I'm the op on this one (not the author). Gotta say, I had higher hopes for the community here.
Isn't it worthwhile to examine our patterns of thinking and work? Shouldn't alternative perspectives such as these spark conversation, rather than sly jibes?
HN grew from curiosity and good-faith. Y'all are not showing up.
Speaking personally I was not particularly moved by the article because I have seen the same thing, in different shapes, thousands of times on HN and elsewhere. Really, AI can't feel and therefore it is inferior? Never heard that one before. Really, an AI can't feel friction and therefore can't adapt to it? Daring today, aren't we? (And a more interesting question: is that even true..?) I realize I am being unnecessarily harsh here, but this article is very much preaching to the choir on HN, which has an anti-AI bent. No one is showing up because there's nothing really to show up to here -- and that is why you are left with "sly jibes" and not much else.
It’s bizarre to me to hear that HN has an anti-AI bent.
This is the place I see AI discussed the most. Admittedly the opinions here are mixed. A lot of people do have negative feelings but there are also a ton of pro-AI comments. There
Are huge 600 comment threads about a new model release, weird rants about “Gastown”, constant “Launch HNs” for model wrappers, and people saying writing code by hand is archaic.
This is one of the most pro-AI places I spend time. The other websites I frequent are much more anti-AI and my experience in real life is that most people don’t like what AI is doing to the world (even if they grudgingly find it useful at work.)
Look, really not trying to get into the weeds here, but since we're there: I respect your take that nothing in this article is novel, though I disagree with it.
My point wasn't as much about that as it was the lack of good faith engagement and curiosity.
It is one of the biggest things to ever happen in the history of software, art, and writing. We're nowhere near the "it's meaningless to talk about why you don't like it" threshold.
TFA raises several points I hadn't heard before. Here's one.
The artifacts we produce define our culture. If we allow LLMs to produce our work, our culture represents that which they understand. But LLMs can't be trained on the entirety of the human experience. "How dare we abandon so many countless traditions and people and ideas and nuances, simply because they are underrepresented in the training data?"
I just feel like that's not performative in the way you're insinuating. That feels like a take to me. Respectful engagement is what I expected here.
I recently mentioned that my team and most of my dev friends don’t use AI for code on a gamdev forum (we do stuff like distributed consensus, compilers, etc.). I was quickly denounced as “an arrogant douche”.
Hey, I’m the author of this article. Just thought I’d share some context, since HN is a little outside the intended audience:
- We’re a tiny design studio specialising in fonts, so our website was (maybe predictably) not set up to handle a big traffic spike. It should be stable now.
- This article was written in response to some font industry discussions on the same topic. It’s a collection of thoughts rather than a manifesto, and there’s nuance which it doesn’t go into. I’m not a die-hard AI hater, just opposed to careless use of it within this narrow field.
When you write without AI you cultivate your team’s understanding which cultivates communication and teamwork and immediate understanding during downtime and emergencies. Build your team, not the product
No AI needed for the design and build of custom metal either, and with a similar long human effort that I am privilaged to be aware and part of that I am quite certain cant be handled useing any computational averaging.
Funnily enough, I have had and am right now involved in a project that the customer tried to have AI design, but that
the most basic calculations were wrong.
It's worse, as even humans working with highly developed design and estimating software, cant deliver accurate shop plans for real world projects that involve irregular surfaces or curves, and changing slopes that must be measured on site.
AI will help you enjoy your cubes and parallograms, and cover them with realistic textures.
My wife got an email from a new hire (now even a new hire yet: she's still on a trial basis), a 23 years old, where she explains that she doesn't want to use AI. That she doesn't like what AI does. On a funny sidenote: the email is obviously 99% llmish, which is hilarious.
That's one extremity: crazy people who refuse to learn a new tool.
Then on the other extremity you have the even much crazier ones: those who believe they've got an intelligent machine that is going to solve all their work problems during the day and then, at night, that is going to enlighten them by revealing them who god really is.
Where the heck are the reasonable people who use AI for what it is: a tool that can be extremely helpful at times and extremely sucky at other times but that is still, on average, a time saver?
I use LLMs daily to piece together technical reports and smooth out rough drafts. It saves me hours of time / week.
I also use it to augment my technical work, because I don't want to be out of a job one day with no marketable skills, except driving an agent harness.
There is a percentage of the population that thinks LLMs are actually intelligent and truly can't tell the difference.
I think others just want to live life as a passenger, not think, and have AI do all the work.
We're here -- I use AI for low-complexity toil, one-off scripts, search & discovery, and as a sounding board for new perspectives.
I still design and build systems almost all myself. If a snippet comes out of an LLM I'm keen to use it's filtered through my brain as well. Polished and transformed to align with my vision. After all, I'm on the hook for supporting it and bringing it to my team.
I'm sure most of us are just sick of the mania around this and choose to avoid interacting with content relating to it.
It's very useful. But irresponsible to use without recognizing and respecting its limitations.
> Where the heck are the reasonable people who use AI for what it is: a tool that can be extremely helpful at times and extremely sucky at other times but that is still, on average, a time saver?
They're unlikely to be vocal because they've already evaluated and decided the role AI will play in their work/life and just moved on/kept working. That's also likely to be a small pool of people relative to the number of people interacting with AI (either by force or choice).
> That's also likely to be a small pool of people relative to the number of people interacting with AI
Perhaps small now. But overall this seems to be what most have done in my small social circle. Small uses of AI here and there, sometimes surprising gains/wins they find out and share if asked, otherwise really it's just another tool to learn and make use of.
Most everyone thinks it's overhyped and wedged into stupid places it doesn't make much sense, especially in consumer products. But they also can recognize that behind the scenes and in closed doors there are perhaps some exciting things happening in certain industries and use-cases.
Most are still very much in the "haven't played with it much yet, it's moving too fast and I'm too old and busy with my life" or "still evaluating as time allows" stage. This is mid-career folks in various professional roles, skewing towards tech. Some sense of "this tech is getting good fast, and I will be left behind if I do not learn it at some point in the future".
I will say most have barely ventured past the "copy/paste from ChatGPT" stage of AI use. It usually elicits comment when someone moves past that and finds out they are far more capable than they realized. Then usually some more comments a couple weeks later mentioning newfound limitations.
We're right here! Some of us just prefer to stay out of these silly irrational debates because we know that neither of those two crazy camps will listen to a word we, or anyone else, will say. We might be wrong about that (I hope we're wrong about that!) but there sure are enough other people chattering that it's easy to sit back and let them have it out.
The "you'll get left behind" crowd has already made it clear that they're not worth engaging with, you're not going to find reasonable voices anywhere those threads are happening...
to the people claiming "hugged to death", this website works for me while on a train in rural Germany (anyone who lives in Europe should be all too aware about phone network quality here).
As for the content: fully agree. Human touch is a value in itself. Unfortunately, modern capitalism does not provide incentives to take care about value, because (by capitalism's metrics) value is inefficiency.
A website flaming out and dying in the face of unusual traffic is a perfectly reasonable business decision. These "witty" comments are effectively self owns.
Well, they're using Render which you'd think they'd be able to handle HN traffic. Not a good look for Render as a service, especially when their first item under product is autoscaling.
Maybe you think this is a witty comment, but ironically it illustrates exactly the problem with outsourcing your thinking to a machine. All they needed to do was raise the instance limit, which they immediately did when they saw the surge of traffic.
No expensive tokens needed, no agents needed, no outsourcing their work to some calculator. The problem was solved even faster than an LLM would have, and they maintained full control and understanding of their systems while solving the problem. It's almost like human expertise is great.
And you know, the whole "maybe ask AI thing" is exactly what everyone is making fun of. Any engineer worth their salt should be able to look at a system crashing under heavy load and come up with a few proper solutions to the problem that don't involve "ask ChatGPT", but people have completely replaced their thinking with this "I'll just ask the calculator" laziness. It's sad, pathetic to see really.
To me this is such a weird take. I'd imagine you don't have a clear understanding of how 95% of the things you interact with on a daily basis is made. So many things from Shampoos, to Microwaves, to your car, to how your coffee is sourced and made. You are perfectly fine giving away your full control and understanding to another intelligence/s for these things. This could be a bad idea, and historically has been for some people. They were eating food that contained things that weren't healthy for them or they are allergic to some product. However, a majority of people still live this way as long as most of them get a good result from the process. Most people only care about giving an input and getting the same output.
You're on a technical forum for people who work in tech. Expecting some bare minimum of technical competency beyond "ask the great oracle" is not a weird take.
All these "principled" people telling others that "they practice what they preach" shooting themselves in the foot with their "production" site down and hugged to death on the front page.
Just ask the AI to set up your site for better uptime if you don't know how to.
This (and all the disgusting "hugged to death, you're dumb, use AI" comments that have replaced HN's normal venom-less "hugged to death" comments) makes me want to leave Hacker News.
It’s a mixed bag. You have insufferable mouth breathing morons who think AGI is here, and on the other hand you have rational - dare I say enlightened - individuals such as yourself.
Isn't it worthwhile to examine our patterns of thinking and work? Shouldn't alternative perspectives such as these spark conversation, rather than sly jibes?
HN grew from curiosity and good-faith. Y'all are not showing up.
This is the place I see AI discussed the most. Admittedly the opinions here are mixed. A lot of people do have negative feelings but there are also a ton of pro-AI comments. There Are huge 600 comment threads about a new model release, weird rants about “Gastown”, constant “Launch HNs” for model wrappers, and people saying writing code by hand is archaic.
This is one of the most pro-AI places I spend time. The other websites I frequent are much more anti-AI and my experience in real life is that most people don’t like what AI is doing to the world (even if they grudgingly find it useful at work.)
My point wasn't as much about that as it was the lack of good faith engagement and curiosity.
Not interesting? Let the damn thing die on /new.
It’s the new web dev, imo.
This post wasn’t about sparking conversation. It’s about using AI makes me lose the human touch in what I do, blah blah, heard it all before.
Sorry, not sorry.
We crossed that threshold at least a year ago.
The artifacts we produce define our culture. If we allow LLMs to produce our work, our culture represents that which they understand. But LLMs can't be trained on the entirety of the human experience. "How dare we abandon so many countless traditions and people and ideas and nuances, simply because they are underrepresented in the training data?"
I just feel like that's not performative in the way you're insinuating. That feels like a take to me. Respectful engagement is what I expected here.
- We’re a tiny design studio specialising in fonts, so our website was (maybe predictably) not set up to handle a big traffic spike. It should be stable now.
- This article was written in response to some font industry discussions on the same topic. It’s a collection of thoughts rather than a manifesto, and there’s nuance which it doesn’t go into. I’m not a die-hard AI hater, just opposed to careless use of it within this narrow field.
Appreciate the more reasonable comments!
My wife got an email from a new hire (now even a new hire yet: she's still on a trial basis), a 23 years old, where she explains that she doesn't want to use AI. That she doesn't like what AI does. On a funny sidenote: the email is obviously 99% llmish, which is hilarious.
That's one extremity: crazy people who refuse to learn a new tool.
Then on the other extremity you have the even much crazier ones: those who believe they've got an intelligent machine that is going to solve all their work problems during the day and then, at night, that is going to enlighten them by revealing them who god really is.
Where the heck are the reasonable people who use AI for what it is: a tool that can be extremely helpful at times and extremely sucky at other times but that is still, on average, a time saver?
I use LLMs daily to piece together technical reports and smooth out rough drafts. It saves me hours of time / week.
I also use it to augment my technical work, because I don't want to be out of a job one day with no marketable skills, except driving an agent harness.
There is a percentage of the population that thinks LLMs are actually intelligent and truly can't tell the difference.
I think others just want to live life as a passenger, not think, and have AI do all the work.
I still design and build systems almost all myself. If a snippet comes out of an LLM I'm keen to use it's filtered through my brain as well. Polished and transformed to align with my vision. After all, I'm on the hook for supporting it and bringing it to my team.
I'm sure most of us are just sick of the mania around this and choose to avoid interacting with content relating to it.
It's very useful. But irresponsible to use without recognizing and respecting its limitations.
I have > 10yoe, fwiw.
They're unlikely to be vocal because they've already evaluated and decided the role AI will play in their work/life and just moved on/kept working. That's also likely to be a small pool of people relative to the number of people interacting with AI (either by force or choice).
Perhaps small now. But overall this seems to be what most have done in my small social circle. Small uses of AI here and there, sometimes surprising gains/wins they find out and share if asked, otherwise really it's just another tool to learn and make use of.
Most everyone thinks it's overhyped and wedged into stupid places it doesn't make much sense, especially in consumer products. But they also can recognize that behind the scenes and in closed doors there are perhaps some exciting things happening in certain industries and use-cases.
Most are still very much in the "haven't played with it much yet, it's moving too fast and I'm too old and busy with my life" or "still evaluating as time allows" stage. This is mid-career folks in various professional roles, skewing towards tech. Some sense of "this tech is getting good fast, and I will be left behind if I do not learn it at some point in the future".
I will say most have barely ventured past the "copy/paste from ChatGPT" stage of AI use. It usually elicits comment when someone moves past that and finds out they are far more capable than they realized. Then usually some more comments a couple weeks later mentioning newfound limitations.
As for the content: fully agree. Human touch is a value in itself. Unfortunately, modern capitalism does not provide incentives to take care about value, because (by capitalism's metrics) value is inefficiency.
Such juvenile behavior can only be attributed to the general unease and defensiveness demonstrated by members of the AI cult in the face of criticism:
“Your blasphemy against our god has been duly punished… you must pray for his forgiveness.”
Please use AI (or anything) to fix your site.
No expensive tokens needed, no agents needed, no outsourcing their work to some calculator. The problem was solved even faster than an LLM would have, and they maintained full control and understanding of their systems while solving the problem. It's almost like human expertise is great.
And you know, the whole "maybe ask AI thing" is exactly what everyone is making fun of. Any engineer worth their salt should be able to look at a system crashing under heavy load and come up with a few proper solutions to the problem that don't involve "ask ChatGPT", but people have completely replaced their thinking with this "I'll just ask the calculator" laziness. It's sad, pathetic to see really.
Just ask the AI to set up your site for better uptime if you don't know how to.
Later: The villain cat has the catchphrases 'Purrrfect' and 'You must be kitten me'. The snake character makes lotsss of sss noissesss.