I think AI as a tool versus AI as a product are different. Even in coding you can see it with tab completion/agents v vibe coding. It's a spectrum and people are trying to find their personal divider on it. Additionally there are those out there that decry anything involving AI as heresy. (no thinking machines!)

> Additionally there are those out there that decry anything involving AI as heresy. (no thinking machines!)

I don’t think anyone decrying the current crop of “AI” is against “thinking machines”. We’re not there yet, LLMs don’t think, despite the marketing.

This is exactly the sort of refusal to comprehend so that you can get in an "um, ackshually" that the op is talking about. He's quoting a line from a book as a metaphor for a concept the book illustrates well.

This guy gets it.

You see someone who you think has missed a larger point, and all you can muster as a reply is a vague jab and unexplained reference? Do you not see the irony? Your whole comment is an “um, ackshually”, the very thing you are decrying.

I didn’t enjoy Dune, by the way. No shade on those who did, of course, but I couldn’t bring myself to finish it.

If you think there’s something there, explain your point. Make an argument. Maybe I have misunderstood something and will correct my thinking, or maybe you have misunderstood and will correct yours. But as it is, I don’t see your comment as providing any value to the discussion. It’s the equivalent of a hit and run, meant to insult the other person while remaining uncommitted enough to shield yourself from criticism.

Yes, latexr managed to somehow sidestep the point entirely and make a pedantic correction. I notice this a lot in these discussions.

The point is AI has lots of useful applications, even though there's also lots of detestable ones.

True. It's more like 'no creative machines' or 'no entry level middle class job machines'.

LLMs think in the same way submarines swim.

So... they do think? Or what is your position? Submarines obviously do swim, otherwise they'd either float or sink.

It's an old saying. The ability for submarines to move through water has nothing to do with swimming, and AIs ability to do generate content has nothing to do with thinking.

Uh, kind of the opposite :D

The quote (from Dijkstra) is that asking whether machines think is as uninteresting as asking whether submarines swim. He's not saying machines don't think, he's saying it's a pointless thing to argue about - an opinion about whether AIs think is an opinion about word usage, not about AIs.

Given the political comments in what's supposed to be a filter, and how everything is prefaced with "shit" like "Pinterest shit," I bet the author had a personal political disagreement with those accounts.

The list is also too specific to be useful in some cases, like, is it really important to you that you add 12 entries for specific Amazon products, like: ` duckduckgo.com,bing.com##a[href*="amazon.com/Rabbit-Coloring-Book-Rabbits-Lovers/dp/B0CV43GKGZ"]:upward(li):remove()`?

It's bizarre that the list was even posted here. Why would anybody feel the need to share their own, personal blocklist with HN?

Even if GenAI is helpful it's okay to morally reject using it. There are plenty of things that give you an advantage in your career but are morally wrong. Complaints include putting people out of jobs, causing a financial bubble, filling GitHub and the internet in general with AI slop, using tons of energy, increasing dram and GPU prices.

And it's not even that apparent how much GenAI improves overall development speed, beyond making toy apps. Hallucinations, bugs, misreading your intentions, getting stuck in loops, wasting your time debugging and testing and it still doesn't help with the actual hard problems of devwork. Even the examples you mention can be fallible.

On top of all that is AI even profitable? It might be fine now but what happens when it's priced to reflect its actual costs? Anecdotally it already feels like models are being quantised and dumbed down - I find them objectively less useful and I'm hitting usage limits quicker than before. Once the free ride is over, only rich people from rich countries will have access to them and of course only big tech companies control the models. It could be peer pressure but many people genuinely object to AI universally. You can't get the useful parts without the rest of it.

Indie game devs aren't really facing any real backslash.

A smart loud minority is screaming a lot but actual paying customers don't care as long as the game is not trash.

You're right it's about paying customers. No one is going to waste time campaigning against a $1.99 squid game knockoff on Steam if it uses AI (many are just Unity assets flips already).

The backlash I've seen is against large studies leaving AI slop in 60+ dollar games. Sure, it might just be some background textures or items at the moment, but the reasoning is that if studies know they can get away with it, quality decline is inevitable. I tend to agree. AI tooling is useful but it can't be at the expense of the product quality.

If a "C+++" was created that was so efficient that it would allow teams to be smaller and achieve the same work faster, would that be anti-worker?

If an IDE had powerful, effective hotkeys and shortcuts and refactoring tools that allowed devs to be faster and more efficient, would that be anti-worker?

Was C+++ built by extensively mining other people's work, possibly creating an economic bubble, putting thousands out of work, creating spikes in energy demand, raising the price of electronic components and inflating the price of downstream products, abusing people's privacy,… hmm. Was it?

Yes (especially drawing from the invention of the numbers 0 and 1), yes (i.e. dotcom bubble), yes (probably people who were writing COBOL up until then), yes (please shut down all your devices), yes, yes.

What part of c++ is inefficient? I can write that pretty quickly without having some cloud service hallucinate stuff.

And no, a faster way to write or refactor code is not anti-worker. Corporations gobbling up tax payer money to build power hungry datacenters so billionaires can replace workers is.

I never said C++ was inefficient, you don't have to prove anything. It's a hypothetical, try use your imagination.

> Corporations gobbling up tax payer money to build power hungry datacenters so billionaires can replace workers is.

Which part of this is important? If there was no taxpayer funding, would it be okay? If it was low power-consumption, would it be okay?

I just want to understand what the precise issue is.

Who could've predicted that the alarmist luddite viewpoint would be unpopular on the technology forum?

technology forum? the last hacker left this dump for lobsters 5 years ago

now it's full of SBF and scam altman wannabes

I don't know why people say this. I look on the front page and it's just interesting articles and blog posts on a variety of differing subjects. You must be either actively seeking out stuff you don't like and wasting your time actively hating it or just imagining it.

You shouldn't be using a wheel, it's inherently anti-worker.

what about cars? they are anti-horses… can we use cars/buses/trains… or nah?

Yes, it is an unpopular opinion around here, but pretty much in the tech world.

I think this is because most of the users/praisers of GenAI can only see it as a tool to improve productivity (see sibling comment). And yes, end of 2025, it's becoming harder to argue that GenAI is not a productivity booster across many industries.

The vast majority of people in tech are totally missing the question of morality. Missing it, or ignoring it, or hiding it.

I agree. The goal of AI is to reduce payroll costs. It has nothing to do with IDEs or writing code or making "art". It's meant to allow the owning class to pay the working class less, nothing more. What it *can* do is irrelevant in the face of what it is for.

If workers (i.e. me) choose to use it without it being imposed on them, is that a morally bad thing in your worldview?

I was trying to use an obscure CLI tool the other day. Almost no documentation and one wrong argument and I would brick an expensive embedded device.

Somehow Google gave me the right arguments in its AI generated answer to my search, and it worked.

I first tried every forum post I could find, but nobody seemed to be doing exactly what I was attempting to do.

I think this is a clear and moral win for AI. I am not in a position to hire embedded development consultants for personal DIY projects.

You've pretty much described the "what it is for" for a large percentage of industrial inventions. Clearly, however, the world would be worse off without many of them.

would the world be worse off if facebook and google had never existed?

I doubt it

The fact that there exist things created in the pursuit of money that are of questionable benefit to society... does not, in ANY way, negate the fact that there are MANY things created via the same motivation that are a benefit to society.

would the world be worse off if instead of google it had been blooglie or hooli that succeeded?

i don't know

I think the backlash comes from all the "AI-driven" layoffs that absolutely impact the end users negatively.