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Comment by crimsonalucard | Hacker News Reader

There's a real lack of humility among our industry, especially in the AI space.

Literally you can google "AI solves world peace" or "AI solves COVID-19" and you'll hit an article.

We also call ourselves ninjas when most of us are just building hugely complex infrastructure behind what is ultimately just a CRUD website.

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This classification of applications as CRUD or not CRUD is not helpful. It‘s like thinking about software as just IO or as just some sort of transformation or even as just some sort of function. It says nothing about the complexity and very little about the structure of the problem at hand.

Maybe a better way to put it is: that the end result is just a website where data is moved around and/or some calculations are done. The whole infrastructure/architecture thing are just strategies on where to place data, how to move data, when to do calculation in the name of mitigating load or making future changes easier.

Ultimately, the end result is we're just building interactive documents. "Interactive document maker" or "Dynamic form writer" is a more humble term than "Problem solver" or "Coding Ninja" because that's literally all we're doing.

It doesn‘t matter if the output is a „document“ or if it runs in a browser. And more so with SPAs. These are not more like documents than any desktop application twenty years ago.

And of course software development is about solving problems. And of course it‘s not just about where to place data.

I completely agree with you. Really getting sick and tired of the tech industry thinking they are better than everyone else because they can program. Very egotistical culture. Down to even morals. I had one guy comment to me "Hard to believe someone in the tech industry believes such things."

But I think it is mostly just American programmers. Or maybe just big city programmers. I've had the opportunity to work with people in Spain, The UK, and Prague, others remotely as well, but I haven't seen the level of ego in those guys as I have seen in Americans.

It's part of the reason I loathe the idea of hiring developers from America. EVERYOTHER industry is perfectly fine with criticizing or reanalyzing the work of others either underneath their authority or about their competitors. I'm sure even some of these programmers have even said "OMG this caffe macchiato is crap. I'm never drinking from this place again." But nope, don't criticize programmers or ask them to redo work. It's just so rude.

But it is probably the fact that companies like Google literally put slides and children's toys in their offices for their apparently adult programmers to enjoy. An artifact of programmer scarcity I'd imagine.

The downvotes are really telling. Don't point out the hubris on HN.

It's hovering and oscillating around zero. Id say it's a 50/50 thing.

That lack of humility also exists in other industries. You can Google "healthcare saves lives" and hit many articles

Healthcare saves lives --- by definition.

I’m gonna steal this for a comic I’m working on verbatim.

Plumbers and custodians also save lives through sanitation. But when you google "Plumbers save lives" you get nothing.

I myself have had my cancer personally cured by AI and machine learning, but does the electrician who provided power to the computer get any credit? No, and that is a huge discrimination problem.

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