Comment by slowin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by slowin | Hacker News Reader

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I think progress is inevitable. Sometimes good, sometimes bad (in my perspective). I love AI but I don't like the eco-damage required to power it (not just water/electricity, but rare earth mining and the human rights violations that go with it). I don't think you can go backwards though.

I was just pointing out the logical tension in the comment I was replying to.

> This is the complete opposite of my experience. AI seems like the logical conclusion of the business-ifying of tech. Get rid of all those pesky nerds, and the MBAs can just create whatever grift pops into their head.

I have dozens of extremely nerdy projects going thanks to AI. I wouldn't have had time for any of them because I was too busy making money to spend 100+ extra hours programming my wildest tech fantasies, but now that's possible!

AI also makes it possible to do hardware programming, reverse engineering (when Anthropic isn't censoring itself) and all manner of other geeky pursuits.

Sure, I agree that progress (towards something) is inevitable. But in the dichotomy presented ("progress" vs. "programmers feelings"), I took progress to mean "the things we're currently making progress on [with regards to AI]." Which I would say are largely a wealth concentration machine, and will probably be a net negative for humanity. To more directly respond to the original question of "progress or programmer feelings", I would ask why we can't just do something else entirely?

I'm genuinely happy that you're having fun with it. I can't get over the feeling that _I'm not building anything._ To me, it seems like hopping on an IRC channel and copy-pasting code from a greybeard instead of writing it myself. I just don't find that satisfying at all.

You clearly don't care about the eco-damage or else you wouldn't be using Big Tech's LLMs lol.

And let's not kid ourselves, you aren't programming anything. You are paying Anthropic to brute force the code for you with their supercomputer which was only built thanks to the rare earth mining and human rights violations you claim to be bothered about.

There is truth to what you're saying. I desperately want local models to be powerful enough to use and I'm sure they will soon enough.

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