A while back, I stopped using Facebook because I just couldn't take it anymore. Just totally sick of it. I'm honestly getting there with AI. At this point, I would prefer to have anything AI related just be blocked at the browser level.
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.
I was a teenager around the dot-com and to this day I feel an idealized sense of longing for participation in the exciting times of the dot-coms. You guys got to enjoy the blazing innovation of the new internet, so full of endless possibilities. Tough luck on your bubble popping moment though.
It was watching all the potential being squandered and the internet basically being relegated to click farming and selling people crap they don't need.
All the really cool stuff seems to have died with the bubble...
I think the sad part was the people entering the IT workforce for only money. Don't get me wrong, I understand why and not gatekeeping. But it was the first time I know that people with computer skills were highly in demand, so anyone who had turned on a computer was able to get a job even if they knew nothing of how a computer actually worked, or networking.
Well, it was exciting I guess. I even knew someone who worked for pets.com!
On the other hand, I worked for a startup selling product information management software to large retailers, and was about as non dot-com as you could get. When the bubble burst, all the funding disappeared for all tech companies, not just the dot-com ones, so we were also all out of a job. Which was not fun.
It's definitely looking like we've passed the peak of the S-curve here.
But there is one difference between now and the dot-bomb that could make the shape of what's next different (note, only "could"; it might very well be very similar): with the massively increased financialization of everything, the link between reality and stocks/private equity investment has become much more tenuous. Speculative investors, as a group, know to some extent that they can keep the bubble going just by continuing to buy.
For a time.
But eventually they will have exhausted all they can squeeze from the "greater fools", and someone's risk analysis department will say "if we don't sell it all now, we'll be stuck holding the bag." And that will start a cascade. Because the other big difference between 2000 and today is the degree of automation in trading....
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.
That's just silly. AI is really bad at the hard things. What it's really good at is automating the tedium away.
Like I had a connector made for service X. Needed one for Y and Z, all use the same basic authentication scheme, but slight differences on where they want the bits set at.
That used to be a week-long project easily with me going through the docs for each service, maybe copy-pasting something from service X and modifying the bits by hand.
Now I can just go "look at projects/service-x-api, now do that but for Service Y in projects/service-y-api" to an agent, tab away and come back to a 90-100% working thing. It went through the API documentation by itself, looked up some blog posts on the undocumented crap they added in January that broke the official flow and made it work.
Meanwhile I could do something with actual impact, helped other people learn stuff and wrote internal guidelines.
I have never had it automate any tedium for me. Because if I didn't write it, I need to scrutinize all of it, but without the benefit of a prebuilt mental model. Reading through tons of similar looking code (because it's supposed to automate boilerplate) looking for subtle mistakes is mind numbingly boring. It's like looking at a wall full of periods in font size 8, and trying to find the one comma.
That’s more of a personal problem isn’t it. You can now work on things that are more valuable. Your old work and interests can be taken up as an art instead: to be enjoyed instead of existing for its function.
Your parents could afford a house, have kids etc etc at a far younger age but now you are single with no kids and choosing food or rent or power. You spin the wheel! Lucky! You get to eat.
Now that anyone can generate a halfway decent pop song at the snap of the finger leads to one of three outcomes. We all just listen to our own interactive stations and have no shared culture, pressure is put on industry to differentiate with a higher quality product, the technology is democratizing and unlocks a new generation of creatives who are able to work with it creating an amplified output.
#4 Some continue merrily onwards with weekly / regular jam sessions with friends and passers through, catering to all skill levels and largely ignoring top 40 and AI trends.
I don't understand your comment. It's poorly-punctuated, and its hard to figure out what your position is. What's a "pie hole" as a metaphor for a person? Is that what you meant?
Are you suggesting AI can understand things deeply?
LLM's are fast at applying information, but thinking deeply, they do not.
I love LLM's, because now I can focus more on the creative and thinking deep aspect, and leave most of the typing and stack overflow browsing to the LLM.
The only people advocating for that are the same kind of people which were pitching the cloud as a solution for your hosting needs.
Ime the sweet spot for development with LLMs is to figure out what you need to do and then do that through AI. Yes, it'll still make some decisions there, but did you really get satisfaction from the decisions of eg what to call a class before? At last I didn't.
You can of course try to offload everything to the LLM and not tell it what to do, but only specify what it should enable (spec driven), but at that point youre gambling wherever the output will work and the project becomes unmaintainable - which may be fine too in certain scenarios, that's just pretty rare in a business context
I am curious where you draw your line. We have all sorts of “machines that do the hard things for you”, do you shun them all? Cars, washing machines, lawnmowers, etc…
I know that AI has some different characteristics than those technologies, but my point is that I don’t think your issue is that does the hard things for you… there has to be something else going on.
There's a specific set of people who get a Zen feeling from doing things the long way.
I'm not one of those, my brain doesn't give me any more dopamine whether I spent a long time doing a thing or took a shortcut. I don't even get dopamine from completing the task, I just get a list of more things that need to be done.
Thinking about the world and oneself isn't a repetitive chore in the way washing your clothes is.
"I doubt, therefore I think, I think, therefore I am" -- if I no longer think, what's left? Biomass? Why us then.. why not goo, or just more parking space?
Energy and awareness. Were more empty than whole and the cells that do make up an invididual are not 100% human. And all of it the periodic table of elements
I would rather spend 2 hours working on a problem, fully thinking through all the approaches and design considerations, than have an LLM write some code and be done in 30 minutes.
That's just a lot more fun for me.
I still use LLMs for faster, focused, searches that cater the results to my specific needs; but I'd still rather build stuff with my own hands.
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.
For me the biggest loss was the explore tabs on github, particularly the trending repositories. You used to be able to go there and find a trendy project or two.
Nowadays, either it is something with an outstanding presentation like copyparty, or it's all just AI and AI serving schlock.
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.
Install Chrome update. Network usage goes off the charts. Close Chrome it goes away. Check task manager. No processes claim the downloads. Use firefox to search around for why.
Apparently "on-device AI models" are a thing. And are downloaded separately after the install of Chrome.
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.
I do find it somewhat interesting that crypto mining firms are perfectly placed to pivot to AI. Both ventures involve building out large clusters of machines to use GPUs to convert electricity into money.
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'm sure there's some AI to help you out. The skunkworks AI projects at companies are what people should really be worried about. The current AI stuff is just rudimentary to test the waters.
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.
But you also spend less time on those tasks, allowing you to do more of those tasks. And if you still spend the same amount of time, and use AI as am assistant, and do review the AI's work, then you can actually learn from it faster.
But I understand that many people don't do that and just finish their task with AI and then don't do anything anymore.
Whole this "GenAI" nonsense just made me appreciate handrafted code more. I really like diving deep into documentation to figure out how things work and actually understand why something does not. YMMW.
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.
There's a LOT going for "AI" and language models in general, but the general population only sees the tip where people post obvious AI slop "art" and screenshot ChatGPT answers on actual questions.
In this case I'm talking about the internet content only. For sure, I'm worrying way more about aircrafts autopilot system written in Rust by AI. Or about something like a life support systems in the hospital... The end of our civilization will come not from the side where we waiting it for...
Tangential: I’m sick of being addicted to this site. The lowering of the signal-to-noise ratio has made the addiction worse, as I still hope to find a nugget of quality posts among a sea of AI discussion, which is not even technical, just comparing what LLM 1 vs 2 said. Any post by Anthropic & co. (twice a week) gets hundreds of points, goes to the top of the frontpage, and the rest of the week are articles testing/benchmarking/complaining about it. During lulls, we have a slew of opinion blogs where everyone and their dog tell a story about how they used AI to do a thing.
At this point I am certain even the most pro AI people on this site would like a bit more variety. The saddest part is that I’ve had to turn to Reddit to get a bit more colour to my media diet.
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.
Nothing can beat Ponzi schemes because it's all promises and the returns only trickle up to the top, they are not evenly distributed.
There are ideas that can deliver VC-sized returns but they depend on a system state different from ours - scaled up energy system, housing market, education system, manufacturing capacity, research capacity, etc etc. Until we unscrew the current status quo, we(USA) will continue limping through these innovations without the capacity to fully utilize them.
I would be miserable too if my job had to do with anything Internet.
It has gone from this cool inter-human knowledge hub and space for creation to a place where everyone tries to sell you something and make the sales pitch unskippable. It’s miserable.
It started getting weird when the full home invasion of Internet-connected nonsense started. I have eyes, I can see there is no milk in the fridge, I don’t need a push notification or glowing circle that says, “May I have your attention, please? Here are five Bezos offers for milk.”
I put up a wall of cheap 3D-printed waterproof enclosures near the local train station with the one in the middle having a handwritten letter from me and a bunch of blank sheets behind it, that asks people to write down knowledge that they think is useful for the rest of the community.
Only rules, no AI-generated content or printouts from websites. If it’s not handwritten or has ads, everyone passing by is allowed to remove and destroy it.
Everything else stays for exactly one week, then it gets removed to make space for something new.
If every enclosure is full, I put a few more up and watch and remove those who stay empty at the end of the week.
Went through 600 sheets of paper so far but people also started putting little hand-drawn artworks and their own colourful paper sheets in by themselves so the cost is more than manageable, as I just walk into the local town hall and take a bunch of paper from their copy stations from time to time.
Every week I go there to remove the letters from people and collect them in folders to make space for new ones. From live advice to cooking recipes with local ingredients, art, poetry, it’s pretty cool to see how many people are getting off the Internet and rather spending time doing this for their local community.
Often when the news are bad and I feel stressed and the next catastrophe is looming I go there with some coffee and watch people look at everything and talk about the stuff put up.
Soon I am running out of wall and will have to look for an extra space.
I simply do not longer believe in sharing valuable knowledge over the Internet as it gets hammered by AI crawlers and then integrated into models and no longer giving credit to the people who created it. So why bother.
My prediction is, that the more (generative) AI is used on the internet, the smaller the world will become.
Most of you will have a miserable life if your livelihood belongs to slaving away for companies relying on being present on the internet, and local knowledge hubs, which are reserved for human knowledge and creativity only, will be the places you meet real people and enjoy sharing knowledge and culture again.
I think AI having the potential to kill the current iteration of the Internet will probably be the best thing it is capable of doing for humanity.
Adapting is what we humans are best at, and I think most humans will adapt away from an internet mostly free of human-first created knowledge and culture. With a bit of luck I’ll live long enough to see if I am right.
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.
AI for productivity is something I advocate for! But I hate the AI content spreading all over social media. Many times I see a man or a woman on IG and unlike early Gen AI days where you could tell in a flash if this is real or AI. But now it's very very difficult to tell and I hate that. I'm not sure why social media is not putting a stop to it.
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 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.
People got to Oregon in the 1800s on wagons, I don't think cars will revolutionize personal travel.
Having infinite, instantaneous, amoral agents of the state analyzing video for patterns - some of which humans can't immediately notice - will revolutionize government oppression.
And just because NK can already do oppression with a heavy hand doesn't mean western countries won't up their game with more subtlety.
Aside some use cases in which the application of machine learning excels - say speech to text, some audio applications, some image editing applications and summarizing a text, I fail to see the utility of other applications like LLMs.
Half of the times they hallucinate and 100% of the times I must double check their output so why not searching by myself in the first place...
I keep reading these posts as "I'm sick of Electricity everything".
The parallel is the same. It's a revolutionary technology, and it's being used everywhere because it's NEW. Fast forward 10 years, it'll be everywhere and nobody will complain about "aw shucks, this appliance uses electricity! I miss the good old days of manually cranking it"
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?
Reminds me of the book "Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning" and its comparison of spaced repetition and cramming.
Cramming often feels more satisfying, more like you're learning, but actually leads to worse retention. Spaced repetition that includes the struggle of recalling something just at the edge of being forgotten, on the other hand, feels worse but leads to much higher retention.
> Being spoon-fed information isn't the same as learning, to me
It's like it distills it for you. I feel like you're thinking of an example like trying to learning operating systems by reading wikipedia articles (i.e. it gives you a high level summary but nothing more).
The way I see it, code says a lot, but it takes time to scroll through it and cmd+click back and forth. But if you just ask the AI "where's x thing happening around this file" it will just point you right to it. So I feel like less cognitive energy is spent dealing with the syntactic quirks of code and more is spent on the essential algorithmic task.
I don't really like using it to summarize natural language written by one author or group, like a paper for example, that just feels like laziness to me.
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!
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.
> 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.
It's a good thing then, that corporations have such a good reputation for never externalizing the costs their products inflict on society & the planet.
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
The voice is a real problem. I’m looking to do some basic home improvement stuff. 2 years ago I could YouTube how to do almost anything and find real people with plausible credentials demonstrating it. Today, first you need to dig through everything that isn’t real.
> Is this what getting old feels like? Hating everything the rest of society is racing to embrace?
I don’t think so. Some societies are racing to embrace mass surveillance and abuse of civil rights. Pointing this out and complaining about it is not “hate” and not reserved for old people only. :)
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.
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.
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
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
tell me about it, my client started recently sending me AI generated QA reports, I guess I don't need to mention in 98% reported issues they are false positive just wasting my time
and it's similar with trying to watch Youtube on TV (Smarttube), too much AI slop though try to be picky when choosing suspicious videos
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...
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'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.
Because "I really wish posts like this would clarify".
I was making a point that saying "I hate AI" is intellectually lazy. The discourse here can be a whole lot better if people put more effort into clarity.
I want Hacker News to be a better place for technically sophisticated conversations than most of Reddit.
But you know exactly which form of AI is exhausting everyone through mediocre application. You know exactly which form of AI requires constant propaganda and astroturfing to get a thimble of adoption.
I think generative AI for slop posts and images on Facebook is a different issue from generative AI for coding agents, even when they share the same underlying models.
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. Granted, management always comes in the way of a good deliverable. I ask people to vote with their wallet if the experience is lacking.
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.
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.
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
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...
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.
It was watching all the potential being squandered and the internet basically being relegated to click farming and selling people crap they don't need.
All the really cool stuff seems to have died with the bubble...
On the other hand, I worked for a startup selling product information management software to large retailers, and was about as non dot-com as you could get. When the bubble burst, all the funding disappeared for all tech companies, not just the dot-com ones, so we were also all out of a job. Which was not fun.
But there is one difference between now and the dot-bomb that could make the shape of what's next different (note, only "could"; it might very well be very similar): with the massively increased financialization of everything, the link between reality and stocks/private equity investment has become much more tenuous. Speculative investors, as a group, know to some extent that they can keep the bubble going just by continuing to buy.
For a time.
But eventually they will have exhausted all they can squeeze from the "greater fools", and someone's risk analysis department will say "if we don't sell it all now, we'll be stuck holding the bag." And that will start a cascade. Because the other big difference between 2000 and today is the degree of automation in trading....
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.
Like I had a connector made for service X. Needed one for Y and Z, all use the same basic authentication scheme, but slight differences on where they want the bits set at.
That used to be a week-long project easily with me going through the docs for each service, maybe copy-pasting something from service X and modifying the bits by hand.
Now I can just go "look at projects/service-x-api, now do that but for Service Y in projects/service-y-api" to an agent, tab away and come back to a 90-100% working thing. It went through the API documentation by itself, looked up some blog posts on the undocumented crap they added in January that broke the official flow and made it work.
Meanwhile I could do something with actual impact, helped other people learn stuff and wrote internal guidelines.
Your parents could afford a house, have kids etc etc at a far younger age but now you are single with no kids and choosing food or rent or power. You spin the wheel! Lucky! You get to eat.
Progress!
- Write a new top 40 song no talent required
- Write a business email, a school paper, etc & no talent required
- Design a logo, a website, an app, a billboard, etc and no talent required.
AI is the best thing to happen to humanity as it mimics & steals humanity for a few pie holes and us the majority does nothing to stop it!
Now that anyone can generate a halfway decent pop song at the snap of the finger leads to one of three outcomes. We all just listen to our own interactive stations and have no shared culture, pressure is put on industry to differentiate with a higher quality product, the technology is democratizing and unlocks a new generation of creatives who are able to work with it creating an amplified output.
LLM's are fast at applying information, but thinking deeply, they do not.
I love LLM's, because now I can focus more on the creative and thinking deep aspect, and leave most of the typing and stack overflow browsing to the LLM.
To be fair your response seems somewhat revealing of your own situation.
> do the hard things for you
The only people advocating for that are the same kind of people which were pitching the cloud as a solution for your hosting needs.
Ime the sweet spot for development with LLMs is to figure out what you need to do and then do that through AI. Yes, it'll still make some decisions there, but did you really get satisfaction from the decisions of eg what to call a class before? At last I didn't.
You can of course try to offload everything to the LLM and not tell it what to do, but only specify what it should enable (spec driven), but at that point youre gambling wherever the output will work and the project becomes unmaintainable - which may be fine too in certain scenarios, that's just pretty rare in a business context
I know that AI has some different characteristics than those technologies, but my point is that I don’t think your issue is that does the hard things for you… there has to be something else going on.
I'm not one of those, my brain doesn't give me any more dopamine whether I spent a long time doing a thing or took a shortcut. I don't even get dopamine from completing the task, I just get a list of more things that need to be done.
"I doubt, therefore I think, I think, therefore I am" -- if I no longer think, what's left? Biomass? Why us then.. why not goo, or just more parking space?
I would rather spend 2 hours working on a problem, fully thinking through all the approaches and design considerations, than have an LLM write some code and be done in 30 minutes.
That's just a lot more fun for me.
I still use LLMs for faster, focused, searches that cater the results to my specific needs; but I'd still rather build stuff with my own hands.
Maybe have AI Tuesdays, where you only post AI crap every Tuesday?
Nowadays, either it is something with an outstanding presentation like copyparty, or it's all just AI and AI serving schlock.
Apparently "on-device AI models" are a thing. And are downloaded separately after the install of Chrome.
Deeply frustrating on a mobile connection.
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.
I have had the opposite experience, philosophy questions tending to show the various chatbots at their most irrational and confabulatory.
Step 2: insert reference to AI
Still a lot of overlap with running a datacenter of ASICs and a datacenter of GPUs, but both are significant capital investments.
So, basically: just bear with us a little bit longer and then drop all computer usage (this will include every tech which blinks).
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.
> 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
But I understand that many people don't do that and just finish their task with AI and then don't do anything anymore.
Honestly, quite a tragedy for many. Myself, I have to be constantly fighting against this to slow myself down
I remember being frustrated at every company claiming to be "innovative" in a past job search.
AI is ruining everything.
There's a LOT going for "AI" and language models in general, but the general population only sees the tip where people post obvious AI slop "art" and screenshot ChatGPT answers on actual questions.
At this point I am certain even the most pro AI people on this site would like a bit more variety. The saddest part is that I’ve had to turn to Reddit to get a bit more colour to my media diet.
There are ideas that can deliver VC-sized returns but they depend on a system state different from ours - scaled up energy system, housing market, education system, manufacturing capacity, research capacity, etc etc. Until we unscrew the current status quo, we(USA) will continue limping through these innovations without the capacity to fully utilize them.
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
It has gone from this cool inter-human knowledge hub and space for creation to a place where everyone tries to sell you something and make the sales pitch unskippable. It’s miserable.
It started getting weird when the full home invasion of Internet-connected nonsense started. I have eyes, I can see there is no milk in the fridge, I don’t need a push notification or glowing circle that says, “May I have your attention, please? Here are five Bezos offers for milk.”
I put up a wall of cheap 3D-printed waterproof enclosures near the local train station with the one in the middle having a handwritten letter from me and a bunch of blank sheets behind it, that asks people to write down knowledge that they think is useful for the rest of the community.
Only rules, no AI-generated content or printouts from websites. If it’s not handwritten or has ads, everyone passing by is allowed to remove and destroy it.
Everything else stays for exactly one week, then it gets removed to make space for something new.
If every enclosure is full, I put a few more up and watch and remove those who stay empty at the end of the week.
Went through 600 sheets of paper so far but people also started putting little hand-drawn artworks and their own colourful paper sheets in by themselves so the cost is more than manageable, as I just walk into the local town hall and take a bunch of paper from their copy stations from time to time.
Every week I go there to remove the letters from people and collect them in folders to make space for new ones. From live advice to cooking recipes with local ingredients, art, poetry, it’s pretty cool to see how many people are getting off the Internet and rather spending time doing this for their local community.
Often when the news are bad and I feel stressed and the next catastrophe is looming I go there with some coffee and watch people look at everything and talk about the stuff put up.
Soon I am running out of wall and will have to look for an extra space.
I simply do not longer believe in sharing valuable knowledge over the Internet as it gets hammered by AI crawlers and then integrated into models and no longer giving credit to the people who created it. So why bother.
My prediction is, that the more (generative) AI is used on the internet, the smaller the world will become.
Most of you will have a miserable life if your livelihood belongs to slaving away for companies relying on being present on the internet, and local knowledge hubs, which are reserved for human knowledge and creativity only, will be the places you meet real people and enjoy sharing knowledge and culture again.
I think AI having the potential to kill the current iteration of the Internet will probably be the best thing it is capable of doing for humanity.
Adapting is what we humans are best at, and I think most humans will adapt away from an internet mostly free of human-first created knowledge and culture. With a bit of luck I’ll live long enough to see if I am right.
This all started with zucks obsession with virtual avatars and you can really see this in VR.
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.
[1] https://inv.thepixora.com/watch?v=CLo3e1Pak-Y
youtube version: https://youtube.com/watch?v=CLo3e1Pak-Y
Having infinite, instantaneous, amoral agents of the state analyzing video for patterns - some of which humans can't immediately notice - will revolutionize government oppression.
And just because NK can already do oppression with a heavy hand doesn't mean western countries won't up their game with more subtlety.
The parallel is the same. It's a revolutionary technology, and it's being used everywhere because it's NEW. Fast forward 10 years, it'll be everywhere and nobody will complain about "aw shucks, this appliance uses electricity! I miss the good old days of manually cranking it"
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.
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'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?
Cramming often feels more satisfying, more like you're learning, but actually leads to worse retention. Spaced repetition that includes the struggle of recalling something just at the edge of being forgotten, on the other hand, feels worse but leads to much higher retention.
It's like it distills it for you. I feel like you're thinking of an example like trying to learning operating systems by reading wikipedia articles (i.e. it gives you a high level summary but nothing more).
The way I see it, code says a lot, but it takes time to scroll through it and cmd+click back and forth. But if you just ask the AI "where's x thing happening around this file" it will just point you right to it. So I feel like less cognitive energy is spent dealing with the syntactic quirks of code and more is spent on the essential algorithmic task.
I don't really like using it to summarize natural language written by one author or group, like a paper for example, that just feels like laziness to me.
Most of all I am sick of people being sick of it!
(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!
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.
It's a good thing then, that corporations have such a good reputation for never externalizing the costs their products inflict on society & the planet.
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 don’t think so. Some societies are racing to embrace mass surveillance and abuse of civil rights. Pointing this out and complaining about it is not “hate” and not reserved for old people only. :)
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.
Oh and messages https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6090712
Enjoy your newfound freedom and live a real life.
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.
and it's similar with trying to watch Youtube on TV (Smarttube), too much AI slop though try to be picky when choosing suspicious videos
(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.)
> 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
I was making a point that saying "I hate AI" is intellectually lazy. The discourse here can be a whole lot better if people put more effort into clarity.
I want Hacker News to be a better place for technically sophisticated conversations than most of Reddit.
Fugazi as fuck
Or generative AI that was used to find 272 vulnerabilities that were fixed in Firefox 150 this week: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/privacy-security/ai-security-zer...
Couple with that the frequent press about “AI is going to replace your job” and the public image problem is pretty bad.
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.
I love all computer technology except printers.
Gimme more - looking forward to further leaps forward in AL and LLMs - the party has just started.
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.
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.
Here's to reading HN projected through the lens of manga comic strips sometime after we solve the GPU shortage..
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