X or 100X. How is that supposed to happen without pushing advertising, hard? We can blame the marketers, but this is structural problem.
wseqyrku 3mo ago
I have watched people interact with chatbots. It's like watching someone pulling a guinea worm out of their leg. I don't know where all that confidence come from.
tomyow 3mo ago
[flagged]
luciana1u 3mo ago
[flagged]
weirdxx 3mo ago
Weird
weirdxx 3mo ago
Someone finally said something

239 points by skadamat 3mo ago

The bullshit will continue until the grifters move on to something else. If you can figure out what that is, you'll make some serious bank!

altmanaltman 3mo ago
quantum computing in next 5-10 years for sure will be the next grift, the wheels are already turning
- ben_w 3mo ago
  Quantum computing is soooo 2018, you want space data centres for the next 5-10 years (or "5-10 tears" as the apple keyboard gave me the first time).
- im_down_w_otp 3mo ago
  Its zeitgeist appeal has been stuck for like 20 years. The problem with it is that unlike sell-side mortgage fraud, self-driving cars, crypto, and current AI… quantum computing doesn’t have a simple, approachable, mass appeal parlour trick to rally around. Until it gets one, it’s never going to facilitate the scale of grift and graft as the others.
  - pclmulqdq 3mo ago
    The threat of breaking all encryption has been a slow-burning $1 trillion or more grift for the field over the last 20-30 years. Not that anything has materialized from it. I am somewhat convinced that PQC is primarily being rolled out so that we can all stop funding those clowns (and because lattice-based cryptography is finally ready for prime time).
    - overgard 3mo ago
      I don't know if breaking encryption will even matter if we just keep handing over all our data anyway.
      - ben_w 3mo ago
        Depends on machine availability. If all crypto can only be broken by a machine that can itself only be made by 3 companies all of which are very careful about who they sell to, we get a few governments spying on everyone (including each other), while keeping normal criminal hacking (and insufficiently important governments) locked out.
MichaelZuo 3mo ago
Yeah, there will always be some percentage of bozos and clowns in America… that’s never going to change. And it’s unrealistic to expect them to stay perfectly motionless, they will try to adapt to the changing landscape too.
- atonse 3mo ago
  Bozos and clowns are a universal cultural phenomenon.
overgard 3mo ago
This stuff makes me nostalgic for NFTs and the metaverse which is pretty horrifying all things considered.

mschuster91 3mo ago

> Marketing, Finance, and HR were spared though, which I find ironic. Oh hell no. A lot of jobs were lost there as well. Marketing got demoted into "just prompt AI" across the board, everyone and their dog built "ingest paper receipts from arbitrary sources into ERP/travel expense programs" (because there still is no standard on "how to transform a paper bill into a QR code"), and HR... "I inserted unreadable white text into resume PDFs to cheat AI resume filters" is reality, not just a meme. > What I don’t like about it is that it creates a fake baseline. If everyone around you appears to have figured something out about AI that has transformed their work, then using AI to summarize meetings suddenly feels embarrassingly basic. Meetings themselves and emails have gone the full bullshit circle. AI agents fluff up prompts into Powerpoint slides so incoherent everyone forced to sit through it eventually nods off and reads the AI summary later on. For emails, similarly AI agents fluff up prompts, send it over the wire, only for another AI agent to distill it back into something consumable by a human. Humans creating engaging content by hand seems to be a lost art these days. Frankly... I can only recommend, leave for some sort of job that is not corporate BS or can otherwise be replaced by a human. Learn a classic trade, to operate heavy machinery or whatever else. Maybe join a firefighter or EMS corps, saving lives is an experience of its own class. Anything IT or corporate is a dead end. First, you can see at the end of the day with your eyes what you have accomplished (which is way better for your mental health), second, it will take quite some time until there's a robot physically capable of the required dexterity to pull and wire cable and an AI capable enough to coordinate that robot, or find and clean a clog in 100 meters of sewer line. Once AI is good enough to replace a clogged shitter... invest in a good gun and target practice, because the rate things are going, society will break down at that point. Or, move towards the countryside and raise some chicken, goats or whatever. A ton of tech people have done so in the last years, fed up with the bullshit.

lstodd 3mo ago
I recommend learning how to splice/fuse fibre. Knowing that you hold gigabits in your hands and only your skill matters is priceless.
- mschuster91 3mo ago

deleted 3mo ago

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Avicebron 3mo ago

Please stop this linkedin relatability theater.

embedding-shape 3mo ago

What these discussions frequently seem to miss, is discussing the exact method, tool and model they're using. > Meanwhile, I’m over here asking ChatGPT to rewrite the same paragraph for the third time because it keeps defaulting me into ‘LinkedIn wisdom post’ mode. GARH. I'm not doubting the author this is their experience, but is this with the trash free/instant ChatGPT or something else? If even "Thinking" was working like that, together with proper prompting, then I'd be surprised by the author's experience. But until people start showing exact examples and exactly what they're using, all the navel-gazing around this, positive, negative or neutral, will all just be empty words we can't really know what to do with.

ben_w 3mo ago
> But until people start showing exact examples and exactly what they're using, I suspect the majority of users won't be aware of what their current setting is. Even though you're right, we can't know what to do with their words.

classified 3mo ago

> AI Confidence Theater That's a benign term for it. Actually, it's lies, damn lies, and fucking god-damn lies. It's the super-mega-overdrive version of every principle that ads are based on. Like they are afraid we still haven't understood what makes ads tick, so they give us the practical in-your-face demo. And they were successful. I'm not believing a single word anyone remotely related to that business says anymore.

dgellow 3mo ago

> Okay…. it’s useful. But show me something that has become so critical in your day that if I took it away tomorrow, your work would actually fall apart. Show me something truly life changing. If only journalists would ask similar questions to corporations. "Ok, you made your entire engineering department agentic. Show me how exactly that contributed positively to your bottom line"

deleted 3mo ago

[deleted]

fercircularbuf 3mo ago

My broader team organized a 2 day hackathon and created teams of 4 each with a mix of engineers, designers, data scientists, admin, localization, and project managers from across the team and gave us 5 pain points our product was experiencing and let us loose. The amount of leverage AI tools give small interdisciplinary teams to apply their existing skill sets is kind of crazy. Lots of very impressive demos, several of which were nearly shippable and provided real value.

cahaya 3mo ago
I'm not disagreeing with the article, but I think you are right that if you use AI in the right setting it can do much more than the average ChatGP that outputs Linkedin like crap: interdisciplinary teams/person + SOTA AI + Right context (customer/ internal pain points, access to the code, focussed Hackathon) = amazing cool things.
- throwaway219450 3mo ago
  The biggest benefit for me has been getting side projects done. Little bugs or todos that would take more time than I have to spare, but don’t detract from the project. I’ve had Claude do stuff like interrogate IoT devices, look into proprietary file formats and even assisted debugging electronics from a text description and datasheets. It has stupidly broad knowledge as long as you watch out for things like getting part numbers/boards correct. Have you ever tried to ask for help on an electronics forum full of miserable greybeards? $20/mo for getting ballpark answers immediately is excellent value. Do assess if you want the learning experience or not, and whether you care if the problem is solved for you. For writing I get the appeal to bloggers, but I can’t stand reading anything that has the hallmarks of generative AI.
  - fibonachos 3mo ago
    Same here. Little side projects and convenience tooling for $day_job that otherwise wouldn’t have gotten built for lack of time. Doesn’t need to be perfect, beautiful code for an audience of one. It just needs to work.

vikp 3mo ago

It's an interesting illustration of the state of the AI market that immediately after arguing that AI cannot do anything complex...we have an ad arguing that AI can actually do those things. Even the people telling you that AI is a hype cycle buy into the hype cycle. First, we have this section: But the noise continues on volume 11/10. So this is my desperate plea... Can we PUHLEASE stop this AI Confidence Theater, people? It’s doing more harm than good. Then immediately after: This post is sponsored by Firecrawl. Firecrawl is the web data API to search, scrape, and interact with the web at scale. Turn the live web into clean, structured data your agents can actually use. (P.S. I personally use Firecrawl in my Lovable apps all.the.time - most recently to scrape this very blog so my AI double could use my latest posts as context.)

algoth1 3mo ago

As someone who has worked closely to the marketing space, there’s a saying that goes something like: ‘then the marketers found about it and ruin everything’. Quick example: when amazon launched kindle self publishing, there was a golden age where wannabe writers could self-publish their books, and let the market dictate what survived and became successful. Eventually, some people got good money out of it. Then marketers found out about it. They realized they could game the system by hiring ghost writers to pump out low quality ebooks to fill every single niche. Then they found out how to game the reviews, even going as far as paying people to leave 5 star reviews on competitors to get amazon to flag the competitors for buying reviews! Forward a few years, and no matter what you search for, there’s a million low quality books fir a couple high quality high effort books who get lost in the sea of garbage. AI just made that problem 100x worse. The same thing is happening with higher effort content creation. These same mindless marketers found out how to exploit video creation, social media marketing, etc. so, the appeal this article is making for people to stop the hype will not be listen to, because once marketers find about something where there’s money to be made, they will absolutely find a way to go scorched earth on it

radicalbyte 3mo ago
Venture Capitalists are now even worse than the marketers.
- ed_elliott_asc 3mo ago
  Marketeers for venture capitalists? Does that beat vc’s?
  - wongarsu 3mo ago
    Marketeers sounds like a great word for the worst of them. The ones that take over a functioning market and burn it for profit
AaronAPU 3mo ago
I’ve long considered marketing to be one of the purest forms of evil in existence. It truly does envelop and destroy everything good.

adi_pradhan 3mo ago

There is a lot of demand for articles like this. The sort of revenge of the humans. I do think a small number of people have totally transformed themselves and their business using AI. But that doesn't overlap with the people who are loudest about it on LinkedIn, X, and other channels.

weego 3mo ago
There are, they're all on the sell side though.
dgellow 3mo ago
Who are those people and businesses?
- ambicapter 3mo ago
  I won’t tell you, you’re just gonna have to tokenmaxx in a vain attempt to chase the dragon.
- munksbeer 3mo ago
  What sort of proof are you expecting from another poster on hn?
  - dgellow 3mo ago
    Blog posts, company names, or whatever. I'm not asking for a proof, I'm asking who are those unnamed people and businesses who transform themselves
  - intended 3mo ago
    Anything that someone would think answers the question or moves the needle forward. Sure, HN has changed over time, but this tends to be a place where people field technical questions and get technical answers.
- meindnoch 3mo ago
  The people selling shovels.

axegon_ 3mo ago

It's somewhat ironic coming from someone that openly states they use AI all day, everyday. Regardless, the message is correct. I don't think that people have become dumber over the last 15 years. At large, they were always dumb. People got access to social media which exposed their stupidity and that was seen as a success(which I still find baffling). Until it wasn't: milking the influencer economy only gets you so far. The new wave is people who believe that slopping something together is them doing the work and that they are the smart ones. In practice, I constantly see people genuinely believing they know what they are doing while some slop machine floods their screens with text. Just go over some "I vibe coded this thing in a weekend", run some basic security tests on it and the results are almost always frightening. All of this is the whole plot of Idiocracy (holy shit, that movie was ahead of it's time and optimistic af for saying that was 500 years away). Slop that appears to work on the surface is quickly becoming the single point of failure for entire industries. And honestly, I am all for it: if the house has to burn down for things to get better, let it burn.

supaflybanzai 3mo ago
Amen! Let it burn…

john_strinlai 3mo ago

>Show me something truly life changing. i dont think there is any software on the planet that i would consider "truly life changing", so i find it a bit weird to hold ai up to that standard. as a note, i found this particularly funny: "It’s doing more harm than good." followed immediately by "This post is sponsored by Firecrawl. Firecrawl is the web data API to search, scrape, and interact with the web at scale."

deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
cautiouscat 3mo ago
> i dont think there is any software on the planet that i would consider "truly life changing", so i find it a bit weird to hold ai up to that standard. I think the author made this point because earlier they mention how people tell them AI changed their life. > So I started asking a simple question whenever someone told me AI had changed their life: ‘Cool. Show me.’
- john_strinlai 3mo ago
  >how people tell them AI changed their life yeah but people say that in casual conversation all the time. my wife, not long ago, said her new facewash changed her life. its a figure of speech.
  - intended 3mo ago
    People are chucking trillions into data centers and AI. It’s the end of work, or that they don’t write code anymore. Every week there is some new method to make LLMs produce code, ranging from Langchain, MCP, Agents, Ralph loops, gas town, just loops. You are stating its hyperbole, when people are walking around without closing their laptops, or are awake all night running agents.
dgellow 3mo ago
AI boosters talk about it as life changing. I think it's fair to ask them to substantiate

codeknight11 3mo ago

Sounds funny coming from someone at Lovable!

love0972 3mo ago

[flagged]

nailer 3mo ago

> But show me something that has become so critical in your day that if I took it away tomorrow, your work would actually fall apart. Show me something truly life changing. Descript. I edit video for work and I am not ever going back to manually seeking to edit video. I am about 8x faster with Descript. This isn’t even a raw praise post: Descript is wildly unstable and shitty at times but I STILL won’t use anything that doesn’t have transcription-based editing.

Planktonne 3mo ago
Do you earn 8 times as much now?
- nailer 3mo ago
  I know the point you’re attempting to make but I’ll answer anyway: no but my work is vastly less tedious.
  - Planktonne 3mo ago
    That's good to hear. I do think you should benefit more from the increased value created, but it sounds like it's actually made a significant difference to you.
no-name-here 3mo ago
Link to the product, apparently has a free tier: https://www.descript.com https://www.descript.com (I'm unaffiliated with them.)

phillipcarter 3mo ago

Hard agree with the post overall, especially on LinkedIn and X. On Bluesky at least there's not nearly as much of this crap, but it's a small community of practitioners and not flooded with sellers and resellers peddling some AI products. For me, the big win is that it's very cheap to experiment with several approaches to something and pick what feels like a good winner. For UX work this is a boon because it shifts the bottleneck to evaluating designs, which is where the bottleneck should be. It has historically not been there.

deleted 3mo ago

[deleted]

romaniv 3mo ago

The article has solid observations, but I would correct one important thing. It's not AI confidence, it's AI psychosis. A lot of people I know are forced to use AI at work. They universally tell me that their coworkers generate awful PRs with bugs, nonsensical code and fake unit tests. But they also universally tell me that they are different, have special workflows and prompts that create good code. The psychology behind this is obvious. Hype and the literal threat of being fired forces everyone to develop coping mechanisms. Bragging about your own adaptability is one of those mechanisms. Unfortunately, the scale and intensity of this and the fact that the mechanism is clearly weaponized for marketing means we're living in an increasingly deranged society.

dan_i 3mo ago
[dead]
dofm 3mo ago
That's "fundamental attribution error" as much as it is any form of psychosis, though I do agree it is at work. Also at work: the Dunning-Kruger hypothesis, Gell-Mann Amnesia and motivated reasoning.
- fithisux 3mo ago
  The problem is that these people are left untreated because that is what people at power can exploit. This is social collapse.
adam_arthur 3mo ago
AI is clearly a force multiplier, both negative and positive. The truth is there are prolific developers like Antirez who have built quality new projects at an incredible pace (Dwarfstar 4, Redis features). But as unpopular as it is to say it, in the working world ~80% of developers pre-AI mostly just attended meetings, did a little busywork and committed small patches here and there. Probably around 20% really moved the needle and contributed the bulk of net new code. Those 80% were constrained in the volume they could output pre-AI, but now they are unleashed to do a large amount of net new work but many without the skills to structure it well+maintainably. It doesn't help that most management has been pushing on LoC over quality the past year. I truly believe most companies as they exist today are not structured for AI. The amount of technical debt that will be created at a rapid pace is basically time delayed self destruction for most codebases if you let people run amok with low contribution standards and rubber stamped approvals. If you treat each AI output as a small well-scoped, well-tested module, which interoperate with each other through well designed APIs, you can have high confidence in quality. But majority of people are pseudo-vibe coding and creating spaghetti monster codebases, and there's really no way to stop it without strong and tight technical oversight.

throw310822 3mo ago

> Show me something truly life changing Does the fact that I barely wrote any lines of code in the past six months while my job has been for the past 20 years (and still is) that of producing code, feels "life changing" enough?

overgard 3mo ago
Being unemployed can be life changing too, if it can do your job
lstodd 3mo ago
That only means those lines of code were devoid of meaning and arguably were best left unwritten. That your job was meaningless and superficial, that you were an unnecessary burden on society. It is life changing in the sense that suddenly you realise you did not exist for all those years.
- throw310822 3mo ago
  Lol. No, I've always put a lot of care in what I made and strove to give people tools that really made them happy. And I still do, steering the AI left and right. But on the other hand yes, seeing the machine fast-forward through most of the reasoning, weighing, understanding, cross-checking, deciding that used to fill hours of my day is... vertiginous. It's real intelligence, and it makes us much less useful and relevant. If your refuge is that whatever the machine can do has never been worth of a human being, you will find yourself soon squeezed in some very narrow corner, and/ or you'll suffer some deep crisis of meaning.
  - lstodd 3mo ago
    > It's real intelligence It is not. It can shortcut only because it had been done before.

simianwords 3mo ago

People seem to think the world works like this: there’s an innovation committee and they plan innovations. Then they get the approval from the masses democratically. And it would involve debates and the innovation is promoted only until we convince everyone. And then we would have randomised controlled trials applied everywhere to prove adoption confidence. Hilarious! People think we are in a socialist economy lol. No: you don't need the broad masses for any confidence. Put your product to the free market and judge whether people like it. That's how it should work and that's how it always works. No one has to convince Jane Doe that AI enhances productivity by 20% and get her approval before deploying data centers.

tatsuya-tamaya 3mo ago

[flagged]

_zoltan_ 3mo ago

I can e-mail wise now with my bill and pay it. it's AWESOME. I've used a bill that was in Hungarian for a EUR account in Austria. No issue. My swiss banks won't be able to do this in the next 5 years. I am not affiliated with wise, just a happy user.

deleted 3mo ago

[deleted]

LogicFailsMe 3mo ago

As much as I grew up with and lived my useful working years around computers, if they went away tomorrow, there'd be a period of adjustment, and then I'd happily up my amateur game with power tools and automobiles. I have a need to tinker and build, but there are many ways to satisfy it. That said, as long as there's still technology, it's awfully nice and a bit gamechanging to have an effective junior engineer who follows orders and who's happy to wade through stack overflow and customize solutions for my problems. It's not that I couldn't do it myself, it's that doing so for one shot weird config issues and arbitrary UI/OS changes sucks the very life blood out of my soul. AI is a tool, an amazing tool IMO, your own personalized philosophical zombie ready to do your bidding. Social media and mobile devices OTOH, they both suck the life out of me moreso than chasing config issues. Unfortunately, some of the best sources of info about some of my interests are trapped on FB in a swamp of rage bait, sigh. Marketing has always been about overpromising and underdelivering, no? OK, show me when it wasn't. And if overpromising on hot tickets like the AGI and FSD didn't get people the big bucks and engagement, maybe they'd dial it back a notch, but that's just not how it's played out so far. See the current crop of contenders to disrupt the leading maker of AI HW with their noisemaking CEOs for the evidence thereof.

ProllyInfamous 3mo ago

As a hobbyist exploring LLMs since Summer 2022 (electrician by trade)... I've been as blown away by generative AI results/output as I've been left laughing at its hallucinations. My first forays were via CrAIyon & ThisWordDoesNotExist .com . Now, four years later: I've finally been able to purchase a 5070Ti (from a ~1080Ti~ – so, an upgrade). The past few days have been overwhelming as I explore the rights/wrongs of bigger offline models (more parameters, even if They're [only] Made Out of Weights). ---- My twin, an actual brilliant engineer (me: amateurhour), after playing with this new "toy" [discussing chessboard layout, electrical engineering concepts] deduced (accurately IMHO): "it's able to be wrong FASTER – don't let this be discouraging it's an incredible piece of hardware but I still cannot trust it for citing reference material." My general Qwen3:14b model was unable to troubleshoot a bespoke coding issue (as expected, it's not a code-er). I have minimal coding experience, but he is a professional hardware engineer; I've been self-tasked to play around with "any coding model that might solve a bug I'm having with a current piece of firmware" – so that should be an interesting conceptual experience for both me and twin. Anybody have a good coding model (it's whatever language Atmel Arduino uses, by default) that runs on a 5070Ti, best?

skydhash 3mo ago
> Anybody have a good coding model (it's whatever language Atmel Arduino uses, by default) that runs on a 5070Ti, best? Atmel Arduino is mostly assembly (rarely used and assembly is generic to everything) and C. But you can’t use the usual C libraries because they are tailored to OS like Linux or Windows and the hardware those run on (i386, amd64, arm,…). That’s the primary constraint you need to implement in whatever LLM tooling you’ll be using. The majority C examples are about Linux or Windows API, not the simpler AVR standard library (the gnu one). Other than that, on Linux and Windows, the hardware is abstracted away. For Linux, You don’t interact with the keyboard and mouse, you use libinput/x11. You don’t interact with soundcards, you use alsa/pulseaudio/pipewire,…. With AVR devices, most abstractions are only one layer deep and mostly help to avoid dealing with the boilerplate of bus protocols. You spend more time with datasheets and diagrams than with code.
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]

mikgp 3mo ago

I’ve started blogging about my experience with AI. I’m not special, my workflow isn’t supercharged. I’ve just started writing about a guy(me) interfacing with these tools as if I was leaning any technology like a programming language or a new cloud tool. And I agree with the authors thesis that the hype is actively harmful. Specifically (and this is a confession not a judgement) if you’re usage of AI is limited to mindlessly vibe coding tools all day long, your missing the actual process of just fumbling through the awkward stage of being consciously ineffective, so you can break through to eventual productivity. And the real productivity probably isn’t as exciting as the game or app you one shotted for fun.

hahahaa 3mo ago

But but but... 1000x engineer who can out compete your 50 person startup with their agent flow.

lstodd 3mo ago
hahaha this reads like a porn clip script.

bitwize 3mo ago

Remember, folks, AI is mainly just statistics. You know, as in what comes after "lies" and "damned lies".

aerhardt 3mo ago

AI can be used in classification, extraction, and synthesis quite effectively. Not to speak of code generation, or like the author says, for research and strategy. In enterprise workflows these are essentially super generalizable NLP and CV models that can be developed and deployed at a fraction of the cost. This is not what the tech bros promised but it’s still pretty damn good!

peteforde 3mo ago

I honestly believe that folks confuse disappointment with an inability to notice their own window for what should be considered impressive continues to shift further into legitimate sci-fi territory. Louis CK's wifi on a plane bit is funny because it's true.

ghusto 3mo ago

> But show me something that has become so critical in your day that if I took it away tomorrow, your work would actually fall apart. Show me something truly life changing. - I no longer look at log files. If there's an MCP that gets access, I don't even download them - I don't look up implementation details, just say "I want this bit to do X". In general, I don't concern myself with technical details anymore - I don't try to debug The way in which these examples are life changing, is that I now solve abstract problems, not technical ones. Of course I could still do my job if AI disappeared tomorrow, but a road sweeper could also do theirs if the sweeping trucks went away too.

ModernMech 3mo ago
> show me something that has become so critical in your day that if I took it away tomorrow, your work would actually fall apart > Of course I could still do my job if AI disappeared tomorrow So then you agree with TFA, it’s not so critical that if taken away your work would not fall apart.
- its_ethan 3mo ago
  It feels a little disingenuous to ignore the second half of his final sentence/conclusion. Feels like you're trying to do some kind of "gotcha". The main thrust of what he was saying is in the second half: "a road sweeper could also do theirs if the sweeping trucks went away too" - you could do your job tomorrow without an IDE auto-completing common syntax, but it's a useful tool for many people. OP is saying that AI, for him, is similarly a very useful tool that he considers to be close to "critical in [his] day". Why not actually address that instead of playing word games?
  - ModernMech 3mo ago
    The original intent of TFA was "Show me something truly life changing" (emphasis mine). "No longer look at log files, or look up implementation details, or don't try to debug" are marginal improvements to already existing processes, not truly life changing. It's just more of the same but more efficient. The point is that with this AI technology, we're putting up with a lot of shit -- everything is getting worse across the board -- on the promise of incredible upsides, so where are they? "I'm X% better at my job" is not seriously responsive to "Show me something truly life changing." That kind of technological progress is routine, so why do we have to put up with all the shit for routine technical progress we could get in any number of other ways that don't enshittify everything.

postalcoder 3mo ago

Ok I'll take the bait. > Look: I work at an AI company. I use AI all day. Looks like OP works at dropbox. Dropbox is not an AI company. It's not remotely one. Why does this matter? Because it undermines the entire point of the post. Later: > And if you’re watching that kind of hyped content: You can be part of the solution, too. Hold your favorite creators accountable! Ask them to show you the receipts! If you know that something doesn’t work, don’t just let it slide. AI confidence theater for me, but not for thee.

nikanj 3mo ago
Dropbox is an AI-company, according to to Dropbox https://blog.dropbox.com/topics/product/introducing-AI-powered-tools https://blog.dropbox.com/topics/product/introducing-AI-power... The challenge in 2026 is finding the company that's not AI-powered (according to themself)
- deleted 3mo ago
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icedchai 3mo ago
Haven't you heard? Every company is an "AI company" now.
spmurrayzzz 3mo ago
I had a similar reaction to the "I work at an AI company" and finding out it was Dropbox. And I agree with you, they are not in any way an AI company that would be relevant for someone making claims about frontier intelligence. I'm empathetic to their position though. It is entirely unsurprising to me that someone working in a growth role at Dropbox is unimpressed by the current state of AI relative to its broader claims in the market. They're not working on AI itself nor are they using applied AI where you see the biggest gains (e.g. SWE, ML, data science, etc.). We still have a significant capability overhang at the frontier for a big chunk of knowledge work task domains, so I think its understandable (given the above selection bias) why someone would think the confidence is overblown. They have a point in their own domain.

daishi55 3mo ago

What a no-content, useless (and sponsored) post. I am tired of the “AI isn’t changing anything” theater when my job went from manually writing code to Claude writing 100% of my code in less than a year.

CurbStomper 3mo ago

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ingvay7 3mo ago

> Marketing, Finance, and HR Having this hype ingested fully by finance is lethal. Ive witnessed CFOs fully believing a lot of the hype and that directly leads to massive chopping of random teams on a spreadsheet with 'use ai' directives.

heresalexandria 3mo ago

My observation is that a lot of folks still discounting the capabilities or impact of AI either aren't working with frontier intelligence or aren't using it right. While the coding horse has been beat within an inch of its life already, I'd recommend throwing Codex on 5.5 high thinking with Computer Use + auto approve at the next thing you're about to spend 5+ minutes on to start to get a feel for how well it handles a broad range of work across literally any surface you interact with today. Use voice mode & mobile app for remote control to seriously watch the friction break down. Is it always perfect? Maybe not - but for a dramatically increasingly slate of tasks it's becoming a no brainer to offload the busywork and raise the bar on what a single person can do. It's natural to have hype when you see where this already and where it's going.

tines 3mo ago
> no brainer An excellent epithet for people who depend on AI!
- heresalexandria 3mo ago
  The same attitude has been directed at points through history for people "who depend on the internet," "who depend on computers," and "who depend on machines." I was told growing up "you won't always have a calculator in your pocket" and yet now my phone has an offline LLM on it.
  - tines 3mo ago
    And if you can’t see the difference between those things, you’ll probably never know.
  - skydhash 3mo ago
    > I was told growing up "you won't always have a calculator in your pocket" and yet now my phone has an offline LLM on it. But does your world stop when the phone is out of power? And does every task require a roundtrip to the internet?

cat_plus_plus 3mo ago

AI is like a therapist, it will only change your life if you want to change. I set up python scripts at work to automatically triage, assign and if straightforward fix bugs assigned to me so I have time for complex feature work. At home, I have a script that sends me daily invites to local events based on my interests. Also put together a Japanese voice tutor powered by several local models, can have long free form conversations to learn the language. Planning to go on a long trip around less visited corners of Japan once I feel I can enjoy conversations with locals. Speaking of trips, on my last vacation I had a coding agent find flights/hotels/activities for me using APIs and browser control and just clicked buy buttons. Agent then read my inbox for booking confirmations and added itenary to my Google calendar to stay organized. All in all pretty awesome. But you do have to explain what you want from AI in some detail, it can't decide how you want to live for you.

nojito 3mo ago

>And most of the time I see some basic workflows. Summarizing Slack. Answering emails. Doing scheduled scans. Performing research and booking something. Sending emails out of Claude. This alone will improve the lives of so many people. The real issue with AI commentary is that everyone is guilty of the hedonistic treadmill. We constantly need it to do more and more to get that sense of awe.

justonepost2 3mo ago

Most of the inhabitants of this forum myself included are now pulsating, leeching tumors off the side of human progress and the world would be better off without us. Those that think “they” have 10xed their output just have not realized it yet.

chrismorgan 3mo ago

> Cut it out. You’re only hurting yourself. Were it so, I wouldn’t mind so much. But they hurt others, too.

overgard 3mo ago
Yup, this is why I get so irritated with AI boosters. If it were just a matter of "I disagree", then I would be happy to ignore the people whom I believe to be deluded, but the problem is: layoffs are real, economic impacts are real, datacenter impacts are real, the impacts on education are real, the impacts on college graduates who can't find jobs are real, the impact of people suffering from psychosis is real. And most of these impacts are from _hype_, not because the technology does what was promised. e.g The CEO fires his workers and then has to rehire a few months later because it turns out the AI couldn't do the job. These people are causing SO MUCH harm, and for what purpose? To ingratiate themselves to billionaires who don't respect them anyway, or to get a retweet on twitter?

bebe9494i4 3mo ago

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einpoklum 3mo ago

> Can we PUHLEASE stop this AI Confidence Theater? But then how will the investors justify having poured over a Trillion USD into AI? Confidence theater will continue until morale improves.

lspears 3mo ago

"Meanwhile, I’m over here asking ChatGPT to rewrite the same paragraph for the third time because it keeps defaulting me into ‘LinkedIn wisdom post’ mode. GARH." Did they tell it to write it differently? You can literally make it sound like a pirate if you want. You can also make it be conservative, non-hype. Just ask.

bronlund 3mo ago

Relax, AI is going to kill education and eliminate jobs, and changing lives, but you have to be patient. Let it cook.

harimau777 3mo ago

Can someone explain to me: I have big problems with how AI companies stole artist's art and I have big concerns with how AI might be overused or misused. However, I don't understand how people can still say that AI is useless. Everyday when I use AI I am impressed with everything it can do. Particularly in coding, AI is useful right now (this may or may not be due to how messy the codebase that I'm working in is). To be clear, this isn't a rhetorical question. I'm wondering what I am missing that other people are seeing.

apsurd 3mo ago
from a coding perspective, it’s about actual value creation. the llms cost money. The subscriptions are a great value subsidized by the frontier model companies. llms ability to output usable code is insane, I agree. It changed the industry and the shape of what the job means. But the ability to code 10 X more output doesn’t magically create more value. In fact, I am personally skeptical and I’m planning on the first few years of growing pains. These LLMs make the job hard harder, make coordination and collaboration harder. There’s going to be a lot of churn. I quit my last job over the AI mandates.
- rnd33 3mo ago
  Subsidized from a capex perspective maybe, but the profit margins for API-priced inference tokens are likely very high. Also, a lot of people get stuck on the idea that the main use case of LLMs is to generate more production code. I don't see it like that at all anymore. It's just as useful or even more useful as a problem-solving partner, generating throw-away prototypes, conducting experiments, verifying assumptions against code and documentation, performing one-off UI or smoke testing.
therealdrag0 3mo ago
It’s constantly goalpost moving. “It’s totally useless” to “it hallucinates constantly” to “it’s not revolutionary” to “show me where it’s 100x productivity gains” to “if AI is so good then why isn’t OpenAI one shoting all its software and even cloning all software on the planet?”

Djrichsjdjdnxkd 3mo ago

She touches on the main problem but most everyone here seems to miss. Marketers exist because every company, every VC, and every stock holder (Wall St. and every person that has money invested for retirement or to pay for their kids college tuition, etc), demands perpetual growth. Till this changes, and it won't any time soon, marketers will exist. No one is working on changing that. Anyone? Startups are the worst. No one is hiring a marketer at a startup to drive 25% yearly revenue growth, the expectation is 10X or 100X. How is that supposed to happen without pushing advertising, hard? We can blame the marketers, but this is structural problem.

wseqyrku 3mo ago

I have watched people interact with chatbots. It's like watching someone pulling a guinea worm out of their leg. I don't know where all that confidence come from.

tomyow 3mo ago

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luciana1u 3mo ago

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weirdxx 3mo ago

Weird

weirdxx 3mo ago

Someone finally said something