6 ms·

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

by kragen 14d 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 14d ago
it's a lot more thought out than a lot of the code getting pushed to production right now
danvayn 14d 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.
- kragen 14d ago
  It just seems like a lot of hate resulting from dysfunctional responses to life circumstances — admittedly, probably pretty bad life circumstances, from the sound of it. Spreading hate online, especially accompanied by lies as in this case, doesn't seem like a socially positive action from my point of view. The author should have kept it to themself and maybe talked to someone who could give them a better perspective, rather than letting their hate out into the world to multiply.
  - donbox 14d ago
    Its on the front page, there is some value.
    - kragen 14d ago
      Being on the front page means it's engaging. It doesn't mean it's valuable. The actual value of many front-page posts is negative.
      - jakzurr 14d ago
        Amen. I read it because it was shorter than the Effective Altruism community stuff I'd been trying to wade through. It did seem a bit entertaining, but I found the ending a disappointment.
  - voidhorse 14d ago
    You ought to apply your own standards to your own comments. The OP is an article that: 1. Raises a number of broad social and ethical concerns about AI. 2. Provides links to back up some of these claims. Yes, it also vents some frustration and includes personal anecdote, but there's nothing wrong with that. If you think something is a net negative for society, you should be frustrated. That doesn't make an argument "unreasonable" or "not well thought out". In fact, your entire response to the article is just anecdote and broad claims with no evidence or citations to back them up. If the article author has "a lot of hate resulting from dysfunctional responses to life circumstances" you must have a lot of naivety and kindness as a dysfunctional response to life's circumstances. If we do not critique things we perceive to be negative developments in society, things won't get better, and we'll let bad decisions slide. A somewhat emotive critique is not "hate". The author at least backed up their points with a few links, which is much more than we can say for your comments.
ghostbrainalpha 14d ago
What do you mean by "firehose quality to this stuff"?
- mikestorrent 14d ago
  Quick to produce, emerges in vast quantities, and getting hit with it can consume all your attention immediately
- kragen 14d ago
  Well, for example, in one afternoon, I have a parsing engine to understand, which is 9 pages of code. I thought I knew OCaml, having written a few interpreters in it, but I didn't know the {foo| |foo} multiline string syntax, I didn't know about Printf.ksprintf, I didn't know about Buffer.create, I didn't know about String.escaped, I must have once known about List.exists and List.rev_append and forgotten, I'd never thought of pattern-matching Array.to_list Sys.argv as a way to parse a command line, I didn't know about Sys.file_exists, and now I also have to think about what the parse result should look like and how to use it. And Claude correctly pointed out that the way I had thought about handling things like heredocs (or {foo| |foo} strings) would violate the preconditions for using the Packrat parsing algorithm, and suggested that I use the alternative approach of parameterized productions as in OMeta, which I need to think over. I think that was the same day I prototyped an approach to using Service Workers from localhost as a platform for persistent mobile apps that don't show up in the app list but also don't rely on the TLS CA system for their security. Which involved learning a lot of stuff about the Service Worker lifecycle and localStorage and IndexedDB that I didn't know before. It's just a lot.
  - simonw 14d ago
    I love how well this comment captures the experience of engaging with LLMs as a way to deliberately challenge and expand knowledge. When I see people worry about LLMs atrophying their mental abilities I assume they haven't thought very hard about ways to lean into using them to expand their mental capabilities.
    - 14d ago
puchatek 14d ago
Water-wasting is not a red herring if you live in an area where droughts are an issue. It just isn't a problem everywhere universally.
- _kulang 14d ago
  You’d have to live there, in the presence of a data centre for AI which actually wastes water. The numbers people throw around on social media are absurd. I’m pretty sure they do not take into account the circular reuse of water for cooling, and just look at flow rates passing over chips.
- simonw 14d ago
  Like golf courses in the desert. (... Palm Springs has around 100 golf courses)
  - kragen 14d ago
    While we're talking about Americans using anything but the metric system (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49746745 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49746745), how many golf courses' worth of water is Google's 10.9 billion "gallons" a year?
    - zahlman 14d ago
      ChatGPT tells me > As a historical U.S. benchmark, an average 18-hole facility had about 80.7 irrigated turf acres and used approximately 152.5 acre-feet/year—about 49.7 million gallons (188 million litres) annually. So about 220. But it's still, ahem, a drop in the bucket compared to the California almond industry.
      - simonw 14d ago
        A while back I satirically suggested https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/17/spot-birds-not-golf/ https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/17/spot-birds-not-golf/ that if hyperscalers wanted to relieve the pressure over data center water use they could buy up a few dozen country clubs and turn them into public parks. (I was only half joking)
runarberg 14d ago
I am sure many smokers in the 1950s also saw the health benefits of tobacco, that they were very happy to experience the increased energy after a smoke and could get more done as a result. I‘m pretty sure none of them felt their lungs and throats deteriorating either. Likewise, you may not feel like AI is de-skilling your brain. But it probably is. We don‘t have the research (yet) that AI is addictive and causes brain atrophy, but all the evidence is certainly pointing that way, the same way the evidence were pointing that way about tobacco in the 1950s. My only hope is that it doesn’t take us another 2 decades to prove the obvious.
- kragen 14d ago
  Oh, I definitely feel a strong pull toward the low-effort path of just letting the AI do everything. It's so much better than I am at writing code, after all! This code it wrote for me is beautiful! But it makes terrible mistakes constantly, and when I'm reduced to pleading with it to check whether it's made mistakes, basically there is no hope. And, of course, it would put me in the Homer Simpson position of declining to get up and walk just because there's a motorized wheelchair at hand.
- PorciiVorbesc 14d ago
  >Likewise, you may not feel like AI is de-skilling your brain. But it probably is. It is, but why is that a problem? Moving from physical labor on the farm, factory or construction site to sedentary work and lifestyles would also atrophy our muscles so now we pursue physical activities we actually enjoy like gym and sports instead of hanging on to those dangerous and strenuous physical labor jobs just to stay in shape. Similarly, you will use the AI to churn through the repetitive mundane tasks the AI can do, and then work your brain on the activities you actually enjoy. Now if you choose to not exercise your brain and dumb yourself down the same way sedentary people don't exercise their bodies and get obese, then I guess that's on you, but we can't force the world to technologically regress just because some people are lazy and don't exercise, the same way we haven't forced construction workers to use pickaxes instead of machinery to tear up a road just to make sure they stay in shape and don't get too fat from sitting in their air conditioned excavators.
foobarian 14d ago
My impression was that the frontier AI coding models are kind of resetting the barriers to entry/reward ratios to before the dot com boom, when people didn't go into this career for money, and so most folks that ended up in it were the 1% kind of talents who really wanted it. Perhaps that's an elitist thing to say? I don't know. That's not to say that AI is pushing people away from computing, it's just that it's creating such massive low resistance paths to getting to the goal without the "productive friction." p.s. and at the same time, it's such a fantastic learning tool. It distills the intuition of a whole world and is able to transmit it on demand, like in your examples. It's an interesting dichotomy.
- a34729t 14d ago
  Yeah thats the silver lining in the whole mess: For those of us who enjoy software, hardware and building things, this will be a new golden age and we can filter out all humans and elves.
  - fragmede 14d ago
    What about the dwarfs?
    - kragen 14d ago
      I am a dwarf and I'm digging a hole.
- kragen 14d ago
  I don't know, maybe? I think it's opened the doors to a lot of people who don't really want to program, but do want, for example, a studio appointment booking management system. Which is good; people's needs matter just as much if they don't enjoy programming. You can use it to create a pretty wide range of things, which seems like it's going to change the things that get created in hard-to-predict ways. Structurally, though, I'm sort of pessimistic. Throughout my career as a programmer, I've earned much more money than electronic engineers whose skills are mostly very similar, and probably much of this happy situation is due to the fact that my productivity depends only on me having access to a computer with GCC and Perl or Python on it, and the internet. If I were living in rural Malawi, I probably couldn't practice my trade, because the US$200 it takes to buy a working laptop is a year's wages there, and people lack the social permission to innovate. (William Kamkwamba's astounding achievements under those circumstances deserve more recognition. Read his autobiography!) But, if I work in any developed economy, that's somewhere between 1 hour and 20 hours of my earnings, so I'm not dependent on investors to create jobs for me. By contrast, electrical engineers mostly can't ship their designs unless an investor is willing to put up the capital to produce a batch of PCBs or chips — probably three batches or so before you get a fully working product. If you're working on a cutting-edge chip, that's several million dollars, so you're probably not going to save that up while working as an employee. This puts electrical engineers in a much worse bargaining position relative to investors. To a smaller extent, the same thing applies to machinists, auto mechanics, and many other skilled workers: they only get jobs if investors invest to create jobs for them. The capital-intensive nature of current AI seems like it might push the negotiation equilibrium for programmers two or three orders of magnitude in favor of investors. But it might not work out that way, and, at least at the moment, I'm finally bringing about numerous projects I'd been procrastinating on for years.
deleted 14d ago
[deleted]
namuol 14d ago
Are any of the projects you mentioned team-maintained and deployed live to users other than yourself?
- kragen 14d ago
  No, thank God.
louwrentius 14d ago
> I pointed Claude Opus 5 at a C codebase I've been working on for years and it immediately found five serious bugs These 'serious' bugs aren't important if you've been working on this code base for years and only now they pop up. I suspect - although I'm guessing - that probably a hobby project. Frankly speaking, although this comment is very dismissive about the opinion blog article - assertively stating that this isn't a well-thought-out post - it seems to me that the personal anekdote is irrelevant and that the blog post in question still fully stands.
- kragen 14d ago
  It's definitely been a hobby project so far, but suddenly its quality has improved a great deal, which I think greatly improves its chances of graduating to being a daily driver.
voidhorse 14d ago
> general environmental doom-mongering I don't think this criticism is very well thought out. There's ample evidence at this point that we are sliding precipitously toward environmental catastrophe and, no, the massive data center build out to support people generating slop illustrations and build toy theorem provers is not helping.
- kragen 14d ago
  We're not just sliding towards environmental catastrophe — we're deep into it! Ocean acidification is killing corals, we just had the hottest month in recorded history, mass refugee movements from climate disasters are fueling xenophobia and warfare in many parts of the world, and the rate of species extinction keeps increasing, as it has for decades. Extinct species are irreparable environmental damage; they're gone forever. However, this is not because of massive data center buildouts. Goldman Sachs's projection in https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/articles/us-data-center-power-demand-projected-to-double-by-2027 https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/articles/us-data-cente... is that by the end of next year US data center power demand will have increased from 31GW to 66GW, roughly 17GW per year. The EIA says https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=87&t=1 https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=87&t=1 that the US uses about 95 quadrillion Btu per year (Americans will do anything to avoid using metric units). That's 3200 gigawatts. So the US's data centers are currently using 1% of the US's energy and adding ½% per year, so that in 02027 that number increases to 2%. 99% of the US's energy use is due to non-data-center causes. And direct energy use is a way in which data centers have an especially large environmental impact. Their other potential impacts, such as cement production, sewage, parking lots, commuters driving to them, and freshwater consumption, are much less than that 1%. Energy use, by the way, doesn't damage the environment. Burning fossil fuels does. All of China's net new energy production is coming from renewable energy — they're shutting down coal plants faster than they're building new ones, and they're decommissioning gasoline-powered vehicles faster than they're selling new ones. A friend of mine from the US told me that one of the most surprising things about visiting Shenzhen was how silent the downtown was, because almost all the cars are electric there — a much higher rate than for China overall, but even for the whole country, it's over 50% of new cars. AI might turn out to be a wonderful thing or a terrible thing, but at least for the next decade or two, that won't be because of datacenter buildouts, which are an utterly insignificant fraction of its effect.
reaperducer 14d ago
Me, I And there is the root of the problem. At the heart of almost every pro-AI comment on HN is "Here's what AI does for me." Put bluntly, "I got mine; fuck everyone else."
- voidhorse 14d ago
  Precisely. The parent is responding to what is an argument about the social, ethical long term effects of a technology by effectively saying "don't care, I personally benefit so whatever". Ironically this kind of response just illustrates the article's point but I doubt the parent has enough self-awareness to recognize that.
- kragen 14d ago
  I do enjoy fucking, but I don't think I have the emotional bandwidth to fuck everyone. I think you have misunderstood my comment. I don't know very much about how other people are using AI, or what effect it's having on them. It's much more important what effect it's having on them than what effect it's having on me. But all I can contribute to the conversation is what I'm personally able to attest to, and the approaches that I've found helpful or unhelpful. Hopefully those experiences and those approaches are of value to others — that's why I'm participating in the conversation, after all. I notice that you don't seem to be participating in the conversation in the same spirit, though — your comment seems to consist entirely of personal attacks, none of which are original or insightful, predicated as they are on a fundamental misunderstanding of the post you're responding to, and it lacks any contribution of your own experiences or techniques. I think you probably should not have posted it.
  - kndiencjejd 11d ago
    Oh don’t waste your breath. Just take a look at this guy’s post history and you’ll see he’s just an insecure little person that thinks belittling other people and other people’s work will make himself look better. Still, free speech and all. It’s just sad though. So many good things a person could be doing and discussing and he always seems to go for the jerk option. Every time. Even his “about” on HN is just a cocktail of self-aggrandising nonsense with a little hint of rudeness.
pseudosavant 14d ago
Totally agree. It is more of a rant than reasoning. Anyone who claims to know how this will end (good or bad) is extrapolating beyond their own knowledge and is vastly oversimplifying what is likely to be one of the most transformative technologies of the last 100 years. In the last 50 years, only the creation of the Internet compares. Like with the Internet, nuclear, television, etc. it will probably be a mix of good and bad.
deterministic 13d ago
[dead]

by kragen 14d ago

revivechristina 14d ago

it's a lot more thought out than a lot of the code getting pushed to production right now

danvayn 14d 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.

kragen 14d ago
It just seems like a lot of hate resulting from dysfunctional responses to life circumstances — admittedly, probably pretty bad life circumstances, from the sound of it. Spreading hate online, especially accompanied by lies as in this case, doesn't seem like a socially positive action from my point of view. The author should have kept it to themself and maybe talked to someone who could give them a better perspective, rather than letting their hate out into the world to multiply.
- donbox 14d ago
  Its on the front page, there is some value.
  - kragen 14d ago
    Being on the front page means it's engaging. It doesn't mean it's valuable. The actual value of many front-page posts is negative.
    - jakzurr 14d ago
      Amen. I read it because it was shorter than the Effective Altruism community stuff I'd been trying to wade through. It did seem a bit entertaining, but I found the ending a disappointment.
- voidhorse 14d ago
  You ought to apply your own standards to your own comments. The OP is an article that: 1. Raises a number of broad social and ethical concerns about AI. 2. Provides links to back up some of these claims. Yes, it also vents some frustration and includes personal anecdote, but there's nothing wrong with that. If you think something is a net negative for society, you should be frustrated. That doesn't make an argument "unreasonable" or "not well thought out". In fact, your entire response to the article is just anecdote and broad claims with no evidence or citations to back them up. If the article author has "a lot of hate resulting from dysfunctional responses to life circumstances" you must have a lot of naivety and kindness as a dysfunctional response to life's circumstances. If we do not critique things we perceive to be negative developments in society, things won't get better, and we'll let bad decisions slide. A somewhat emotive critique is not "hate". The author at least backed up their points with a few links, which is much more than we can say for your comments.

ghostbrainalpha 14d ago

What do you mean by "firehose quality to this stuff"?

mikestorrent 14d ago
Quick to produce, emerges in vast quantities, and getting hit with it can consume all your attention immediately
kragen 14d ago
Well, for example, in one afternoon, I have a parsing engine to understand, which is 9 pages of code. I thought I knew OCaml, having written a few interpreters in it, but I didn't know the {foo| |foo} multiline string syntax, I didn't know about Printf.ksprintf, I didn't know about Buffer.create, I didn't know about String.escaped, I must have once known about List.exists and List.rev_append and forgotten, I'd never thought of pattern-matching Array.to_list Sys.argv as a way to parse a command line, I didn't know about Sys.file_exists, and now I also have to think about what the parse result should look like and how to use it. And Claude correctly pointed out that the way I had thought about handling things like heredocs (or {foo| |foo} strings) would violate the preconditions for using the Packrat parsing algorithm, and suggested that I use the alternative approach of parameterized productions as in OMeta, which I need to think over. I think that was the same day I prototyped an approach to using Service Workers from localhost as a platform for persistent mobile apps that don't show up in the app list but also don't rely on the TLS CA system for their security. Which involved learning a lot of stuff about the Service Worker lifecycle and localStorage and IndexedDB that I didn't know before. It's just a lot.
- simonw 14d ago
  I love how well this comment captures the experience of engaging with LLMs as a way to deliberately challenge and expand knowledge. When I see people worry about LLMs atrophying their mental abilities I assume they haven't thought very hard about ways to lean into using them to expand their mental capabilities.
  - 14d ago

puchatek 14d ago

Water-wasting is not a red herring if you live in an area where droughts are an issue. It just isn't a problem everywhere universally.

_kulang 14d ago
You’d have to live there, in the presence of a data centre for AI which actually wastes water. The numbers people throw around on social media are absurd. I’m pretty sure they do not take into account the circular reuse of water for cooling, and just look at flow rates passing over chips.
simonw 14d ago
Like golf courses in the desert. (... Palm Springs has around 100 golf courses)
- kragen 14d ago
  While we're talking about Americans using anything but the metric system (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49746745 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49746745), how many golf courses' worth of water is Google's 10.9 billion "gallons" a year?
  - zahlman 14d ago
    ChatGPT tells me > As a historical U.S. benchmark, an average 18-hole facility had about 80.7 irrigated turf acres and used approximately 152.5 acre-feet/year—about 49.7 million gallons (188 million litres) annually. So about 220. But it's still, ahem, a drop in the bucket compared to the California almond industry.
    - simonw 14d ago
      A while back I satirically suggested https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/17/spot-birds-not-golf/ https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/17/spot-birds-not-golf/ that if hyperscalers wanted to relieve the pressure over data center water use they could buy up a few dozen country clubs and turn them into public parks. (I was only half joking)

runarberg 14d ago

I am sure many smokers in the 1950s also saw the health benefits of tobacco, that they were very happy to experience the increased energy after a smoke and could get more done as a result. I‘m pretty sure none of them felt their lungs and throats deteriorating either. Likewise, you may not feel like AI is de-skilling your brain. But it probably is. We don‘t have the research (yet) that AI is addictive and causes brain atrophy, but all the evidence is certainly pointing that way, the same way the evidence were pointing that way about tobacco in the 1950s. My only hope is that it doesn’t take us another 2 decades to prove the obvious.

kragen 14d ago
Oh, I definitely feel a strong pull toward the low-effort path of just letting the AI do everything. It's so much better than I am at writing code, after all! This code it wrote for me is beautiful! But it makes terrible mistakes constantly, and when I'm reduced to pleading with it to check whether it's made mistakes, basically there is no hope. And, of course, it would put me in the Homer Simpson position of declining to get up and walk just because there's a motorized wheelchair at hand.
PorciiVorbesc 14d ago
>Likewise, you may not feel like AI is de-skilling your brain. But it probably is. It is, but why is that a problem? Moving from physical labor on the farm, factory or construction site to sedentary work and lifestyles would also atrophy our muscles so now we pursue physical activities we actually enjoy like gym and sports instead of hanging on to those dangerous and strenuous physical labor jobs just to stay in shape. Similarly, you will use the AI to churn through the repetitive mundane tasks the AI can do, and then work your brain on the activities you actually enjoy. Now if you choose to not exercise your brain and dumb yourself down the same way sedentary people don't exercise their bodies and get obese, then I guess that's on you, but we can't force the world to technologically regress just because some people are lazy and don't exercise, the same way we haven't forced construction workers to use pickaxes instead of machinery to tear up a road just to make sure they stay in shape and don't get too fat from sitting in their air conditioned excavators.

foobarian 14d ago

My impression was that the frontier AI coding models are kind of resetting the barriers to entry/reward ratios to before the dot com boom, when people didn't go into this career for money, and so most folks that ended up in it were the 1% kind of talents who really wanted it. Perhaps that's an elitist thing to say? I don't know. That's not to say that AI is pushing people away from computing, it's just that it's creating such massive low resistance paths to getting to the goal without the "productive friction." p.s. and at the same time, it's such a fantastic learning tool. It distills the intuition of a whole world and is able to transmit it on demand, like in your examples. It's an interesting dichotomy.

a34729t 14d ago
Yeah thats the silver lining in the whole mess: For those of us who enjoy software, hardware and building things, this will be a new golden age and we can filter out all humans and elves.
- fragmede 14d ago
  What about the dwarfs?
  - kragen 14d ago
    I am a dwarf and I'm digging a hole.
kragen 14d ago
I don't know, maybe? I think it's opened the doors to a lot of people who don't really want to program, but do want, for example, a studio appointment booking management system. Which is good; people's needs matter just as much if they don't enjoy programming. You can use it to create a pretty wide range of things, which seems like it's going to change the things that get created in hard-to-predict ways. Structurally, though, I'm sort of pessimistic. Throughout my career as a programmer, I've earned much more money than electronic engineers whose skills are mostly very similar, and probably much of this happy situation is due to the fact that my productivity depends only on me having access to a computer with GCC and Perl or Python on it, and the internet. If I were living in rural Malawi, I probably couldn't practice my trade, because the US$200 it takes to buy a working laptop is a year's wages there, and people lack the social permission to innovate. (William Kamkwamba's astounding achievements under those circumstances deserve more recognition. Read his autobiography!) But, if I work in any developed economy, that's somewhere between 1 hour and 20 hours of my earnings, so I'm not dependent on investors to create jobs for me. By contrast, electrical engineers mostly can't ship their designs unless an investor is willing to put up the capital to produce a batch of PCBs or chips — probably three batches or so before you get a fully working product. If you're working on a cutting-edge chip, that's several million dollars, so you're probably not going to save that up while working as an employee. This puts electrical engineers in a much worse bargaining position relative to investors. To a smaller extent, the same thing applies to machinists, auto mechanics, and many other skilled workers: they only get jobs if investors invest to create jobs for them. The capital-intensive nature of current AI seems like it might push the negotiation equilibrium for programmers two or three orders of magnitude in favor of investors. But it might not work out that way, and, at least at the moment, I'm finally bringing about numerous projects I'd been procrastinating on for years.

deleted 14d ago

[deleted]

namuol 14d ago

Are any of the projects you mentioned team-maintained and deployed live to users other than yourself?

kragen 14d ago
No, thank God.

louwrentius 14d ago

> I pointed Claude Opus 5 at a C codebase I've been working on for years and it immediately found five serious bugs These 'serious' bugs aren't important if you've been working on this code base for years and only now they pop up. I suspect - although I'm guessing - that probably a hobby project. Frankly speaking, although this comment is very dismissive about the opinion blog article - assertively stating that this isn't a well-thought-out post - it seems to me that the personal anekdote is irrelevant and that the blog post in question still fully stands.

kragen 14d ago
It's definitely been a hobby project so far, but suddenly its quality has improved a great deal, which I think greatly improves its chances of graduating to being a daily driver.

voidhorse 14d ago

> general environmental doom-mongering I don't think this criticism is very well thought out. There's ample evidence at this point that we are sliding precipitously toward environmental catastrophe and, no, the massive data center build out to support people generating slop illustrations and build toy theorem provers is not helping.

kragen 14d ago
We're not just sliding towards environmental catastrophe — we're deep into it! Ocean acidification is killing corals, we just had the hottest month in recorded history, mass refugee movements from climate disasters are fueling xenophobia and warfare in many parts of the world, and the rate of species extinction keeps increasing, as it has for decades. Extinct species are irreparable environmental damage; they're gone forever. However, this is not because of massive data center buildouts. Goldman Sachs's projection in https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/articles/us-data-center-power-demand-projected-to-double-by-2027 https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/articles/us-data-cente... is that by the end of next year US data center power demand will have increased from 31GW to 66GW, roughly 17GW per year. The EIA says https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=87&t=1 https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=87&t=1 that the US uses about 95 quadrillion Btu per year (Americans will do anything to avoid using metric units). That's 3200 gigawatts. So the US's data centers are currently using 1% of the US's energy and adding ½% per year, so that in 02027 that number increases to 2%. 99% of the US's energy use is due to non-data-center causes. And direct energy use is a way in which data centers have an especially large environmental impact. Their other potential impacts, such as cement production, sewage, parking lots, commuters driving to them, and freshwater consumption, are much less than that 1%. Energy use, by the way, doesn't damage the environment. Burning fossil fuels does. All of China's net new energy production is coming from renewable energy — they're shutting down coal plants faster than they're building new ones, and they're decommissioning gasoline-powered vehicles faster than they're selling new ones. A friend of mine from the US told me that one of the most surprising things about visiting Shenzhen was how silent the downtown was, because almost all the cars are electric there — a much higher rate than for China overall, but even for the whole country, it's over 50% of new cars. AI might turn out to be a wonderful thing or a terrible thing, but at least for the next decade or two, that won't be because of datacenter buildouts, which are an utterly insignificant fraction of its effect.

reaperducer 14d ago

Me, I And there is the root of the problem. At the heart of almost every pro-AI comment on HN is "Here's what AI does for me." Put bluntly, "I got mine; fuck everyone else."

voidhorse 14d ago
Precisely. The parent is responding to what is an argument about the social, ethical long term effects of a technology by effectively saying "don't care, I personally benefit so whatever". Ironically this kind of response just illustrates the article's point but I doubt the parent has enough self-awareness to recognize that.
kragen 14d ago
I do enjoy fucking, but I don't think I have the emotional bandwidth to fuck everyone. I think you have misunderstood my comment. I don't know very much about how other people are using AI, or what effect it's having on them. It's much more important what effect it's having on them than what effect it's having on me. But all I can contribute to the conversation is what I'm personally able to attest to, and the approaches that I've found helpful or unhelpful. Hopefully those experiences and those approaches are of value to others — that's why I'm participating in the conversation, after all. I notice that you don't seem to be participating in the conversation in the same spirit, though — your comment seems to consist entirely of personal attacks, none of which are original or insightful, predicated as they are on a fundamental misunderstanding of the post you're responding to, and it lacks any contribution of your own experiences or techniques. I think you probably should not have posted it.
- kndiencjejd 11d ago
  Oh don’t waste your breath. Just take a look at this guy’s post history and you’ll see he’s just an insecure little person that thinks belittling other people and other people’s work will make himself look better. Still, free speech and all. It’s just sad though. So many good things a person could be doing and discussing and he always seems to go for the jerk option. Every time. Even his “about” on HN is just a cocktail of self-aggrandising nonsense with a little hint of rudeness.

pseudosavant 14d ago

Totally agree. It is more of a rant than reasoning. Anyone who claims to know how this will end (good or bad) is extrapolating beyond their own knowledge and is vastly oversimplifying what is likely to be one of the most transformative technologies of the last 100 years. In the last 50 years, only the creation of the Internet compares. Like with the Internet, nuclear, television, etc. it will probably be a mix of good and bad.

deterministic 13d ago

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