12 ms·

I quit. The clankers won

• deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
• cl0ckt0wer 6mo ago
  Just because they invented cars doesn't mean you stop jogging.
  • deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
  • pitched 6mo ago
    I really like the sentiment and will quote this in the future! My own thoughts line up a bit closer to the article though, with this quote being a good summary of it: > The 1% utility AI has is overshadowed by the overwhelming mediocracy it regurgitates.
  • ramon156 6mo ago
    Read the post, it's a gotcha ;P I was scared too
  • bicx 6mo ago
    When they invented cars (and cars became popular and affordable), people did stop walking everywhere. Jogging wasn’t popularized until the 1970s, when we all realized we needed to be intentional with fitness in our car-based society.
    • tasuki 6mo ago
      > people did stop walking everywhere. I didn't. Yesterday I walked 11 km for errands. Today I took a detour when walking to work, a more scenic route with less traffic. For me walking is not much slower than using public transport (you need to get to it, then from it to the point of your destination), and not much slower than a car (stuck in traffic, finding parking, not to mention the road rage). I'd be faster on a bicycle but I'm not in a hurry and enjoy my walks.
      • saulpw 6mo ago
        Have you been walking since you were a child? Or were you raised in a car-centric culture, and discovered as an adult that you prefer walking?
        • tasuki 6mo ago
          My father loves cars, but he also walks everywhere, so the former.
    • rglynn 6mo ago
      This is a US-centric take, in Europe, particularly in cities, we walk everywhere. There is perhaps some relevance to the analogy however, because the US is designed in such a way that makes walking difficult to impossible. I am already seeing this pattern in vibe-coded areas where engineers will just use AI because it's too difficult to parse and edit by hand.
  • guzfip 6mo ago
    No but everyone has gotten real fat since then.
  • simgt 6mo ago
    They did make it very hard for people to do anything else but use a car in many, many places though...
    • OJFord 6mo ago
      In the US, perhaps, which has had perhaps the bulk of its growth post-automobiles.
  • jordanb 6mo ago
    > Just because they invented cars doesn't mean you stop jogging. They literally made it a crime to walk down the street.
    • bombcar 6mo ago
      across the street, no? It's also a crime to jog on the railroad tracks.
      • beeflet 6mo ago
        If it's a crime to jog on railroad tracks, and the avalibility of rail makes it so that everything you need is only accessible by rail, I conclude that rail prevents you from jogging.
        • bombcar 6mo ago
          I'm sorry for all the people who lived in my original SimCity towns. They must have been nearly spherical.
      • jordanb 6mo ago
        Prior to cars walking anywhere in any street was completely normal. You can watch movies filmed before the 1920s and city streets are full of people walking around or congregating. If a wagon or trolley hit someone that was considered the fault of the driver, every time. When cars started arriving and being driven around by people who were wreckless and bad at it, you started getting manufacturers and "motorists" lobbying for the concept and laws around jay-walking. Even the word was a way to delegitimize what used to be normal. "Jay" was negative slang for country-person (think red-neck). The idea was "modern city people stay out of the streets!"
      • nunez 6mo ago
        Down the street also. "Fighting Traffic" by Peter D. Norton talks about this at length. The suburbs didn't exist when automobiles hit the market. Most people lived in cities because that's where the jobs were and transportation (outside of whatever public transportation options the cities provided) was limited. Kids and adults used the streets freely (which were for horses, though they were widened as automobiles started growing in popularity). This changed as cars killed kids (and adults) who didn't know that cars were much faster than cars and didn't react in time. Traffic deaths were so numerous, cities invested lots of money in "safety parades" that were kind of gruesome, actually (like showing tombstones of the future deceased). [^0] Jaywalking was a crime that was invented to deal with exactly this phenomenon. People fought HARD to keep the streets free (where else are kids going to play). People lost that battle, as we know. [^0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2022-06-10/how-cities-responded-to-traffic-deaths-100-years-ago https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2022-06-10/how-citie...
  • mmustapic 6mo ago
    The one I like better is: software is great at playing chess, doesn't mean you cannot play too
• bjourne 6mo ago
  Fucking hilarius domain name . David is unfortunately not announcing a rewrite of the Linux IPC stack!
  • bombcar 6mo ago
    Ha I read it as the DBU Shell but I guess dbus hell is more natural.
  • CrzyLngPwd 6mo ago
    How did I miss DBUS Hell haha
  • moron4hire 6mo ago
    Real PenIsland.com vibes.
• gkoenig 6mo ago
  Man I love the design of your site, and that goldfish made my day. For the article it was nice, but the font is really what got me.
• btreecat 6mo ago
  "No AI" right above a robot voice playback button. Mixed messages fr Hot take, folks packing it in because of AI probably were not difference makers before AI, and wouldn't be difference makers after it either. I agree with the author, keep writing. It helps hone your ability to communicate effectively which we all need for some time to come (at least until we become batteries).
  • keybored 6mo ago
    What does a synthesized audio playback button have to do with AI as commonly and hotly discussed?
    • btreecat 6mo ago
      > sythansized audio playback Thats generated audio. It may not be LLM generated but it's not read by a human. To draw an arbitrary line between _this kind_ of generated content but not _that kind_ is seemingly a matter of perspective and preferences.
      • keybored 6mo ago
        Perspective and preferences are two out of N parts that make up a person’s opinion, which in turn is something that makes a judgement about distinguishing two things NOT arbitrary. But partly overlapping with perspective is reasoning (subjective or objective), which is also something that makes a judgement not arbitrary. But your pre-judgement here tells me that that part is uninteresting to you.
        • btreecat 6mo ago
          It's still arbitrary, even if you attempt to backfill reasoning and conflate opinion with fact. The fact is, it's generated content, less sophisticated code was use to generate it, but it's still generated from text input.
          • keybored 6mo ago
• bitmasher9 6mo ago
  Picking out my favorite idea out of many: we do need ways to stay mentally sharp in the age of AI. Writing and publishing is a good one. I also recommend stimulating human conversations and long-form reading. More and more the bar is being lowered. Don’t fall to brain rot. Don’t quite quit. Stay active and engaged, and you’ll begin to stand out among your peers.
  • cyanydeez 6mo ago
    I'm pretty sure all this AI is built on top of Silicon valley's technobabble of "permanent underclass" which seems to have zero introspection as to why we're just going to accept the feudal overlords of technology. But besides that, it's interesting so many people are willing to tailor their entire workflow and product to indeterminate machines and business culture. I recommend everyone stop using these infernal cloud devices and start with a nice local model that doesn't instantly give you everything, but is quite capabable of removing a select amount of drudgery that is rather relaxing. And as soon as you get too lazy to do enough specifying or real coding, it fucks up your dev environment and you slap yuorself a hundred times wondering why you ever trusted someone else to properly build your artifaces. There's definitely some philosophy being edged into our spaces that need to be combatted.
    • guzfip 6mo ago
      > which seems to have zero introspection as to why we're just going to accept the feudal overlords of technology. You’ve let them in and given them power in many aspects of your life without even a whimper of resistance. Of course you’ll accept them as your lords.
    • flir 6mo ago
      I'm pretty sure the -as-a-service stage is only temporary. The local models are only going to get better, and the improvement curve has to top out eventually. Maybe the cloud models will still give you a few extra percentage points of performance, especially if they're based on data sets that aren't available to the public, but it won't make much difference on most tasks and the local models will have a lot of advantages too.
• erelong 6mo ago
  "You can just blog things"
  • dare944 6mo ago
    "Let them write blogs!"
• muskstinks 6mo ago
  One problem writing does have: we grew up in a massive changing and progressing software writing area. A golden area. Now i still show clean code videos from bob and other old things to new hires and young collegues. Java got more features, given but the golden area of discovery is over. The new big thing is ai and i'm curious to see how it will feel to write real agents for my company specific use cases. But i'm also seeing people so bad in their daily jobs, that I wish to get their salary as tokens to use. It will change and it changes our field. Btw. "Is there anything, in the entire recorded history of human creation, that could have possibly mattered less than the flatulence Sora produced? NFTs had more value." i disagree, video generation has a massive impact on the industry for a lot of people. Don't down play this. NFTs btw. never had any impact besides moving money from a to b
  • flir 6mo ago
    > But i'm also seeing people so bad in their daily jobs, that I wish to get their salary as tokens to use. Oof. The modern "Go away or I will replace you with a very small shell script"
  • sd9 6mo ago
    At least have the grace to show new hires Rich Hickey lectures or something. Uncle bob is nonsense.
    • muskstinks 6mo ago
      I'm giving them a lot more but I assumed people know uncle bob. Like the Open Source Architecture Books, Googles SRE Books, 1:1 mentoring every week. But yeah there is one person made of teflon. Nothing sticks. And i could tell you that teflon person in every company i worked so far.
      • sd9 6mo ago
        I know what you mean. Tbh I just think this isn’t for everyone. I’ve been in your position before, you can try everything but some people just can’t get it. And maybe they do and they become a little more productive, but they can’t produce production quality stuff that isn’t brittle. I’ve never found a way around it, and I don’t want to believe that some people can’t grok this field, but that is what I’ve experienced. Maybe other people can educate better. I’ve just found that at some point you have to limit the blast radius and move onto more productive uses of your own time.
• deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
• Spacecosmonaut 6mo ago
  "Generative AI is art. It’s irredeemably shit art; end of conversation." I think most people cannot destinguish between "genuine" creativity and an artificial almalgamation of training data and human provided context. For one, I do not know what already exsists. Some work created by AI may be an obvious rip off of the style of a particular artist, but I wouldnt know. To me it might look awesome and fresh. I think many of the more human centric thinkers will be disappointed at how many people just wont care.
  • chii 6mo ago
    most people are just utilitarian and do not care for "art" (in the high art sense). AI is perfect for that. It reveal, perhaps to the dismay of those who revel in high art, that it might be an illusion that art has genuine creativity, if most people find ai to produce acceptable output.
  • none2585 6mo ago
    Further I'd argue we KNOW people don't care if you look at the music industry. Pop music is often composed by dozens of people who specialize in a thin sliver of the track - lyrics, vocals, drums, &c. - and then it's given a pretty face and makes the charts. That's really no different than something like Suno. I think AI is forcing people who thought that THEIR thing was too nuanced or too complex to be replaced by technology to reckon with what makes them special.
  • apples_oranges 6mo ago
    The question is how subtle AI can be. I feel like art sometimes seems to communicate A, and the artist intended to communicate A and perhaps some B, but clearly, it also hints at another C (and maybe also D, E, ..), which was not intended by the artist or recognised by many viewers, while to some people it's clearly there. Now where did that come from? And can or will AI create it?
  • esafak 6mo ago
    People have been having this debate with popular art forever. Some people do not even believe in taste, and that everyone's artistic opinions have equal merit.
• farfatched 6mo ago
  > The AI industry is 99% hype; a billion dollar industrial complex to put a price tag on creation. At this point if you believe AI is ‘just a tool’ you’re wilfully ignoring the harm. > (Regardless, why do I keep being told it’s an ‘extreme’ stance if I decide not to buy something?) > The 1% utility AI has is overshadowed by the overwhelming mediocracy it regurgitates. This sort of reasoning is why you might have been called extreme. It's less extreme to say "many people see and/or get lots of benefit, but it's wrong to use the tool due to the harms it has". There's nothing wrong with extreme, but since you asked.
  • xnorswap 6mo ago
    Yes, declaring AI to be 99% hype just turns away people like me from what the author has to say. I was an AI sceptic for a long time until toward the end of last year when I seriously evaluated them, and came to realise it could add tremendous value. When someone comes along and declares that it's all hype, it goes against my experience that it's getting things done. I can also see the harm it does, and I hope the tooling improves to reduce that harm. For example, there's a significant lack of caching in the tooling. It's constantly re-reading the same files every day, and more harmfully, constantly fetching the same help pages and blog-posts from the web. If it had a generous built in HTTP cache, and instruction to maximise use of the cache, then it could avoid a lot of re-fetching of content, which would help reduce the harms. Declaring my experience to be invalid and based on nothing but hype doesn't engage people like me at all. And it's the people like me, the middle-of-the-road developer working on enterprise software, that either need convincing to not use the tools, or for our habits to change to minimise the harm. Because otherwise we're quietly getting on with using it, potentially destroying forests and lakes as we do.
    • kasey_junk 6mo ago
      It’s worse than that, in the linked “I’ve done my research” they make the tired claim that ai hallucinates api calls. Which while true has not been a practical problem since tool calling was added. I think the position that ai is morally troubling enough that the downsides out way the positives is perfectly defensible. But the entire argument becomes a joke when you can’t accurately catalog the positives.
• poopwagon 6mo ago
  [flagged]
  • projektfu 6mo ago
    It's not just one sentence after another. It's a completely new paradigm of paragraph creation. /s
    • poopwagon 6mo ago
      [dead]
  • the_af 6mo ago
    You don't like Hemingway, I take it?
• zzzeek 6mo ago
  rants about AI from people who have already decided up front to never actually attempt to use the tools (which seems to be the case here from the post and the other one it links) are not really providing any value to the discourse. There is nothing new about using machinery to automate boring / repetitive tasks, including the wall of resistance that comes up. But it should be clear that genuinely useful tooling and automation tends to become a normal part of life, from the plow, to the printing press, to the dishwasher, to digital video editing, to autocorrect, and now to large language models. There's a lot that has to be worked out with LLMs in particular as they are now encroaching heavily upon human creativity and thought. This is an extremely important topic. But rants like these with terms like "the plagarism machine" and "the solution is that we all must vow to never use AI in any shape or form" are not really contributing.
  • nodra 6mo ago
    Trying to understand why it would matter if their hosting provider used ai or not. Genuine question so I can understand your take.
  • kasG 6mo ago
    You are a good employee! Python people always shill for their employer's opinions.
  • gruntbuggly 6mo ago
    We're starting to rethink what an over reliance on plow based tilling has done for soil health. The point being that technologies are tradeoffs and it's helpful to understand the tradeoffs we are making.
    • zzzeek 5mo ago
      that's the absolute truth here
• bombcar 6mo ago
  You have to write for yourself. People have said this for years, decades, millennia even - but nobody really believes that writing to an audience of zero (or one, if Mom is still around) is worth it. Everyone wants to be a famous author, or at least a published/somewhat acknowledged one; few are willing to write their novel and be satisfied with zero or near-zero sales/readings. But that is exactly what you need to do, especially in the age of AI. Everyone who was "in it to win it" (think linkedinslop which existed before AI) is going to certainly use AI - because they do not give a shit about the quality of themselves - they just want the result. And you can only become a writer (unpublished, unread, or no) by doing the writing - it takes time (10,000 hours?) that cannot be replaced by AI, just like you can't have the body of a marathon runner without running (yes, yes, the joke). You may be able to get 26 miles and change away, even very fast, but unless you personally do the running of that distance without cheating, you will not get the inherent benefits. And if you instruct an AI, or another human even, to write for you, you may get some of the results you want, but you won't have changed to become a writer. We shouldn't celebrate the successful blogs; they're already rewarded enough. It's celebrating the unsuccessful blogs that is needed - even if, frankly, the vast majority of them are sub-AI levels of crap it is still a human changing and progressing behind them. Babies fall over a lot but unless you take them out of the stroller and let them do so, they'll never progress to crawling, walking, running.
  • fragmede 6mo ago
    Do people who journal exist in your world view?
• ceplabs 6mo ago
  This might be the coolest personal website theme I've ever seen.
• Waterluvian 6mo ago
  Improving developer skills is not valuable to your company. They don't tell a customer how many person-hours of engineering talent improvement their contract is responsible for. They just want a solved problem. Some companies comprehend how short-sighted this is and invest in professional development in one way or another. They want better engineers so that their operations run better. It's an investment and arguably a smart one. Adoption of AI at a FOMO corporate pace doesn't seem to include this consideration. They largely want your skills to atrophy as you instead beep boop the AI machine to do the job (arguably) faster. I think they're wrong and silly and any time they try to justify it, the words don't reconcile into a rational series of statements. But they're the boss and they can do the thing if they want to. At work I either do what they want in exchange for money or I say no thank you and walk away. Which led me to the conclusion I'm currently at: I think I'm mostly just mourning the fact that I got to do my hobby as a career for the past 15 years, but that’s ending. I can still code at home.
  • simonw 6mo ago
    > Improving developer skills is not valuable to your company Every company I've ever worked at has genuinely believed in and invested in improving developer skills.
    • Waterluvian 6mo ago
      That’s been my experience, too. But now I get a sort of, “I dunno. Maybe don’t use AI on Fridays?” There doesn’t seem to be a plan for maintaining that culture.
    • tonyedgecombe 6mo ago
      Every company I worked for didn’t give a shit about my skills. They just wanted to solve the problem in front of them and if they couldn’t then they would hire someone in with the right skills. Improving my skills was seen as a risk as I might leave.
      • catlifeonmars 6mo ago
• nslsm 6mo ago
  [flagged]
• malwrar 6mo ago
  I do find it hard to tolerate the feeling of being watched online. The second-most trending dataset on huggingface right now is a snapshot of HN updating at a 5 minute interval. It makes me not want to really comment at all, just like how I don’t really publish any software I write anymore. Turns out it sucks to produce original works when you know that, whereas previously a few people at best might see your work, now it’s a bunch of omniscient robots and maybe half of those original people are using the robots instead.
  • philipwhiuk 6mo ago
    I think the immediate term action is to viciously block all crawlers. Writing a blog yes, feeding the beast no.
    • ArcHound 6mo ago
      This sounds like a nice principled stance, but you won't get any traffic with this approach. That's demotivating - to me blogging is a tight balance of exploration, learning, improving and feedback. I'm not able to write without considering how this impacts the reader - removing all readers breaks the process for me.
    • lstodd 6mo ago
      Yeah, everyone went on "blocking all crawlers" end result being half of internet inaccessible over vpns. Good job, people.
      • 82618901 6mo ago
        [dead]
  • niek_pas 6mo ago
    This is really interesting to me, because it never occurred to me to feel this way. Why would I care whether my comments are ending up in some dataset somewhere that's being used to train some model? My comments are boring and mostly uninformed. Have at it. I'm curious: would you say the feeling of being watched online is making you afraid of some repercussion, or is it something else?
• taintlord 6mo ago
  [dead]
• titzer 6mo ago
  I laugh jollily in the face of AI. I know the coming shit pile, its nature isn't going to be surprising, only the speed and utter surrender of the vast majority of humanity to mediocrity. What AI represents to me is a teacher! I have so long lacked a music teacher and musical tools. I spent my entire career doing invisible software at the lowest levels and now I can finally build cool tools that help me learn and practice and enjoy playing music! Screw all the haters; if you're curious about a wide range of topics and already have some knowledge, you can galavant across a vast space and learn a lot along the way. AI is a bit of a bullshitter but don't take its bullshit as truth, like you should never take anything your teacher says as gospel. How do we know what's true? The truth of the universe and the world is that underneath it all, it is self consistent, and we keep making measurement errors. The AI is an enormous pot of magic that it's up to you to organize with...your own skills. You have to actively resist deskilling by doing things. AI should challenge you and reward you, not make you passive. Use AI to teach yourself by asking lots of questions and constantly testing the results against reality. For me right now, that's the fretboard.
• rtpg 6mo ago
  Old web stuff is still around. RSS feeds are out there. Some parts of masto are generally chill and filled with people having interesting convos. You don't have to give up on everything to participate, but it can be a space to go to if you're tired of every social interaction being mediated by (I'm being glib) hustlers
• OJFord 6mo ago
  Paha, I thought this domain was 'D-Bus Hell' until I clicked in. (It's D. Bushell's blog.)
• sdevonoes 6mo ago
  Can’t we just sabotage AI? We have the means for sure (speed light communication across the globe). Like, at least for once in the history of software engineering we should get together like other professionals do. Sadly our high salaries and perks won’t make the task easy for many - spend tons of tokens on useless stuff at work (so your boss knows it’s not worth it) - be very picky about AI generated PRs: add tons of comments, slow down the merge, etc.
  • bendmorris 6mo ago
    I think you should be very picky about generated PRs not as an act of sabotage but because very obviously generated ones tend to balloon complexity of the code in ways that makes it difficult for both humans and agents, and because superficial plausibility is really good at masking problems. It's a rational thing to do. Eventually you are faced with company culture that sees review as a bottleneck stopping you from going 100x faster rather than a process of quality assurance and knowledge sharing, and I worry we'll just be mandated to stop doing them.
  • zozbot234 6mo ago
    > be very picky about AI generated PRs: add tons of comments, slow down the merge, etc. But that's the opposite of sabotage, you're actually helping your boss use AI effectively! > spend tons of tokens on useless stuff at work (so your boss knows it’s not worth it) Yes, but the "useless" stuff should be things like "carefully document how this codebase works" or "ruthlessly critique this 10k-lines AI slop pull request, and propose ways to improve it". So that you at least get something nice out of it long-term, even if it's "useless" to a clueless AI-pilled PHB.
  • xyzal 6mo ago
    Generate hundreds repos of plain old spaghetti code and put it on github. Easiest thing you can do.
  • doctorwho42 6mo ago
    It really is the albatross around the neck of software and software adjacent professionals... How you don't see the value of collective action is wild to me. Most of you are still working class, you can't survive that many years unemployed... But the Kool aid has been drunk, and the philosophy of silicon valley cemented in your field. It will take a lot of pain or work to get it to change.
• kstenerud 6mo ago
  > The giant plagiarism machines have already stolen everything. Copyright is dead. Licenses are washed away in clean rooms. Isn't this what the free software movement wanted? Code available to all? Yes, code is cheap now. That's the new reality. Your value lies elsewhere. You can lament the loss of your usefulness as a horse buggy mechanic, or you can adapt your knowledge and experience and use it towards those newfangled automobiles.
  • mmustapic 6mo ago
    No, the free software movement wants that the source code of the software you use be available to you to modify it if you wish. AI does not necessarily do that.
    • kstenerud 6mo ago
      AI makes the entirety of the software engineering profession available to you. All you have to do is ask the right way, and you can build in days what once took months or years. Decompiling and re-engineering proprietary code has never been easier. You almost don't even need the source code anymore. The object code can be examined by your LLM, and binary patches applied. Closed source is no longer the moat it was, and so keeping the source code to yourself is only going to hurt you as people pass you over for companies who realize this, and strive to make it easier for your LLM to figure their systems out.
      • kuschku 5mo ago
        > Decompiling and re-engineering proprietary code has never been easier. You almost don't even need the source code anymore. The object code can be examined by your LLM, and binary patches applied. We've always been able to do that, but that's not the point. There's a reason free software licenses require the "the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it" to be opened. One of the core tenets is that any user should have the exact same access as the original developers.
      • Arkhaine_kupo 6mo ago
• Havoc 6mo ago
  > The only winning move is not to play. Alas I think tech crowd have collectively painted humanity into a corner where not playing is not an option anymore. The combination of having subverted copyright and enabled cheap machine replication kills large swaths of creativity. At least as a viable living. One can still do many things on an artisanal level certainly and as excited as I am about AI it’s hard not to see it as a big L for humanity’s creative output
  • niek_pas 6mo ago
    Interestingly, Ireland just launched a Basic Income for the Arts scheme. Many caveats (I think it's only like 300 euros a month, for a small group of people, etc.) but an interesting development nonetheless.
  • doctorwho42 6mo ago
    The problem is worse than that though, yes you can do most things on an artisanal level... But who is going to pay for that? What happens when head count drops, you get less capital in the hands of working class... And no matter your opinions on the wealthy, they don't have the need or desire for 5% of the population doing artisanal level work for them at a living wage.
    • Havoc 6mo ago
      >yes you can do most things on an artisanal level... But who is going to pay for that? Nobody. When I said artisanal I meant that there is no mainstream market for it.
• oompydoompy74 6mo ago
  Good lord I’m going to have to figure out some way to filter Hacker News. I’m so tired of this same sort of article (and the opposite) being posted every day. AI isn’t going away. AI is better than you think it is. AI is probably also worse than you think it is. The world has nuance, so can we please all chill?
  • jdefr89 6mo ago
    Sort of hard to do because AI it shoved down your throat in one form or another virtually everywhere you go. I also think a lot of us Hackers are mourning the fact we spent many years mastering machines and programming just to have the skill devalued (at least from the publics perspective) nearly over night. I personally think it is more important now more than ever to understand technology. To be able to write code, understand how a CPU works etc. Tech literacy will help prevent doom scenarios. A future where virtually everyone depends on AI and Computers but lacks people who actually understand them from a low level perspective seems bleak. I know thinking itself seems to have gone out of fashion and its given rise to misinformation and/or political nonsense like the rise of fascism etc... I think a lot of us just feel "empty" and are trying to express it.
    • oompydoompy74 6mo ago
      I get it. I’ve been doing this for 11 years. I use agents everyday at work now and deal with all the benefits and problems of that. The craft is certainly changing and it will take years for everything to shake out and settle. I understand the desire to publicly wax poetic, but nobody actually knows shit about where we will land, so it gets a bit tiresome to see over and over.
    • deleted 6mo ago
      [deleted]
    • mchaver 6mo ago
      I agree that humans should continue to value various forms of literacy even in the face of AIs that can do everything better than us. I too will continue to dig deeper into tech literacy. There was a Terence Tao paper recently that mentioned we are in a shift similar to the end of heliocentrism. It made clear that Earth is not the center of the universe, but Earth is still deeply valuable and important for humans. Much the same way that AI may supersede our understanding and intellect and make the are limitations more apparent, but our human intellect is still important to humans. Plus, what are you going to do when the price of LLM tokens are through the roof or you get messages like "burn an extra 1,000,000 tokens for a better implementation!".
• Thanemate 6mo ago
  Funnily enough I saw this post as I was placing my HN account on hiatus, because I'm tired pretending that the quality of discourse is on par with what I've been used to read and participate in. We're obviously in an era where "good enough" is taken so far that, what used to be the middle of the fictional line is not the middle point anymore but a new extreme. You're either someone who cares for the output or someone who cares how readable and easy to extend the code is. I can only assume this is done on hopeful purpose, with the hope that the LLM's will "only keep improving linearly" to the point where readability and extendability is not my problem by it's "tomorrow's LLM" problem.
  • inanutshellus 6mo ago
    Ok but if you're a person that likes HN discourse but thinks "eternal september" has happened ... what's your plan? You'll still come here, read the comments, see something engaging and want to reply and... feel sad because shakes fist at [datacenter] clouds it's all just bots talking to each other anyway. Seems lame. Keep talking anyway.
    • 7777332215 6mo ago
      I thought the same as the person you replied to. For me, the solution is to stop coming here as often and instead read traditional literature. Soon to remove my access entirely to this website.
    • latexr 6mo ago
      You’re making a lot of assumptions. They could just stop visiting HN. They don’t even need a “plan” or an alternative, they can just stop.
      • inanutshellus 5mo ago
        Well. My assumptions are based on the that the alternative would never matter. He'd simply stop existing (in HN-space), and that's an overtly less-fun universe to live in. We certainly do suddenly live in "interesting times".
• Lerc 6mo ago
  Blog posts are an interesting case, they are a very good example of something where abundance of supply outstrips any demand so much that it cannot be realistic to expect a median level contribution to receive any significant attention. Setting aside the self delusion that makes a considerable number to erroneously rate themselves above average, the reason you create blog posts should not be for the attention you might gain, there simply are not the eyeballs. You create as a form of self expression, to organise your thoughts, to create a record of them. AI can never challenge in those areas because it is, as it has always been, the act of creation is the goal.
• staminade 6mo ago
  Anti-AI articles like this seem to be the new "Doing my part to resist big tech: Why I'm switching back from Chrome to Firefox" genre that popped up on HN for a decade or so. If it makes you feel better, great, but don't kid yourself that your actions will make any difference whatsoever to the overall trajectory of AI adoption in IT or society.
  • dmix 6mo ago
    Plus many of these articles seem maximized to attract attention on social media, which is its own machine. Posting your most provocative and strong opinions in reaction to the latest controversy-of-the-week is what fuels the internet and culture more than anything these days. The attention economy demands hot takes mixed with preaching about every new thing.
    • simianwords 6mo ago
      see: purity spiral politics
  • beej71 6mo ago
    I love it if it would affect the trajectory, but I don't think it will. I do think it will affect my trajectory, though.
  • raincole 6mo ago
    This genre has always been very prevalent on HN. Move from cloud to on-premise. Move away from US-based services. Move away from Gmail. Move away from Github.
    • simianwords 6mo ago
      Was there one for memory managed languages like C# vs self managed like C/C++?
      • raincole 6mo ago
        Rust.
• alfanick 6mo ago
  I quit. The clankers won. I don't see any proof that software development is not dead. Software engineering is not, and it's much more than writing code, and it can be fun. But writing code is dead, there is no point of doing it if an LLM can output the same code 100x faster. Of course, architecture and operations stays in our hands (for now?). Initially I was very sceptic, first versions of ChatGPT or Claude were rather bad. I kept holding to a thought that it cannot get good. Then I've spend a few months evaluating them, if you know how to code, there is no point of coding anymore, just instruct an LLM to do something, verify, merge, repeat. It's an editor of some sorts, an editor where you enter a thought and get code as an output. Changes the whole scene.
  • Anamon 6mo ago
    If you're not just working on throw-away tools, revisit this sentiment every few months. Verifying generated code and writing code are not equivalent at all. You're replacing a builder's mindset with a supervisor's mindset, and the supervisor's workers are dumb. You're bound to end up with the same class of problems we always had when programmers were reviewing their own code or testing their own features. Blind spots. Fine for personal hobby tools or quick scripts. Not acceptable for business-critical software. The LLM hype seems to have made an entire profession forget the painfully learned lessons of the last 70 years.
  • zozbot234 6mo ago
    LLM's don't really output the same code quality as a human, even on the smallest scale. It's not even close. Maybe you can guide them to refactor their slop up to human-written quality, but then you're still coding. You're just doing it by asking the computer to write something, instead of physically typing the whole thing out with a keyboard.
    • ratmeadow 6mo ago
      Yeah I also keep thinking this. I don't see LLMs reliably producing code that is up to my standards. Granted I have high standards because I do take pride in producing high quality code (in all manner of metrics). A lot of the time the code works, unfortunately only for the most naive, mechanical definition of "works".
• marknutter 6mo ago
  > I’m not protective over the word “art”. Generative AI is art. It’s irredeemably shit art; end of conversation. A child’s crayon doodle is also lacking refined artistry but we hang it on our fridge because a human made it and that matters. More pretentious gatekeeping from luddites who like to yell at clouds. This is someone who would love a piece of artwork created using ai tools right up until someone told them it was created using ai tools.
  • Anamon 6mo ago
    Or "someone who would read a news article and be shocked/excited/moved by it right up until someone told them it was fake GenAI slop." Apart from the fact that, yes, GenAI art is overwhelmingly shit and by definition derivative, it's also not unreasonable to not want to be lied to. People look for human connection. They like being lied to about human expression in a piece of art about as much as they like being catfished.
• deadbabe 6mo ago
  I’ve decided the only way I’ll adopt a full automated agentic AI workflow the way companies want, is if I am allowed to hold multiple jobs at multiple companies. Imagine having 6 software engineering jobs, each paying maybe $150k a year, all being done by agents. Hell, I might even do this secretly without their consent. If I can hold just 10 jobs for about 3 or 4 years, I can retire and leave the industry before it all comes crumbling down in 2030. The problem of course, is securing that many jobs. But maybe agents can help with applying for jobs.
• LunicLynx 6mo ago
  This feels weird somehow. It feels like: Damn we can’t train our AI any better as everything regurgitated slop now. How can we get people to create new content for us, hopefully with new ideas … Might be just me though, but I definitely don’t get why blogging should be the solution.
• juleiie 6mo ago
  Yeah well I just don’t care about „AI dark forest” You seriously need to go outside and touch grass if you are so defeated by another chess winning machine Nobody wants to Watch AI play chess, nobody wants to read ai blogposts AI makes human writing more valuable, not less. I will pay good money for pure human made books certified as made without a single word auto generated whether in original or during process of Translation.
• butlike 6mo ago
  A non-sequitur, but I really like the style of the blog. Good job.
• coldtea 6mo ago
  >It’s never been more important to blog. There has never been a better time to blog. I will tell you why. We’re being starved for human conversation and authentic voices The supposedly starved don't seem to care much for such food. Blogs are kind of a wasteland.
• zetanor 6mo ago
  >One upside of this looming economic and intellectual depression is that the media is beginning to recognise gate keepers are no longer the hand that feeds them. In what world is "the media" not an integral, tightly-bound part of the ratchet mechanism that seeks to suppress all distinction?
• randallsquared 6mo ago
  > to put a price tag on creation. I mean, to put a price tag on enabling vastly more creation than would otherwise have occurred!
• __s 6mo ago
  misleading title. MODS?
• keiferski 6mo ago
  I think it's probably accurate to say that the vast majority of writers throughout history were writing for an extremely tiny or nonexistent audience. My favorite example of this is Nietzsche, who basically had zero readership during most of his life, beyond a few close friends, and even had to personally pay to get his books published. He only posthumously became one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century. So while I do worry about AI's impact on blogging/writing/etc., I do think to some extent, you either love the process or you don't. If you only write in order to have readers, you're in the wrong game.
  • justonceokay 6mo ago
    There are a lot of arts that were funded for a short time in our recent history that previously were absolutely not funded at all under almost any circumstance. Centralized media created centralized stars with centralized incomes For the vast majority of history it was all community theater, carnies, and “that guy in the square guy who knows the lute”. Fun fact, in medieval Europe acting was considered a sin so great you could not get a Christian burial, as you were channeling the spirit of others. Realpolitik it was probably because actors were mostly queer in the cities and Roma in the countryside. What’s old is new…
  • savory_pancake 6mo ago
    This is interesting to me: for some reason I had in my mind that Nietzsche may have been in poor health but was at least somewhat well known in his time. There’s always Van Gogh and Starry Night to think about as well.
    • keiferski 6mo ago
      He became reasonably well known amongst the German intellectual class, but only after he was already “insane.” There are some interesting anecdotes of this, especially one I came across in Harry Kessler’s diary. During Nietzsche’s conscious life he was basically only read by his friends.
• rickcarlino 6mo ago
  LLMs can produce text information but they cannot have experiences. Writing about authentic experience is still a worth while endeavor. Expression of a preference is also an experience when framed correctly.
  • justonceokay 6mo ago
    I think about Irish and British writing of dialogue, where is is extremely common for characters to only just now realize the importance of something their interlocutor said, and backtrack the conversation. Often this is done for humor. (Think about characters correcting each other with the use of “exacerbate” in Shaun of the Dead) The only way to write like that is to have a real theory of mind for the two characters and understand that they are four processing speeds: that of both speakers, that of the narrator, and that of the reader.
• giancarlostoro 6mo ago
  I find it funny how clanker took off and everyone uses it. It was edited in a video where someone was otherwise saying something extremely racist (the more offensive version of the n-word). For those curious it involves a burger king hat, schizophrenia and an airplane, someone edited the n-word out and put clanker with AI (because why not insult AI by using AI?). I do wonder if the AI uprising will involve robots killing anyone who used clanker in a derogatory way and sparing everyone else. Also, yes, I know the origin is Star Wars, but it went viral recently a very specific way. The power of edgelord memes.
  • damnitbuilds 6mo ago
    Years until we are forbidden from writing Clanker and have to write C***r: 3
    • giancarlostoro 6mo ago
      I had Claude write me some lyrics about Clankers after that one guy had an AI write a hit piece about him over denying his PR.
• danesparza 6mo ago
  I just chased a few interesting rabbit holes because of the links to other articles in this article. Thank you for that. ;-)
• code_for_monkey 6mo ago
  I work for a bank and Im basically just an ai user now. Honestly its like pulling teeth to get anyone to look at your code here. Im just on hackernews lol
  • rglover 6mo ago
    Major or regional? This is alarming beyond words.
    • code_for_monkey 6mo ago
      Major, big big major, not just me either. How is it alarming beyond words? If I said "Im an emt and I just ask the AI everything" now that would be alarming beyond words.
      • Eextra953 6mo ago
        I have a buddy who is a cop and he tells me that they use AI to write reports and even to check if their reason for pulling someone over will hold up later. As annoying as it is in SW, people using AI outside of SW is much more alarming.
        • code_for_monkey 6mo ago
          Now thats alarming!
      • rglover 6mo ago
        Because it's a bank and apparently a big one.
        • code_for_monkey 6mo ago
          do you think the other big banks arent doing this? Bank jobs are pretty broad, theres a ton of code getting written here.
• aaa_aaa 6mo ago
  On the copyright stuff, I say good riddance.
• abeppu 6mo ago
  I think the "Leave them Behind" section at the end sort of ignores the whole "they will ruthlessly copy your material, and put aggressive extra load on your server while repeatedly stealing your work" dimension. You can try to avoid consuming AI-generated material, but of course part-way through a lot of things you may wonder whether it is partly AI-generated, and we don't yet have a credible "human-authored" stamp. But you can't really keep them from using your work to make cheap copies of you, or at least reducing your audience by including information or insights from your work in the chat sessions of people who otherwise might have read your work.
• pklausler 6mo ago
  > First let’s accept the realities. The giant plagiarism machines have already stolen everything. Copyright is dead. Licenses are washed away in clean rooms. Mass surveillance and tracking are a feature, privacy is a bug. Everything is an “algorithm” optimised to exploit. Suppose that I have discovered a novel algorithm that solves an important basic problem much more efficiently than current techniques do. How do I hide it from the web scrapers that will steal it if I put it on GitHub or elsewhere? Should I just write it up as a paper and be content with citations and minor glory? Or should I capture AI search results today for "write me code that does X", put my new code up under a restrictive license, capture search results a day later, demonstrate that an AI scraper has acquired the algorithm in violation of the license, and seek damages?
  • saulpw 6mo ago
    Isaac Newton tried to keep his Calculus secret and almost got scooped by Leibniz. IMO trying to hoard knowledge is not a great look; we all (mostly) have a sense that knowledge belongs to humanity as a whole.
  • keeda 6mo ago
    I think what you're looking for is patents. I've said it before, but I think patents are the only protection left for innovative software and "the little guy." It always was, really, but it's blindingly apparent today. Unfortunately, that would be considered heresy on forums like HN, and people will continue to rail against AI and whatever it's causing and patents, instead of realizing that one is the only available leverage against the other.
    • pklausler 6mo ago
      I have a few patents, including one for a novel machine instruction, and I recall the attorney telling me that one cannot patent mathematics, only methods and systems.
      • keeda 6mo ago
        That's true but generally that applies to purely abstract mathematics. If the mathematics is truly abstract, no form of IP anywhere would protect it. That has always been (rightfully IMO) the realm of scientific publications. Otherwise it's straightforward to say that the mathematics is being applied to achieve a practical goal via execution on a computer. (You'll see the term non-transitory computer-readable media" a lot in claims.) You now have a method and system. Now, caselaw frequently changes things, like the "Alice" decision in the US made it much harder to just patent things done "on a computer" but the underlying principle holds. I'd also guess if your approach makes something faster or cheaper, it should be possible to show it is non-abstract, because resources like time and costs are not abstract quantities. Standard disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer! I've just worked with patents extensively.
• prplfsh 6mo ago
  I honestly don't get it - how isn't everyone having a blast with AI? Every one of those side projects you never had time for you can build in a weekend. You can explore five ideas at once. You can do big refactors/cleanups you'd never be able to dream of in the past. As a software engineer it's been fantastic.
  • tenahu 6mo ago
    That has been my feeling too. I have completed soo many personal projects (or improvements) that were collecting dust on my 'mental shelf'. Without AI I would probably never get to them because realistically, I do not have dozens, or hundreds of personal hours to devote to fun, but unnecessary projects.
  • glouwbug 6mo ago
    Some of us work on critical systems
  • drchickensalad 6mo ago
    You do know that there's many different personalities that people can have right? A lot of people love writing code and don't care about those things at all.
  • nunez 6mo ago
    I've been using Claude for a side project I've been trying to write for some time. Seeing it generate features at a much faster clip than I can (that actually compiles) has definitely been addictive. However, the joy I used to get from seeing something that I wrote work is all but gone, and it sucks big time to lose that. The back and forth is more annoying now as well. Instead of trying different approaches to code to produce an outcome, I'm prompting "this is broken; can you fix it?" or "this almost works! can you do $x instead" and doing stuff in another window while Claude churns. This isn't fun or stimulating at all for me. It's like carrying a dog to a ball instead of making them run for it. Using it also reminds me that a big part of the experience I've spent years accumulating is (or feels) no longer useful. That everyone can "write" (produce) code now is a good thing, but SO MUCH TIME AND ENERGY was spent on putting writing and understanding code on a pedestal (especially on this site), and seeing that get torn down while gaslighting us into thinking that this never happened has been affecting my psyche for sure. There's also the dirty feeling I get from abdicating more and more of my skills to a big company that is probably salivating at the idea of developers not being able to write code without Claude Code anymore. I have a handful of projects I'd like to work on, but I'd rather leave them on the shelf until I can hand-write them than use agents to finish them and, in doing so, create a codebase that I'm less likely to be able to maintain without agents. I guess I can turn the question back at you: how aren't you not losing your mind at becoming a glorified spec writer?
• Bridged7756 6mo ago
  I just don't see it. What's truly sad is that a field allegedly filled with technically proficient people is filled with trend chasing and FOTM trends. To this day, people with nuanced takes are far and between and most people either go full force into LLM evangelism or LLM denial, the first more annoying, by far. I'm really getting tired of the programming obituaries. As if LLMs didn't fail at any complex task, as if they didn't vomit shit code and as if they didn't just copy patterns surrounding the new code, and as if they didn't hallucinate and downright write wrong code or made up libraries. Yet for some reason, every time you bring it up, someone will come along and say "You're not using it right then.", Is it that, or is it just that they're only doing toy projects? I'm led to believe the latter. At this point I don't know what's organic and what's not. Reddit is filled with astroturfing for big LLM. Maybe this place is too? Even if that was not the case, I'm led to believe that it isn't uncommon for people to swallow up all of the big LLM propaganda and fall into despair, or fall into unrealistic expectations, and just parrot it everywhere else. One thing is for certain, LLM evangelism has all the money of the world, and LLM denial doesn't. It's only natural to think that the balance is tilted in terms of media presence. Even at the best, or worst, LLMs can't do anything you couldn't do yourself better with a scaffolding prompt + manual editing, and at the end of the day, you still need the cognitive energy to review, veto, come up with, the implementation. What does this exactly do anyways other than saving you a bunch of keypresses? I wonder if the people touting it to be all that really didn't think before LLMs, of just switched their brain off on them. I used to really like this site, but I think that just consuming the RSS feed is enough for me. I think that lobster.rs has less "trend chasing" point of views these days, and I do wonder if it might be on here there's larger amounts of non technical people jumpy to call for the funeral of things.
  • littlexsparkee 6mo ago
    for those confused, lobster.rs is a Serbian language learning school, parent meant lobste.rs
• VectorVault 6mo ago
  [dead]
• simianwords 6mo ago
  This person gives me the vibe that they are so attached to their craft that they can't seem to do anything about LLM's ubiquity rising but scold and vaguely sloganeer. Was this how other professionals dealt with their grief? Like a translator in the advent of ML based translations? Like a lift man?
  • justonceokay 6mo ago
    I’m reminded of the Douglas Adams quote I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: 1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. 2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. 3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things. A lot of the dissonance on this forum is probably age based.
    • jjk7 6mo ago
      "I used to be with it, but then they changed what it was. Now what I'm with isn't it, and what's it seems weird and scary to me, and it'll happen to you, too." - Abe Simpson
• yabutlivnWoods 6mo ago
  Such a bizarre sentiment the web and internet as we know/knew them is some bastion of freedom and future for humanity. According to the author AI is 99% hype. That 1% of AI utility can unlock more for humanity than 99.999% of blogs; static text hosted from a laptop in a closet. Odd ball position that cheap publishing via the web is a path to The Next Generation for humanity is 100% hype. Other than feeding dopamine addiction humanity has not improved greatly since we read all those insipid posts on GeoCities no one remembers today. It's all been 99%+ hype to feed Wall Street. Young GenX and older Millennials with tech jobs were temporary political pawns and gonna end up bag holders like may older GenXers and Boomers who lived through the car boom, the housing boom, the retail boom. Same old human shit, different hype.
• okokwhatever 6mo ago
  When will we understand that not everybody works in a FAANG? Assuming that the way to put some food in the table for all software developers is always a matter of creating a new magical algor. in a mystical programming language deployed in an unicorn architecture is so childish. 99% of all software development today is simply creating a crud or refactoring a codebase because React guys decided to change everything again.
• throwaway743 6mo ago
  The footer rules
• cynicalpeace 6mo ago
  People don't care what bots have to say Therefore, things like writing, film, sales, etc are less productively scalable by bots And things like code, where people don't care how the sausage is made as long as it "works" are more productively scalable by bots And even in the situation of code, the job description leans more on defining what "works" which requires the human touch
• sublinear 6mo ago
  If writing code was the only value your employer ever saw in you, it's for the best that you're forced to find a better job now. You would have eventually hit this point in your career anyway regardless of "AI". The broader corporate world has never wanted code monkeys. They want "boring" reliability and pay a reasonable wage for it. On the other hand, they also won't tolerate contrarians who can't deliver, so maybe some of the fear from people posting this sort of thing really is justified.
• runningmike 6mo ago
  Love the one-armed code bandit on the home page of this blog! Nice UX experience! See: https://dbushell.com/ https://dbushell.com/
• archagon 6mo ago
  So many insecure AI boosters in the comments slandering and mocking the author. And yet the upvotes clearly indicate that the sentiment in the article resonates widely with the community. Well, there’s not much of a point leaving a comment saying “yes, this, exactly this,” so I’ll leave one here on behalf of my fellow lurkers. The more AI gets shoved down my throat, the less I’m inclined to use it for anything, and the more I’m inspired to write my own writing, make my own art, and create my own code — with great creative joy and burning anger. Enjoy your 1000x productivity gains and your inevitable burnout as you downskill to a glorified inference loop.
• Context_Engine 6mo ago
  the tools of today are pretty great!
• mtrifonov 6mo ago
  I'm building in the opposite direction. An AI that participates in group conversations but knows when to shut up. The hardest part is making it not talk when humans are handling it. Turns out coding social awareness into an AI is way harder than coding productivity. I get why people feel replaced by the productivity tools. The social side is nowhere close to replacing anyone.
• deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
• mimd 6mo ago
  Considering that the rant is using photos from Star Trek and Oliver Twist to make their points, copyrighted material with no indication of permission, they're less "creative" than a stochastic parrot.