Had some unique concert audio recordings which had gotten corrupted when I moved the files during a backup. I had tried looking at the files and trying to recover them. It felt like they had the data but no software could play them.
Sat on them for 5 yrs. Finally decided to try if AI tools could help. Tool Copilot 20mins and a lot of mucking around with hex dumps. First couple of times it got a semi working solution (only first few seconds of a file were playable). Finally managed to recover all the files.
I have realised that my own "anti-AI" position is little to do with AI itself, and a lot to do with the flatly appalling culture around it, and my reluctance is partly to do with what navigating it has meant for me and people I care about.
I am willing to accept that I must learn these tools, so I am learning the tools. Open source, open weights, open culture.
--
A diversion for a second:
Some time back I saw a comment here (I am sorry, I can't find it at the moment) about how FreeCAD is the "state of the art" CAD package in the traditional, philosophical sense — the sense that "the art" can only truly be advanced if it is available to all. It doesn't matter if there are things that appear better: "the art" is what people will openly share, educate in and distribute. Implicitly, in this thinking, the "state of the art" is _behind_ the "cutting edge", which is where uneven, volatile advancements are made.
I had to sit with it for a while but my feeling is this is true. Perhaps Parasolid is the cutting edge; FreeCAD is the state of the art. Confusing these two is a cultural problem, and we should reclaim "the state of the art".
On this basis, the frontier models are the cutting edge; the "state of the art" is open weights. So the latter is what I am learning to use.
—
Now that I am learning these tools at my own pace, I can see what they can do and they can't do for a middle-aged British freelancer, I can clearly see how progress works, and I can ignore the "latest model already fixes this" silliness. I am able to work on ways to use these tools to solve my own problems, and I can evaluate them all as the future boring technology they will soon be.
It has helped me see what I am "anti-", with clarity:
- I am "anti-" the idea that tech people have brazenly been underestimating the complexity, values, culture, traditions, and principles of the creative industries they have gleefully fucked up (I have a foot in multiple camps here so I can see this easily)
- I am "anti-" the tethering of this technology to "e/acc", and the "in the near future we will destroy all your jobs, sorry, I guess you're fucked, maybe learn AI" mentality that it has been riddled with since the earliest point
- I am "anti-" the sort of imperial default; "hey you can just change your business so it is dependent on one of two American cloud startups that have demonstrated little commitment to openness r behaving in a predictable manner, that has subsidised pricing that will one day blow up, and is like Uber did, YOLO-ripping through regulations, legal principles and foreign commercial cultures, and at the end of it will leave ordinary people holding the bag while they yomp on towards the next thing to fuck up.
In short, I am "anti-" the brazen, entitled, trollish trend of devaluing all of human culture and denigrating anyone who is not in the tech industry as expendable, inferior, quaint, gate-keeper-ish, etc.; it is like what happens to any social group when the spoilt children of the local overgrown rich-kid come to dominate it.
The technology? A bit less world-shaking than people realise, but possibly worth it for code-generation.
I guess you can describe me as anti-AI. I use AI everyday to write code. I can’t deny that it makes me more efficient. And there’s pressure from the people that pay my bills to produce more and more with it. But I still hate it. I hate the code it writes. I hate what is turning my job into. I hate the main companies behind it. I hate all the resources being poured into it. I hate that most of the real profit and benefits from it will just go on to make more delusional tech billionaires the likes of Zuckerberg and Musk instead of actually being distributed somewhat fairly amongst all of us.
But yeah, I can vibe code the same crappy app as millions of other engineers in a weekend. And we will all pay Apple $99 a year to upload the same crappy app to the App Store hoping to catch some of that AI-wave money.
This assumes the military just wants to kill all civilians, which isn’t the case in basically any revolutions. The military doesn’t know which houses to hit, and when >1/2 of the houses are armed in the US it makes disarming all possible defectors very difficult.
I.e. your scenario of an insurgent being packaged up nicely in an identified building is dumb because the insurgent already lost to be revealed that way.
The 15 years of failed insurgency removal in Afghanistan and Iraq are great evidence of this.
It's not just a nitpick, because this is really at the core of your position. Ignoring the terminology, you're trying to claim there is some principle that says everyone should have the default position that LLMs aren't conscious instead of uncertainty. And there isn't. You have to weigh actual arguments for or against LLM consciousness.
> There's no real serious debate here. Everyone's just vibing
Sure, but if everyone including Ted Chiang is just vibing, and no one can prove anything, that makes Ted's statement false and Anthropic's statement true.
> If you (or Anthropic) want to claim "but this is philosophy
I'd just like you or Ted Chiang to not pretend your vibes are science. You're welcome to have them. I also don't think LLMs are conscious. But it's our personal judgement, and not scientific fact.
I can't imagine where we are headed. You understand every step of what it did and can appreciate the complexity but it'll only take a few generations for this to become something like magic to the tech priests beseeching the machine spirits for blessings
The genuine answer is that many people who hold a lot of power over me (the executive suite of my industry) intend to do me harm with it (put me out of a job).
That's the Clever Hans argument, and the fact that you confidently use this tells me you are engaging in broscience / pseudoscience. Like I say, anti-scientific attitudes like yours are part of the problem, fanning the hype.
The comment above is perfectly clear, and if you have been living under a rock since the Reagan years, that's on you.
See Elon talking about Tesla finally joining the S&P 500 so index funds would finally have to buy its shares. See a hundred examples where socialism is reserved for the few, the jungle and legal constraints for the rest of us.
One of my favorite dynamics: Warrior class that really kicks butt, takes control over the state and then slowly becomes obsolete but is so embedded in the social structure that it just sticks around sucking up vast resources for hundreds of years.
I've read the Ottoman Empire had this happen with the Janissaries, but there are lots of other instances of the military becoming a colossal useless but dangerous parasite, even lots of current-day ones.
I suspect there is a lot of selection bias going on as well.
Forums like this, reddit, X, readers of news sites etc tend to be filled with people that don’t have much going on in their lives, have a lot of free time to comment, are less likely to exploit the benefits of AI, and more likely to have simpler skills sets that are replaceable with AI.
Talking to people in real world, I would say the overwhelming majority are excited by AI and interesting in using it more rather than less.
I don't think HN is unitedly anti-AI, I see a continuum of views and nuanced opinions. The societal implications could be large and are unknowable. It isn't about how quick the product is delivered to customers-- the second order effects are what some are reasonably worried about. It's difficult for me to only view it through a technical context because my brain is enumerating all the ways it can impact us. It has in some ways made the workplace seem insufferable (for lack of a better word) and that irritant quality could have some reflexively opposing for a legitimate reason.
When I say “zones” I’m referring to site-local addresses specifically which were deprecated and replaced by ULAs because zones in anything other than link local addresses were declared stupid and hard to implement. That may be where the confusion is coming from. I’m sorry I didn’t use specific language. I understand what we commonly call the “interface scope” is technically a “zone id”.
mDNS working on link-local means you can advertise your service over mDNS so no user ever types this shit into their address bar in the first place.
This specify-encode-fulfill loop/method is effective to make agents create bug-free code.
In my version of this workflow I do specify myself, then let the LLM do the rest.
This way 1.) I'm 100% sure the understanding/spec is good 2.) It's translated into an executable format so the implementation can be verified 3.) The implementation has maximum code coverage tests which steers the AI to produce code which follows standards, fits into the existing codebase, and it's very easy to refactor.
So far, this is the one and only advantage of using LLMs in my SWE practice. They glue together (human written) specs with code, with confidence, in no time.
It's quite clear that there is an effort to engineer mega financial vehicles that index tracking funds are forced to buy. The incentive to do so is massive, and there is nothing illegal about it.
As a holder of index funds such as the S&P, I'd much prefer that these vehicles are excluded for at least some period of time to ensure that the greater fool isn't simply my index portfolio.
This does not really match my observations. While it does feel to me the sentiment is shifting towards a more negative one, overall HN feels reasonably balanced between those that are pro-AI and those anti-AI (with the middle ground somewhat absent).
Unlike what many other comments here seem to suggest, HN seems much more pro-AI than what I see in real life amongst developers - at least where I live.
And I do think many users would care more than we might think, but unlike art etc. it is often more difficult to tell.
What field? They brought back up that old sci-fi term AI specifically for neural networks to create a false impression among people that this is a technology that can "think."
well work wise its usually for adjacent tooling. It unblocks other things, but like actual prod code, i'm always a little skeptical.
For example we had this problem where we had to take in customer inputs for requests and calculate out the projected downstream TPS. This is fairly complex since we run a query parser/orchestrator.
This is expensive to write myself or to have engi's do it, but the scaling algorithms are all there and we have excel sheets for spreading out overall costs.
so then all was needed was basically write out a big spec of the reqs - give it the docs/parser code/excel sheets, then just have it span out the pieces as a sequential checklist.
1. CI/OPS
2. docs
3. test infra
4. incremental build out in phases to chain it all together.
There's probably a lot to say about it's merits or problems, but given the demographics (or my perception of them) is largely "software people" can you really be that surprised or angry given that this could snuff out a _lot_ of people's livelihoods like nothing we've probably seen in our lifetimes?
I don't think they'll let the chain of managers above you handle the llm directly. That is just too much risk of incompetence. Instead, there will be micro teams (1 dev, 1 sre, 1 product owner) that are meta manageed by a LLM. And their llm reports directly to a higher up's llm. And software will diversify to prevent all these supply chain attacks we've seen lately.
