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Comment by pushfoo | Hacker News Reader

TL;DR: Yes, and I think that's why some of these comments are so hostile to OP.

> it's impossible to try and make them understand, they just don't care. I can't make them care. It's a clash of cultures, I guess.

That seems to be what OP's cathartic humor is about. It's also (probably) a deliberate provocation since that sub-culture doesn't deal well with this sort of humor.

If that's the case, you can see it working in this thread. Some of the commenters with the clearest C-suite aspirations are reacting with unironic vitriol as if the post is about them personally.

I think most of those comments already got flagged, but some seemed genuine in accusing OP of being a dangerously ill menace to society, e.g. "...Is OP threatening us?"

In a sense, OP is threatening them, but not with literal violence. He's making fun of their aspirations, and he's doing so with some pretty vicious humor.

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I think it's a bit reductive to flatten the conversation so much. While I don't have as much of an extreme reaction as the people you talk about, the post left a bit of a sour taste in my mouth. Not because I'm one of "those people" - I agree with the core of the post, and appreciate that the person writing it has actual experience in the field.

It's that the whole conversation around machine learning has become "tainted" - mention AI, and the average person will envision that exact type of an evil MBA this post is rallying against. And I don't want to be associated with them, even implicitly.

I shouldn't feel ashamed for taking some interest and studying machine learning. I shouldn't feel ashamed for having some degree of cautious optimism - the kind that sees a slightly better world, and not dollar signs. And yet.

The author here draws pretty clear lines in what they're talking about - but most readers won't care or even read that far. And the degree of how emotionally charged it is does lead me to think that there's a degree of further discontent, not just the C-suite rhetoric that almost everyone but the actual C-suites can get behind.

> I think it's a bit reductive to flatten the conversation so much.

Is that because I added a TL;DR line, or my entire post?

> I shouldn't feel ashamed for taking some interest and studying machine learning. I shouldn't feel ashamed for having some degree of cautious optimism - the kind that sees a slightly better world, and not dollar signs. And yet.

I agree with this in general. I didn't mean to criticize having interest in it.

> And the degree of how emotionally charged it is does lead me to think that there's a degree of further discontent

Do you mean the discontent outside the C-suite? If so, yes, I agree with that too. But if we start discussing that, we'll be discussing the larger context of economic policy, what it means to be human, what art is, etc.

> Is that because I added a TL;DR line, or my entire post?

The TL;DR was a fine summary of the post, I was talking about the whole of it. Though, now that I re-read it, I see that you were cautious to not make complete generalizations - so my reply was more of a knee-jerk reaction to the implication that most people who oppose the author's style are just "temporarily embarrassed C-suites", unlike the sane people who didn't feel uncomfortable about it.

> I didn't mean to criticize having interest in it.

I don't think you personally did - I was talking about the original post there, not about yours. The sentiment in many communities now is that machine learning itself (or generative AI specifically) is an overhyped, useless well that's basically run dry - and there's no doubt that the dislike of financial grifters is what started their disdain for the whole field.

> Do you mean the discontent outside the C-suite?

Yes.

> the post left a bit of a sour taste in my mouth [...] And the degree of how emotionally charged it is does lead me to think that there's a degree of further discontent

I think part of the problem is that it's generally futile to judge the mental state or hidden motivations of some random person on the internet based solely on something they've written about a particular topic. And yet, we keep trying to do that, over and over and over, and make our own (usually incredibly flawed) judgments about authors based on that.

The post left a bit of a sour taste in my mouth too, mainly because as I've gotten older I don't really enjoy "violence humor" all that much anymore. I think a big part of that is experience: experiencing violence myself (to a fairly minor degree, even), and knowing people who have experienced violence makes joking about violence just not feel particularly funny to me.

But if I step back a bit, my (probably flawed) judgment is pretty mild: I don't think the author is a violent person or would ever actually threaten or bring violence upon colleagues. I'm not even sure the author is even anywhere near as angry about the topic as the post might lead us to believe. Violence humor is just a rhetorical device. And just like any rhetorical device, it will resonate with some readers but not with others.

> the post is about them personally.

There is a decent chance that, yes, this rant is quite literally aimed at the people that frequent Hacker News. Where else are you going to find a more concentrated bunch of people peddling AI hype, creating AI startups, and generally over-selling their capabilities than here?

on linkedin, for starters

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