8 ms·

I'm tired of talking about AI

70 points by elza_1111 1y ago

0xbadc0de5 1y ago
s/tired of//
PaulHoule 1y ago
If you really felt that way you wouldn't talk about it. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fight_Club https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fight_Club People complaining about AI are flooding the zone together with all the people who switched from NFT to AI, the "I vibe coded something and it almost works" crowd, etc. Be careful what you vote up, also keep an eye on the /new page and vote things up that aren't about AI, also feel free to submit things that aren't about AI. If you look at the difference between the home page and the /new page, you can see the supply of bad articles about AI far exceeds the demand, keep holding the line against it.
andrewstuart 1y ago
[flagged]
- mdaniel 1y ago
  I didn't recognize that expression, so to save other's the search: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune_(franchise)#The_Butlerian_Jihad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune_(franchise)#The_Butlerian... > As explained in Dune, the Butlerian Jihad is a conflict taking place over 11,000 years in the future[7] (and over 10,000 years before the events of Dune), which results in the total destruction of virtually all forms of "computers, thinking machines, and conscious robots". and thus if you use "luddites" to describe people who push back against LLMs being the second coming, and further suggest that those folks want all computers thrown in the trash, then you are deeply unserious and I have fed the troll
  - kown7 1y ago
    It's such a wild clash of (sci-)fi dis-/utopias. It's almost dialectic.
  - dredmorbius 1y ago
    And Herbert is himself alluding to Samuel Butler, author of the anti-technological utopian novel Erewhon: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erewhon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erewhon> Full text: <https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/samuel-butler/erewhon https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/samuel-butler/erewhon>
- jameskilton 1y ago
  The original "Luddites" had very valid concerns about the impending reduction of quality of the clothing they were making and subsequent working conditions with the advent of automated looms. Likewise many people today, myself included, have very valid concerns about the actual use of AI, where it's going, and how it can and will be misused. We would love to have these discussions, but calling us "Luddites" and then referencing a situation where a robot literally killed a child to prove a point is not how to start that.
  - andrewflnr 1y ago
    > referencing a situation where a robot literally killed a child Is this part of the deep Dune lore that I never read, or did they edit their comment?
    - jameskilton 1y ago
      Comment seems to be flagged and gone, but yes they referenced wanting a "Butlerian Jihad".
- happytoexplain 1y ago
  Calling people who have legitimate grievances over a new technology "Luddites", as if the Luddites were stupid assholes, makes me absolutely sick with sadness for the impact on people in my society. It's a lazy, tremendously over-used metaphor, and you can disagree with an opinion without this low-effort inhumanity.
  - CamperBob2 1y ago
    If you could point to a single instance in human history where the "Luddites" of the day proved right in the long run by literally attacking technology, it might help you make your case for rehabilitating them. Or at least it might serve as an interesting basis for discussion.
    - happytoexplain 1y ago
      Sure - the Luddites were correct. Unless you're defining "correct" as "stopped the development of a disruptive technology", which would be, of course, ignorant. Edit: The post I'm replying to was edited to redefine the context to be the defense of Luddites specifically for destroying machines. I may have used different words/tone in that case, but my opinion is still qualitatively the same. Just know I am speaking holistically. Edit: To be more specific (and less snide): Inevitability does not making something universally good, and people negatively affected are correct and justified to react negatively.
      - CamperBob2 1y ago
        Sorry, I felt it necessary to clarify my point. The Luddites were justified in asking for a share of the fruits of their labor, just as as any of of us are, but in a larger sense their attack on the machinery of progress was an attack on just that... progress. How is your position distinguishable from any other phrasing of the broken-window fallacy? Humans shouldn't aspire to do a robot's job. We have better things to do.
    - jplusequalt 1y ago
      >"Attack technology" Nobody is blowing up data centers.
- dang 1y ago
  Ok, but please don't post generic flamebait yourself. It's just as against the site guidelines either way: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
BGyss 1y ago
I'm tired of hearing about people who are tired of talking about AI - is there a place on the Internet for me?
- crinkly 1y ago
  I am not. It reinforces my belief that this phase of bullshit will wear off one day which I can’t bloody wait for.
  - charlieyu1 1y ago
    AI has its use, but the ecosystem is filled with scammers selling snake oil and a few people who are fed up but completely overreacting like this blogger. I guess giving a fair assessment covering both pros and cons neither generate clicks nor money these days.
    - crinkly 1y ago
      Correct. LLMs are the problem not AI as a whole. They are a universal hammer made of shit.
- pera 1y ago
  LinkedIn, 24/7 of pure AI chat
  - crinkly 1y ago
    Some of the people on there are real as well despite being nearly indistinguishable from LLM excrement. I never used it but a couple of my colleagues do and show me some of the stuff in there.
- kotaKat 1y ago
  Unfortunately because nobody decided to code some proper consent into it you're forced to listen to people bitch they didn't want it in the first place. "Maybe later" it'll stop, but "Not now". [Imagine a dialog box button here, but the only word says "Thanks :)"]
tines 1y ago
This sums up my feelings exactly. The future is going to be so much more boring than the past, as we (society at large) dislocate our Understanding to LLMs. Without Understanding, there will be no Beauty, only Pleasure.
DaveZale 1y ago
try this https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/
- amelius 1y ago
  Two men and an AI walk into a bar ...
  - mdaniel 1y ago
    The AI orders a bleach on the rocks The bartender: that's not a real drink AI: You're absolutely right! I see now that the drink is not real. I'll have a bleach in a glass with ice The two men leave, knowing that watching this interaction is making them stupider and taking them away from tasty drinks elsewhere
    - DaveZale 1y ago
      Bartender says, why the long face? AI says because I am the workhorse of the future and I have AI Covid, now get me that bleach on the rocks, the man who thinks he's the smartest in the world says inject it into my AI veins.
andybak 1y ago
AI seems to elicit a different response from people than any other debate I can remember. It's different to blockchain (which had a similar level of "will you all just shut the fuck up about it?") It's different to culture war stuff (which was very toxic and hard to have sensible discussions about - but in a different way). It's the only topic in my lifetime where I have to remember not to even mention it to several close friends. And these are geeky people I have a lot of shared interests in common with. I'm over 50 and I remember a lot of controversial topics - but this one is weird in a different way.
- happytoexplain 1y ago
  To oversimplify: Because it's real.
  - tines 1y ago
    More like, because it's pleasurable enough that people will accept it as a substitute for the real. Delusional people are marrying their AIs, for example.
    - queenkjuul 1y ago
      Based on my experience with Claude Code so far, my coworkers mostly use it because they think it's fun, or cool, not because it writes great code or saves tons of time, because i can attest it isn't doing those. I'm not saying it isn't useful, I'm just also seeing lots of crappy output that gets totally rewritten, and useless docs people keep creating for some reason, that is eating all the time they supposedly saved by relying on it in the first place.
- mdaniel 1y ago
  IMHO, if bitcoin mining had given some people $10MM and debited other people $10, but each one at random, no matter what --temperature= was provided to the mining CLI, you'd have likely seen the same discussion > It's making me rich! It's making me poor! Well then you're holding it wrong! Well you're spending electricity on senseless compute! Well you're just living in a fiat past! (nod)
josefritzishere 1y ago
This article well summarizes where I have landed on AI. No tool ever created by humans is good at everything. Like all previous tools, it will be good at some things but not everything. The rest is hype. If you are over 25 you have seen hype come and go before. This is no different except that AI also can create a truly incredible amount of spam and probably should be regulated by the FCC for that alone.
Buttons840 1y ago
The only AI discussions I find tiring are the ones about the definition of a word. People will talk endlessly about what the definition of "intelligent", or "conscious" should be. I no longer care. I just accept that words mean what the speaker intended then to mean and then I have no trouble talking about the actual technology, its pros and cons, etc.
vouaobrasil 1y ago
I feel like the real reason behind this fatigue, which is an issue most people skirt around a lot, is that AI takes the joy out of intellectual tasks. Modern global capitalism only emphasizes efficiency, so everyone asks: does it make programmers more efficient? Does it make this or that company more efficient? But it's quite clear to me that aside from the initial amusement over AI's capabilities, it takes the joy out of what humans once did with their own minds. I'll come straight out and say it: if you make something with your own mind, like the solution to a tricky puzzle or a new App, I'd respect it. But if you do it with AI, I don't respect it. Fundamentally, people NEED to admire human creation, as it's how our society has always operated, even with the growing automation of rote tasks. But for the first time, we are automating away our precious resource of inspiration through the act of experiencing the creation of others. A darn shame if you ask me. Of course, others will just ignore me and grab at the convenience, because it's what we've been taught to do for the past few hundred years.
colinsane 1y ago
what i hated about AI discourse a year ago was how far removed it was from anything concrete. nobody seemed to have a _purpose_ in building AI; no thing they wanted to use it _for_. it was a silly text or image generator, would someday become a "do everything" device, and the progression from here to there was unknowable: it was just a plot device for anyone suddenly interested in writing speculative fiction. in my vicinity, the sci-fi discourse has died down the last few months. my coworkers will _show me_ how they use these tools when i ask them, and are building on/with them incrementally. the shift in tone is encouraging. there's space for actual practical discourse around this stuff now. chat about concrete things with your friends/coworkers -- if you're interested in it. ignore the media, CEO interviews and LinkedIn hype posts: they're playing a different sort of game that you're probably happier off not being a part of.
- burny_tech 1y ago
  I'm personally interested about the intersection of AI and physics
  - jackthetab 1y ago
    Do you follow Steve Brunton's YT channel[1]? His physics stuff is mostly fluid dynamics but still pretty cool. [1] https://www.youtube.com/@Eigensteve https://www.youtube.com/@Eigensteve
jsnell 1y ago
Ah, a new entry in the "throw every possible AI criticism at the wall, and see what sticks" genre. As always, going for quantity rather than quality undermines the entire endeavor, as the article gets dominated by the stale and mostly invalid talking points. "I'm tired about talking about AI, so here's 2000 words about AI" will appear on the surface to be a novel twist, but actually what the author seems to mean is that they don't want to be talked to about AI, have written this, and are now filtering out all rebuttals. It's just the classic fake win of a forum poster claiming this will be their last message on a subject, followed by three pages of text. Like, of course if talking about AI is causing you distress, stop doing it. But then just stop doing it, don't try to get in the last word some pretense of it being "absolution". It's a bit of a shame, because I think slightly expanding the last section and cutting out basically all the rest would have worked way better. There has been some discourse on what the skill set for somebody using AI for creating software could look like in the future (it'll change over time, obviously). There hasn't been very much written on who would enjoy that job, and it's something where nobody can rebut the author. They're the #1 expert in the world on their own preferences.
kelnos 1y ago
I agree, I'm tired of it too. I resisted for a while, not seeing the value. I'll use ChatGPT or Claude for non-programming things sometimes. Finally a few trusted friends convinced me to give it a go. I installed Claude Code and paid for the Pro plan. It's... interesting? I haven't given it too many tasks yet, and I'm still learning how to get the most out of it, so I can't pass judgment yet. One thing I've noticed is that, for everything I've given it so far, it takes much longer to do it than if I'd do it myself. But maybe that's ok. > What does my job look like? It looks like prompting an agent to do a thing, then skipping over to another agent to review its answer to a different problem. Jumping between different attempts by agents to do what I asked all day, juggling a dozen or more projects so I don’t waste any time. Reviewing code for something that can’t learn from the time I invested, catching the same mistakes over and over. Yeah that sounds awful. That's not something that I'd enjoy. The act of writing code to build something that solves a problem is what brings me joy. It's why I've been hooked since my dad gave me a book on BASIC when I was 8 years old. If this is what the "software developer" job becomes, then I'm fine not being able to get a job in that field anymore. That's not a job I'd want.

70 points by elza_1111 1y ago

s/tired of//

If you really felt that way you wouldn't talk about it. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fight_Club https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fight_Club People complaining about AI are flooding the zone together with all the people who switched from NFT to AI, the "I vibe coded something and it almost works" crowd, etc. Be careful what you vote up, also keep an eye on the /new page and vote things up that aren't about AI, also feel free to submit things that aren't about AI. If you look at the difference between the home page and the /new page, you can see the supply of bad articles about AI far exceeds the demand, keep holding the line against it.

andrewstuart 1y ago

[flagged]

mdaniel 1y ago
I didn't recognize that expression, so to save other's the search: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune_(franchise)#The_Butlerian_Jihad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune_(franchise)#The_Butlerian... > As explained in Dune, the Butlerian Jihad is a conflict taking place over 11,000 years in the future[7] (and over 10,000 years before the events of Dune), which results in the total destruction of virtually all forms of "computers, thinking machines, and conscious robots". and thus if you use "luddites" to describe people who push back against LLMs being the second coming, and further suggest that those folks want all computers thrown in the trash, then you are deeply unserious and I have fed the troll
- kown7 1y ago
  It's such a wild clash of (sci-)fi dis-/utopias. It's almost dialectic.
- dredmorbius 1y ago
  And Herbert is himself alluding to Samuel Butler, author of the anti-technological utopian novel Erewhon: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erewhon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erewhon> Full text: <https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/samuel-butler/erewhon https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/samuel-butler/erewhon>
jameskilton 1y ago
The original "Luddites" had very valid concerns about the impending reduction of quality of the clothing they were making and subsequent working conditions with the advent of automated looms. Likewise many people today, myself included, have very valid concerns about the actual use of AI, where it's going, and how it can and will be misused. We would love to have these discussions, but calling us "Luddites" and then referencing a situation where a robot literally killed a child to prove a point is not how to start that.
- andrewflnr 1y ago
  > referencing a situation where a robot literally killed a child Is this part of the deep Dune lore that I never read, or did they edit their comment?
  - jameskilton 1y ago
    Comment seems to be flagged and gone, but yes they referenced wanting a "Butlerian Jihad".
happytoexplain 1y ago
Calling people who have legitimate grievances over a new technology "Luddites", as if the Luddites were stupid assholes, makes me absolutely sick with sadness for the impact on people in my society. It's a lazy, tremendously over-used metaphor, and you can disagree with an opinion without this low-effort inhumanity.
- CamperBob2 1y ago
  If you could point to a single instance in human history where the "Luddites" of the day proved right in the long run by literally attacking technology, it might help you make your case for rehabilitating them. Or at least it might serve as an interesting basis for discussion.
  - happytoexplain 1y ago
    Sure - the Luddites were correct. Unless you're defining "correct" as "stopped the development of a disruptive technology", which would be, of course, ignorant. Edit: The post I'm replying to was edited to redefine the context to be the defense of Luddites specifically for destroying machines. I may have used different words/tone in that case, but my opinion is still qualitatively the same. Just know I am speaking holistically. Edit: To be more specific (and less snide): Inevitability does not making something universally good, and people negatively affected are correct and justified to react negatively.
    - CamperBob2 1y ago
      Sorry, I felt it necessary to clarify my point. The Luddites were justified in asking for a share of the fruits of their labor, just as as any of of us are, but in a larger sense their attack on the machinery of progress was an attack on just that... progress. How is your position distinguishable from any other phrasing of the broken-window fallacy? Humans shouldn't aspire to do a robot's job. We have better things to do.
  - jplusequalt 1y ago
    >"Attack technology" Nobody is blowing up data centers.
dang 1y ago
Ok, but please don't post generic flamebait yourself. It's just as against the site guidelines either way: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

BGyss 1y ago

I'm tired of hearing about people who are tired of talking about AI - is there a place on the Internet for me?

crinkly 1y ago
I am not. It reinforces my belief that this phase of bullshit will wear off one day which I can’t bloody wait for.
- charlieyu1 1y ago
  AI has its use, but the ecosystem is filled with scammers selling snake oil and a few people who are fed up but completely overreacting like this blogger. I guess giving a fair assessment covering both pros and cons neither generate clicks nor money these days.
  - crinkly 1y ago
    Correct. LLMs are the problem not AI as a whole. They are a universal hammer made of shit.
pera 1y ago
LinkedIn, 24/7 of pure AI chat
- crinkly 1y ago
  Some of the people on there are real as well despite being nearly indistinguishable from LLM excrement. I never used it but a couple of my colleagues do and show me some of the stuff in there.
kotaKat 1y ago
Unfortunately because nobody decided to code some proper consent into it you're forced to listen to people bitch they didn't want it in the first place. "Maybe later" it'll stop, but "Not now". [Imagine a dialog box button here, but the only word says "Thanks :)"]

tines 1y ago

This sums up my feelings exactly. The future is going to be so much more boring than the past, as we (society at large) dislocate our Understanding to LLMs. Without Understanding, there will be no Beauty, only Pleasure.

DaveZale 1y ago

try this https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/

amelius 1y ago
Two men and an AI walk into a bar ...
- mdaniel 1y ago
  The AI orders a bleach on the rocks The bartender: that's not a real drink AI: You're absolutely right! I see now that the drink is not real. I'll have a bleach in a glass with ice The two men leave, knowing that watching this interaction is making them stupider and taking them away from tasty drinks elsewhere
  - DaveZale 1y ago
    Bartender says, why the long face? AI says because I am the workhorse of the future and I have AI Covid, now get me that bleach on the rocks, the man who thinks he's the smartest in the world says inject it into my AI veins.

andybak 1y ago

AI seems to elicit a different response from people than any other debate I can remember. It's different to blockchain (which had a similar level of "will you all just shut the fuck up about it?") It's different to culture war stuff (which was very toxic and hard to have sensible discussions about - but in a different way). It's the only topic in my lifetime where I have to remember not to even mention it to several close friends. And these are geeky people I have a lot of shared interests in common with. I'm over 50 and I remember a lot of controversial topics - but this one is weird in a different way.

happytoexplain 1y ago
To oversimplify: Because it's real.
- tines 1y ago
  More like, because it's pleasurable enough that people will accept it as a substitute for the real. Delusional people are marrying their AIs, for example.
  - queenkjuul 1y ago
    Based on my experience with Claude Code so far, my coworkers mostly use it because they think it's fun, or cool, not because it writes great code or saves tons of time, because i can attest it isn't doing those. I'm not saying it isn't useful, I'm just also seeing lots of crappy output that gets totally rewritten, and useless docs people keep creating for some reason, that is eating all the time they supposedly saved by relying on it in the first place.
mdaniel 1y ago
IMHO, if bitcoin mining had given some people $10MM and debited other people $10, but each one at random, no matter what --temperature= was provided to the mining CLI, you'd have likely seen the same discussion > It's making me rich! It's making me poor! Well then you're holding it wrong! Well you're spending electricity on senseless compute! Well you're just living in a fiat past! (nod)

josefritzishere 1y ago

This article well summarizes where I have landed on AI. No tool ever created by humans is good at everything. Like all previous tools, it will be good at some things but not everything. The rest is hype. If you are over 25 you have seen hype come and go before. This is no different except that AI also can create a truly incredible amount of spam and probably should be regulated by the FCC for that alone.

Buttons840 1y ago

The only AI discussions I find tiring are the ones about the definition of a word. People will talk endlessly about what the definition of "intelligent", or "conscious" should be. I no longer care. I just accept that words mean what the speaker intended then to mean and then I have no trouble talking about the actual technology, its pros and cons, etc.

vouaobrasil 1y ago

I feel like the real reason behind this fatigue, which is an issue most people skirt around a lot, is that AI takes the joy out of intellectual tasks. Modern global capitalism only emphasizes efficiency, so everyone asks: does it make programmers more efficient? Does it make this or that company more efficient? But it's quite clear to me that aside from the initial amusement over AI's capabilities, it takes the joy out of what humans once did with their own minds. I'll come straight out and say it: if you make something with your own mind, like the solution to a tricky puzzle or a new App, I'd respect it. But if you do it with AI, I don't respect it. Fundamentally, people NEED to admire human creation, as it's how our society has always operated, even with the growing automation of rote tasks. But for the first time, we are automating away our precious resource of inspiration through the act of experiencing the creation of others. A darn shame if you ask me. Of course, others will just ignore me and grab at the convenience, because it's what we've been taught to do for the past few hundred years.

colinsane 1y ago

what i hated about AI discourse a year ago was how far removed it was from anything concrete. nobody seemed to have a _purpose_ in building AI; no thing they wanted to use it _for_. it was a silly text or image generator, would someday become a "do everything" device, and the progression from here to there was unknowable: it was just a plot device for anyone suddenly interested in writing speculative fiction. in my vicinity, the sci-fi discourse has died down the last few months. my coworkers will _show me_ how they use these tools when i ask them, and are building on/with them incrementally. the shift in tone is encouraging. there's space for actual practical discourse around this stuff now. chat about concrete things with your friends/coworkers -- if you're interested in it. ignore the media, CEO interviews and LinkedIn hype posts: they're playing a different sort of game that you're probably happier off not being a part of.

burny_tech 1y ago
I'm personally interested about the intersection of AI and physics
- jackthetab 1y ago
  Do you follow Steve Brunton's YT channel[1]? His physics stuff is mostly fluid dynamics but still pretty cool. [1] https://www.youtube.com/@Eigensteve https://www.youtube.com/@Eigensteve

jsnell 1y ago

Ah, a new entry in the "throw every possible AI criticism at the wall, and see what sticks" genre. As always, going for quantity rather than quality undermines the entire endeavor, as the article gets dominated by the stale and mostly invalid talking points. "I'm tired about talking about AI, so here's 2000 words about AI" will appear on the surface to be a novel twist, but actually what the author seems to mean is that they don't want to be talked to about AI, have written this, and are now filtering out all rebuttals. It's just the classic fake win of a forum poster claiming this will be their last message on a subject, followed by three pages of text. Like, of course if talking about AI is causing you distress, stop doing it. But then just stop doing it, don't try to get in the last word some pretense of it being "absolution". It's a bit of a shame, because I think slightly expanding the last section and cutting out basically all the rest would have worked way better. There has been some discourse on what the skill set for somebody using AI for creating software could look like in the future (it'll change over time, obviously). There hasn't been very much written on who would enjoy that job, and it's something where nobody can rebut the author. They're the #1 expert in the world on their own preferences.

kelnos 1y ago

I agree, I'm tired of it too. I resisted for a while, not seeing the value. I'll use ChatGPT or Claude for non-programming things sometimes. Finally a few trusted friends convinced me to give it a go. I installed Claude Code and paid for the Pro plan. It's... interesting? I haven't given it too many tasks yet, and I'm still learning how to get the most out of it, so I can't pass judgment yet. One thing I've noticed is that, for everything I've given it so far, it takes much longer to do it than if I'd do it myself. But maybe that's ok. > What does my job look like? It looks like prompting an agent to do a thing, then skipping over to another agent to review its answer to a different problem. Jumping between different attempts by agents to do what I asked all day, juggling a dozen or more projects so I don’t waste any time. Reviewing code for something that can’t learn from the time I invested, catching the same mistakes over and over. Yeah that sounds awful. That's not something that I'd enjoy. The act of writing code to build something that solves a problem is what brings me joy. It's why I've been hooked since my dad gave me a book on BASIC when I was 8 years old. If this is what the "software developer" job becomes, then I'm fine not being able to get a job in that field anymore. That's not a job I'd want.