5 ms·

I'm the op on this one (not the author). Gotta say, I had higher hopes for the community here. Isn't it worthwhile to examine our patterns of thinking and work

I'm the op on this one (not the author). Gotta say, I had higher hopes for the community here. Isn't it worthwhile to examine our patterns of thinking and work? Shouldn't alternative perspectives such as these spark conversation, rather than sly jibes? HN grew from curiosity and good-faith. Y'all are not showing up.

darkmarmot 3mo ago
I recently mentioned that my team and most of my dev friends don’t use AI for code on a gamdev forum (we do stuff like distributed consensus, compilers, etc.). I was quickly denounced as “an arrogant douche”.
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
ryanthedev 3mo ago
I think the eye roll is the need to shout that you don’t use AI. It’s the new web dev, imo. This post wasn’t about sparking conversation. It’s about using AI makes me lose the human touch in what I do, blah blah, heard it all before. Sorry, not sorry.
- tony_cannistra 3mo ago
  TFA raises several points I hadn't heard before. Here's one. The artifacts we produce define our culture. If we allow LLMs to produce our work, our culture represents that which they understand. But LLMs can't be trained on the entirety of the human experience. "How dare we abandon so many countless traditions and people and ideas and nuances, simply because they are underrepresented in the training data?" I just feel like that's not performative in the way you're insinuating. That feels like a take to me. Respectful engagement is what I expected here.
  - Levitz 3mo ago
    But that's not anything new, and even in the same text you can see examples of that. LLMs are a tool. The brush is a tool, the pencil is a tool. The way we write already is defined by tools. This very comment is remarkably defined by its medium, I can't control its font size! Or the font at all, for that matter, nor the color, hell I can't even control how and where this comment is read! This means I'm generally going to write it in English, a whole different language from my native one! How is that for "defining"??? None of this is new, it's all dictated by human experience in the very same way that the output of a LLM gets dictated by human experience. That's the way memes (as in, anthropology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme?) work. LLMs don't understand, they just output based on some parameters. We've been here before.
  - gumby 3mo ago
    The LLM is the next generation of 20th century culture. Until the early 20th century, all stories (from before homer to Shakespeare, through Dickens and so on), music etc we continual remix and interpretation. But as recording became possible and then film, cultural elements mixed with law adopted expensive production and started to become more locked down. Corporations (which are just machines themselves) made musical acts whose members were just actors playing a role (still happens today with K-pop being the most successful). Disney colonized the public domain and drowned out the origins, with their versions becoming canonical But consumers were willing participants. Rather than make a costume of your favorite character people now preferentially seek out licensed versions of dolls, costumes, “official” soundtracks etc rather than treating it all as just more raw material for your own imagination. I’m not saying there isn’t fanfic and remix culture as well but when was the last time you saw a kid with a home-made “character” T-shirt? They even buy sport jerseys with the ads included! So the mechanical slop infiltrating culture is just the current apotheosis of this process atrophy of the imagination. Truly it is degenerative AI
- happytoexplain 3mo ago
  It is one of the biggest things to ever happen in the history of software, art, and writing. We're nowhere near the "it's meaningless to talk about why you don't like it" threshold.
  - stackghost 3mo ago
    >We're nowhere near the "it's meaningless to talk about why you don't like it" threshold. We crossed that threshold at least a year ago.
  - blinkbat 3mo ago
    we're so near and literally beyond that threshold
- echelon 3mo ago
  [flagged]
  - happytoexplain 3mo ago
    It's very hard to be happy about things that actively reduce one's happiness. This isn't unreasonable. You have a different experience - that doesn't make everybody else an idiot. In fact, your comment (regardless of attitude on AI) is exactly an example of the kind of attitude that is in opposition to the curiosity, positivity, and humanity that HN historically represents.
    - echelon 3mo ago
      > In fact, your comment (regardless of attitude on AI) is exactly an example of the kind of attitude that is in opposition to the curiosity, positivity, and humanity that HN historically represents. My patience has worn out. I've tolerated the anti-AI sentiment for years, but at this point it's beyond grating. I've heard all the arguments, I've been called all the names. The anti-AI crowd is frequently uncivil, and that just gets to glide by. I'm tired of it. I don't go flagging every anti AI voice here, regardless of how hateful or cruel it is.
      - therobots927 3mo ago
        [flagged]
        echelon 3mo ago
        This is the kind of civil discourse HN allows these days.
        therobots927 3mo ago
        [flagged]
        3mo ago
johnfn 3mo ago
Speaking personally I was not particularly moved by the article because I have seen the same thing, in different shapes, thousands of times on HN and elsewhere. Really, AI can't feel and therefore it is inferior? Never heard that one before. Really, an AI can't feel friction and therefore can't adapt to it? Daring today, aren't we? (And a more interesting question: is that even true..?) I realize I am being unnecessarily harsh here, but this article is very much preaching to the choir on HN, which has an anti-AI bent. No one is showing up because there's nothing really to show up to here -- and that is why you are left with "sly jibes" and not much else.
- tony_cannistra 3mo ago
  Look, really not trying to get into the weeds here, but since we're there: I respect your take that nothing in this article is novel, though I disagree with it. My point wasn't as much about that as it was the lack of good faith engagement and curiosity. Not interesting? Let the damn thing die on /new.
  - johnfn 3mo ago
    The article does not engage with its subject matter with good-faith engagement and curiosity. "Always has been. Always will be." is, inherently, the author's lack of engagement with the subject matter. "They cannot see the world outside" is a shut door that does not admit curiosity or an interesting comment. And so you are seeing this reflected back in the response.
  - sublinear 3mo ago
    There has been plenty of good faith ruined by trolls on both sides of the discussion. The vast majority of which are new accounts. HN seems to have been under attack for years now. More generally, the AI discussions that HN regulars actually want to have are going to be limited to the business plans, press releases about new models, and the (very) occasional higher quality project that couldn't have been done without a big lift from an LLM. Anyone genuinely wanting to discuss the truth from a philosophical or scientific perspective is never going to penetrate the profound ignorance on much of the business side (mostly startups and aging leadership), so why bother? Business is at least what everyone has in common here.
sieabahlpark 3mo ago
[dead]
blinkbat 3mo ago
it's funny when a site posted on a tech board goes down from traffic. it's funnier when the site is making some kind of principled stance about the power of handmade tools, which presumably made the site, which went down.
- happytoexplain 3mo ago
  Please don't write in this petty way on HN.
- Konnstann 3mo ago
  Everyone knows that AI would never build a tool that would cap bandwidth based on how much a user is paying for hosting. Famously anthropic charges you the same amount for claude usage regardless of how many tokens you use, extending towards infinity.
hexasquid 3mo ago
I imagine everyone has a point at which they feel a movement has pushed its rhetoric just that bit too far. When one takes a lofty and high-minded position, one can find oneself exposed to ridicule. In case it helps the authentic human connection: I too wrote this with my human hands and did not use AI.
archagon 3mo ago
The hacker intelligentsia is long gone from this site. It’s little more than a VC/tech merc mixer.

darkmarmot 3mo ago

I recently mentioned that my team and most of my dev friends don’t use AI for code on a gamdev forum (we do stuff like distributed consensus, compilers, etc.). I was quickly denounced as “an arrogant douche”.

deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]

ryanthedev 3mo ago

I think the eye roll is the need to shout that you don’t use AI. It’s the new web dev, imo. This post wasn’t about sparking conversation. It’s about using AI makes me lose the human touch in what I do, blah blah, heard it all before. Sorry, not sorry.

tony_cannistra 3mo ago
TFA raises several points I hadn't heard before. Here's one. The artifacts we produce define our culture. If we allow LLMs to produce our work, our culture represents that which they understand. But LLMs can't be trained on the entirety of the human experience. "How dare we abandon so many countless traditions and people and ideas and nuances, simply because they are underrepresented in the training data?" I just feel like that's not performative in the way you're insinuating. That feels like a take to me. Respectful engagement is what I expected here.
- Levitz 3mo ago
  But that's not anything new, and even in the same text you can see examples of that. LLMs are a tool. The brush is a tool, the pencil is a tool. The way we write already is defined by tools. This very comment is remarkably defined by its medium, I can't control its font size! Or the font at all, for that matter, nor the color, hell I can't even control how and where this comment is read! This means I'm generally going to write it in English, a whole different language from my native one! How is that for "defining"??? None of this is new, it's all dictated by human experience in the very same way that the output of a LLM gets dictated by human experience. That's the way memes (as in, anthropology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme?) work. LLMs don't understand, they just output based on some parameters. We've been here before.
- gumby 3mo ago
  The LLM is the next generation of 20th century culture. Until the early 20th century, all stories (from before homer to Shakespeare, through Dickens and so on), music etc we continual remix and interpretation. But as recording became possible and then film, cultural elements mixed with law adopted expensive production and started to become more locked down. Corporations (which are just machines themselves) made musical acts whose members were just actors playing a role (still happens today with K-pop being the most successful). Disney colonized the public domain and drowned out the origins, with their versions becoming canonical But consumers were willing participants. Rather than make a costume of your favorite character people now preferentially seek out licensed versions of dolls, costumes, “official” soundtracks etc rather than treating it all as just more raw material for your own imagination. I’m not saying there isn’t fanfic and remix culture as well but when was the last time you saw a kid with a home-made “character” T-shirt? They even buy sport jerseys with the ads included! So the mechanical slop infiltrating culture is just the current apotheosis of this process atrophy of the imagination. Truly it is degenerative AI
happytoexplain 3mo ago
It is one of the biggest things to ever happen in the history of software, art, and writing. We're nowhere near the "it's meaningless to talk about why you don't like it" threshold.
- stackghost 3mo ago
  >We're nowhere near the "it's meaningless to talk about why you don't like it" threshold. We crossed that threshold at least a year ago.
- blinkbat 3mo ago
  we're so near and literally beyond that threshold
echelon 3mo ago
[flagged]
- happytoexplain 3mo ago
  It's very hard to be happy about things that actively reduce one's happiness. This isn't unreasonable. You have a different experience - that doesn't make everybody else an idiot. In fact, your comment (regardless of attitude on AI) is exactly an example of the kind of attitude that is in opposition to the curiosity, positivity, and humanity that HN historically represents.
  - echelon 3mo ago
    > In fact, your comment (regardless of attitude on AI) is exactly an example of the kind of attitude that is in opposition to the curiosity, positivity, and humanity that HN historically represents. My patience has worn out. I've tolerated the anti-AI sentiment for years, but at this point it's beyond grating. I've heard all the arguments, I've been called all the names. The anti-AI crowd is frequently uncivil, and that just gets to glide by. I'm tired of it. I don't go flagging every anti AI voice here, regardless of how hateful or cruel it is.
    - therobots927 3mo ago
      [flagged]
      - echelon 3mo ago
        This is the kind of civil discourse HN allows these days.
        therobots927 3mo ago
        [flagged]
        3mo ago

johnfn 3mo ago

Speaking personally I was not particularly moved by the article because I have seen the same thing, in different shapes, thousands of times on HN and elsewhere. Really, AI can't feel and therefore it is inferior? Never heard that one before. Really, an AI can't feel friction and therefore can't adapt to it? Daring today, aren't we? (And a more interesting question: is that even true..?) I realize I am being unnecessarily harsh here, but this article is very much preaching to the choir on HN, which has an anti-AI bent. No one is showing up because there's nothing really to show up to here -- and that is why you are left with "sly jibes" and not much else.

tony_cannistra 3mo ago
Look, really not trying to get into the weeds here, but since we're there: I respect your take that nothing in this article is novel, though I disagree with it. My point wasn't as much about that as it was the lack of good faith engagement and curiosity. Not interesting? Let the damn thing die on /new.
- johnfn 3mo ago
  The article does not engage with its subject matter with good-faith engagement and curiosity. "Always has been. Always will be." is, inherently, the author's lack of engagement with the subject matter. "They cannot see the world outside" is a shut door that does not admit curiosity or an interesting comment. And so you are seeing this reflected back in the response.
- sublinear 3mo ago
  There has been plenty of good faith ruined by trolls on both sides of the discussion. The vast majority of which are new accounts. HN seems to have been under attack for years now. More generally, the AI discussions that HN regulars actually want to have are going to be limited to the business plans, press releases about new models, and the (very) occasional higher quality project that couldn't have been done without a big lift from an LLM. Anyone genuinely wanting to discuss the truth from a philosophical or scientific perspective is never going to penetrate the profound ignorance on much of the business side (mostly startups and aging leadership), so why bother? Business is at least what everyone has in common here.

sieabahlpark 3mo ago

[dead]

blinkbat 3mo ago

it's funny when a site posted on a tech board goes down from traffic. it's funnier when the site is making some kind of principled stance about the power of handmade tools, which presumably made the site, which went down.

happytoexplain 3mo ago
Please don't write in this petty way on HN.
Konnstann 3mo ago
Everyone knows that AI would never build a tool that would cap bandwidth based on how much a user is paying for hosting. Famously anthropic charges you the same amount for claude usage regardless of how many tokens you use, extending towards infinity.

hexasquid 3mo ago

I imagine everyone has a point at which they feel a movement has pushed its rhetoric just that bit too far. When one takes a lofty and high-minded position, one can find oneself exposed to ridicule. In case it helps the authentic human connection: I too wrote this with my human hands and did not use AI.

archagon 3mo ago

The hacker intelligentsia is long gone from this site. It’s little more than a VC/tech merc mixer.