13 ms·

Everybody's Lost Their Minds

341 points by ibobev 20d ago

augment_me 20d ago
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deleted 20d ago
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monster_truck 20d ago
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- brink 20d ago
  It's endless comments like this that make me feel like it's the minority that's sane, which reaffirms the author's point.
  - orangedog 20d ago
    I don't know if it is the minority but I think sanity is the group of people not taking a "side" and just realizing this new tech is what it is and it's going to and has had both major advantages and disadvantages. Blog posts like the above are a dime a dozen along with their opposite and thy only read like people caught up in bubbles.
    - cgio 20d ago
      We are all caught up in our bubble. That’s why being exposed to someone else’s is useful. The moment you dismiss it as their bubble you assert not just their wall but also yours.
    - mtlmtlmtlmtl 20d ago
      Yep, good observation. And it's so exhausting not to take a side. Because people on both sides invariably misinterpret you as being on the other side and strawman you accordingly. Personally, I agree with the author on some things. The copyright laundering, the PR theatrics in search of regulatory capture, the concentration of power in a handful of gargantuan corporations in a country currently headed for totalitarianism at an alarming pace. The proliferation of slop drowning out all the good stuff. These are genuine issues, and they worry me, a great deal. And yet, it's become impossible to seriously contend that this technology isn't tremendously useful for certain tasks. I've used it myself with good results. But I don't buy the maximally bullish view that an LLM will eventually surpass humans in all areas. There are severe flaws with the technology that are inherent to its architecture and simply cannot be scaled away. This is as incontrovertible to me as its usefulness. The trough of disillusionment is coming for all of us, it always does. And much like the internet past the trough, we'll have a lot of cool new shit as a result of this technology, and we'll have a lot of horrifying new problems as well. This is the case for any paradigm shifting technology. That's my view when trying my best to be objective. Subjectively though, I'm deeply depressed about it all. LLMs have taken everything I love about computing and turned it on its head. I got into computers because they were so different from people. Mathematical, rigorous, efficient, unambigious(yes, bugs can be very confusing but there's always a satisfying and logical answer to dig out with enough effort). Now, apparently, to do the job I (used to) love, I have to spend most my time spoonfeeding instructions to a pretentious, know-it-all asshole who repeatedly fails to follow simple instruction, and yet is somehow still better than me at my job. I hate it. I'm 10 times more productive, and 100% of the joy is gone. I've quit, and I'm now considering what the fuck to do with my life. Something with minimal computer involvement. I will continue to code as a hobby and tool for my own purposes, LLM free, but I won't even bother uploading my code anywhere, because what's the point.
righthand 20d ago
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deleted 20d ago
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drbscl 20d ago
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- orangedog 20d ago
  Yeah, when you are pulling out terms of the very online like "meat proxies", you're not exactly in a place to judge the rest of society, you're in a bubble.
grebc 20d ago
I’ve had a pet theory for a long time that society loses it’s collective mind every 10ish years or so, usually starting with a good reason, but the outcome is mass stupidity followed by mass forgetting leading to a new cycle. War on terror, GFC, crypto, covid, now AI. Although the cycle does seem to be shortening. Also we’re just so damn stupid to learn from history, or even just people 10 years older than us, that we repeat the cycle. And there I guess is where saying a new sucker is born every minute is from.
- doginasuit 20d ago
  I have a more sympathetic view, I thought covid could have been much worse. Of course there were silly moments like the existential panic from a toilerpaper shortage but it seems like the vast majority of people acted responsibly and kept their heads over the long haul. In the meantime, we developed revolutionary vaccines that solved the problem. There's the lingering societal PTSD to consider, but I think most of the challenge in the aftermath are latent issues that preexisted covid and it just brought them to the surface. I think our world a couple decades from now will be stronger than it would have been in a universe where covid never happened, and actually has a better chance at dealing with the next covid-level threat. Perhaps that is this, in a way. Covid proved that a healthy looking society is not always so healthy, and I think it works in reverse too. The outcome of the upcoming election will tell us something about how far we have to go.
  - grebc 20d ago
    This might be Australia specific, but I think a lot of the movement restrictions were unnecessary. And long term damaging to not just adults but there’s a whole cohort of kids/teenagers who just missed out on certain things and we’re patting ourselves on the back we survived? The places that needed restrictions such as hospitals & nursing homes still got covid by & large. We didn’t necessarily need to close down the whole show. I’ve had my jabs, also had covid multiple times. I’m not a disbeliever, I just think the collective reaction was completely OTT.
    - watwut 20d ago
scarmig 20d ago
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- johnsmith1840 20d ago
  Were did this myth originate anyways? Did datacenter burst a pipe at some point?
  - scarmig 20d ago
    There was construction of some data center, and someone's well water started looking dirty around the same time. From there it metasisized into claims that it's destroying all the world's water.
  - mapontosevenths 20d ago
    Evaporative cooling. They think that because the earth is only 2/3rds water we will run out before it rains back down again. I jest, of course. The actual argument is something about most water being frozen and how some people live in deserts so we should all live as if we were desert dwellers. As you can tell I'm not very convinced by it. Water is literally the least scarce thing on earth.
  - shagie 20d ago
    Consider the image of a data center. https://datacenters.google/discover-more/photo-gallery/ https://datacenters.google/discover-more/photo-gallery/ and scroll down to "The Dalles, Oregon" and well... look at them. And then its reported water use: https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2022/12/googles-water-use-is-soaring-in-the-dalles-records-show-with-two-more-data-centers-to-come.html https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2022/12/googles-wa... > Google’s water use in The Dalles has nearly tripled in the past five years, and the company’s data centers now consume more than a quarter of all the water used in the city. > That’s according to records released this week after the city settled a lawsuit against The Oregonian/OregonLive and agreed to hand over data on Google’s water consumption. The company’s water use is poised to continue soaring in the years ahead, as Google has plans for two more data centers along the Columbia River. https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2021/11/the-dalles-sues-to-keep-googles-water-use-a-secret.html https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2021/11/the-dalles... > Google is contemplating two new server farms on the site of a former aluminum smelter in The Dalles, where it already has an enormous campus of data centers on its property along the Columbia River. > Google says it needs more water to cool its data centers, but neither the company nor the city will say how much more – only that The Dalles can’t meet Google’s needs without expanding its water system. The deal calls for Google to pay for the upgrade. > Even so, the proposed water pact has attracted scrutiny and skepticism in The Dalles, a riverfront city of about 15,000 approximately 80 miles east of Portland. > Residents and nearby farmers are concerned about the city’s long-term water supply amid an ongoing drought. They complain they don’t know enough about Google’s actual water use. ---- It is possible to do some cooling with closed cycle, though more than a few data centers have been built with open cycle cooling in places were the water table is precarious or in parts of the country under drought conditions. Unless a data center construction discloses its water use and shows that it isn't using a lot, then people are assuming its using as much as it can (and up to the water rights or capacity that it has). ... Which isn't an unreasonable assumption to make. https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2026/04/more-oregon-water-for-googles-data-centers-more-concern-over-secrecy.html https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2026/04/more-orego... > Google’s data centers gulped down nearly 550 million gallons of water in The Dalles in 2025. That’s nearly 40% of all the water consumed in the entire city and a huge jump from the year before. > The city expects that local water consumption will soar over the next several years and bills will nearly double as The Dalles works to upgrade its aging water system. But the city won’t say how much of the rising demand comes from Google, citing a promise to keep the numbers secret and confidentiality provisions in Oregon public records law. And data centers are being very cagy with their water consumption because the amount of water that it uses is related to the amount of compute it has and that is being held as an industry secret.
micromacrofoot 20d ago
I agree that everyone's lost their minds, but so has this guy. LLMs are actually producing a lot of pretty good stuff, can debug things that would have taken an entire team a week, and the people running AI companies are also generally like the most boring supervillains imaginable. All true. It is also completely screwing up the global economy, and most people barely understand what it is and what's happening. It's also not going to collapse anytime soon as a technology despite what the economy does, and it's going to get a lot worse before it gets better. Everyone who's extreme on it on either end is generally wrong.
- iAMkenough 20d ago
  I believe both extremes are right, because more than one thing can be true at once.
  - micromacrofoot 20d ago
    that we're creating god but that it's also a fad that will go away soon?
    - Terr_ 20d ago
      I think you just accidentally described what's already been happening for 7000+ years. Though if any followers still exist, they probably wouldn't agree that 𒀭𒂗𒆠 was just a fad.
      - zahlman 20d ago
        To save others the search query: > Enki (Sumerian: 𒀭𒂗𒆠 dEN-KI), also known as Ea (Akkadian: 𒀭𒂍𒀀 dE₂-A), was the Mesopotamian god of wisdom, crafts, fresh subterranean waters, magic, and incantations.[1][11] He was believed to rule the Abzû. In Mesopotamian astronomy, he was associated with the stars of the southern band of the sky.[17] Enki's wife was Damgalnuna, and their children included Nanshe, Asalluhi, Marduk and Enbilulu. His sukkal (attendant deity) was Isimud. Servants of the god included lahmu, kulullû, and the Seven Sages.
S-E-P 20d ago
This is someone's vent post.
- phyzome 20d ago
  How perspicacious of you!
  - S-E-P 20d ago
    Thanks <3
daedrdev 20d ago
AI does not use much water. If you believe it does, like this article does, you have fallen for propaganda and lies, ironic in a post calling everyone using AI stupid. The main cause of water fear mongering is that one woman’s well was dirty during construction of a data center. First construction is not the center running, and having lived on a well they get dirty for all kinds of reasons.
- lowbloodsugar 20d ago
  The major hyperscalers report water use: Google consumed 10.9 billion gallons in 2025, up 34%, versus Amazon's disclosed 2.5 billion.
  - gorjusborg 20d ago
    Thank you, I wasn't aware they did this: https://sustainability.google/reports/google-2026-environmental-report/ https://sustainability.google/reports/google-2026-environmen... https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/sustainability/amazon-data-center-water-usage https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/sustainability/amazon-data-...
  - daedrdev 20d ago
    The Us uses 320 billion gallons a day. Google thus used 0.01% of total US water. Or about 0.6% of the water used to grow almonds
    - phyzome 20d ago
      Now compare to the planned datacenters.
      - daedrdev 20d ago
        US data centers are going to 3x this year. Still not a lot.
        phyzome 20d ago
sandinmyjoints 20d ago
> human resources are still a zero-sum game, and every individual feeling super busy in their agentic silo doing a thousand things at once does not, in the end, help solve the kinds of projects that require cross-functional collaboration and team work. This rings true.
BadBadJellyBean 20d ago
I feel this post. I am tired of "directing" agents when in reality it feels more like trying to herd a group of toddlers. Sure they can mostly write better code than a toddler but this constant nudging and reminding and reiterating and stopping them from using the token budget of the whole company for a one off script. It gets tiring and I feel like I am losing brain power while doing it. Maybe it's faster but explosive diarrhea is also a faster way to produce shit.
- swader999 20d ago
  Welcome to management.
  - BadBadJellyBean 20d ago
    I feel like humans don't switch between being an idiot and a genius quite as fast as LLMs do. But yeah I have been thinking about my future and I am not sure I am cut out for the role of manager.
  - strls 19d ago
    Managing subordinates whom 1) Dou didn't hire 2) Are only there for cost reasons 3) You can't fire no matter how much they screw up.
- AIiscoming 20d ago
  AI builds like 95% for me than i play around with it for a bit for the last 5%. I'm still a lot faster for certain things with AI but its weird. Instead of just being annoyed about some weird bug, i'm annoyed about an LLM which can do everything and then falls over itself on weird issues. It feels weird true but it still also relevant faster?
  - BadBadJellyBean 20d ago
    I never liked telling people what to do or watching people do something. Using AI is exclusively like telling someone to do something who is either super smart or dumb as a brick and you never know which persona you will. The only thing you can be sure of is that it will produce whatever it produces very fast with 100% confidence. Also I care for code style, consistency and overall maintainability because I don't want to be locked into using LLMs and I can only really do that when I proof read everything. I don't want a huge project that will take a full rewrite for a human to understand it.
redlimetea 20d ago
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boxed 20d ago
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kragen 20d ago
This doesn't seem like a well-thought-out post. I mean, I probably could have told you that from the fact that it's either pro-AI or anti-AI (in this case the latter), but this is a particularly poorly thought out post. Others here have pointed out the water-wasting red herring, but there are several other pieces of nonsense here — the general environmental doom-mongering, and labeling recursive self-improvement as "mystical", for example. Me, I pointed Claude Opus 5 at a C codebase I've been working on for years and it immediately found five serious bugs and told me how to fix them, as well as how to use Linux system calls I wasn't familiar with to solve some other problems. And I gave it a new language for PEGs I'd written up a couple of years ago, and it wrote me a working implementation in OCaml that afternoon, fixing several bugs in my example grammars along the way and resolving a conceptual problem I'd had a roadblock on. I asked Fable 5.1 to implement a minimal proof assistant, and it wrote a clone of J-Bob in Python, which I'm studying now. Although there is a certain firehose quality to this stuff, I sure don't intend to use AI to actively de-skill my brain. That doesn't guarantee that AI will be a beneficial innovation overall, of course! As with most innovations, it probably depends on the balance between people being able to use the innovation to gain control over their own lives, and people being able to use it to gain control over others' lives. (Barring a FOOM scenario, of course, where our prediction ability is nonexistent.) So, I don't think a pro-AI post can be well thought out, either. It's too early and chaotic to understand what's going to happen, and it may actually be uncertain. Pro and anti are both far too simplistic.
- revivechristina 20d ago
  it's a lot more thought out than a lot of the code getting pushed to production right now
- danvayn 20d ago
  Not criticizing or calling into question the contents of the posts or your rebuttal. Just wanted to point out this is not a Normal HN post or blog. Most blogs have the self removed to some degree or ultimately focus out of the self. This is clearly a journalistic blog, a shared diary entry sort of prose. You can see it in the first paragraph. It is basically intended to be emotive or get across the idea of getting emotions out about a topic, and ironically this is what makes it a not-bad-post. Basically, I don’t know how well thought out it is, but the prose argues that the point isn’t for it to be an objective take, and that if it were well thought out (ie highly iterated on and more objective or factual than subjective) some personal meaning that was intended to be expressed is lost along the way. In other words It may have not appealed to you but that’s fine - you might just be outside the target demographic. In any case I don’t think it necessarily should be more well thought out. I prefer that these pieces exist or have their place. I definitely prefer their existence to a world where every personal Blog post has to arise from fiduciary or technical concerns, instead of from the soul. This is a soulful blog. I like it.
camillomiller 20d ago
Completely off topic, but I'm absolutely fascinated by the fact that this blog's central column is built as a... <table> Good old times. Definitely not vibe coded, though.
- zabriel_goss 20d ago
  Table layout, my old friend!
- phyzome 20d ago
  And of course this is inferior to the most advanced CSS technique, which is... literally ASCII-art tables. (As words instead of lines.)
- account42 20d ago
  You might also be fascinated if you inspect the layout of the website you're commenting on. If it works....
mschuster91 20d ago
> So no, I'm not going to set ethics aside and then actively offer myself up as tribute to self-amputate my brain. I'm sorry if everybody else can't get rid of the brain slugs, but at this point I'm just looking to get off this ride. Same. I quit, aside from two contracts I'll serve until they run out, I'll be studying Electrical Engineering. Even if AI takes over that space... good luck constructing a robot with the dexterity required to pull cables. To anyone in IT... go and study for some qualification in tasks not easily doable for a machine. The trades are going to be a goldmine especially with all the boomers retiring. Or buy some ranch in the midst of nowhere and farm artisanal chickens, cattle or goats. (For legal reasons, the latter was a joke. Farming is extremely risky, requires a lot of upfront cash, a lot of what used to be generational knowledge, but it seems to attract a lot of IT people, especially for whatever reason the goat farming)
bucket2015 20d ago
It's interesting how there's an increasing split of software engineers into those who're very happy with AI and leaning more into it, and those who're increasingly skeptical or dejected. I don't know how this will play out, but I haven't seen anything like this before.
- mjfisher 20d ago
  Can I be both?
  - thechao 20d ago
    Absolutely!
- FailMore 20d ago
  I have leaned heavily into it… and became good at “agentic thinking”, but now I’m going to reverse. I have become dumber, sloppier, lazier, more distracted. I’m less happy than before. It’s hard to escape the productivity addiction and expectations though.
  - Izkata 20d ago
    I've seen this happen to multiple co-workers, in the span of months. Two were laid off so I don't know how it's going with them, and another has backed off but not fully abandoned AI code. I'm resisting it entirely because of these problems.
- rspeele 20d ago
  I'm very happy with the performance and ability of AI. I think the best software ever will come out of this. It's very clear to me that AI empowers one to make "just ok" software effortlessly, and "incredibly excellent" software with the same level of effort we previously used to make "just ok" software. So there will be a lot of slop, but there will also be some real diamonds created by those who put the extra work in. The extra work might not involve manually writing or even reading much code, but it is work nonetheless. I still count myself as "dejected" overall. I'm dejected by the economic shape of AI which seems destined to keep concentrating outsized rewards to the top few who own it or have enough capital to shackle it to their will. I'm fearful that intelligence, once it becomes a commodity you can rent any time you may need it, will be socially devalued in our already anti-intellectual society. I worry that in a couple decades we may resemble the world of "The Machine Stops" (1909), where nobody really knows how things work. Of course we already live in such a complex world, no one person has complete knowledge of the "stack" they rely on. I can write software in C or assembler but I can't design a CPU and don't really understand how one is manufactured. (I may someday study that field, but I haven't yet!) But I take solace in the fact that somebody out there, has put the time in to study each of those things and is an expert in them. At every layer and in every niche of our engineering world there are masters of their craft, and there are students learning the fundamentals to keep that knowledge alive and growing. What if in 30 or 40 years that is not the case, and there are whole corners of knowledge the modern world depends on where everybody is reduced to "I dunno how it works, but Claude said..."?
tptacek 20d ago
If you think vulnerability research simply doesn't matter, you have a lot of company in that opinion. It's something Bruce Schneier used to argue, and Marcus Ranum, and a bunch of other people that used be on closed secret vulnerability-sharing mailing lists before Bugtraq blew those cliques up. These are very old arguments. But if you do think vulnerability research matters, and you're trying to argue that frontier models aren't a seismic change for that discipline, you have almost no company. Vulnerability researchers are overwhelmingly leaning on automation to find vulnerabilities and, just as importantly, generate the tooling required to test hypotheses. You can feel about that however you want to feel about it. I mostly don't care, except: you can watch people like this being negatively polarized back into the bad old days of the mid-1990s, content-free CERT advisories, and vendor-controlled "responsible disclosure" by a use case that frontier models unimpeachably excel at.
- jeremyjh 20d ago
  It’s amazing how half the developers on earth live on a completely different planet now. There are plenty of new challenges, sure but we are far past the point where we can have a debate about “is it useful?” And yet we continue to do so. I understand the feeling of loss some people may be facing. And there are definitely some really bad practices - like nakedly spewing claudspeak at your colleagues instead of communicating. Or raising a PR you don’t understand. There are asymmetries we haven’t learned to navigate. But we aren’t returning to a world where it doesn’t dominate our discipline so it’s best to find opportunities.
  - vermilingua 20d ago
    The question most of us are asking isn’t “is it useful”, but “is it worth it”. Engaging with these tools involves no small amount of self-debasement and long term degradation of skills; do I want to sacrifice myself on the altar of productivity? For me the answer is still absolutely resolutely “no”.
    - akerl_ 20d ago
      You’re already using a computer to automate massive amounts of what used to be manual human effort. Why is using AI tools self-debasing or degrading?
AIiscoming 20d ago
"That's because finding vulnerabilities has never been the bottleneck in information security." Thats just not true.
- burritoAlPast0r 20d ago
  How will more updates fix the human component?
  - AIiscoming 20d ago
    Sry not sure what you mean. I only wanted to say that finding security issues was def bottlenecked by humans.
uwagar 20d ago
there must be a trope by now for article titles sounding interesting yet scratch the surface and its only about AI.
jongjong 20d ago
I've been coding for 22 years, 14 years professionally, so I appreciate AI coding. It was annoying before when I had a very clear idea of what I wanted and yet it still took a whole week to implement. Now, with AI coding, I can implement any decent sized feature, exactly how I want, in a few hours and it's all polished and ready, all edge cases handled. Everything it's generating looks almost exactly like what I would have written, just written faster. Personally, I feel avenged by AI because I had been saying for years that you don't really need static typing once you reach a certain level, getting types right isn't the most difficult problem and isn't a significant source of bugs. Everyone was gaslighting me about this... Yet now everyone can verify themselves because AI has reached this level I was speaking of. Now anyone who coded with a frontier model on both TypeScript and JavaScript can see that it makes no difference at all. I can't remember ever seeing Claude mistake the type of a variable with either language... And TBH, I find Vanilla JavaScript from AI to be more succinct, not over-engineered like Typescript. Which is a point I'd been trying to make for years about incentives and actual patterns of usage (as opposed to theoretical benefits).
- zahlman 20d ago
  If you have a blog post on the topic I'd be interested. My experience with AI coding isn't really the same, but my experience with typing discipline definitely is, and I've thought about writing about it myself but don't really know where to start.
  - timacles 19d ago
    hard to believe anyone who writes something this overwhelmingly positive. I use a ton of AI, it writes a shit load of code for me, and I eventually get good results. Its also goes off on ridiculous tangents, implements things i dont want, over engineers almost everything. Makes large code bases convoluted and unreadable. Yes humans also do that, LLMs do it a lot faster. > Now, with AI coding, I can implement any decent sized feature, exactly how I want, in a few hours and it's all polished and ready, all edge cases handled. No way a human wrote that, sounds like a late night TV advertisement.
enraged_camel 20d ago
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Rover222 20d ago
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3pm 20d ago
I think there were always two camps when it came to writing code, a strong bimodal distribution. People that care about the perceived code quality (aka the ‘craft’) and people who treat the code as a means to an end. At least I always felt this tension. And there is always an exception, and a person can shift between two camps during the same day. But would generally lean towards one. I know I do. And one is not better than the other, they could both be very smart and well meaning. And you need both for success in a for-profit business. It’s been discussed ad nauseam but one particular metaphor I like is Jesus Christ vs James Bond. James Bond would win most of the time. Most people tend to think like James Bond, and if they don’t, the organization strongly nudges them in this direction, promotions get decided and it becomes self reinforcing. Now a new powerful tool shows up and I think it is time for the Jesus Christ camp to throw in the towel.
- taurath 20d ago
  Depends what you’re doing. Constraints are different between projects, and advice given for how to utilize AI rarely takes that into account. Don’t sling when you need to craft, and don’t craft when you need to sling. Knowing the difference matters more, and you can spend your entire career on one side or another.
  - 3pm 20d ago
    Craft was premised on the idea that a good writing and composition matters because it would be easier to read and comprehend (sometimes accepted by orgs because it was sold as cheaper). Now AI can read the code so the craft-leaning people would need to somehow sell it as 'fewer tokens will be spent on a well factored code' or 'well factored code reduces AI hallucinations'? Now a Slinger (using your terminology) can just ask AI to make the code look 'craftier' - and that is the best case scenario. In other words, they will not buy what we sell and if they will they can now produce the results for cheaper. Overlooking the devil in the details, as usual.
Ancalagon 20d ago
> Spending upwards of 75% of my time directly or indirectly dealing with AI every day has absolutely robbed me of most of my enjoyment of my work. Most days feel like that Twilight Zone where you wake up and you're the same, but everyone else is different. Oh my god this nails my experience to a T.
SuperV1234 20d ago
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- chroma_zone 20d ago
  I doubt that's true > Spending upwards of 75% of my time directly or indirectly dealing with AI every day...
  - SuperV1234 19d ago
    That makes it even worse -- spending that much time with AI should make it glaringly obvious how valuable it is.
    - chroma_zone 19d ago
      Not everyone has had such a positive experience... And anyway, whatever value AI provides doesn't put it beyond criticism.
sbinnee 20d ago
I cannot say that I agree to all the issues in the post. But men I am sick of meat proxies too.
lucianmarin 20d ago
Printing press was bad. Usenet was bad. Google was bad. AI is bad too. Robots? They will kill us.
vatsachak 20d ago
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tonymet 20d ago
were we building fabulous software beforehand? It was clumsy, buggy, expensive, demanding, oppressive, cluttered. AI , trained on that garbage , is producing what now? Supposedly clumsy , buggy and so on. The lack of self awareness is just hilarious.
daishi55 20d ago
> And yet, despite having found literally thousands of new vulnerabilities (only a fraction of which were reported to Open Source projects, by the way), I don't think that we're any safer than before. I’m not sure I follow. There are dozens of zero day, full RCE/privilege escalation linux vulnerabilities that have been found and fixed due to the use of LLMs. Some of which existed for decades. Unclear how that doesn’t make us safer than before.
frereubu 20d ago
> half of the people you interact with have turned into meat proxies Samuel Butler presaged this in Erewhon (1872) : "May not man himself become a sort of parasite upon the machines? An affectionate machine-tickling aphid?"
JMiao 20d ago
I am using safari on an older ipad and initially thought this website was an art project. The screen was black with an unlabeled toggle button. Tapping the toggle made everything visible. A dark mode bug, I guess. The intrigue was mild yet odd.
runjake 20d ago
I saw this post in my RSS feeds early this morning. The post was so poorly thought out, pessimistic, and full of anti-AI myths that I unsubscribed from this blog's RSS feed. I'm surprised to see it make the front page of Hacker News.
- archagon 20d ago
  And I’m now inclined to subscribe to this person’s blog. So I guess everything remains in balance.
  - runjake 19d ago
    .... enjoy the articles and fight against the inevitable future?
    - deleted 19d ago
      [deleted]
carlosjobim 20d ago
If you're surrounded by fools, or maniacs, or any other adjective you don't like, then that's your clue to change environment and the people you surround yourself with. Most of the times it's really just that. Entire nations of people can go nuts or went nuts before you were born. People will never change, so go where better people are instead of banging your head against the wall.
deleted 20d ago
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limaoscarjuliet 20d ago
I hated AI from the start, but then gradually warmed up to it. It does help me to write code. And it gets better every day, sometimes literally. Today I think it is a tool. Like a framer's nail gun. It helps us to be faster and potentially better at what we do. Oh, and got to ride Waymo recently and it got me places, alive and well. So it does some things right. But the true answer is not so simple. A friend of mine recently asked me a question: "My child wants to go into software dev, should I let him?" Well, crap, maybe consider something else?
loup-vaillant 20d ago
> these AI models not only lend themselves to generation of Child Sexual Abuse Material Err, how exactly does the generation of questionnable material abuses a child? Assuming there's no actual CSAM in the training corpus, the causal link between that and children being actually exploited seems tenuous at best, similar to drawings of Japanese middle schoolers, fictions about underage people... Those are nothing like purchasing or seeking out pictures, movies, drawings, or depictions of actual abuse of actual children. As disgusting as it may be, not all child porn is CSAM. Of course, if there is CSAM in the training data set, that's a different story. And let me be clear: I don't whether, nor how much, the consumption of purely fictional child porn by adults ends up hurting (or helping) actual children. For all I know it normalises associated behaviours and is responsible for a significant portion of incest cases around the world. Or it acts as a safety valve for paedophiles so they don't turn criminal. Or both, or none, I don't know. My guess though is that it's similar to how action flicks and FPS games influence gun violence. --- That was about the worst I could say about this post. Most of the rest resonated with me. I'm especially scared of the dependence and deskilling.
- loup-vaillant 19d ago
  A starting point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relationship_between_child_pornography_and_child_sexual_abuse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relationship_between_child_por... There seems to be conflicting evidence, fraught with spurious correlations on both sides. Honestly, I'm not sure which policy I'd adopt in the face of such uncertainty. I'd probably fund more research.
hduto 20d ago
I am not concerned about being a meat proxy (fine).I worry about the possible "unfounded oracle." A model that although constrained by humans, (like delphi) acts without any human criticism. Like multivac from Isaac Asimov's short story: https://www.commonlit.org/texts/the-machine-that-won-the-war https://www.commonlit.org/texts/the-machine-that-won-the-war
inquirerGeneral 20d ago
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8bitsrule 20d ago
I enjoyed this lovely rant by Timnit Gebru today. It's titled something like "AI companies are stoking fears of extinction to avoid discussing actual harms," https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCB-NQtsKrs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCB-NQtsKrs
- rphv 20d ago
  How cynical. What if the fears of extinction are _rational_? Given the stakes, we're obligated to treat the threat as a real possibility until proven otherwise. People will go to great lengths to avoid believing truths that dramatically challenge their worldviews. Consider the case of Rudolf Vrba and Alfréd Wetzler, who escaped from Auschwitz and were initially met with disbelief when they described the atrocities they'd witnessed.
  - majewsky 20d ago
    I agree. AI skeptics are widely met with disbelief when describing the atrocities that LLM operators are inflicting on society right now.
  - AlexandrB 19d ago
    > Given the stakes, we're obligated to treat the threat as a real possibility until proven otherwise. No we're not. The seventh day adventists also believe that the world is about to end, why are we not obligated to treat that threat as real?
  - queenkjuul 19d ago
    Nobody ever gives a real reason why extinction is a plausible threat from current model development, and Chinese researchers don't seem to agree that it's plausible either.
justavalidman 20d ago
h ve Cogni cyber data on sale contct sande.. pari@cogni or cell - +91/989x819x38
rphv 20d ago
> If you actually thought your product will kill all humans, then you could, you know, like, just stop building the torment nexus. All by yourself, no government regulations required. Wrong. This is a classical prisoner's dilemma. _Everyone_ has to stop, otherwise the undesirable outcome happens faster. It requires coordination, which can be achieved through regulation.
mikewarot 20d ago
>Now imagine that we had spent all these resources on doing the basics: ensuring your organization has an up-to-date and comprehensive asset inventory with fine-grained package listings; building infrastructure that supports regular, frequent, and automated OS and applіcation updates; automatically rebooting systems when they hit, say, 30 days of uptime to ensure these updates are picked up; That would still leave the root cause of most of our problem un-addressed, ambient authority based Operating Systems are fundamentally insecure. Unfortunately, all of our systems share that architecture.
jkochis 19d ago
Do you remember when people were proud to say they were computer illiterate and refused to learn how to use them for as long as they could? Do you know the tales of John Henry or Paul Bunyan? I am sure there are plenty of other analogies that can be drawn, but what cannot be denied is that if most people believe that this is progress, then this is where we are heading.
fithisux 18d ago
The author speaks for me.

341 points by ibobev 20d ago

augment_me 20d ago

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monster_truck 20d ago

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brink 20d ago
It's endless comments like this that make me feel like it's the minority that's sane, which reaffirms the author's point.
- orangedog 20d ago
  I don't know if it is the minority but I think sanity is the group of people not taking a "side" and just realizing this new tech is what it is and it's going to and has had both major advantages and disadvantages. Blog posts like the above are a dime a dozen along with their opposite and thy only read like people caught up in bubbles.
  - cgio 20d ago
    We are all caught up in our bubble. That’s why being exposed to someone else’s is useful. The moment you dismiss it as their bubble you assert not just their wall but also yours.
  - mtlmtlmtlmtl 20d ago
    Yep, good observation. And it's so exhausting not to take a side. Because people on both sides invariably misinterpret you as being on the other side and strawman you accordingly. Personally, I agree with the author on some things. The copyright laundering, the PR theatrics in search of regulatory capture, the concentration of power in a handful of gargantuan corporations in a country currently headed for totalitarianism at an alarming pace. The proliferation of slop drowning out all the good stuff. These are genuine issues, and they worry me, a great deal. And yet, it's become impossible to seriously contend that this technology isn't tremendously useful for certain tasks. I've used it myself with good results. But I don't buy the maximally bullish view that an LLM will eventually surpass humans in all areas. There are severe flaws with the technology that are inherent to its architecture and simply cannot be scaled away. This is as incontrovertible to me as its usefulness. The trough of disillusionment is coming for all of us, it always does. And much like the internet past the trough, we'll have a lot of cool new shit as a result of this technology, and we'll have a lot of horrifying new problems as well. This is the case for any paradigm shifting technology. That's my view when trying my best to be objective. Subjectively though, I'm deeply depressed about it all. LLMs have taken everything I love about computing and turned it on its head. I got into computers because they were so different from people. Mathematical, rigorous, efficient, unambigious(yes, bugs can be very confusing but there's always a satisfying and logical answer to dig out with enough effort). Now, apparently, to do the job I (used to) love, I have to spend most my time spoonfeeding instructions to a pretentious, know-it-all asshole who repeatedly fails to follow simple instruction, and yet is somehow still better than me at my job. I hate it. I'm 10 times more productive, and 100% of the joy is gone. I've quit, and I'm now considering what the fuck to do with my life. Something with minimal computer involvement. I will continue to code as a hobby and tool for my own purposes, LLM free, but I won't even bother uploading my code anywhere, because what's the point.

righthand 20d ago

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drbscl 20d ago

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orangedog 20d ago
Yeah, when you are pulling out terms of the very online like "meat proxies", you're not exactly in a place to judge the rest of society, you're in a bubble.

grebc 20d ago

I’ve had a pet theory for a long time that society loses it’s collective mind every 10ish years or so, usually starting with a good reason, but the outcome is mass stupidity followed by mass forgetting leading to a new cycle. War on terror, GFC, crypto, covid, now AI. Although the cycle does seem to be shortening. Also we’re just so damn stupid to learn from history, or even just people 10 years older than us, that we repeat the cycle. And there I guess is where saying a new sucker is born every minute is from.

doginasuit 20d ago
I have a more sympathetic view, I thought covid could have been much worse. Of course there were silly moments like the existential panic from a toilerpaper shortage but it seems like the vast majority of people acted responsibly and kept their heads over the long haul. In the meantime, we developed revolutionary vaccines that solved the problem. There's the lingering societal PTSD to consider, but I think most of the challenge in the aftermath are latent issues that preexisted covid and it just brought them to the surface. I think our world a couple decades from now will be stronger than it would have been in a universe where covid never happened, and actually has a better chance at dealing with the next covid-level threat. Perhaps that is this, in a way. Covid proved that a healthy looking society is not always so healthy, and I think it works in reverse too. The outcome of the upcoming election will tell us something about how far we have to go.
- grebc 20d ago
  This might be Australia specific, but I think a lot of the movement restrictions were unnecessary. And long term damaging to not just adults but there’s a whole cohort of kids/teenagers who just missed out on certain things and we’re patting ourselves on the back we survived? The places that needed restrictions such as hospitals & nursing homes still got covid by & large. We didn’t necessarily need to close down the whole show. I’ve had my jabs, also had covid multiple times. I’m not a disbeliever, I just think the collective reaction was completely OTT.
  - watwut 20d ago

scarmig 20d ago

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johnsmith1840 20d ago
Were did this myth originate anyways? Did datacenter burst a pipe at some point?
- scarmig 20d ago
  There was construction of some data center, and someone's well water started looking dirty around the same time. From there it metasisized into claims that it's destroying all the world's water.
- mapontosevenths 20d ago
  Evaporative cooling. They think that because the earth is only 2/3rds water we will run out before it rains back down again. I jest, of course. The actual argument is something about most water being frozen and how some people live in deserts so we should all live as if we were desert dwellers. As you can tell I'm not very convinced by it. Water is literally the least scarce thing on earth.
- shagie 20d ago
  Consider the image of a data center. https://datacenters.google/discover-more/photo-gallery/ https://datacenters.google/discover-more/photo-gallery/ and scroll down to "The Dalles, Oregon" and well... look at them. And then its reported water use: https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2022/12/googles-water-use-is-soaring-in-the-dalles-records-show-with-two-more-data-centers-to-come.html https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2022/12/googles-wa... > Google’s water use in The Dalles has nearly tripled in the past five years, and the company’s data centers now consume more than a quarter of all the water used in the city. > That’s according to records released this week after the city settled a lawsuit against The Oregonian/OregonLive and agreed to hand over data on Google’s water consumption. The company’s water use is poised to continue soaring in the years ahead, as Google has plans for two more data centers along the Columbia River. https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2021/11/the-dalles-sues-to-keep-googles-water-use-a-secret.html https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2021/11/the-dalles... > Google is contemplating two new server farms on the site of a former aluminum smelter in The Dalles, where it already has an enormous campus of data centers on its property along the Columbia River. > Google says it needs more water to cool its data centers, but neither the company nor the city will say how much more – only that The Dalles can’t meet Google’s needs without expanding its water system. The deal calls for Google to pay for the upgrade. > Even so, the proposed water pact has attracted scrutiny and skepticism in The Dalles, a riverfront city of about 15,000 approximately 80 miles east of Portland. > Residents and nearby farmers are concerned about the city’s long-term water supply amid an ongoing drought. They complain they don’t know enough about Google’s actual water use. ---- It is possible to do some cooling with closed cycle, though more than a few data centers have been built with open cycle cooling in places were the water table is precarious or in parts of the country under drought conditions. Unless a data center construction discloses its water use and shows that it isn't using a lot, then people are assuming its using as much as it can (and up to the water rights or capacity that it has). ... Which isn't an unreasonable assumption to make. https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2026/04/more-oregon-water-for-googles-data-centers-more-concern-over-secrecy.html https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2026/04/more-orego... > Google’s data centers gulped down nearly 550 million gallons of water in The Dalles in 2025. That’s nearly 40% of all the water consumed in the entire city and a huge jump from the year before. > The city expects that local water consumption will soar over the next several years and bills will nearly double as The Dalles works to upgrade its aging water system. But the city won’t say how much of the rising demand comes from Google, citing a promise to keep the numbers secret and confidentiality provisions in Oregon public records law. And data centers are being very cagy with their water consumption because the amount of water that it uses is related to the amount of compute it has and that is being held as an industry secret.

micromacrofoot 20d ago

I agree that everyone's lost their minds, but so has this guy. LLMs are actually producing a lot of pretty good stuff, can debug things that would have taken an entire team a week, and the people running AI companies are also generally like the most boring supervillains imaginable. All true. It is also completely screwing up the global economy, and most people barely understand what it is and what's happening. It's also not going to collapse anytime soon as a technology despite what the economy does, and it's going to get a lot worse before it gets better. Everyone who's extreme on it on either end is generally wrong.

iAMkenough 20d ago
I believe both extremes are right, because more than one thing can be true at once.
- micromacrofoot 20d ago
  that we're creating god but that it's also a fad that will go away soon?
  - Terr_ 20d ago
    I think you just accidentally described what's already been happening for 7000+ years. Though if any followers still exist, they probably wouldn't agree that 𒀭𒂗𒆠 was just a fad.
    - zahlman 20d ago
      To save others the search query: > Enki (Sumerian: 𒀭𒂗𒆠 dEN-KI), also known as Ea (Akkadian: 𒀭𒂍𒀀 dE₂-A), was the Mesopotamian god of wisdom, crafts, fresh subterranean waters, magic, and incantations.[1][11] He was believed to rule the Abzû. In Mesopotamian astronomy, he was associated with the stars of the southern band of the sky.[17] Enki's wife was Damgalnuna, and their children included Nanshe, Asalluhi, Marduk and Enbilulu. His sukkal (attendant deity) was Isimud. Servants of the god included lahmu, kulullû, and the Seven Sages.

S-E-P 20d ago

This is someone's vent post.

phyzome 20d ago
How perspicacious of you!
- S-E-P 20d ago
  Thanks <3

daedrdev 20d ago

AI does not use much water. If you believe it does, like this article does, you have fallen for propaganda and lies, ironic in a post calling everyone using AI stupid. The main cause of water fear mongering is that one woman’s well was dirty during construction of a data center. First construction is not the center running, and having lived on a well they get dirty for all kinds of reasons.

lowbloodsugar 20d ago
The major hyperscalers report water use: Google consumed 10.9 billion gallons in 2025, up 34%, versus Amazon's disclosed 2.5 billion.
- gorjusborg 20d ago
  Thank you, I wasn't aware they did this: https://sustainability.google/reports/google-2026-environmental-report/ https://sustainability.google/reports/google-2026-environmen... https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/sustainability/amazon-data-center-water-usage https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/sustainability/amazon-data-...
- daedrdev 20d ago
  The Us uses 320 billion gallons a day. Google thus used 0.01% of total US water. Or about 0.6% of the water used to grow almonds
  - phyzome 20d ago
    Now compare to the planned datacenters.
    - daedrdev 20d ago
      US data centers are going to 3x this year. Still not a lot.
      - phyzome 20d ago

sandinmyjoints 20d ago

> human resources are still a zero-sum game, and every individual feeling super busy in their agentic silo doing a thousand things at once does not, in the end, help solve the kinds of projects that require cross-functional collaboration and team work. This rings true.

BadBadJellyBean 20d ago

I feel this post. I am tired of "directing" agents when in reality it feels more like trying to herd a group of toddlers. Sure they can mostly write better code than a toddler but this constant nudging and reminding and reiterating and stopping them from using the token budget of the whole company for a one off script. It gets tiring and I feel like I am losing brain power while doing it. Maybe it's faster but explosive diarrhea is also a faster way to produce shit.

swader999 20d ago
Welcome to management.
- BadBadJellyBean 20d ago
  I feel like humans don't switch between being an idiot and a genius quite as fast as LLMs do. But yeah I have been thinking about my future and I am not sure I am cut out for the role of manager.
- strls 19d ago
  Managing subordinates whom 1) Dou didn't hire 2) Are only there for cost reasons 3) You can't fire no matter how much they screw up.
AIiscoming 20d ago
AI builds like 95% for me than i play around with it for a bit for the last 5%. I'm still a lot faster for certain things with AI but its weird. Instead of just being annoyed about some weird bug, i'm annoyed about an LLM which can do everything and then falls over itself on weird issues. It feels weird true but it still also relevant faster?
- BadBadJellyBean 20d ago
  I never liked telling people what to do or watching people do something. Using AI is exclusively like telling someone to do something who is either super smart or dumb as a brick and you never know which persona you will. The only thing you can be sure of is that it will produce whatever it produces very fast with 100% confidence. Also I care for code style, consistency and overall maintainability because I don't want to be locked into using LLMs and I can only really do that when I proof read everything. I don't want a huge project that will take a full rewrite for a human to understand it.

redlimetea 20d ago

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boxed 20d ago

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kragen 20d ago

This doesn't seem like a well-thought-out post. I mean, I probably could have told you that from the fact that it's either pro-AI or anti-AI (in this case the latter), but this is a particularly poorly thought out post. Others here have pointed out the water-wasting red herring, but there are several other pieces of nonsense here — the general environmental doom-mongering, and labeling recursive self-improvement as "mystical", for example. Me, I pointed Claude Opus 5 at a C codebase I've been working on for years and it immediately found five serious bugs and told me how to fix them, as well as how to use Linux system calls I wasn't familiar with to solve some other problems. And I gave it a new language for PEGs I'd written up a couple of years ago, and it wrote me a working implementation in OCaml that afternoon, fixing several bugs in my example grammars along the way and resolving a conceptual problem I'd had a roadblock on. I asked Fable 5.1 to implement a minimal proof assistant, and it wrote a clone of J-Bob in Python, which I'm studying now. Although there is a certain firehose quality to this stuff, I sure don't intend to use AI to actively de-skill my brain. That doesn't guarantee that AI will be a beneficial innovation overall, of course! As with most innovations, it probably depends on the balance between people being able to use the innovation to gain control over their own lives, and people being able to use it to gain control over others' lives. (Barring a FOOM scenario, of course, where our prediction ability is nonexistent.) So, I don't think a pro-AI post can be well thought out, either. It's too early and chaotic to understand what's going to happen, and it may actually be uncertain. Pro and anti are both far too simplistic.

revivechristina 20d ago
it's a lot more thought out than a lot of the code getting pushed to production right now
danvayn 20d ago
Not criticizing or calling into question the contents of the posts or your rebuttal. Just wanted to point out this is not a Normal HN post or blog. Most blogs have the self removed to some degree or ultimately focus out of the self. This is clearly a journalistic blog, a shared diary entry sort of prose. You can see it in the first paragraph. It is basically intended to be emotive or get across the idea of getting emotions out about a topic, and ironically this is what makes it a not-bad-post. Basically, I don’t know how well thought out it is, but the prose argues that the point isn’t for it to be an objective take, and that if it were well thought out (ie highly iterated on and more objective or factual than subjective) some personal meaning that was intended to be expressed is lost along the way. In other words It may have not appealed to you but that’s fine - you might just be outside the target demographic. In any case I don’t think it necessarily should be more well thought out. I prefer that these pieces exist or have their place. I definitely prefer their existence to a world where every personal Blog post has to arise from fiduciary or technical concerns, instead of from the soul. This is a soulful blog. I like it.

camillomiller 20d ago

Completely off topic, but I'm absolutely fascinated by the fact that this blog's central column is built as a... <table> Good old times. Definitely not vibe coded, though.

zabriel_goss 20d ago
Table layout, my old friend!
phyzome 20d ago
And of course this is inferior to the most advanced CSS technique, which is... literally ASCII-art tables. (As words instead of lines.)
account42 20d ago
You might also be fascinated if you inspect the layout of the website you're commenting on. If it works....

mschuster91 20d ago

> So no, I'm not going to set ethics aside and then actively offer myself up as tribute to self-amputate my brain. I'm sorry if everybody else can't get rid of the brain slugs, but at this point I'm just looking to get off this ride. Same. I quit, aside from two contracts I'll serve until they run out, I'll be studying Electrical Engineering. Even if AI takes over that space... good luck constructing a robot with the dexterity required to pull cables. To anyone in IT... go and study for some qualification in tasks not easily doable for a machine. The trades are going to be a goldmine especially with all the boomers retiring. Or buy some ranch in the midst of nowhere and farm artisanal chickens, cattle or goats. (For legal reasons, the latter was a joke. Farming is extremely risky, requires a lot of upfront cash, a lot of what used to be generational knowledge, but it seems to attract a lot of IT people, especially for whatever reason the goat farming)

bucket2015 20d ago

It's interesting how there's an increasing split of software engineers into those who're very happy with AI and leaning more into it, and those who're increasingly skeptical or dejected. I don't know how this will play out, but I haven't seen anything like this before.

mjfisher 20d ago
Can I be both?
- thechao 20d ago
  Absolutely!
FailMore 20d ago
I have leaned heavily into it… and became good at “agentic thinking”, but now I’m going to reverse. I have become dumber, sloppier, lazier, more distracted. I’m less happy than before. It’s hard to escape the productivity addiction and expectations though.
- Izkata 20d ago
  I've seen this happen to multiple co-workers, in the span of months. Two were laid off so I don't know how it's going with them, and another has backed off but not fully abandoned AI code. I'm resisting it entirely because of these problems.
rspeele 20d ago
I'm very happy with the performance and ability of AI. I think the best software ever will come out of this. It's very clear to me that AI empowers one to make "just ok" software effortlessly, and "incredibly excellent" software with the same level of effort we previously used to make "just ok" software. So there will be a lot of slop, but there will also be some real diamonds created by those who put the extra work in. The extra work might not involve manually writing or even reading much code, but it is work nonetheless. I still count myself as "dejected" overall. I'm dejected by the economic shape of AI which seems destined to keep concentrating outsized rewards to the top few who own it or have enough capital to shackle it to their will. I'm fearful that intelligence, once it becomes a commodity you can rent any time you may need it, will be socially devalued in our already anti-intellectual society. I worry that in a couple decades we may resemble the world of "The Machine Stops" (1909), where nobody really knows how things work. Of course we already live in such a complex world, no one person has complete knowledge of the "stack" they rely on. I can write software in C or assembler but I can't design a CPU and don't really understand how one is manufactured. (I may someday study that field, but I haven't yet!) But I take solace in the fact that somebody out there, has put the time in to study each of those things and is an expert in them. At every layer and in every niche of our engineering world there are masters of their craft, and there are students learning the fundamentals to keep that knowledge alive and growing. What if in 30 or 40 years that is not the case, and there are whole corners of knowledge the modern world depends on where everybody is reduced to "I dunno how it works, but Claude said..."?

tptacek 20d ago

If you think vulnerability research simply doesn't matter, you have a lot of company in that opinion. It's something Bruce Schneier used to argue, and Marcus Ranum, and a bunch of other people that used be on closed secret vulnerability-sharing mailing lists before Bugtraq blew those cliques up. These are very old arguments. But if you do think vulnerability research matters, and you're trying to argue that frontier models aren't a seismic change for that discipline, you have almost no company. Vulnerability researchers are overwhelmingly leaning on automation to find vulnerabilities and, just as importantly, generate the tooling required to test hypotheses. You can feel about that however you want to feel about it. I mostly don't care, except: you can watch people like this being negatively polarized back into the bad old days of the mid-1990s, content-free CERT advisories, and vendor-controlled "responsible disclosure" by a use case that frontier models unimpeachably excel at.

jeremyjh 20d ago
It’s amazing how half the developers on earth live on a completely different planet now. There are plenty of new challenges, sure but we are far past the point where we can have a debate about “is it useful?” And yet we continue to do so. I understand the feeling of loss some people may be facing. And there are definitely some really bad practices - like nakedly spewing claudspeak at your colleagues instead of communicating. Or raising a PR you don’t understand. There are asymmetries we haven’t learned to navigate. But we aren’t returning to a world where it doesn’t dominate our discipline so it’s best to find opportunities.
- vermilingua 20d ago
  The question most of us are asking isn’t “is it useful”, but “is it worth it”. Engaging with these tools involves no small amount of self-debasement and long term degradation of skills; do I want to sacrifice myself on the altar of productivity? For me the answer is still absolutely resolutely “no”.
  - akerl_ 20d ago
    You’re already using a computer to automate massive amounts of what used to be manual human effort. Why is using AI tools self-debasing or degrading?

AIiscoming 20d ago

"That's because finding vulnerabilities has never been the bottleneck in information security." Thats just not true.

burritoAlPast0r 20d ago
How will more updates fix the human component?
- AIiscoming 20d ago
  Sry not sure what you mean. I only wanted to say that finding security issues was def bottlenecked by humans.

uwagar 20d ago

there must be a trope by now for article titles sounding interesting yet scratch the surface and its only about AI.

jongjong 20d ago

I've been coding for 22 years, 14 years professionally, so I appreciate AI coding. It was annoying before when I had a very clear idea of what I wanted and yet it still took a whole week to implement. Now, with AI coding, I can implement any decent sized feature, exactly how I want, in a few hours and it's all polished and ready, all edge cases handled. Everything it's generating looks almost exactly like what I would have written, just written faster. Personally, I feel avenged by AI because I had been saying for years that you don't really need static typing once you reach a certain level, getting types right isn't the most difficult problem and isn't a significant source of bugs. Everyone was gaslighting me about this... Yet now everyone can verify themselves because AI has reached this level I was speaking of. Now anyone who coded with a frontier model on both TypeScript and JavaScript can see that it makes no difference at all. I can't remember ever seeing Claude mistake the type of a variable with either language... And TBH, I find Vanilla JavaScript from AI to be more succinct, not over-engineered like Typescript. Which is a point I'd been trying to make for years about incentives and actual patterns of usage (as opposed to theoretical benefits).

zahlman 20d ago
If you have a blog post on the topic I'd be interested. My experience with AI coding isn't really the same, but my experience with typing discipline definitely is, and I've thought about writing about it myself but don't really know where to start.
- timacles 19d ago
  hard to believe anyone who writes something this overwhelmingly positive. I use a ton of AI, it writes a shit load of code for me, and I eventually get good results. Its also goes off on ridiculous tangents, implements things i dont want, over engineers almost everything. Makes large code bases convoluted and unreadable. Yes humans also do that, LLMs do it a lot faster. > Now, with AI coding, I can implement any decent sized feature, exactly how I want, in a few hours and it's all polished and ready, all edge cases handled. No way a human wrote that, sounds like a late night TV advertisement.

enraged_camel 20d ago

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Rover222 20d ago

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3pm 20d ago

I think there were always two camps when it came to writing code, a strong bimodal distribution. People that care about the perceived code quality (aka the ‘craft’) and people who treat the code as a means to an end. At least I always felt this tension. And there is always an exception, and a person can shift between two camps during the same day. But would generally lean towards one. I know I do. And one is not better than the other, they could both be very smart and well meaning. And you need both for success in a for-profit business. It’s been discussed ad nauseam but one particular metaphor I like is Jesus Christ vs James Bond. James Bond would win most of the time. Most people tend to think like James Bond, and if they don’t, the organization strongly nudges them in this direction, promotions get decided and it becomes self reinforcing. Now a new powerful tool shows up and I think it is time for the Jesus Christ camp to throw in the towel.

taurath 20d ago
Depends what you’re doing. Constraints are different between projects, and advice given for how to utilize AI rarely takes that into account. Don’t sling when you need to craft, and don’t craft when you need to sling. Knowing the difference matters more, and you can spend your entire career on one side or another.
- 3pm 20d ago
  Craft was premised on the idea that a good writing and composition matters because it would be easier to read and comprehend (sometimes accepted by orgs because it was sold as cheaper). Now AI can read the code so the craft-leaning people would need to somehow sell it as 'fewer tokens will be spent on a well factored code' or 'well factored code reduces AI hallucinations'? Now a Slinger (using your terminology) can just ask AI to make the code look 'craftier' - and that is the best case scenario. In other words, they will not buy what we sell and if they will they can now produce the results for cheaper. Overlooking the devil in the details, as usual.

Ancalagon 20d ago

> Spending upwards of 75% of my time directly or indirectly dealing with AI every day has absolutely robbed me of most of my enjoyment of my work. Most days feel like that Twilight Zone where you wake up and you're the same, but everyone else is different. Oh my god this nails my experience to a T.

SuperV1234 20d ago

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chroma_zone 20d ago
I doubt that's true > Spending upwards of 75% of my time directly or indirectly dealing with AI every day...
- SuperV1234 19d ago
  That makes it even worse -- spending that much time with AI should make it glaringly obvious how valuable it is.
  - chroma_zone 19d ago
    Not everyone has had such a positive experience... And anyway, whatever value AI provides doesn't put it beyond criticism.

sbinnee 20d ago

I cannot say that I agree to all the issues in the post. But men I am sick of meat proxies too.

lucianmarin 20d ago

Printing press was bad. Usenet was bad. Google was bad. AI is bad too. Robots? They will kill us.

vatsachak 20d ago

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tonymet 20d ago

were we building fabulous software beforehand? It was clumsy, buggy, expensive, demanding, oppressive, cluttered. AI , trained on that garbage , is producing what now? Supposedly clumsy , buggy and so on. The lack of self awareness is just hilarious.

daishi55 20d ago

> And yet, despite having found literally thousands of new vulnerabilities (only a fraction of which were reported to Open Source projects, by the way), I don't think that we're any safer than before. I’m not sure I follow. There are dozens of zero day, full RCE/privilege escalation linux vulnerabilities that have been found and fixed due to the use of LLMs. Some of which existed for decades. Unclear how that doesn’t make us safer than before.

frereubu 20d ago

> half of the people you interact with have turned into meat proxies Samuel Butler presaged this in Erewhon (1872) : "May not man himself become a sort of parasite upon the machines? An affectionate machine-tickling aphid?"

JMiao 20d ago

I am using safari on an older ipad and initially thought this website was an art project. The screen was black with an unlabeled toggle button. Tapping the toggle made everything visible. A dark mode bug, I guess. The intrigue was mild yet odd.

runjake 20d ago

I saw this post in my RSS feeds early this morning. The post was so poorly thought out, pessimistic, and full of anti-AI myths that I unsubscribed from this blog's RSS feed. I'm surprised to see it make the front page of Hacker News.

archagon 20d ago
And I’m now inclined to subscribe to this person’s blog. So I guess everything remains in balance.
- runjake 19d ago
  .... enjoy the articles and fight against the inevitable future?
  - deleted 19d ago
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carlosjobim 20d ago

If you're surrounded by fools, or maniacs, or any other adjective you don't like, then that's your clue to change environment and the people you surround yourself with. Most of the times it's really just that. Entire nations of people can go nuts or went nuts before you were born. People will never change, so go where better people are instead of banging your head against the wall.

deleted 20d ago

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limaoscarjuliet 20d ago

I hated AI from the start, but then gradually warmed up to it. It does help me to write code. And it gets better every day, sometimes literally. Today I think it is a tool. Like a framer's nail gun. It helps us to be faster and potentially better at what we do. Oh, and got to ride Waymo recently and it got me places, alive and well. So it does some things right. But the true answer is not so simple. A friend of mine recently asked me a question: "My child wants to go into software dev, should I let him?" Well, crap, maybe consider something else?

loup-vaillant 20d ago

> these AI models not only lend themselves to generation of Child Sexual Abuse Material Err, how exactly does the generation of questionnable material abuses a child? Assuming there's no actual CSAM in the training corpus, the causal link between that and children being actually exploited seems tenuous at best, similar to drawings of Japanese middle schoolers, fictions about underage people... Those are nothing like purchasing or seeking out pictures, movies, drawings, or depictions of actual abuse of actual children. As disgusting as it may be, not all child porn is CSAM. Of course, if there is CSAM in the training data set, that's a different story. And let me be clear: I don't whether, nor how much, the consumption of purely fictional child porn by adults ends up hurting (or helping) actual children. For all I know it normalises associated behaviours and is responsible for a significant portion of incest cases around the world. Or it acts as a safety valve for paedophiles so they don't turn criminal. Or both, or none, I don't know. My guess though is that it's similar to how action flicks and FPS games influence gun violence. --- That was about the worst I could say about this post. Most of the rest resonated with me. I'm especially scared of the dependence and deskilling.

loup-vaillant 19d ago
A starting point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relationship_between_child_pornography_and_child_sexual_abuse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relationship_between_child_por... There seems to be conflicting evidence, fraught with spurious correlations on both sides. Honestly, I'm not sure which policy I'd adopt in the face of such uncertainty. I'd probably fund more research.

hduto 20d ago

I am not concerned about being a meat proxy (fine).I worry about the possible "unfounded oracle." A model that although constrained by humans, (like delphi) acts without any human criticism. Like multivac from Isaac Asimov's short story: https://www.commonlit.org/texts/the-machine-that-won-the-war https://www.commonlit.org/texts/the-machine-that-won-the-war

inquirerGeneral 20d ago

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8bitsrule 20d ago

I enjoyed this lovely rant by Timnit Gebru today. It's titled something like "AI companies are stoking fears of extinction to avoid discussing actual harms," https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCB-NQtsKrs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCB-NQtsKrs

rphv 20d ago
How cynical. What if the fears of extinction are _rational_? Given the stakes, we're obligated to treat the threat as a real possibility until proven otherwise. People will go to great lengths to avoid believing truths that dramatically challenge their worldviews. Consider the case of Rudolf Vrba and Alfréd Wetzler, who escaped from Auschwitz and were initially met with disbelief when they described the atrocities they'd witnessed.
- majewsky 20d ago
  I agree. AI skeptics are widely met with disbelief when describing the atrocities that LLM operators are inflicting on society right now.
- AlexandrB 19d ago
  > Given the stakes, we're obligated to treat the threat as a real possibility until proven otherwise. No we're not. The seventh day adventists also believe that the world is about to end, why are we not obligated to treat that threat as real?
- queenkjuul 19d ago
  Nobody ever gives a real reason why extinction is a plausible threat from current model development, and Chinese researchers don't seem to agree that it's plausible either.

justavalidman 20d ago

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rphv 20d ago

> If you actually thought your product will kill all humans, then you could, you know, like, just stop building the torment nexus. All by yourself, no government regulations required. Wrong. This is a classical prisoner's dilemma. _Everyone_ has to stop, otherwise the undesirable outcome happens faster. It requires coordination, which can be achieved through regulation.

mikewarot 20d ago

>Now imagine that we had spent all these resources on doing the basics: ensuring your organization has an up-to-date and comprehensive asset inventory with fine-grained package listings; building infrastructure that supports regular, frequent, and automated OS and applіcation updates; automatically rebooting systems when they hit, say, 30 days of uptime to ensure these updates are picked up; That would still leave the root cause of most of our problem un-addressed, ambient authority based Operating Systems are fundamentally insecure. Unfortunately, all of our systems share that architecture.

jkochis 19d ago

Do you remember when people were proud to say they were computer illiterate and refused to learn how to use them for as long as they could? Do you know the tales of John Henry or Paul Bunyan? I am sure there are plenty of other analogies that can be drawn, but what cannot be denied is that if most people believe that this is progress, then this is where we are heading.

fithisux 18d ago

The author speaks for me.