dannersy

True. The techno optimists seem to think it is justified for a chance to cure a disease.

It is cold for me to not want to concede everything to billionaires to cure a disease? You are short sighted, as I would argue the reverse is cold.

I am okay with Alzheimer's not being cured if it means we are not bending over backwards to welcome a billionaire overlord class. I don't think Altman or Amodei give a fuck about Alzheimer's unless a cure gives them a reason to obtain more investments. You could say that is the system working, but as a member of said system, it feels pretty shit.

It is honestly offensive to me that this isn't plainly obvious to everyone. AI has never, ever, and never will be, about making life better for the average human. It has always been, and always will be, about wealth consolidation and control. Does anyone think it is coincidence that now local models are more useful the market has suddenly made it massively more expensive to buy your own hardware? Companies are just giving up making consumer hardware because they can can just focus on hyper-scalers. They want to control compute as well, there is no liberating aspect to any of this.

Businesses, especially tech ones, are not altruistic. The idea that tech companies are out to make anyone's life better is a joke and a sentiment that should have died decades ago. The evidence is of predatory business practices and leveraging the worst aspects of our brain chemistry to keep us hooked on apps that make us less happy, keep us stupid and less informed, and buying more.

Even more confusing are the people who are welcoming AI with open arms as just another skill to learn, _surely_ they'll be the ones who come out on top, right? It has all the stink of the countless Americans believing they too will become billionaires and everyone else are just suckers as they are all one healthcare problem away from bankruptcy.

We don't learn.

Okay?

Because then we already have it, and if we do, it is pretty underwhelming.

This is the new old way. This was fine before irresponsible use of AI. Between vibe coding and using AI to find vulnerabilities as a result of vibes, I'm afraid that we will have to find ways to have more controlled environments.

Low cost to entry, easy to get scale from the beginning if you need it. The large cloud providers throw free credit at startups to lock them in all the time. I had a short lived stint trying to get my own startup off the ground and it was really easy to get free compute from Google with no strings attached. This was many years ago now, but I would be surprised if it is any different.

I am with you entirely and would not have taken that route today, but it is really easy to see why people go that route.

> Anti-AI Devs/Techies have their heads in the sand or/and resorting to binary thinking when it comes to AI.

The goal posts are being moved, yet again, as the reality of generative AI's usefulness starts to narrow. I think most "anti-AI" devs wanted the technology to be supplemental in the first place, in the hands of responsible engineers. The hype riders are the ones who are saying our job is over.

> reducing the cost

The evidence is the contrary. The tools are become more expensive by the month it seems.

As a more emotions based response to your post: I find it pretty gross that we are ready to accept that this tech should be used in art whatsoever. I think saying this is a barrier-to-entry-lowering tech is a misnomer, because even those who use computers still need to understand the program, mechanics must understand the function and implications of a torque wrench; there is no effort or skill involved with generating slop, you always get a result. Additionally, the first part of your post was to argue that we should be using these tools to do narrow scoped tooling and one-off script, and then you moved to generating videos and music, which shows that you aren't even aware of the "scope" involved in those efforts.

This post is delusional. There nothing liberating about generative AI and folks aren't investing hundreds of billions because they think it will liberate people.

I was down voted pretty hard for calling this comment out. I would say I'm surprised but honestly? Completely predictable.

I can say from expertise that vibing a full move of any project from one language to another is probably not a great way to evaluate if the decision is a good one. I got downvoted, maybe I said it too authoritatively. But hey, that is just like, my experienced opinion, man.

Since when was HN ever about asked for criticism?

I think the criticism is still a valid to an extent because I don't see how this would give you a good way to evaluate Zig vs. Rust. Maybe a better approach is to migrate a particularly problematic space and bench that on its own?

While I agree, I think that the reward is that when I write things myself I have to revisit that code much less frequently than those who are vibing their services. I'm sure someone will tell me that the person didn't prompt it right. Anyway, until we no longer live in this crumbling semblance of a capitalist society, then I will continue to do my job to not just keep it but also make my life easier.

Can we please stop anthropomorphizing LLMs? It is extremely unhealthy and seems like it feeds into people's irresponsible use of a tool that could otherwise be useful if we stopped treating prediction machines like what they are not.

No one uses it this way, despite what people say. They hit any sort of wall and then ask the robot. Thought ends.

Beautifully stated and I couldn't agree more. This is my experience.

I am paid far less than what I'm worth to work at a company that is as close to ethically neutral as I could find. The next step would be nonprofits, but there aren't many and a lot of times they can't justify my pay, understandably.

Good luck convincing people to not just take the money.

Honestly, it isn't particularly good at greenfield stuff. It's a mess all around. Seeing the claims that AI is better at code than humans has been a failure for my direct experience and those I know who work at larger companies. Incident and regression rates are up exponentially and requiring more people to play wack-a-mole.

Yeah, my only hope is that this is unsustainable, admittedly for selfish reasons.

I know plenty of engineers being forced to use these tools whether they want to or not. A lot of which are okay with using AI liberally, but don't particularly like generative AI and see it as pretty irresponsible (which feels more true by the week and it is clear from first hand experience). I don't know, there is a huge gradient of users, but I would argue that in previous revolutionary technologies, we didn't have to force people to use a good tool. I didn't have to be forced to use Google search or Google Maps, tech that is now ubiquitous with western society. It seems really suspect that suits have to enforce the use of something that is supposed to change the way we work and be a force multiplier.

No, you have gone off in your own tangent. The person you're responding to is talking about money and my point is that you're using a misleading metric. Even if the current user base is paying more for the "exponential token usage", it does not add up to the industry's cost of maintaining and building on this technology, especially since we are not taking into account what that token usage costs the provider. First you said Anthropic as your source, but now you're talking about OpenAI's ChatGPT, who are floundering for a product and user base, which they themselves claim will be profitable through subscriptions at numbers never seen before in a subscription business model.

So as I said, a self interested metric who also controls how many tokens it takes to get a desirable result from their models.

> The usage of LLMs is continuing to increase ~exponentially

I would like a source for that statement. Additionally, I want to know by who? Because it certainly isn't end users. Inflating token usage doesn't make it any more economically viable if your user base, b2b or not, hasn't increased with it. On the contrary, that is a worse scenario for providers.

If they were they would show evidence because they'd pull in more investment. I don't believe their claim that they make profits on inference, especially not with reports like this coming out.

Once again, this whole article is predicated on us being at the finish line. You know who will care about how something got written? Very suddenly, it will be the org that has an issue that the AI fails to fix or you don't understand well enough to fix within a span of time they deem reasonable. That has been the battle since the beginning of software and the only thing you have to combat it is your understanding.

I am still baffled about engineer's or developer's use of AI. I see fail and fail on anything other than some novelty one-shotted tool, and even then folks are bending over backwards to find the value because that solution is always a shallow representation of what it needs to be.

My projects are humming away, hand made. They have bugs, but when they show up, I more often than not know exactly what to do. My counterparts have AI refactoring wild amount of code for issue that can be solved with a few lines of adjustment.

TL;DR I feel like I live in a different reality than those who write these blog

You do not write Rust yet will make blanket absurd claims about Rust being overcomplicated or not solving your problems. The additional comparison of Rust to PHP is also ridiculous for so many reasons it might not be worth even discussing, because it just seems bad faith from the start.

You're missing a very fundamental point here, and this is usually something I find with long time C programmers. C is a great, but old language, with decades of overhead on context, tooling, and lib understanding that make getting in to writing C substantially more difficult than say, Rust. We are still humans, and Rust isn't entirely trying to solve C from a fundamental paradigm of handling memory from a technical point of view, but more from a programmer one. Your comment about solving memory bugs is predicated on perfect human usage of C to not write the bug in the first place, which is precisely one of the many problems Rust is looking to solve.

Is this another AI article? What is said about Rust here has been said over and over again, and this brings nothing new to the table. They also always seem to be writing from a place of ignorance. If you're writing "high level Rust" the use of clone or Arc or whatever is negligible. If you're writing an HTTP service, your clone will be so fast it will make literally zero difference in the scope of your IO bound service.

Another observation is developer experience. Again, have you written _any_ Rust? I would argue that the reason Rust is such a joy to use is that the compile time errors are amazing, the way docs are handled are amazing, and so on. I know the eco system for something like Typescript is worlds better, but have you ever tried to _really_ understand what shenanigans are going on behind the scenes on some random hook from say, React? Their docs are so dismal and sparse and make assumptions on what they think you should know. Rust? You go to the doc gen, read what they think you should know as an overview, and if it isn't enough, I can click on "source" to dive deeper. What more could I possibly want?

Perhaps I'm just triggered. The discussion on Rust always seems to be fad or hype driven and almost always have very little to do with how it is to actually use it. If I have to read about compile times, again, I'm going to scream. Of all the languages I've used, it is one of the best in terms of a mature project needing new features or refactors. This is mentioned in some articles, but mostly we hear about "velocity" from some one dimensional perspective, usually someone from the web space, where it is arguable if the person should even bother trying to use Rust in the first place.

Apologies for the rant, but at this point I think Rust as a buzz word for article engagement has become tiring because it seems clear to me that these people aren't _actually_ interested in Rust at all. Who gives a shit what someone on Reddit thinks of your use of clone??

This is great news and thank you for work.