dannersy

Of total users 5% is a substantial number of consumers and some would argue a non-trivial amount of market share to ignore when making a product.

This also goes without saying that the more adoption we see, the better these alternatives will get as we see consumers and businesses view Linux as worth the investment.

There is little of value in this code.

Even worse, the AI will supply a mediocre version of the source specific to someone else's case, and not getting anything in return, ultimately choking the open source effort. The article touches on this briefly.

All I post anymore is anti-AI sentiment because it just feels like we're in a cycle of blind trust. A lot of FOSS seems cautious about LLMs for a plethora of reasons (quality and ethics among those) but we're a long way from making the tools that are supposedly going to replace us a locally runnable tool. So, until then, we're conceding pur agency to Anthropic and whoever else.

Meanwhile, war is breaking out and disrupting already stressed supply chains and manufacturing (for instance, Taiwan relies heavily on natural gas). Many manufacturers are starting to ditch production of consumer hardware, the supposed hardware folks ITT want to run their local models on. The vast majority of datacenters aren't being built yet, and those that are being built are missing their targets, still have aging GPUs in boxes without the infrastructure to power and turn them on, all while floating hundreds of billions in debt.

Surely I can't be the only one who sees the issues here? Each topic is hours of "what ifs" and a massive gamble to see if any of it will come together in a way that will be good for anyone who visits HN.

I see a lot less thinking as a result of using LLMs as they are today and I don't see the providers building tools to promote a better way to use them. They are still way too sycophantic.

I mean, that is fine, but then it seems like people at large are not using them "right". I think you'll find that since these tools are convenient and produce a lot of code in terms of lines, that verifying goes out the window. Due diligence was hard before these tools existed.

Except that this product isn't comparable whatsoever to Youtube. Contrary to your point, there are whole businesses popping up because people are paying for search engines due to users feeling that Google's results are insufficient for serious search. I'm not sure this is a proper comparison.

Yeah, it is wild seeing with my eyes how bad these tools are in a lot of cases. We do have some vibe coders on our team but they basically are banned from my current project because they completely ruin the design and nuke throughput. HN would have me believe I'm a Luddite who shouldn't be writing code, however. I truly do not understand how to reconcile this experience and many times it is too complicated a topic to explain to someone who isn't an engineer. AI is the uiltmate Dunning-Kruger machine. You cannot fix what you do not know because you do not know that you did not know.

As you say, I think things are just going to fall apart and we're just going to have to learn the hard way.

This is insane.

I feel like a crazy person, especially when I read HN. Half or more of the comments on this thread are saying how the game is over for even writing code. Then at my job, I see people break things at a rate I can't personally keep up with. Worse, I hear more and more colleagues talk about mandated AI tooling usage and massive regression rates. My company isn't there yet, but I feel it is around the corner.

> People say OpenAI is burning money and is on the verge of collapse. The same people will say OpenAI building an ads business on ChatGPT is "enshittifcation". These people are quite insufferable, no offense to the many who are exactly as I described.

I guess ignore the evidence of what I can see? If it provided the value everyone says it does, then charging the amount of what you would generate for ad revenue doesn't seem like a huge ask. But that's not the objective, is it? All the players want to become the defacto AI provider, and they know bait and switch tactics is all they have.

This sentiment comes off as an abusive relationship with the tech industry. Rewarding new ways to define a race to the bottom. We never demand or expect better, just gladly roll over and throw money at your new keeper. It's sad.

The blog isn't even necessarily anti-AI yet the majority of responses here are defending it like the author kicked their dog.

The sentiment that developers shouldn't be writing code anymore means I cannot take you seriously. I see these tools fail on a daily basis and it is sad that everyone is willing to concede their agency.

They don't care about good code, but they do pay people a lot of money to care about good code. If the people you hired didn't care, our software quality would be worse than it is. And since people are caring less in the face of AI, it is getting worse.

This is about to get substantially worse as companies introduce more AI into their workflows.

Because if you don't know the language or problem space, there are footguns in there that you can't find, you won't know what to look for to find them. Only until you try to actually use this in a production environment will the issues become evident. At that point, you'll have to either know how to read and diagnose the code, or keep prompting till you fix it, which may introduce another footgun that you didn't know that you didn't know.

This is what gets me. The tools can be powerful, but my job has become a thankless effort in pointing out people's ignorance. Time and again, people prompt something in a language or problem space they don't understand, it "works" and then it hits a snag because the AI just muddled over a very important detail, and then we're back to the drawing board because that snag turned out to be an architectural blunder that didn't scale past "it worked in my very controlled, perfect circumstances, test run." It is getting really frustrating seeing this happen on repeat and instead of people realizing they need to get their hands dirty, they just keep prompting more and more slop, making my job more tedious. I am basically at the point where I'm looking for new avenues for work. I say let the industry just run rampant with these tools. I suspect I'll be getting a lot of job offers a few years from now as everything falls apart and their $10k a day prompting fixed one bug to cause multiple regressions elsewhere. I hope you're all keeping your skills sharp for the energy crisis.

Anecdotal evidence, how scientific of you. When I say it's unfounded, I'm saying it hasn't been proven with actual research and data. So when you ask, "by whom?", that's exactly my point, it is unfounded. That's what that word means, no one has made a claim, backed by data, that AI is making significant waves on productivity. I don't think I've missed the point at all, but it seems I hit an emotional nerve with you though, so the conversation is over.

Agreed.

I think my point stands. Procedural generation is a tool that usually works best when it is supplementary. What makes New Vegas an amazing game is all the hand built narratives and intricate storylines. So yeah, I agree, Starfield is boring because of the story. But if the procedural vastness was interesting enough to not be boring, then we wouldn't be talking about this to begin with.

No Man's Sky got better as they were more intentional with their content. The game has more substance and a lot of that had to be added by hand. It is dropped in procedurally but they had to touch it up, manually, to make it interesting. Let's not revise history.

I don't think it has anything to do with ego. There are studies on the topic of AI and productivity and I assume we have a way to go before we can say anything concretely. Software workflows permeate the industry you're in. You're putting words in my mouth, I said nothing about what people are doing is wrong or not useful. I said the claim that generative AI is making engineers more productive is an unfounded one. What code you shit out isn't where the work starts or ends. Using expedient solutions and having to face potentially more work in the future isn't even something that is a claim about software, I can make that claim about life.

You need to evaluate what you read rather than putting your own twist on what I've said.

You're cherry picking. The open world games aren't as compelling anymore since the novelty is wearing off. I can cherry pick, too. For example, Starfield in all its grandeur is pretty boring.

And the users may not care about code directly, but they definitely do indirectly. The less optimized and more off-the-shelf solutions have seen a stark decrease in performance but allowing game development to be more approachable.

LLMs saving engineers and developers time is an unfounded claim because immediate results does not mean net positive. Actually, I'd argue that any software engineer worth their salt knows intimately that more immediate results is usually at the expense of long term sustainability.

Let us not pretend that they won't be used for war eventually. If they cave immediately under pressure, then this is an inevitably.

Well, yes. They know what they are doing. They know when given the option the consumer makes the affordable choice. I just don't have to like or condone their practices. Maybe instead of taking on billions of dollars of debt they should have thought about a business model that makes sense first? Maybe the collective "we" (consumers and investors, but especially investors) should keep it in our pants until the product is proven and sustainable?

It will be real interesting if the haters are right and this technology is not the breakthrough the investors assume it to be AFTER it is already sewn into everyone's work flows. Everyone keeps talking about how jobs will be displaced, yet few are asking what happens when a dependency is swept out from underneath the industry as a whole if/when this massive gamble doesn't pay off.

Whatever. I am squawking into the void as we just repeat history.

No offense, but this is the most predicable outcome ever. The software industry at large does this over and over again and somehow we're surprised. Provide thing for free or for cheap, and then slowly draw back availability once you have dominant market share or find yourself needing money (ahem).

The providers want to control what AI does to make money or dominate an industry so they don't have to make their money back right away. This was inevitable, I do not understand why we trust these companies, ever.

I am genuinely interested in hearing why we collectively ditched XMPP. I would love to hear someone who has been in the weeds on the development or even just following closely.

Edit: Seems someone beat me to it with a good reply.

Whether you view the question as nonsensical, the most simple example of a riddle, or even an intentional "gotcha" doesn't really matter. The point is that people are asking the LLMs very complex questions where the details are buried even more than this simple example. The answers they get could be completely incorrect, flawed approaches/solutions/designs, or just mildly misguided advice. People are then taking this output and citing it as proof or even objectively correct. I think there are ton of reasons this could be but a particularly destructive reason is that responses are designed to be convincing.

You _could_ say humans output similar answers to questions, but I think that is being intellectually dishonest. Context, experience, observation, objectivity, and actual intelligence is clearly important and not something the LLM has.

It is increasingly frustrating to me why we cannot just use these tools for what they are good for. We have, yet again, allowed big tech to go balls deep into ham-fisting this technology irresponsibly into every facet of our lives the name of capital. Let us not even go into the finances of this shitshow.

I don't share his experience entirely, by even on my desktop built for gaming I can notice the right click menu is delayed in comparison to Windows 10. Even more heinous, before you remove it, the AI button would lazy load causing you to sometimes hit it by accident when you mean to hit something else. God forbid I'm not 80 years old and click my menus with any sort of speed.

Also, if I'm going to have to adjust anything to use an operating system, I might as well use Linux. The only value prop for me to use Windows was gaming, but at this point I'm just completely ripping the band-aid off because it doesn't seem like Microsoft is going in a better direction.

Yes, they could roll their own, but you have no issues with this being necessary? I think the attitude of "just deal with it" is far more negative than someone expressing they are upset with the state of the internet, its controllers, and its abusers.

I hope this is a meme because it is wild to me how you don't see this as being a problem. You are contributing to an internet for bots and not people.

Cared about anything other than their own upward movement, actively worked towards my professional development, made sure I had actual, not hand wavey, feedback, and made sure my compensation reflected my growing responsibility.

I am aware that all of those things may not be in their power to give, but some combination of that in any org that is somewhat functional would be motivating.

No I am not. Your response proves my point in regards to getting bogged down in semantics. In a nutshell, my point is that if we do not care or do nothing when it comes to malicious use of FOSS, you very well may lose FOSS or at least the ability to develop in a FOSS environment. It is the paradox of intolerance of a different flavor.

I think you'll find, especially within the tech community, people struggle with purity and semantics. They see that supporting and promoting FOSS is to be okay with its use for war, oppression, or whatever mental gymnastics they need to just not care or promote bad things. They will argue about what "free and open" means and get mixed up in definitions, political alignments, etc.

It is pretty obvious to me, that being blase about whomever using FOSS for adversarial reasons is not very "open" or "free". Somewhere in the thread there is an argument about the paradox of intolerance and I don't really care to argue with people on the internet about it because it is hard to assume the debate is in good faith.

My point is this: Throw away all your self described nuance and ask this yourself whether or not you think any malicious, war-monger, authoritarian, or hyper-capitalist state would permit a free and open source software environment? If the objective of a business, government, or billionaire is power, control, and/or exclusivity then, well, your lofty ideals behind FOSS have completely collapsed.