There’s something uninspiring about a machine thats supposed to “do the hard things for you” so to speak. I like using my mind and understanding things deeply.
Sure you could say that “managing the AI” can be deeply understood in a way but it’s just not exciting.
I'm looking at engineering job specs at the moment and it's very wearisome that every company seems to have pivoted from highlighting the unique value they provide to customers to putting AI front and centre in their employer branding. My eyes immediately glaze over at what may have been the result of "Claude, take this HR/marketing/whatever copy and inject some AI".
I've adopted the tools because they're useful, but businesses need to chill. AI seems to amplify existing bottlenecks within organisations, so we should probably tread carefully when it comes to pushing the tech. Fix the organisational problems first and hedge our bets.
I wonder if anyone reading this was around during the dot-com bubble because maybe it felt the same...
Yes, I was around then. It felt exactly the same. That’s how you know it’s a bubble. Because everyone starts acting stupid and conjuring up all these ridiculous explanations for why it makes sense when it plainly doesn’t. In 1999, everything was about the Internet, even when it didn’t make sense. Every company was saying that to be left out of the “Internet revolution” was a fast path to bankruptcy. It’s the same with AI today. Yes, the Internet was important and some companies did get displaced, but most didn’t. So too for AI.
I was around during the dot-com bubble. When it popped it popped pretty quickly. It wasn't a slow leak. Everything needed to be a dot-com and everything was centered around being a dot-com no matter what the business actually did. Money was pouring and almost anything dot-com was getting funding.
I moved to a dot-com right at the tail end of it. We built a pretty decent startup from scratch within the first two months and debuted at one of the largest trade shows in the world. We had our own private label factoring credit card and we did credit card transactions over the internet and with handheld cellular devices. It was built to scale, colocated, and we were getting customers. When the floor dropped out it was done in less than two months. dot-com was a very negative thing for a while after that.
What's especially frustrating is that the posts about AI are also disproportionately written by AI. I can sort of understand that people who are very enthusiastic about LLMs also use them for blogging. But the most bizarre part is that a lot of anti-AI opinion pieces are LLM-generated too. Either cynical click-sploitation or extreme hypocrisy.
I noticed recently that there are new "AI Widget" and "Chat Widget" EasyList filters in the uBlock Origin Annoyances filter lists. I'm not sure when they were added but they weren't checked by default for me. They definitely help clear some of the clutter.
AI has helped me rediscover my love of coding. It helps me write my emails for me, puts together my shopping list, and gives me advice on how to structure my day. AI tells me what to do. I don't have to fear my choices anymore, because AI makes the choices for me.
I think this is just social media content right? Just don't consume it?
Personally I find AI great and where I can , everything is AI enhanced
- Coding / Software dev (obvious one)
- Health ... been super useful as I recently had a thyroidectomy, it's given me a lot of information the drs didn't and also spotted a mistake my dr made in post surgery symptoms. I maintain my own set of .md files documenting all medical things now.
- Shopping. Super useful though still has a way to go, but relative to google I tend to use the AI results more often.
- Random problems... Insanely useful!
- Fact Checking, pretty good for the most. But you have to fact check your fact checking.
One problem is that when people delegate tasks to AI, they don't themselves learn anything from doing the task -- not just in the general sense of personal improvement, but in the very concrete sense of "what is it that was produced".
Before AI, when someone showed you a presentation or an Excel sheet, even if it was complete horseshit that they had made up, they knew what was in it: they knew more about it than you, by definition.
Now, not so much; people output things they know nothing about, and when they show it to you they are discovering it just as you are.
I have a tech support buddy who, while good, allows himself more arrogance than his skills deserve. I asked him what CRC errors, and he said to ask AI, kindly providing me its output:
> CRC (Cyclic Redundancy Check) errors on Wi-Fi indicate that data frames were corrupted during transmission, often caused by high electromagnetic interference (EMI), physical layer issues, or faulty hardware. They cause packet loss, slow speeds, and intermittent connectivity. Common solutions include replacing cables, reducing interference, updating drivers, and adjusting radio power
This is all well and good except: read the prompt carefully. It never actually says what CRC errors are. This is the average AI user: literally work on, build, and fix things without the slightest clue about what it is you're actually working on.
I took compliance training today and the "actors" and voices were AI.
After watching the GPT images release video, it reenforced my skepticism that society will adapt. Then I thought about AI analysis of people's movements in public and realized that governments already capture everything, and now will be able to use infinite AI surveillance agents to watch all things all the time.
Any disobedience or crime (but really only against the government and gentry) can be instantly investigated by asking AI to analyze the behavior of all people and vehicles in the days prior to and after the incident. That's if they can't identify you immediately at the time of the crime.
When the time comes that civilian disorder is required to change the behavior of government, it will be impossible.
AI is the destruction of individual freedom. It is the destruction of citizens' ability to rebel against power.
This has been happening in China since 2018[1]. North Korea is able to oppress its citizens just fine without AI. I don't think recent advances are going to revolutionize government oppression.
If you can afford it hire a virtual assistant and have them filter things for you and curate stuff. If you are suffering through things to find glimpses of enjoyment it is best you outsource your suffering to someone dedicated. Seriously, I had a $5 dollar an hour assistant who did all sorts random stuff for me. This even included curating things to read, talking to professional acquaintances on behalf of me using a script. It will cost you around 200-300 dollar a month but with the right person you can skip the BS.
I block YouTube channels if I see they use AI slop as their thumbnail image and certainly if they use AI voices once the video starts playing. (This is only feasible because I already select from a highly curated subset of YouTube that generally doesn't use AI.)
I'm working with AI since early 00's and it was a lot of fan of this with very little community of an artificial neural networks developers. Now AI is widely available and used by people with discussable level of intelligence to generate tons of slop, so all the internet looks like a big trash bin.
AI slop everywhere on social is terrible; I grant you that.
But AI tool in the hands of professionals that care about what they produce is becoming revolutionary. We are doing things we would never have done. Projects I never would have even started I am doing with new enthusiasm. I and the people I work with are using agents to learn new topics so fast. AI makes mistakes all the time, I found myself getting gaslit last week that refreshing my auth token would update my permissions (authentication and authorization are not the same thing)
If you are just looking at the output in images and garbage posts. Yes it is an abomination that must be stopped. But I cannot imagine a world without it now. And for the better.
> I and the people I work with are using agents to learn new topics so fast.
I'm a person who loves learning but I don't really understand this claim. My brain quickly reaches a saturation point when learning new topics. I need to leave and come back multiple times until I begin to understand, but this seems to me to be a normal part of the process. It's the struggle that forms the connections in my brain.
Being spoon-fed information isn't the same as learning, to me. Are you also using AI to test you on your new knowledge? Does it administer these tests periodically? Or are you just reviewing notes and saying to yourself "I know this now"?
How are you ensuring you've learned anything at all?
I think this is a problem unique to facebook / meta. I mean the camera roll has a dedicated "ai images" at the top instead of... your active camera like every other app.
This all started with zucks obsession with virtual avatars and you can really see this in VR.
I think we’ll look back on this period as The Great Enshittification where everyone ran out of ideas but capitalism demands growth so everything just got worse. The mass manufacturing of mediocre AI content might be the force that ends the digital era and maybe we’ll all just go outside again.
Here's hoping. It's not that there's no new ideas, it's that they don't deliver VC sized returns. The only thing that delivers the returns investors are looking for are Ponzi schemes.
I do not dislike AI. It has potential to change and improve the human condition. With that being said, it has its downsides with workforce displacement being at the top of the list, for me at least. Unemployment, however, has been prevalent in the US for many decades, mostly due to political maneuvering of previous politicians. AI has just made things a bit more difficult for the workforce, especially the recent generations who were already dealing with unemployment due to unmarketable degrees from colleges. I am not ashamed to say that, though I've been in tech for years, I am one of those statistics, unfortunately.
To fix this, AI companies should refocus their goals to account for the displacement of human roles as they continue to improve AIs. They should start doing that sooner rather than later.
The reality is that AI already does things better than some humans ever could. From what some individuals have been telling me, in education, for example, AI is already disrupting the classrooms. Teachers are feeling the AI-burn in the already declining education sector.
Though, I see a decline in human creativity and influence due to AI, I myself have used it to learn certain OS-related concepts or tweaks that would have normally taken me months to figure out had I focused solely on google searches, reddit threads and similar.
If I could do more, I would but I am limited by the lack of better, powerful hardware with the price being what they are.
Exactly. This inability to accept progress is going to lead some people to ruin. Open mindedness would do a lot of good for them. Try to develop a taste for the technology: learn to ignore irrational fear of something that’s just a tool.
I think after the initial euphoria dies down, and the models reach a capability plateau, the use cases will start to come to fore.
I am an experienced developer, and, if I know what I am doing, then AI tools are an average junior programmer that I can beckon.
I have also dabbled in music creation with AI, first generating the lyrics, and then the music with vocals. Is it good. Nope. Is it average, some might say so. Is it a great use of my time, sure. Like a paid video game.
Nothing makes me hit that close button faster than those fake voices everywhere now. That overly polished narrator on every other TikTok, half the YouTube videos read by the same auto-tuned robot (that apparently people over 60 can't tell is a robot). And don't get me started on streamers with like a confidence voice filter. Fuck all that noise.
And it's only going to get worse. Is this what getting old feels like? Hating everything the rest of society is racing to embrace? I keep waiting for the backlash, for people to get sick of the plastic sheen on everything, but they conveyor belt just keeps moving. Maybe I'm just turning into my parents griping about all the weird music videos on MTV? =P
Sounds like they got sick of if after working on it so much. It's really frustrating and tiring when you get everything essentially right but it doesn't work out because of slightly off timing or for some absurdly complex set of reasons that you can never pin down. That's the recipe for burnout.
(1) Tried to bring back the old symbolic AI in 2010s on my own account but people kept knocking down my door because they needed help with one or another neural net. I got an autoencoder in front of customers as part of a highly successful product.
(2) Worked for a startup trying to teach RNNs to read clinical notes; people typecast me as the idealist but I would have preferred the cynical business plan of a product for medical offices to "rebill" insurance to maximize revenue, like the value is clear and nobody dies if it screws up.
(3) Worked at another startup that was training CNNs to read all sorts of documents and datasets you see in corporate environments. That summer I had a methodology I called "predictive evaluation" and a sheaf full of notes that proved that variations of the system we had wasn't really going to work (but they did get it to work enough for one at least one customer) and there was that meeting when we talked about BERT and I said "that seems to avoid all my objections" but the team was through with developing new models and my methodology would have underestimated what BERT could do because it didn't give credit for getting the right answer by the wrong method! Turned out transformers also fixed problems those RNNs had too!
Facebook especially is bad because I don't think Zuck cares. His entire personal history is shady. People have been missing posts for YEARS, well beyond the last few years when it got really bad
(I'm going to guess you mean generative AI such as image/video/text generation used to create slop on Facebook, but I really wish posts like this would clarify.)
I think this post is vague enough for each one of us to think about the part we are sick of and relate. I'm sick of generative for sure.. but then again [0]:
> Everyone seems to have their own personal definition of acceptable AI use. If you Vibecode an entire app, it's because you are lazy and unskilled. But use AI for code review and writing tests? You are smart and efficient.
> You could use AI to remove photo backgrounds or clean up artifacts, that's just good editing. But generating an image for your blog post? You are stealing from hardworking artists. You are a fraud! You probably use AI as a writing assistant like a monster. But using it to generate documentation from your code is indispensable.
Unfortunate that it took so long for you to realize social networks are just a river of outrage and slop, because it has literally always been so for a decade before AI even became a thing - it's just that now AI has made the cheapness immediately visible.
I used to be able to curate my feed and pay attention to people I knew. I could see the photo projects my friends were working on, hear about life updates from past acquaintances, or reach out if someone was having a rough time.
Now, all cohorts, from recent coworkers to childhood friends I made before the first web browser, routinely spew paragraphs of LLM slop to shill a career coaching podcast. It’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
Social networks are only a small part of it. It’s email, mailing lists, billboards, sheets of paper stapled to utility poles, newspaper articles, dentist office phone lines, jigsaw puzzles, home furnishings, homework assigned to grade schoolers, birthday cards and on and on.
There is no real life anymore because even if you realize how fucked up things are, people around you will keep swiming in that river of outrage and slop life became. World is so fucked up
I don't mind AI. What I don't like is the complete saturation of communication channels with the same mainstream ideas and products over and over. This started long before AI slop.
I like ai. It's great. You can make your own apps. Hack anything basically. Print money. It's easy to block ai posts on browser level using ai of course. Oh...
Far from “dooming”, AI currently has a major public image problem - it’s got a lower approval rating than the current President. Most people’s perception of AI is the lousy customer service chatbot, a phone tree that doesn’t work when they call customer service, and AI generated spam, scammy images, and so forth.
Couple with that the frequent press about “AI is going to replace your job” and the public image problem is pretty bad.
Public image isn’t reality. Just because people can’t be bothered to learn about the productivity boost that AI provides for businesses: doesn’t mean that there aren’t any. Honestly this constant outrage and FUD is getting ridiculous. Don’t use it if you don’t like it. Some of us actually want to be more efficient.
Bot implementation quality is up to the engineer. It is not an inherent limitation of the LLM.
AI replacing jobs is a good thing. I don't know why people want to keep doing stupid jobs that even a machine can do. As for their income, they should vote for politicians that give them benefits rather than take them away.
I am sure there were people for a few decades that complained that horses were no longer in demand, but these people are now extinct, and the AI doomers will be too.
What’s wrong with printers? Imagine designing a laser that bounces off of mirror spinning at 20k+ rpm while coordinating with a paper feeder. Sounds pretty cool to me
I honestly want to follow you around for a day. I am reserved with how I engage with technology. It needs to be making my life better, not extracting value from me. Tech for tech alone is no longer exciting to me as it once was.
Am I the only one that wants to print on dot-matrix printers again? Maybe find a copy of The Print Shop (Broderbund). It could just be nostalgia kicking in.
Unironically the best method to implement that browser feature you're looking for is probably also AI. Which tells a meta-story, AI isn't a new feature it's also a new medium. It can be used to turn cave speak into works of literature just as easily as it can turn voluminous spew into one liners (Ed Zitron just popped into mind for some reason). You can't ignore it once it exists, but it sounds like the problem you have genuinely can be solved by it, and I expect over the next decade we'll see a lot more of exactly that.
Here's to reading HN projected through the lens of manga comic strips sometime after we solve the GPU shortage..
There's incredible opportunity in the stuff that is missing, which is a wonderful thing.
The linear function do not work any more - we'll all deal with AI on some level, handwritten programs would be like assembly programs, there will be some, but not many.
But everyone is currently focused on the second derivative - using AI to further AI stuff - that's a valid goal but not in of itself, AI is just a tool, a tool that gets better is still a tool. It still needs to build something other than itself.
First derivative is where the money is. Let me grab this tool and do something useful/fun with it. Thanks for the fierce competition to build me the best tool in the mean time.
Like adding erosion to this hydrology simulator that I felt too complex a few years ago: https://aperocky.com/hydrosim
Why though? It is the technology of today's times. 70s had microprocessors, 80s had languages and tools, 90s was about the internet, 00s was about e-commerce and then web2.0 and later iPhone, mobile/local/social, 15s-20s was gig and creator economy, blockchain, metaverse... and now its AI. If you are sick of reading about AI, what would you rather read/talk about?
Maybe I’m naive since most of that was before I was born, but a lot of the past topics you mentioned seem more interesting because the people talking about them (I assume) had interesting knowledge and opinions to share about them. AI is an extremely boring topic because the people most excited about it are “idea people” rather than people with interesting knowledge and expertise. And idea people are pretty draining to listen to for years on end.
Even the top post on HN about ChatGPT’s image generation is full of a bunch of comments just saying “wow this is epic”, “I can make so many mangas with this”, etc. Or a post about a new model where people are saying bland stuff like “this doesn’t write Typescript as well as Nut43-2.1-Max”. Compare those to a post about language design, for instance, and you’d see a lot more interesting discussion and opinions.
Just my opinion though. It seems like the more interesting topics in AI are related to its divisiveness, and even that is getting super old after years of it going on.
For me it’s just become…incredibly boring.
There’s something uninspiring about a machine thats supposed to “do the hard things for you” so to speak. I like using my mind and understanding things deeply.
Sure you could say that “managing the AI” can be deeply understood in a way but it’s just not exciting.
I'm looking at engineering job specs at the moment and it's very wearisome that every company seems to have pivoted from highlighting the unique value they provide to customers to putting AI front and centre in their employer branding. My eyes immediately glaze over at what may have been the result of "Claude, take this HR/marketing/whatever copy and inject some AI".
I've adopted the tools because they're useful, but businesses need to chill. AI seems to amplify existing bottlenecks within organisations, so we should probably tread carefully when it comes to pushing the tech. Fix the organisational problems first and hedge our bets.
I wonder if anyone reading this was around during the dot-com bubble because maybe it felt the same...
Yes, I was around then. It felt exactly the same. That’s how you know it’s a bubble. Because everyone starts acting stupid and conjuring up all these ridiculous explanations for why it makes sense when it plainly doesn’t. In 1999, everything was about the Internet, even when it didn’t make sense. Every company was saying that to be left out of the “Internet revolution” was a fast path to bankruptcy. It’s the same with AI today. Yes, the Internet was important and some companies did get displaced, but most didn’t. So too for AI.
I was around during the dot-com bubble. When it popped it popped pretty quickly. It wasn't a slow leak. Everything needed to be a dot-com and everything was centered around being a dot-com no matter what the business actually did. Money was pouring and almost anything dot-com was getting funding.
I moved to a dot-com right at the tail end of it. We built a pretty decent startup from scratch within the first two months and debuted at one of the largest trade shows in the world. We had our own private label factoring credit card and we did credit card transactions over the internet and with handheld cellular devices. It was built to scale, colocated, and we were getting customers. When the floor dropped out it was done in less than two months. dot-com was a very negative thing for a while after that.
Step 1: remove reference to blockchain
Step 2: insert reference to AI
Yes, a lot of posts on HN are also about AI. Used to have more variety.
There is a bright side, though: At least we’ve stopped talking about crypto.
When the AI bubble pops, we’re all going back to talking crypto.
very exciting time in crypto with NIST finally standardizing a bunch of pq stuff! (that's what we're going to be talking about, right???)
Naw, in another five minutes it’ll be something different. But it will be about crypto.
What's especially frustrating is that the posts about AI are also disproportionately written by AI. I can sort of understand that people who are very enthusiastic about LLMs also use them for blogging. But the most bizarre part is that a lot of anti-AI opinion pieces are LLM-generated too. Either cynical click-sploitation or extreme hypocrisy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Society_of_the_Spectacle
You’re absolutely right!
I noticed recently that there are new "AI Widget" and "Chat Widget" EasyList filters in the uBlock Origin Annoyances filter lists. I'm not sure when they were added but they weren't checked by default for me. They definitely help clear some of the clutter.
AI has helped me rediscover my love of coding. It helps me write my emails for me, puts together my shopping list, and gives me advice on how to structure my day. AI tells me what to do. I don't have to fear my choices anymore, because AI makes the choices for me.
Sam and Dario were in the closet making AIs and I saw one of the AIs and the AI looked at me.
The AI looked at you?!
I think this is just social media content right? Just don't consume it?
Personally I find AI great and where I can , everything is AI enhanced
- Coding / Software dev (obvious one)
- Health ... been super useful as I recently had a thyroidectomy, it's given me a lot of information the drs didn't and also spotted a mistake my dr made in post surgery symptoms. I maintain my own set of .md files documenting all medical things now.
- Shopping. Super useful though still has a way to go, but relative to google I tend to use the AI results more often.
- Random problems... Insanely useful!
- Fact Checking, pretty good for the most. But you have to fact check your fact checking.
- Market Research, surprisingly good
- Philosophy, really good and useful
So basically anything.
You can use AI, tell AI to read the page first and if it's AI anything to block it. Vibecode an extension.
One problem is that when people delegate tasks to AI, they don't themselves learn anything from doing the task -- not just in the general sense of personal improvement, but in the very concrete sense of "what is it that was produced".
Before AI, when someone showed you a presentation or an Excel sheet, even if it was complete horseshit that they had made up, they knew what was in it: they knew more about it than you, by definition.
Now, not so much; people output things they know nothing about, and when they show it to you they are discovering it just as you are.
This is novel, and discomforting.
I have a tech support buddy who, while good, allows himself more arrogance than his skills deserve. I asked him what CRC errors, and he said to ask AI, kindly providing me its output:
> CRC (Cyclic Redundancy Check) errors on Wi-Fi indicate that data frames were corrupted during transmission, often caused by high electromagnetic interference (EMI), physical layer issues, or faulty hardware. They cause packet loss, slow speeds, and intermittent connectivity. Common solutions include replacing cables, reducing interference, updating drivers, and adjusting radio power
This is all well and good except: read the prompt carefully. It never actually says what CRC errors are. This is the average AI user: literally work on, build, and fix things without the slightest clue about what it is you're actually working on.
He makes >6 figures lol
Yes, the "desirable difficulties" are gone in many areas
Honestly, quite a tragedy for many. Myself, I have to be constantly fighting against this to slow myself down
This drives me absolutely nuts.
I took compliance training today and the "actors" and voices were AI.
After watching the GPT images release video, it reenforced my skepticism that society will adapt. Then I thought about AI analysis of people's movements in public and realized that governments already capture everything, and now will be able to use infinite AI surveillance agents to watch all things all the time.
Any disobedience or crime (but really only against the government and gentry) can be instantly investigated by asking AI to analyze the behavior of all people and vehicles in the days prior to and after the incident. That's if they can't identify you immediately at the time of the crime.
When the time comes that civilian disorder is required to change the behavior of government, it will be impossible.
AI is the destruction of individual freedom. It is the destruction of citizens' ability to rebel against power.
We would be far better off without it.
This has been happening in China since 2018[1]. North Korea is able to oppress its citizens just fine without AI. I don't think recent advances are going to revolutionize government oppression.
[1] https://inv.thepixora.com/watch?v=CLo3e1Pak-Y
youtube version: https://youtube.com/watch?v=CLo3e1Pak-Y
Right behind you.
If you can afford it hire a virtual assistant and have them filter things for you and curate stuff. If you are suffering through things to find glimpses of enjoyment it is best you outsource your suffering to someone dedicated. Seriously, I had a $5 dollar an hour assistant who did all sorts random stuff for me. This even included curating things to read, talking to professional acquaintances on behalf of me using a script. It will cost you around 200-300 dollar a month but with the right person you can skip the BS.
I block YouTube channels if I see they use AI slop as their thumbnail image and certainly if they use AI voices once the video starts playing. (This is only feasible because I already select from a highly curated subset of YouTube that generally doesn't use AI.)
I'm working with AI since early 00's and it was a lot of fan of this with very little community of an artificial neural networks developers. Now AI is widely available and used by people with discussable level of intelligence to generate tons of slop, so all the internet looks like a big trash bin.
It's especially irritating if OpenAI is built off fraud which it could be. It means the whole bubble/genuine current hot thing got off to a bad start
AI slop everywhere on social is terrible; I grant you that.
But AI tool in the hands of professionals that care about what they produce is becoming revolutionary. We are doing things we would never have done. Projects I never would have even started I am doing with new enthusiasm. I and the people I work with are using agents to learn new topics so fast. AI makes mistakes all the time, I found myself getting gaslit last week that refreshing my auth token would update my permissions (authentication and authorization are not the same thing)
If you are just looking at the output in images and garbage posts. Yes it is an abomination that must be stopped. But I cannot imagine a world without it now. And for the better.
> I and the people I work with are using agents to learn new topics so fast.
I'm a person who loves learning but I don't really understand this claim. My brain quickly reaches a saturation point when learning new topics. I need to leave and come back multiple times until I begin to understand, but this seems to me to be a normal part of the process. It's the struggle that forms the connections in my brain.
Being spoon-fed information isn't the same as learning, to me. Are you also using AI to test you on your new knowledge? Does it administer these tests periodically? Or are you just reviewing notes and saying to yourself "I know this now"?
How are you ensuring you've learned anything at all?
I think this is a problem unique to facebook / meta. I mean the camera roll has a dedicated "ai images" at the top instead of... your active camera like every other app.
This all started with zucks obsession with virtual avatars and you can really see this in VR.
I think we’ll look back on this period as The Great Enshittification where everyone ran out of ideas but capitalism demands growth so everything just got worse. The mass manufacturing of mediocre AI content might be the force that ends the digital era and maybe we’ll all just go outside again.
Here's hoping. It's not that there's no new ideas, it's that they don't deliver VC sized returns. The only thing that delivers the returns investors are looking for are Ponzi schemes.
well this is overdue
Oft posted?
Most Americans are using AI but are sick and tired of hearing about it (2 points, 12 days ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47717956
I am definitely missing the pre-AI writing era (322 points, 23 days ago, 240 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47571279
I am leaving the AI party after one drink (121 points, 25 days ago, 130 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47545030
Is anybody else bored of talking about AI? (746 points, 28 days ago, 527 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47508745
I'm Sick of This AI Shit [video] (48 points, 2 months ago, 22 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47086392
Ask HN: AI Depression (56 points, 2 months ago, 28 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47001833
I am just sooo sick of AI prediction content, let's kill it already (74 points, 5 months ago, 71 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45982542
'Attention is all you need' coauthor says he's 'sick' of transformers (432 points, 6 months ago, 224 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45690840
Ask HN: Is anyone else sick of AI splattered code (89 points, 7 months ago, 84 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45278819
Hear, hear, friend, you might have missed web 2.0. Oh web 2.0. The designers like myself were so sick of this nonsense.
AI is the same, but amplified and affecting a lot more people.
So I just recall Web 2.0 era and know that this too, shall pass.
I get your frustration.
I do not dislike AI. It has potential to change and improve the human condition. With that being said, it has its downsides with workforce displacement being at the top of the list, for me at least. Unemployment, however, has been prevalent in the US for many decades, mostly due to political maneuvering of previous politicians. AI has just made things a bit more difficult for the workforce, especially the recent generations who were already dealing with unemployment due to unmarketable degrees from colleges. I am not ashamed to say that, though I've been in tech for years, I am one of those statistics, unfortunately.
To fix this, AI companies should refocus their goals to account for the displacement of human roles as they continue to improve AIs. They should start doing that sooner rather than later.
The reality is that AI already does things better than some humans ever could. From what some individuals have been telling me, in education, for example, AI is already disrupting the classrooms. Teachers are feeling the AI-burn in the already declining education sector.
Though, I see a decline in human creativity and influence due to AI, I myself have used it to learn certain OS-related concepts or tweaks that would have normally taken me months to figure out had I focused solely on google searches, reddit threads and similar.
If I could do more, I would but I am limited by the lack of better, powerful hardware with the price being what they are.
2001: I'm Sick of Internet Everything
Exactly. This inability to accept progress is going to lead some people to ruin. Open mindedness would do a lot of good for them. Try to develop a taste for the technology: learn to ignore irrational fear of something that’s just a tool.
I think after the initial euphoria dies down, and the models reach a capability plateau, the use cases will start to come to fore.
I am an experienced developer, and, if I know what I am doing, then AI tools are an average junior programmer that I can beckon.
I have also dabbled in music creation with AI, first generating the lyrics, and then the music with vocals. Is it good. Nope. Is it average, some might say so. Is it a great use of my time, sure. Like a paid video game.
Nothing makes me hit that close button faster than those fake voices everywhere now. That overly polished narrator on every other TikTok, half the YouTube videos read by the same auto-tuned robot (that apparently people over 60 can't tell is a robot). And don't get me started on streamers with like a confidence voice filter. Fuck all that noise.
And it's only going to get worse. Is this what getting old feels like? Hating everything the rest of society is racing to embrace? I keep waiting for the backlash, for people to get sick of the plastic sheen on everything, but they conveyor belt just keeps moving. Maybe I'm just turning into my parents griping about all the weird music videos on MTV? =P
I was sick about this before y'all because I was involved in three efforts to try to commercialize foundation models before the technology was ready.
Most of all I am sick of people being sick of it!
if you were already sick, why were you even working with it at all?
Sounds like they got sick of if after working on it so much. It's really frustrating and tiring when you get everything essentially right but it doesn't work out because of slightly off timing or for some absurdly complex set of reasons that you can never pin down. That's the recipe for burnout.
(1) Tried to bring back the old symbolic AI in 2010s on my own account but people kept knocking down my door because they needed help with one or another neural net. I got an autoencoder in front of customers as part of a highly successful product.
(2) Worked for a startup trying to teach RNNs to read clinical notes; people typecast me as the idealist but I would have preferred the cynical business plan of a product for medical offices to "rebill" insurance to maximize revenue, like the value is clear and nobody dies if it screws up.
(3) Worked at another startup that was training CNNs to read all sorts of documents and datasets you see in corporate environments. That summer I had a methodology I called "predictive evaluation" and a sheaf full of notes that proved that variations of the system we had wasn't really going to work (but they did get it to work enough for one at least one customer) and there was that meeting when we talked about BERT and I said "that seems to avoid all my objections" but the team was through with developing new models and my methodology would have underestimated what BERT could do because it didn't give credit for getting the right answer by the wrong method! Turned out transformers also fixed problems those RNNs had too!
probably: worked on it, then got sick of it
Facebook especially is bad because I don't think Zuck cares. His entire personal history is shady. People have been missing posts for YEARS, well beyond the last few years when it got really bad
Oh and messages https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6090712
What's "AI"?
(I'm going to guess you mean generative AI such as image/video/text generation used to create slop on Facebook, but I really wish posts like this would clarify.)
Not trying to be snarky but it’s pretty obviously the one that’s been dominating the news/LinkedIn/This site/meetings in tech jobs yeah?
I think this post is vague enough for each one of us to think about the part we are sick of and relate. I'm sick of generative for sure.. but then again [0]:
> Everyone seems to have their own personal definition of acceptable AI use. If you Vibecode an entire app, it's because you are lazy and unskilled. But use AI for code review and writing tests? You are smart and efficient.
> You could use AI to remove photo backgrounds or clean up artifacts, that's just good editing. But generating an image for your blog post? You are stealing from hardworking artists. You are a fraud! You probably use AI as a writing assistant like a monster. But using it to generate documentation from your code is indispensable.
[0]: https://idiallo.com/blog/ai-is-ok-just-not-yours
Use the ample context clues or have AI explain it to you, but either way we don't need useless comments like these.
This response is uncalled for, you’re making things unnecessarily hostile.
I literally guessed from the context clues in the (parentheses in my post).
Then why did you ask the question?
Because "I really wish posts like this would clarify".
Unfortunate that it took so long for you to realize social networks are just a river of outrage and slop, because it has literally always been so for a decade before AI even became a thing - it's just that now AI has made the cheapness immediately visible.
Enjoy your newfound freedom and live a real life.
No. Something genuine has been lost.
I used to be able to curate my feed and pay attention to people I knew. I could see the photo projects my friends were working on, hear about life updates from past acquaintances, or reach out if someone was having a rough time.
Now, all cohorts, from recent coworkers to childhood friends I made before the first web browser, routinely spew paragraphs of LLM slop to shill a career coaching podcast. It’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
Social networks are only a small part of it. It’s email, mailing lists, billboards, sheets of paper stapled to utility poles, newspaper articles, dentist office phone lines, jigsaw puzzles, home furnishings, homework assigned to grade schoolers, birthday cards and on and on.
There is no real life anymore because even if you realize how fucked up things are, people around you will keep swiming in that river of outrage and slop life became. World is so fucked up
Wise words
I have solution: let AI filter out unwanted AI contents! Subscription starts at $5/mo. /s
I don't mind AI. What I don't like is the complete saturation of communication channels with the same mainstream ideas and products over and over. This started long before AI slop.
I like ai. It's great. You can make your own apps. Hack anything basically. Print money. It's easy to block ai posts on browser level using ai of course. Oh...
There is no future for AI doomers.
Far from “dooming”, AI currently has a major public image problem - it’s got a lower approval rating than the current President. Most people’s perception of AI is the lousy customer service chatbot, a phone tree that doesn’t work when they call customer service, and AI generated spam, scammy images, and so forth.
Couple with that the frequent press about “AI is going to replace your job” and the public image problem is pretty bad.
Public image isn’t reality. Just because people can’t be bothered to learn about the productivity boost that AI provides for businesses: doesn’t mean that there aren’t any. Honestly this constant outrage and FUD is getting ridiculous. Don’t use it if you don’t like it. Some of us actually want to be more efficient.
Bot implementation quality is up to the engineer. It is not an inherent limitation of the LLM.
AI replacing jobs is a good thing. I don't know why people want to keep doing stupid jobs that even a machine can do. As for their income, they should vote for politicians that give them benefits rather than take them away.
I am sure there were people for a few decades that complained that horses were no longer in demand, but these people are now extinct, and the AI doomers will be too.
Yep, if you’re work can be automated so easily then you need to understand such work wasn’t as worthwhile as you thought.
Do you want there to be?
I love AI and LLMs.
I love all computer technology except printers.
Gimme more - looking forward to further leaps forward in AL and LLMs - the party has just started.
What’s wrong with printers? Imagine designing a laser that bounces off of mirror spinning at 20k+ rpm while coordinating with a paper feeder. Sounds pretty cool to me
I love printers, I hate ink cartridges
I love printers and ink, I hate the people that make the experience worse in hopes of making more money.
I honestly want to follow you around for a day. I am reserved with how I engage with technology. It needs to be making my life better, not extracting value from me. Tech for tech alone is no longer exciting to me as it once was.
> I love all computer technology except printers.
Am I the only one that wants to print on dot-matrix printers again? Maybe find a copy of The Print Shop (Broderbund). It could just be nostalgia kicking in.
Unironically the best method to implement that browser feature you're looking for is probably also AI. Which tells a meta-story, AI isn't a new feature it's also a new medium. It can be used to turn cave speak into works of literature just as easily as it can turn voluminous spew into one liners (Ed Zitron just popped into mind for some reason). You can't ignore it once it exists, but it sounds like the problem you have genuinely can be solved by it, and I expect over the next decade we'll see a lot more of exactly that.
Here's to reading HN projected through the lens of manga comic strips sometime after we solve the GPU shortage..
There's incredible opportunity in the stuff that is missing, which is a wonderful thing.
The linear function do not work any more - we'll all deal with AI on some level, handwritten programs would be like assembly programs, there will be some, but not many.
But everyone is currently focused on the second derivative - using AI to further AI stuff - that's a valid goal but not in of itself, AI is just a tool, a tool that gets better is still a tool. It still needs to build something other than itself.
First derivative is where the money is. Let me grab this tool and do something useful/fun with it. Thanks for the fierce competition to build me the best tool in the mean time.
Like adding erosion to this hydrology simulator that I felt too complex a few years ago: https://aperocky.com/hydrosim
Why though? It is the technology of today's times. 70s had microprocessors, 80s had languages and tools, 90s was about the internet, 00s was about e-commerce and then web2.0 and later iPhone, mobile/local/social, 15s-20s was gig and creator economy, blockchain, metaverse... and now its AI. If you are sick of reading about AI, what would you rather read/talk about?
Maybe I’m naive since most of that was before I was born, but a lot of the past topics you mentioned seem more interesting because the people talking about them (I assume) had interesting knowledge and opinions to share about them. AI is an extremely boring topic because the people most excited about it are “idea people” rather than people with interesting knowledge and expertise. And idea people are pretty draining to listen to for years on end.
Even the top post on HN about ChatGPT’s image generation is full of a bunch of comments just saying “wow this is epic”, “I can make so many mangas with this”, etc. Or a post about a new model where people are saying bland stuff like “this doesn’t write Typescript as well as Nut43-2.1-Max”. Compare those to a post about language design, for instance, and you’d see a lot more interesting discussion and opinions.
Just my opinion though. It seems like the more interesting topics in AI are related to its divisiveness, and even that is getting super old after years of it going on.