4 ms·

This is my thoughts as well! It makes smarter people smarter and dumb people dumber!

by the_real_cher 1mo ago

doctorwho42 1mo ago
All at the cost of ... {List of negatives regarding the construction and powering of AI data centers }
- dan_ggggg 1mo ago
  The social costs are worse.
  - doctorwho42 1mo ago
    I dunno, concentrating the environmental impact of 20GW of gas based power generation would be the equivalent of 6-9 Million cars running... All in the space of a corner of a small city
    - dan_ggggg 1mo ago
      That sounds much worse than I had expected. Is this enough consumption to significantly affect the local price of gasoline? Edit: Why don't they have lower-emission power sources?
      - doctorwho42 1mo ago
        We do have lower emission alternatives, but not at the cost point... Remember these are corporations trying to make the largest profit possible
- wredcoll 1mo ago
  If you added up the negative effect of every single "ai data center" you'd end up with less than a single coal mine. It's good to think about second order impacts but this is not useful.
  - doctorwho42 1mo ago
    Citation needed, Just one 20 GW AI data center which is being built with gas powered turbine generator power plant, will be the largest fossil fuel power plant in the world... How exactly is that the same as one coal mine
mrguyorama 1mo ago
It helps smart people be barely more effective and helps dumb (more importantly, people who do not value effort, people who are lazy, people who are self absorbed) people shit out endless streams of worthless tokens that can swamp out everything. Raising the noise floor like this only makes it that much harder to find "Smart" people, which we were already doing terrible at. I use Claude every single day, but this is such a bad tradeoff. Maybe it will help me standup a quick fix when that is needed. Maybe it can help me dig through documentation to find relevant bits and figure out the unstated assumptions underlying it. Maybe it helps me generate test cases. Meanwhile, my day to day life is now noise. All social media is noise. All content is noise. Slop pours onto me from all directions. Writing more test cases isn't helping me. Am I smart? Am I dumb? I don't care, right now I'm deafened
- suburban_strike 1mo ago
  All I've noticed is AI creating a perverse incentive to make everything as complicated and bureaucratic as possible, so only the people that know how to leverage AI to cut through it ever succeed. I'm using Claude at work myself and am impressed with the product, but notice that this is the only reason I need to use it at all. Our product pages were shit to begin with, now they're AI-generated and somehow even worse. Our procedures are incomprehensible spaghetti with enough arbitrary context switching to give a sadistic Soviet municipal administrator an erection at the thought of watching anyone try to actually follow them. Use AI to create inefficiencies, then use AI to bypass them. Those who can't do the latter will struggle to survive.
- altairprime 1mo ago
  > Raising the noise floor like this only makes it that much harder to find "Smart" people, which we were already doing terrible at. Clarification: to value “smart” people, which we were already doing terrible at.
- wizzwizz4 1mo ago
  > Raising the noise floor like this only makes it that much harder to find "Smart" people, It does give us a new heuristic, though: people who are willing to completely cut generative AI out of their lives (cold-turkey, if you ever started using it) are a much smaller group of, predominantly thoughtful, people. You do have to give up Claude to be part of this group, but from what you say, that's no great loss, and no longer being deafened is worth it. This has considerable advantages over conventional elitism, because the barrier-to-entry is negative in almost all cases. The one exception I've found is assistive tech, where the state-of-the-art is so poor that vibecoded slop is genuinely an improvement over the state-of-the-art, and in many cases the tooling simply isn't available to make your own assistive tech (unless you want to bootstrap an entire networked computing environment, which isn't very helpful when you want to do your online banking and do not, in fact, work at your bank). But there are not many principled exceptions where you could seriously argue that the trade-off is worth it. Take mathematics, for example, which we often see touted as a "good use-case" of generative AI. The primary advantage of generative AI in mathematics is being able to search though a vast corpus of ivory towers and inconsistent terminology (without proper attribution) to locate and connect ideas that can help solve problems. The deficiency this is addressing is elitism, inadequate communication, and inadequate indexing within academic mathematics. This problem is entirely created by the academic mathematicians, and has been known for nearly a century (per https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Nicolas_Bourbaki&oldid=1369772998 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Nicolas_Bourbaki&...): > Bourbaki was founded in response to the effects of the First World War which caused the death of a generation of French mathematicians; as a result, young university instructors were forced to use dated texts. While teaching at the University of Strasbourg, Henri Cartan complained to his colleague André Weil of the inadequacy of available course material, which prompted Weil to propose a meeting with others in Paris to collectively write a modern analysis textbook. To my knowledge, this is the only organised project to clean up and improve mathematical communication. Everything else (Metamath, Mizar, AFP, Lean) is yet another ivory tower. The Wikipedia article on this topic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_knowledge_management https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_knowledge_managem...) risks deletion as non-notable, that's how little anyone's actually trying. They made their own bed, and generative AI will only provide a brief respite from having to lie in it. (I was surprised how many other "compelling" use-cases evaporated when I applied this razor to them: the sibling comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49392265 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49392265 points out one such.) Vibe-coding assistive tech which doesn't yet exist, as a temporary scaffold to improve the quality-of-life of yourself and others in a social world dominated by non-essential access barriers is, to my knowledge, the only exception to this principle that can be justified. If you treat people who make other excuses, or who don't even bother with excuses, as not worth listening to, you lose little – and doubly-so, if you make your stance clear, so that others know the "cost" of gaining your attention.
stevecoalbear 1mo ago
Most importantly, it makes investors think dumb people are smart.
grey-area 1mo ago
There is zero evidence for this. LLMs make significant mistakes frequently and smart people have no way of judging those mistakes outside their domain expertise. They are also sycophantic and great at being an echo chamber which makes people feel smart even if they are not. So I think the burden of proof is on you to prove that they somehow amplify intelligence, it seems highly unlikely.
- ndriscoll 1mo ago
  Most domains have some kind of internal consistency/theory building you can do. A smart person can certainly notice inconsistencies when trying to learn something. In fact they're likely to be points of confusion that the smart person will dive into just to try to make sense of things, even if they don't suspect the LLM is at fault.
  - grey-area 1mo ago
    People who think they are smart often think they can get by in any domain without knowledge and context, but at a certain point this fails and knowledge is required, not just intelligence.
    - skydhash 1mo ago
      Pretty much this. With the internet and my websearch-fu, I can find some facts on a lots of things. And while I do for some questions I have, I try to never interject answers when I don’t have a modicum of mastery in the domain. Mastery is the formation of an internal model that guide your actions and thinking. It’s not merely knowledge and intelligence.
      - grey-area 1mo ago
        Yes sorry for the shorthand, an internal model is a good way to describe mastery. It’s something LLMs don’t have and can’t transmit.
    - ndriscoll 1mo ago
bsder 1mo ago
AI does not make me "smarter" in the important thing I am working on. In software particularly, what AI does do is give me back my time from the drudge work that I don't care about. Keeping my build system configured and my tests up to date and my documentation synchronized is a good use of AI because I mostly don't care about how crummy the result is as long as it "works".
- chrisjj 1mo ago
  > ... a good use of AI because I mostly don't care about how crummy the result is as long as it "works". This is "AI"s forte. Producing more bad work at lower cost.
chrisjj 1mo ago
Unfortunately this results in overwhelming net dumbing because the dumb are the ones lacking the smarts to avoid the "AI".

This is my thoughts as well! It makes smarter people smarter and dumb people dumber!

doctorwho42 1mo ago

All at the cost of ... {List of negatives regarding the construction and powering of AI data centers }

dan_ggggg 1mo ago
The social costs are worse.
- doctorwho42 1mo ago
  I dunno, concentrating the environmental impact of 20GW of gas based power generation would be the equivalent of 6-9 Million cars running... All in the space of a corner of a small city
  - dan_ggggg 1mo ago
    That sounds much worse than I had expected. Is this enough consumption to significantly affect the local price of gasoline? Edit: Why don't they have lower-emission power sources?
    - doctorwho42 1mo ago
      We do have lower emission alternatives, but not at the cost point... Remember these are corporations trying to make the largest profit possible
wredcoll 1mo ago
If you added up the negative effect of every single "ai data center" you'd end up with less than a single coal mine. It's good to think about second order impacts but this is not useful.
- doctorwho42 1mo ago
  Citation needed, Just one 20 GW AI data center which is being built with gas powered turbine generator power plant, will be the largest fossil fuel power plant in the world... How exactly is that the same as one coal mine

mrguyorama 1mo ago

It helps smart people be barely more effective and helps dumb (more importantly, people who do not value effort, people who are lazy, people who are self absorbed) people shit out endless streams of worthless tokens that can swamp out everything. Raising the noise floor like this only makes it that much harder to find "Smart" people, which we were already doing terrible at. I use Claude every single day, but this is such a bad tradeoff. Maybe it will help me standup a quick fix when that is needed. Maybe it can help me dig through documentation to find relevant bits and figure out the unstated assumptions underlying it. Maybe it helps me generate test cases. Meanwhile, my day to day life is now noise. All social media is noise. All content is noise. Slop pours onto me from all directions. Writing more test cases isn't helping me. Am I smart? Am I dumb? I don't care, right now I'm deafened

suburban_strike 1mo ago
All I've noticed is AI creating a perverse incentive to make everything as complicated and bureaucratic as possible, so only the people that know how to leverage AI to cut through it ever succeed. I'm using Claude at work myself and am impressed with the product, but notice that this is the only reason I need to use it at all. Our product pages were shit to begin with, now they're AI-generated and somehow even worse. Our procedures are incomprehensible spaghetti with enough arbitrary context switching to give a sadistic Soviet municipal administrator an erection at the thought of watching anyone try to actually follow them. Use AI to create inefficiencies, then use AI to bypass them. Those who can't do the latter will struggle to survive.
altairprime 1mo ago
> Raising the noise floor like this only makes it that much harder to find "Smart" people, which we were already doing terrible at. Clarification: to value “smart” people, which we were already doing terrible at.
wizzwizz4 1mo ago
> Raising the noise floor like this only makes it that much harder to find "Smart" people, It does give us a new heuristic, though: people who are willing to completely cut generative AI out of their lives (cold-turkey, if you ever started using it) are a much smaller group of, predominantly thoughtful, people. You do have to give up Claude to be part of this group, but from what you say, that's no great loss, and no longer being deafened is worth it. This has considerable advantages over conventional elitism, because the barrier-to-entry is negative in almost all cases. The one exception I've found is assistive tech, where the state-of-the-art is so poor that vibecoded slop is genuinely an improvement over the state-of-the-art, and in many cases the tooling simply isn't available to make your own assistive tech (unless you want to bootstrap an entire networked computing environment, which isn't very helpful when you want to do your online banking and do not, in fact, work at your bank). But there are not many principled exceptions where you could seriously argue that the trade-off is worth it. Take mathematics, for example, which we often see touted as a "good use-case" of generative AI. The primary advantage of generative AI in mathematics is being able to search though a vast corpus of ivory towers and inconsistent terminology (without proper attribution) to locate and connect ideas that can help solve problems. The deficiency this is addressing is elitism, inadequate communication, and inadequate indexing within academic mathematics. This problem is entirely created by the academic mathematicians, and has been known for nearly a century (per https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Nicolas_Bourbaki&oldid=1369772998 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Nicolas_Bourbaki&...): > Bourbaki was founded in response to the effects of the First World War which caused the death of a generation of French mathematicians; as a result, young university instructors were forced to use dated texts. While teaching at the University of Strasbourg, Henri Cartan complained to his colleague André Weil of the inadequacy of available course material, which prompted Weil to propose a meeting with others in Paris to collectively write a modern analysis textbook. To my knowledge, this is the only organised project to clean up and improve mathematical communication. Everything else (Metamath, Mizar, AFP, Lean) is yet another ivory tower. The Wikipedia article on this topic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_knowledge_management https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_knowledge_managem...) risks deletion as non-notable, that's how little anyone's actually trying. They made their own bed, and generative AI will only provide a brief respite from having to lie in it. (I was surprised how many other "compelling" use-cases evaporated when I applied this razor to them: the sibling comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49392265 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49392265 points out one such.) Vibe-coding assistive tech which doesn't yet exist, as a temporary scaffold to improve the quality-of-life of yourself and others in a social world dominated by non-essential access barriers is, to my knowledge, the only exception to this principle that can be justified. If you treat people who make other excuses, or who don't even bother with excuses, as not worth listening to, you lose little – and doubly-so, if you make your stance clear, so that others know the "cost" of gaining your attention.

stevecoalbear 1mo ago

Most importantly, it makes investors think dumb people are smart.

grey-area 1mo ago

There is zero evidence for this. LLMs make significant mistakes frequently and smart people have no way of judging those mistakes outside their domain expertise. They are also sycophantic and great at being an echo chamber which makes people feel smart even if they are not. So I think the burden of proof is on you to prove that they somehow amplify intelligence, it seems highly unlikely.

ndriscoll 1mo ago
Most domains have some kind of internal consistency/theory building you can do. A smart person can certainly notice inconsistencies when trying to learn something. In fact they're likely to be points of confusion that the smart person will dive into just to try to make sense of things, even if they don't suspect the LLM is at fault.
- grey-area 1mo ago
  People who think they are smart often think they can get by in any domain without knowledge and context, but at a certain point this fails and knowledge is required, not just intelligence.
  - skydhash 1mo ago
    Pretty much this. With the internet and my websearch-fu, I can find some facts on a lots of things. And while I do for some questions I have, I try to never interject answers when I don’t have a modicum of mastery in the domain. Mastery is the formation of an internal model that guide your actions and thinking. It’s not merely knowledge and intelligence.
    - grey-area 1mo ago
      Yes sorry for the shorthand, an internal model is a good way to describe mastery. It’s something LLMs don’t have and can’t transmit.
  - ndriscoll 1mo ago

bsder 1mo ago

AI does not make me "smarter" in the important thing I am working on. In software particularly, what AI does do is give me back my time from the drudge work that I don't care about. Keeping my build system configured and my tests up to date and my documentation synchronized is a good use of AI because I mostly don't care about how crummy the result is as long as it "works".

chrisjj 1mo ago
> ... a good use of AI because I mostly don't care about how crummy the result is as long as it "works". This is "AI"s forte. Producing more bad work at lower cost.

chrisjj 1mo ago

Unfortunately this results in overwhelming net dumbing because the dumb are the ones lacking the smarts to avoid the "AI".