People complaining about AI are flooding the zone together with all the people who switched from NFT to AI, the "I vibe coded something and it almost works" crowd, etc.
Be careful what you vote up, also keep an eye on the /new page and vote things up that aren't about AI, also feel free to submit things that aren't about AI. If you look at the difference between the home page and the /new page, you can see the supply of bad articles about AI far exceeds the demand, keep holding the line against it.
AI seems to elicit a different response from people than any other debate I can remember. It's different to blockchain (which had a similar level of "will you all just shut the fuck up about it?")
It's different to culture war stuff (which was very toxic and hard to have sensible discussions about - but in a different way).
It's the only topic in my lifetime where I have to remember not to even mention it to several close friends. And these are geeky people I have a lot of shared interests in common with.
I'm over 50 and I remember a lot of controversial topics - but this one is weird in a different way.
It is because it is a direct attack against human creativity. It separates people into two very disparate classes: those who want to use and develop it to become more efficient and rich, and those who hate it with a passion because for them, it takes away the beauty of humanity at the forefront of creativity.
Unlike blockchain, the philosophy and morality of these two classes, one represented by efficiency and one represented by human passion, are diametrically opposed in every respect.
I think for many people, the real debate taking place has nothing to do with the specific technology, and instead has everything to do with labor.
Depending on who you speak to, AI presents itself as the biggest automation risk to the largest number of workers in human history. This has spurred a new wave of conscious thought about labor among many people, particularly young workers trying to enter the workforce, and creatives who are seeing their art turned against them.
This is a big moment in the west, as for the last 50+ years, the powers that be have done everything in their power to suppress labor movements and erode class consciousness among their populations. Therefor, many people are not used to dealing with the fact that we're all expendable, that the American Dream never existed, etc., and it's a raw topic that makes certain people (understandably) frustrated to grapple with.
IMHO, if bitcoin mining had given some people $10MM and debited other people $10, but each one at random, no matter what --temperature= was provided to the mining CLI, you'd have likely seen the same discussion
> It's making me rich! It's making me poor! Well then you're holding it wrong! Well you're spending electricity on senseless compute! Well you're just living in a fiat past!
Completely agreed. Also literally the only topic I've ever had to avoid with friends. It's not just that we can good-naturedly agree to disagree (like we can with religion, politics, etc.), but they are allergic to even the mention of it. It is something they very actively want to not talk about, which I've never experienced before.
You're right that it's weird in a different way, and I still can't quite put my finger on why.
Unfortunately because nobody decided to code some proper consent into it you're forced to listen to people bitch they didn't want it in the first place. "Maybe later" it'll stop, but "Not now".
[Imagine a dialog box button here, but the only word says "Thanks :)"]
what i hated about AI discourse a year ago was how far removed it was from anything concrete. nobody seemed to have a _purpose_ in building AI; no thing they wanted to use it _for_. it was a silly text or image generator, would someday become a "do everything" device, and the progression from here to there was unknowable: it was just a plot device for anyone suddenly interested in writing speculative fiction.
in my vicinity, the sci-fi discourse has died down the last few months. my coworkers will _show me_ how they use these tools when i ask them, and are building on/with them incrementally. the shift in tone is encouraging. there's space for actual practical discourse around this stuff now. chat about concrete things with your friends/coworkers -- if you're interested in it. ignore the media, CEO interviews and LinkedIn hype posts: they're playing a different sort of game that you're probably happier off not being a part of.
This article well summarizes where I have landed on AI. No tool ever created by humans is good at everything. Like all previous tools, it will be good at some things but not everything. The rest is hype. If you are over 25 you have seen hype come and go before. This is no different except that AI also can create a truly incredible amount of spam and probably should be regulated by the FCC for that alone.
I agree, I'm tired of it too. I resisted for a while, not seeing the value. I'll use ChatGPT or Claude for non-programming things sometimes.
Finally a few trusted friends convinced me to give it a go. I installed Claude Code and paid for the Pro plan. It's... interesting? I haven't given it too many tasks yet, and I'm still learning how to get the most out of it, so I can't pass judgment yet. One thing I've noticed is that, for everything I've given it so far, it takes much longer to do it than if I'd do it myself. But maybe that's ok.
> What does my job look like? It looks like prompting an agent to do a thing, then skipping over to another agent to review its answer to a different problem. Jumping between different attempts by agents to do what I asked all day, juggling a dozen or more projects so I don’t waste any time. Reviewing code for something that can’t learn from the time I invested, catching the same mistakes over and over.
Yeah that sounds awful. That's not something that I'd enjoy. The act of writing code to build something that solves a problem is what brings me joy. It's why I've been hooked since my dad gave me a book on BASIC when I was 8 years old.
If this is what the "software developer" job becomes, then I'm fine not being able to get a job in that field anymore. That's not a job I'd want.
Ah, a new entry in the "throw every possible AI criticism at the wall, and see what sticks" genre. As always, going for quantity rather than quality undermines the entire endeavor, as the article gets dominated by the stale and mostly invalid talking points.
"I'm tired about talking about AI, so here's 2000 words about AI" will appear on the surface to be a novel twist, but actually what the author seems to mean is that they don't want to be talked to about AI, have written this, and are now filtering out all rebuttals. It's just the classic fake win of a forum poster claiming this will be their last message on a subject, followed by three pages of text.
Like, of course if talking about AI is causing you distress, stop doing it. But then just stop doing it, don't try to get in the last word some pretense of it being "absolution".
It's a bit of a shame, because I think slightly expanding the last section and cutting out basically all the rest would have worked way better. There has been some discourse on what the skill set for somebody using AI for creating software could look like in the future (it'll change over time, obviously). There hasn't been very much written on who would enjoy that job, and it's something where nobody can rebut the author. They're the #1 expert in the world on their own preferences.
I feel like the real reason behind this fatigue, which is an issue most people skirt around a lot, is that AI takes the joy out of intellectual tasks. Modern global capitalism only emphasizes efficiency, so everyone asks: does it make programmers more efficient? Does it make this or that company more efficient?
But it's quite clear to me that aside from the initial amusement over AI's capabilities, it takes the joy out of what humans once did with their own minds. I'll come straight out and say it: if you make something with your own mind, like the solution to a tricky puzzle or a new App, I'd respect it. But if you do it with AI, I don't respect it.
Fundamentally, people NEED to admire human creation, as it's how our society has always operated, even with the growing automation of rote tasks. But for the first time, we are automating away our precious resource of inspiration through the act of experiencing the creation of others.
A darn shame if you ask me. Of course, others will just ignore me and grab at the convenience, because it's what we've been taught to do for the past few hundred years.
The only AI discussions I find tiring are the ones about the definition of a word. People will talk endlessly about what the definition of "intelligent", or "conscious" should be.
I no longer care. I just accept that words mean what the speaker intended then to mean and then I have no trouble talking about the actual technology, its pros and cons, etc.
This sums up my feelings exactly. The future is going to be so much more boring than the past, as we (society at large) dislocate our Understanding to LLMs. Without Understanding, there will be no Beauty, only Pleasure.
> As explained in Dune, the Butlerian Jihad is a conflict taking place over 11,000 years in the future[7] (and over 10,000 years before the events of Dune), which results in the total destruction of virtually all forms of "computers, thinking machines, and conscious robots".
and thus if you use "luddites" to describe people who push back against LLMs being the second coming, and further suggest that those folks want all computers thrown in the trash, then you are deeply unserious and I have fed the troll
The original "Luddites" had very valid concerns about the impending reduction of quality of the clothing they were making and subsequent working conditions with the advent of automated looms.
Likewise many people today, myself included, have very valid concerns about the actual use of AI, where it's going, and how it can and will be misused.
We would love to have these discussions, but calling us "Luddites" and then referencing a situation where a robot literally killed a child to prove a point is not how to start that.
Calling people who have legitimate grievances over a new technology "Luddites", as if the Luddites were stupid assholes, makes me absolutely sick with sadness for the impact on people in my society. It's a lazy, tremendously over-used metaphor, and you can disagree with an opinion without this low-effort inhumanity.
PaulHoule|7 months ago
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fight_Club
People complaining about AI are flooding the zone together with all the people who switched from NFT to AI, the "I vibe coded something and it almost works" crowd, etc.
Be careful what you vote up, also keep an eye on the /new page and vote things up that aren't about AI, also feel free to submit things that aren't about AI. If you look at the difference between the home page and the /new page, you can see the supply of bad articles about AI far exceeds the demand, keep holding the line against it.
andybak|7 months ago
It's different to culture war stuff (which was very toxic and hard to have sensible discussions about - but in a different way).
It's the only topic in my lifetime where I have to remember not to even mention it to several close friends. And these are geeky people I have a lot of shared interests in common with.
I'm over 50 and I remember a lot of controversial topics - but this one is weird in a different way.
vouaobrasil|7 months ago
Unlike blockchain, the philosophy and morality of these two classes, one represented by efficiency and one represented by human passion, are diametrically opposed in every respect.
jplusequalt|7 months ago
Depending on who you speak to, AI presents itself as the biggest automation risk to the largest number of workers in human history. This has spurred a new wave of conscious thought about labor among many people, particularly young workers trying to enter the workforce, and creatives who are seeing their art turned against them.
This is a big moment in the west, as for the last 50+ years, the powers that be have done everything in their power to suppress labor movements and erode class consciousness among their populations. Therefor, many people are not used to dealing with the fact that we're all expendable, that the American Dream never existed, etc., and it's a raw topic that makes certain people (understandably) frustrated to grapple with.
mdaniel|7 months ago
> It's making me rich! It's making me poor! Well then you're holding it wrong! Well you're spending electricity on senseless compute! Well you're just living in a fiat past!
(nod)
crazygringo|7 months ago
You're right that it's weird in a different way, and I still can't quite put my finger on why.
happytoexplain|7 months ago
amelius|7 months ago
BGyss|7 months ago
pera|7 months ago
threatofrain|7 months ago
crinkly|7 months ago
kotaKat|7 months ago
[Imagine a dialog box button here, but the only word says "Thanks :)"]
colinsane|7 months ago
in my vicinity, the sci-fi discourse has died down the last few months. my coworkers will _show me_ how they use these tools when i ask them, and are building on/with them incrementally. the shift in tone is encouraging. there's space for actual practical discourse around this stuff now. chat about concrete things with your friends/coworkers -- if you're interested in it. ignore the media, CEO interviews and LinkedIn hype posts: they're playing a different sort of game that you're probably happier off not being a part of.
burny_tech|7 months ago
josefritzishere|7 months ago
kelnos|7 months ago
Finally a few trusted friends convinced me to give it a go. I installed Claude Code and paid for the Pro plan. It's... interesting? I haven't given it too many tasks yet, and I'm still learning how to get the most out of it, so I can't pass judgment yet. One thing I've noticed is that, for everything I've given it so far, it takes much longer to do it than if I'd do it myself. But maybe that's ok.
> What does my job look like? It looks like prompting an agent to do a thing, then skipping over to another agent to review its answer to a different problem. Jumping between different attempts by agents to do what I asked all day, juggling a dozen or more projects so I don’t waste any time. Reviewing code for something that can’t learn from the time I invested, catching the same mistakes over and over.
Yeah that sounds awful. That's not something that I'd enjoy. The act of writing code to build something that solves a problem is what brings me joy. It's why I've been hooked since my dad gave me a book on BASIC when I was 8 years old.
If this is what the "software developer" job becomes, then I'm fine not being able to get a job in that field anymore. That's not a job I'd want.
jsnell|7 months ago
"I'm tired about talking about AI, so here's 2000 words about AI" will appear on the surface to be a novel twist, but actually what the author seems to mean is that they don't want to be talked to about AI, have written this, and are now filtering out all rebuttals. It's just the classic fake win of a forum poster claiming this will be their last message on a subject, followed by three pages of text.
Like, of course if talking about AI is causing you distress, stop doing it. But then just stop doing it, don't try to get in the last word some pretense of it being "absolution".
It's a bit of a shame, because I think slightly expanding the last section and cutting out basically all the rest would have worked way better. There has been some discourse on what the skill set for somebody using AI for creating software could look like in the future (it'll change over time, obviously). There hasn't been very much written on who would enjoy that job, and it's something where nobody can rebut the author. They're the #1 expert in the world on their own preferences.
vouaobrasil|7 months ago
But it's quite clear to me that aside from the initial amusement over AI's capabilities, it takes the joy out of what humans once did with their own minds. I'll come straight out and say it: if you make something with your own mind, like the solution to a tricky puzzle or a new App, I'd respect it. But if you do it with AI, I don't respect it.
Fundamentally, people NEED to admire human creation, as it's how our society has always operated, even with the growing automation of rote tasks. But for the first time, we are automating away our precious resource of inspiration through the act of experiencing the creation of others.
A darn shame if you ask me. Of course, others will just ignore me and grab at the convenience, because it's what we've been taught to do for the past few hundred years.
Buttons840|7 months ago
I no longer care. I just accept that words mean what the speaker intended then to mean and then I have no trouble talking about the actual technology, its pros and cons, etc.
0xbadc0de5|7 months ago
tines|7 months ago
andrewstuart|7 months ago
[deleted]
dang|7 months ago
mdaniel|7 months ago
> As explained in Dune, the Butlerian Jihad is a conflict taking place over 11,000 years in the future[7] (and over 10,000 years before the events of Dune), which results in the total destruction of virtually all forms of "computers, thinking machines, and conscious robots".
and thus if you use "luddites" to describe people who push back against LLMs being the second coming, and further suggest that those folks want all computers thrown in the trash, then you are deeply unserious and I have fed the troll
jameskilton|7 months ago
Likewise many people today, myself included, have very valid concerns about the actual use of AI, where it's going, and how it can and will be misused.
We would love to have these discussions, but calling us "Luddites" and then referencing a situation where a robot literally killed a child to prove a point is not how to start that.
happytoexplain|7 months ago
DaveZale|7 months ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/
amelius|7 months ago