I'm the op on this one (not the author). Gotta say, I had higher hopes for the community here.
Isn't it worthwhile to examine our patterns of thinking and work? Shouldn't alternative perspectives such as these spark conversation, rather than sly jibes?
HN grew from curiosity and good-faith. Y'all are not showing up.
I recently mentioned that my team and most of my dev friends don’t use AI for code on a gamdev forum (we do stuff like distributed consensus, compilers, etc.). I was quickly denounced as “an arrogant douche”.
My wife got an email from a new hire (now even a new hire yet: she's still on a trial basis), a 23 years old, where she explains that she doesn't want to use AI. That she doesn't like what AI does. On a funny sidenote: the email is obviously 99% llmish, which is hilarious.
That's one extremity: crazy people who refuse to learn a new tool.
Then on the other extremity you have the even much crazier ones: those who believe they've got an intelligent machine that is going to solve all their work problems during the day and then, at night, that is going to enlighten them by revealing them who god really is.
Where the heck are the reasonable people who use AI for what it is: a tool that can be extremely helpful at times and extremely sucky at other times but that is still, on average, a time saver?
I use LLMs daily to piece together technical reports and smooth out rough drafts. It saves me hours of time / week.
I also use it to augment my technical work, because I don't want to be out of a job one day with no marketable skills, except driving an agent harness.
There is a percentage of the population that thinks LLMs are actually intelligent and truly can't tell the difference.
I think others just want to live life as a passenger, not think, and have AI do all the work.
> Where the heck are the reasonable people who use AI for what it is: a tool that can be extremely helpful at times and extremely sucky at other times but that is still, on average, a time saver?
They're unlikely to be vocal because they've already evaluated and decided the role AI will play in their work/life and just moved on/kept working. That's also likely to be a small pool of people relative to the number of people interacting with AI (either by force or choice).
> That's also likely to be a small pool of people relative to the number of people interacting with AI
Perhaps small now. But overall this seems to be what most have done in my small social circle. Small uses of AI here and there, sometimes surprising gains/wins they find out and share if asked, otherwise really it's just another tool to learn and make use of.
Most everyone thinks it's overhyped and wedged into stupid places it doesn't make much sense, especially in consumer products. But they also can recognize that behind the scenes and in closed doors there are perhaps some exciting things happening in certain industries and use-cases.
Most are still very much in the "haven't played with it much yet, it's moving too fast and I'm too old and busy with my life" or "still evaluating as time allows" stage. This is mid-career folks in various professional roles, skewing towards tech. Some sense of "this tech is getting good fast, and I will be left behind if I do not learn it at some point in the future".
I will say most have barely ventured past the "copy/paste from ChatGPT" stage of AI use. It usually elicits comment when someone moves past that and finds out they are far more capable than they realized. Then usually some more comments a couple weeks later mentioning newfound limitations.
We're right here! Some of us just prefer to stay out of these silly irrational debates because we know that neither of those two crazy camps will listen to a word we, or anyone else, will say. We might be wrong about that (I hope we're wrong about that!) but there sure are enough other people chattering that it's easy to sit back and let them have it out.
The "you'll get left behind" crowd has already made it clear that they're not worth engaging with, you're not going to find reasonable voices anywhere those threads are happening...
No AI needed for the design and build of custom metal either, and with a similar long human effort that I am privilaged to be aware and part of that I am quite certain cant be handled useing any computational averaging.
Funnily enough, I have had and am right now involved in a project that the customer tried to have AI design, but that
the most basic calculations were wrong.
It's worse, as even humans working with highly developed design and estimating software, cant deliver accurate shop plans for real world projects that involve irregular surfaces or curves, and changing slopes that must be measured on site.
AI will help you enjoy your cubes and parallograms, and cover them with realistic textures.
to the people claiming "hugged to death", this website works for me while on a train in rural Germany (anyone who lives in Europe should be all too aware about phone network quality here).
As for the content: fully agree. Human touch is a value in itself. Unfortunately, modern capitalism does not provide incentives to take care about value, because (by capitalism's metrics) value is inefficiency.
A website flaming out and dying in the face of unusual traffic is a perfectly reasonable business decision. These "witty" comments are effectively self owns.
Well, they're using Render which you'd think they'd be able to handle HN traffic. Not a good look for Render as a service, especially when their first item under product is autoscaling.
All these "principled" people telling others that "they practice what they preach" shooting themselves in the foot with their "production" site down and hugged to death on the front page.
Just ask the AI to set up your site for better uptime if you don't know how to.
This (and all the disgusting "hugged to death, you're dumb, use AI" comments that have replaced HN's normal venom-less "hugged to death" comments) makes me want to leave Hacker News.
It’s a mixed bag. You have insufferable mouth breathing morons who think AGI is here, and on the other hand you have rational - dare I say enlightened - individuals such as yourself.
I'm the op on this one (not the author). Gotta say, I had higher hopes for the community here.
Isn't it worthwhile to examine our patterns of thinking and work? Shouldn't alternative perspectives such as these spark conversation, rather than sly jibes?
HN grew from curiosity and good-faith. Y'all are not showing up.
I think the eye roll is the need to shout that you don’t use AI.
It’s the new web dev, imo.
This post wasn’t about sparking conversation. It’s about using AI makes me lose the human touch in what I do, blah blah, heard it all before.
Sorry, not sorry.
I recently mentioned that my team and most of my dev friends don’t use AI for code on a gamdev forum (we do stuff like distributed consensus, compilers, etc.). I was quickly denounced as “an arrogant douche”.
The site was back up but now it's down again for some reason.
Should have one shotted an assembly rewrite for maximum serving efficiency
Where are the voices of reason?
My wife got an email from a new hire (now even a new hire yet: she's still on a trial basis), a 23 years old, where she explains that she doesn't want to use AI. That she doesn't like what AI does. On a funny sidenote: the email is obviously 99% llmish, which is hilarious.
That's one extremity: crazy people who refuse to learn a new tool.
Then on the other extremity you have the even much crazier ones: those who believe they've got an intelligent machine that is going to solve all their work problems during the day and then, at night, that is going to enlighten them by revealing them who god really is.
Where the heck are the reasonable people who use AI for what it is: a tool that can be extremely helpful at times and extremely sucky at other times but that is still, on average, a time saver?
You might not be hearing from these people.
I use LLMs daily to piece together technical reports and smooth out rough drafts. It saves me hours of time / week.
I also use it to augment my technical work, because I don't want to be out of a job one day with no marketable skills, except driving an agent harness.
There is a percentage of the population that thinks LLMs are actually intelligent and truly can't tell the difference.
I think others just want to live life as a passenger, not think, and have AI do all the work.
> Where the heck are the reasonable people who use AI for what it is: a tool that can be extremely helpful at times and extremely sucky at other times but that is still, on average, a time saver?
They're unlikely to be vocal because they've already evaluated and decided the role AI will play in their work/life and just moved on/kept working. That's also likely to be a small pool of people relative to the number of people interacting with AI (either by force or choice).
> That's also likely to be a small pool of people relative to the number of people interacting with AI
Perhaps small now. But overall this seems to be what most have done in my small social circle. Small uses of AI here and there, sometimes surprising gains/wins they find out and share if asked, otherwise really it's just another tool to learn and make use of.
Most everyone thinks it's overhyped and wedged into stupid places it doesn't make much sense, especially in consumer products. But they also can recognize that behind the scenes and in closed doors there are perhaps some exciting things happening in certain industries and use-cases.
Most are still very much in the "haven't played with it much yet, it's moving too fast and I'm too old and busy with my life" or "still evaluating as time allows" stage. This is mid-career folks in various professional roles, skewing towards tech. Some sense of "this tech is getting good fast, and I will be left behind if I do not learn it at some point in the future".
I will say most have barely ventured past the "copy/paste from ChatGPT" stage of AI use. It usually elicits comment when someone moves past that and finds out they are far more capable than they realized. Then usually some more comments a couple weeks later mentioning newfound limitations.
We're right here! Some of us just prefer to stay out of these silly irrational debates because we know that neither of those two crazy camps will listen to a word we, or anyone else, will say. We might be wrong about that (I hope we're wrong about that!) but there sure are enough other people chattering that it's easy to sit back and let them have it out.
The "you'll get left behind" crowd has already made it clear that they're not worth engaging with, you're not going to find reasonable voices anywhere those threads are happening...
FYI just 502'd
No AI needed for the design and build of custom metal either, and with a similar long human effort that I am privilaged to be aware and part of that I am quite certain cant be handled useing any computational averaging. Funnily enough, I have had and am right now involved in a project that the customer tried to have AI design, but that the most basic calculations were wrong. It's worse, as even humans working with highly developed design and estimating software, cant deliver accurate shop plans for real world projects that involve irregular surfaces or curves, and changing slopes that must be measured on site. AI will help you enjoy your cubes and parallograms, and cover them with realistic textures.
to the people claiming "hugged to death", this website works for me while on a train in rural Germany (anyone who lives in Europe should be all too aware about phone network quality here).
As for the content: fully agree. Human touch is a value in itself. Unfortunately, modern capitalism does not provide incentives to take care about value, because (by capitalism's metrics) value is inefficiency.
Noticing a lot of different variations of “LOL hugged to death. Maybe ask AI to fix your site.” here.
Such juvenile behavior can only be attributed to the general unease and defensiveness demonstrated by members of the AI cult in the face of criticism:
“Your blasphemy against our god has been duly punished… you must pray for his forgiveness.”
A website flaming out and dying in the face of unusual traffic is a perfectly reasonable business decision. These "witty" comments are effectively self owns.
These people should know that it's a type designer's website, not a software shop. The site works from here so I know;)
hugged to death at 8 points and 20 minutes in frontpage.
Please use AI (or anything) to fix your site.
Well, they're using Render which you'd think they'd be able to handle HN traffic. Not a good look for Render as a service, especially when their first item under product is autoscaling.
Edge caching seems to be opt-in
Sorry for the disruption! This is 100x our normal peak traffic, needed to raise the instance limit.
It's the natural vinyl warmth
All these "principled" people telling others that "they practice what they preach" shooting themselves in the foot with their "production" site down and hugged to death on the front page.
Just ask the AI to set up your site for better uptime if you don't know how to.
You say this as if almost every AI generated landing page posted to HN isn't falling apart at the seams.
Artists: No cold-hearted machine can ever replicate the ingenuity, the innate creativity and passionate soul of the artiste.
Later: The villain cat has the catchphrases 'Purrrfect' and 'You must be kitten me'. The snake character makes lotsss of sss noissesss.
Why wouldn't a snake character make lots of ssss noises? I've never met one in real life but I have to imagine the tongue is an impediment.
This (and all the disgusting "hugged to death, you're dumb, use AI" comments that have replaced HN's normal venom-less "hugged to death" comments) makes me want to leave Hacker News.
If it is that bad then I sincerely apologise.
It’s a mixed bag. You have insufferable mouth breathing morons who think AGI is here, and on the other hand you have rational - dare I say enlightened - individuals such as yourself.
And yet people still prefer it over AI slop.
I shall call it artist slop.
I'll be honest, I probably wouldn't be able to tell the difference between a human-only created typeface and an AI assisted typeface.