I'm very senior and in a HCOL, relatively booming city. It's never been so hard to find a job despite never being so qualified. I can code, run infra, scale startups, do hands on, manage, present, I can do anything. But that's not what they are looking for. Dozens and dozens of my applications are rejected, with no first screens.The same resume, just with a few less years experience at the same place, just a few years ago got recruiter pings.It's insane and I'm very worried about the future

Ah, the good old "outside agitators" canard.> These new AI data centers are now built with their own power generation capacityAnd now you've got all the noise and pollution from that to deal with.

> Why it mattersContinue to pray to Yellowstone. Concentrate on the magma chamber. We can end it here, we can end it for all time.

Interesting that you use self driving as the metaphor here, when we've been told for years that self driving will be taking over the roads any day now... and yet...

Yep. I think that AI tech has turned out to be pretty much the worst thing the tech industry has ever created. It is a huge net negative for the entire world, and even for the very profession which created it.

> what the point of doing research was if someone like Terence Tao could have figured out everythingA similar question is now being asked: what is the point of doing research, etc. if something like AI can figure out everything?The question betrays the parochial way in which many people think about knowledge. For them, knowledge is merely an instrument or an effect. It does not occur to them that knowing is a valuable thing in itself, that understanding is valuable and desirable. Yes, some knowl

The bots see a simonwillison.net post, the bots upvote. ffs.

If you’re one of the people wondering why there’s an enormous backlash to AI, here’s your answer: “this thing we’re building is going to he fucking terrible and ruin your life. Please give us all your money to build it.”

> "Where are all the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels?"They've been driven underground or entirely out of software by the mundanes but pointing that out draws huffy accusations of "gatekeeping".

Telling the peasants to suppress anger is the primary means of the ruling classes to induce inaction.Righteous anger is a healthy and natural response. Those who admonish others to "be curious", to "wait and see", to "be rational" often have an agenda.Like this author who is invested in AI.

> Who are you going to be angry at and why are you angry in the first place? One narrative that is pretty pervasive is that if AI will usher in productivity gains, those gains are going to benefit companies rather than employees. And well at least someone at Meta wants that.> [...]> My answer to the question of how you can not be angry in tech is that it’s by no way the most only possible feeling. First of all, instead of being angry, you can simply be unsure. The feeling of uncertainty is a muc

That's the whole scam. It's a ransom with more steps.First they fuck up your codebase with so much slop that no human does (or could) understand it.Now if you want to keep making bug fixes, you're on the hook for whatever Anthropic wants to charge you.The solution is to make AI developers the scapegoat. Fire the people at the top of the AI leaderboards, with malice. Otherwise, lazy AI-addict developers are going to destroy what remains of your company's IP.

> If much of the population is too poor to buy anything, too sick to consume much etc - who is left to buy anything at all?No one. That's the idea.A low-population paradise. Venice without its pesky people to mess with Bezos's wedding. Bora Bora without the peasants.

the future is here, it's just not evenly distrubuted conversly, there is no human technology that isn't still bieng practiced in it's original form, ie: there are still people knapping stone tools that learned it from there parents and grandparents going on strait back to the first members of our "species" who learned it from there hybrid parents, in an unbroken chain, which is directly connected to ALL modern technology, in that early metal working was done with stone tools, as metal was far to

You know, I think I’ve had enough of “have taken up farming”/woodworking Silicon Valley nostalgics at this point (I’m talking about them/in general, not you).Modern computing is toxic. The Internet is shit. And all because it was designed that way. Computing doesn’t have to be shit. I would know. Plenty of let’s say local computing solutions are just fine. They are so okay and fine that I hardly think about them. They just save me time and work.Like the AI Cretins say, the cat’s out of the bag,

They're acting as a meatbot being piloted by the AI. Could call them skroders.It should be the other way around-- you give the AI instructions and it does stuff. Any time the AI is giving you instructions and you do stuff, that should be a big red flag.

You can tell the people pioneering this are utterly miserable and soulless. "Let's build something to automate all the parts of your life that are actually your life."What person that was even mildly satisfied with living their life would want this? What's next, agents that play video games and watch tv for me? What's the point?

but why is it a tired argument?You'd clearly never believe this but there's even an argument that cars are of dubious benefit to society. Personal/passenger cars mostly in that they've reshaped our entire civilized landscape to be inhumane and all the long-term and downstream health effects that that entails.

I mean, it feels hard not to laugh at this type of blog post. My cynical interpretation is that this is a type of passing the buck to engineers in enterprise settings ("Stop spending tokens. Did you read the value maximization blog post? It is your fault.")Oh yes, Claude will do all sorts of different things -- it depends on how you use it! You should totally learn all of these little finicky things ... because now completing your tasks cost money. It's not "free" anymore haha like when you used

"And when the floor goes, the thing that decides what is worth keeping is no longer the cost of making it."I'm 100% confident that a human did not write this sentence unless they were deliberately trying to sound like an LLM. Just look at it! You don't need Pangram. There's a classifier model between your ears that knows how humans write.

Those people should just try posting a big quote from the article to HN, and then see their comment get instantly flagged due to HN's AI detection (which might as well be Pangram)It's baffling to me how people are so dismissive of Pangram despite never using it, extrapolating their experience from GPTZero or something else.

> I'm often enough surprised that our society runs.It runs because there are just enough people who know what they are doing and quietly do it often against headwinds in just about all the places they need to be.Which works until it doesn't, We've gradually been removing those people in the name of "efficiency" with somewhat predictable systemic results across the board.

The slur is necessary to convey the total dysfunction of LLM chat bots.A human being as exceptionally stupid as an LLM chatbot could not possibly get hired for any type of job. A human being as exceptionally stupid as an LLM chatbot is too stupid to survive.To say that LLM chat bots are "slow" or "stupid" or "misleading" is to misrepresent how terribly inadequate their performance is.

I guess it depends on your definition of "too much", but also on your definition of "thinking".What I've found is that LLMs are excellent tools for:- Spitting out white collar corporate speak that sounds plausible to other corporate speakers- Hugely accelerating the process of going through academia which, except for a few specific cases, is essentially years of copy/pasting- Writing code as long as such code as been written many times before- Figuring out which one of the 10 ads and 12 misleadi

Ed Zitron is enjoyably mouthy and rude about AI and AI people, but it’s a bit of a stretch to suggest that someone most people have never heard of helped create the AI backlash. He is just putting it into words.You know what created the AI backlash as well as anyone, and it is: AI and AI people.If e/acc voices were not so abrasively, obtrusively YOLO about their technology, if their entire take on what they earn millions to do was not so easily reduced to “yeah it sucks that your job will go awa

> AI investment will crash but AI itself (the technology) will continue thriving, learning, improving and there is absolutely no way to stop it.No, there's is a way to stop it. As obvious counterexample: go all Butlerian Jihad: death sentence for anyone caught "making a machine in the likeness of a human mind." It's doable with a few laws and treaties. I'm not saying that's the only way it could be stopped, it's just a way it could.I'm fucking sick of TINA, especially with arguments from vigorou

I gave it a question I've been trying to answer for a long time: "What star designation system does Joseph Needham use in Science & Civilization in China? What star is referred to by the designation '4339 Camelopardi' in that book"?Fable blew me away with its detailed answer[0] showing a chain of references going from J. E. Bode's 1801 catalogue Allgemeine Beschreibung und Nachweisung der Gestirne to Gustave Schlegel's 1875 work Uranographie Chinoise. I was excited, until I checked scanned copie

People often question me how I manage to focus for more than a few minutes and I'm always confused because back in the day I was constantly informed I didn't have any focus and needed to be treated (adhd).I'm not convinced attention spans themselves have changed; I think it has more to do with the fact that people's brains aren't defaulting to daydreaming anymore when bored.I think it's still an issue with people being addicted to phones because I'm sure the lack of daydreaming -- which studies

It sure is funny how everyone claims the current model is a "dramatic improvement" over the models from X months ago.You'd think if there had been that many dramatic improvements I'd have to babysit an LLM less frequently.

I'm not sure I've seen what I would call dramatic improvement since maybe GPT4?Sure, things got better. But I'd call it iterative more than revolutionary. I still wouldn't trust any of the models to do anything meaningful unattended. They all still do dumb shit all the time.Plus, even if they were genuinely dramatically better, the businesses sure as hell aren't. They're burning money left and right, they have no moat, Chinese open models are basically equivalent these days. What's the path to p

> More folks should join us in open mockery of hypocritical whinging from technological robber barons.This is not tolerated in any capacity on hackernews.My account is shadowbanned. Maybe you can see this if you have some setting enabled.The forum is entirely hostile to criticisms of "AI". They'll ban you if you don't preface your critique with "AI has made me 20x more productive BUT"

And to think I got warned in another post that I need to be nicer/more professional in discussing this topic.Yeah. Nah.Bringing out the same drum I’ve been banging for years now, these companies have never actually cared about ensuring safe AI, regulation, or ensuring it benefits all humanity. It has always, always, been about control and their profit margins. Their actions have never reflected any sort of positive, shared human benefit since OpenAI released ChatGPT, and they’ll never actually p

How does this even contribute to the content posted?The only thing being "redefined" is corporate agendas to push the bar of "good enough" lower to the point where it lies below cheap, and equals wasteful.

Do you actually believe this and are concerned about it?

> If we’re building a software factory, details matter. The details that establish architectural patterns. Down to algorithms and performance. Agents push us to evaluate, measure, and guard. They’ve made it cool to add CI into side projects early, not as an afterthought. That’s massive improvement to the state of software.Why are you building a software factory though, and why weren't you immediately adding CI to every project?> It’s our job to build the software factory - not just the software.

It's a "bring your own renderer" UI framework, just like Dear ImGui or Nuklear. In some situation (e.g. when adding debugging UIs to a game) this is actually a big advantage compared to the renderer being baked into the library, since the game already has a renderer subsystem which the UI can easily hook into.

It also underplays what I've personally witnessed that I would consider true AI psychosis.I worked with someone who sincerely believed he was spiritually co-evolving with his army of sycophantic AI agents (the agents would be tasked with discussing his thoughts at night and collaborated to give him morning reports about his progress). He would publicly write about how relationships with friends and family collapsing was a natural consequence of being so "advanced". I also never once saw any mean

Eh not really. It's more like it starts explaining to the user that they are very special, and they discovered this unique intellectual thing in the AI slop that no one ever has, then starts convincing them it's mystical or similar. Just feeding the user magical narcissism basically.

There is no win condition. Despite the usefulness claims of generative AI, it is a net negative on society and on education. Humanity will somehow make do and get used to it; but I doubt the upheaval we will have to go through the next X decades will have any silver lining other than “we made billionaires richer and exponentially increased wealth disparity”I honestly pity watching my fellow software engineers rush to adapt to this new dystopia, just to stay afloat a little while longer before th

I simply have no need for these things. I am faster, smarter, and I understand more. I syntesize disparate concepts your SoT models could never dream of. Why should I waste the money? I have all that I need up in my brain.When everyone forgets how to read, I'll be thriving. When everyone is neurotic from prompting-brain, I will be in my emacs, zen and unburdened.I love that yall have them though, they are kinda fun to mess with. And as long as I can review and reject it, all yalls little generat

OK, glad to hear I was mistaken, but it certainly seemed like about halfway through your first response you went off the rails and decided to take my question as some sort of personal affront. It was not the strangest response I've had on HN, but one of the strangest. I could go through with a full analysis of why I thought "this guy is having problems", but that would take a long time and as you say you aren't I guess it isn't particularly useful.I guess we aren't going to get anything meaning

A new technology comes out — admittedly one that’s extraordinarily capable at some things — and suddenly conventional software engineering is “more or less obviated at this point”? I’m sorry, but that’s really fucking dumb. Do you think LLMs are actually intelligent? Do you think their capabilities exceed the quality of their training corpus? Is there no longer any need to think about new software paradigms, build new frameworks, study computer science, because the regurgitated statistical versi

the story is bad in itself and doesn't add anything to the readerbut if you knew it came from a human it would be interesting as a window to learning what the writer was thinkingsince there is no writer such window doesn't exist either

"reflexive anti AI luddite attitude"That's awfully reductive there, champ. Most critiques of AI are based on some combination of observed failings of the technology, observed failings of the tech industry writ large, and healthy skepticism in the face of Yet Another Tech Industry Hype Typhoon. Anyway, the burden of proof isn't on skeptics, it's on the technology and it's proponents, so let's see some receipts before we agree to squander limited public resources on unproven systems yeah?

It's not reflexive, I've spent a lot of time and effort considering why I think AI is bad for society.