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Bored of It

paulrobertlloyd.com

573 pointsNotInOurNames478 comments

> The best minds of my generation

I’m tired of that line. I remember first seeing it on “the best minds of our generation being employed to sell you ads”. Making a computer go brrr doesn’t qualify anyone for a “best mind”.

I’d hope a “best mind” would be, above all, empathetic. Concerned about the well being of their fellow humans. Philosophical about the state of the world. Patient. Curious. Wise and not just smart.

That we keep putting greedy assholes on a “best minds” pedestal due to their ability to exploit others for personal profit is part of the problem.

On that specific quote -

I feel like this is offensive on more than one level. The waste of our best minds... sure. Fine. But - "to sell you ads."

Marketting has the dubious distinction of being one area of human endeavor where technological advances serve mostly to make your life worse, make your mind less focused, make your wallet more empty.

The spherical-cow "ideal" 100% efficient perfect marketing campaign/tactic literally hypnotizes you into dropping all your money on an arbitrary good or service. It is isomorphic to somebody mugging you. What does it look like if we achieve 10% efficiency? 1%? How is this infringement on your agency and financial well-being a positive social good? What if we could achieve profitable returns even by flooding the zone at 0.001%? How many ads do you want to be subjected to per thing that somebody in your neighborhood buys?

0. I want third-party advertising eliminated entirely and self-sdvertising advertising on one's own property more regulated than it currently is.

Be careful what you wish for. At least at the moment it is easy to use tools like uBlock to avoid ads but it gets more difficult if they are served as an integral part of the page from the same domain.

> The spherical-cow "ideal" 100% efficient perfect marketing campaign/tactic literally hypnotizes you into dropping all your money on an arbitrary good or service. It is isomorphic to somebody mugging you.

I like the quote and despise advertising of any kind for mostly the same reason, but you could apply this logic to any kind of business and it starts to fall apart.

> The spherical-cow "ideal" 100% efficient perfect pharmaceutical is physically addictive. It is isomorphic to narcotics trafficking.

> The spherical-cow "ideal" 100% efficient perfect medical system keeps you sick.

> The spherical-cow "ideal" 100% efficient perfect food product induces constant cravings.

There’s arguments to be made that all of these things are true, but what we’re talking about is not essential to the activities themselves but the profit motive that underlies them. Profit motive in and of itself is not sufficient to cause this kind of behavior; it requires a disregard for the consequences that your actions will have upon others. A lot of marketers fall into this category, but I’m not convinced that marketing in and of itself can be reduced to this spherical-cow in a vacuum.

This is a good point. You could equally well argue that the spherical cow “ideal” 100% marketing shows you exactly the right product right as you need it. And then shuts the hell up!

100% efficient everything is an unimaginable dystopia. All that's nice, and good, all kindness and love and happiness, all that exists within economic inefficiencies. It's the slack that lets us be human.

That said, of the four examples you mentioned, only one has the distinction of being a metaphorical cancer on modern society, entrapping everything it touches in negative-sum games until it burns out all value and metastasizes to the next fertile ground. It's what ruined medium after medium, from phones through over-the-air TV, cable, web, video streaming, news, social media - and it just keeps going.

I wrote this over 5 years ago, and since then, the cancer analogy only felt ever more accurate to me: https://jacek.zlydach.pl/blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.html

I like where you're going with this - we do need an economic system that priorities people and not profits. So I hope you take this for the pedantry it is-

But the customer for an ad is the company. They are buying it, so a hypnotizing ad would be 100% effective for them.

In your version of the analogy, its what's effective for the seller- so the ad equivalent would be a situation where in order to get any sales, 100% of your margin goes towards advertising.

I'm actually convinced that "marketing", as such, can be completely orthogonal to profit altogether. Any sort of communication of a novel thing would fall under this banner, but I learn about new FOSS projects on here every day because the maintainers and developers are willing to 'advertise' them to me.

Without ads there's no craving to be filled. Without food I still die of hunger. Without pharmaceuticals I still die of sickness.

The difference is all those other things you listed - food, drugs, etc provide value. An ad provides none.

> but you could apply this logic to any kind of business and it starts to fall apart.

Exactly, it all starts to fall apart when common sense is applied - it's just that we've become horribly dependent, many even addicted to the dehumanizing grind of our beloved competition economy..

The immanent rise of autonomous machines is the sudden emergency exit from capitalism we (or rather: some of us) have been rooting for.. IF we can convince the people of this planet that a non-commercial post-scarcity open-access open-source commons economy is a more hopeful trajectory into the long future.. Let's not give up on this one yet.

I'm willing to go along with this hypothesis. So first step is to end capitalism, then we can see if we still hate ads?

I disagree. The spherical cow of marketing is a system that connects consumers with EXACTLY what they are looking for. What you are describing is the capitalist spherical cow.

Helping customers find products and services to their needs is a good and worthwhile goal. Unfortunately, the typical role of marketing is to convince people that they have problems that only the marketed product can fix.

How many marketing professionals do you know that work for non-profit providers of goods and services? I'm sure they exist, but I imagine not many.

Marketing isn't just about connecting consumers to products, it's also about creating demand.

Along these lines, "it" most fundamentally refers to unrestrained capitalism.

(Or perhaps computing.)

Won’t argue with it being overdone, but it’s in reference to Ginsberg. Not necessarily complimentary. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49303/howl

Gingsberg stole it from Yeats — “the best lack all conviction…” / “the best minds of my generation…” — many similar verses, e.g., “what rough beast…” / “what sphinx of cement…”

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43290/the-second-comi...

Those aren't nearly close enough to be considered stolen. Possibly allusions (which is not stealing), but even then, the only similarity of the bests is "The best" usage. Nothing about the rest of the lines, or before, are similar enough to be "stolen" (potentially the Ginsberg troping Yeat's "full of passionate intensity" of the worst into his best's "madness, starving hysterical", but that too is allusion, not stealing).

The best lack all conviction, while the worst // Are full of passionate intensity.

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, // dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,

How is this stealing in any form?

He stole the concept of poetry from Yeats?

Having been in IT for close to 15 years now, a lot of good minds work in IT a lot of good minds don't.

But I've encountered a lot of stupid (for lack of a better word) people in IT who were convinced they are good at _everything_ just because they grokked algorithms and data structures. Not sure it's a phenomenon unique to IT, but what DOGE is doing is exactly what I mean.

Can confirm, this isn't just an IT thing. Physicians are a prime example—people tend to put doctors on a pedestal, and some doctors start believing they know everything about everything, even when it's clearly outside their wheelhouse. Being smart in one area doesn’t automatically make you an expert in another, but it’s easy for everyone involved to forget that.

I’m a CFO that used to work in healthcare. Have had many cases where a doctor tries to explain to me how accounting “should work” and I have to tell them we have this little thing call revenue recognition or GAAP or how accruals work, etc. basically the stuff covered in accounting 101.

I’m used to fielding questions about numbers from all types but only doctors will immediately jump to telling you it’s wrong without asking questions and adamantly insisting they know the right way to do things is what I’ve noticed as a personality quirk generalization.

I'm a retired neurosurgical anesthesiologist; you are correct about this illusion that physicians often labor under. But it's worth noting that when medical topics are posted here, the responses from non-physicians are sometimes so nonsensical that I for one laugh out loud reading them. In fact, I look forward to these discussions for this very reason.

This is called "engineer's disease".

You can regularly find it on this very site :)

I mean, there are probably only a few places on the internet with more people who believe their insights into other disciplines are profound simply because they understand how computers work than the HN comment section. So we should all be able to relate.

> I’m tired of that line. I remember first seeing it on “the best minds of our generation being employed to sell you ads”. Making a computer go brrr doesn’t qualify anyone for a “best mind”.

It's the other way around. It's not just, or primarily, about run of the mill software devs. It's also about the would-be top mathematicians and physicists and psychologists and others - best minds in various domains, that in a better world would be busy solving real problems, but due to quirk of the economy end up working on ruining lives of other people, at scale, because adtech pays well while almost all useful work pays a pittance.

I remember this quote not as judging or categorizing people by smartness, but as lamenting a world which mismanages humanity's potential so badly, by literally directing our best problem solvers to work on creating problems for everyone.

I think the argument is more about whether someone involved in hostile behavior deserves to be called a "best mind" compared to someone worse at math but better at empathy.

Fwiw I kinda agree with both of you. Don't really know how to square it

I'd say it's something like "a squandering of potential"

From context, we can infer that "best minds" means "smart people who make new things." I feel it's fair to lament that, while these people could put their intelligence towards the betterment of everybody, they are often instead working on shit like ad tech.

Probably ‘capable’ should be used instead of ‘best’. The latter might lead the reader astray with notions of ethics.

The best tech stack I have ever worked on was in an adtech company. The code was beautiful and the utility functions to interface with various AWS services were really really neat. I built a near real time estimator using Theta Sketches.

While job searching, I have tried to use techs like Sketches in my filters but it mostly draws up a blank. Would love to work on genuinely interesting stuff like that again.

It honestly did leave a bad taste in my mouth whenever I thought what the end goal of it all was.

I think it's a reference to Allen Ginsberg's the Howl, which chronicles Ginsberg watching brilliant people of his generation die in war or become drug casualties, their potential squandered either by evil men or navel-gazing.

"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness"

I'm not sure what Ginsberg meant when he used the term but I imagine it wasn't the same type of mind.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49303/howl

I think "best" in this case stands for highest performance and not necessarily moral values - with this definition, unfortunately, making a computer go brrr does qualify for a best mind, if the brrr is especially impressive.

This reminds me of Bret Devereaux's series on Alexander III of Macedon and the meaning of "greatness" [0]:

> Only once we’ve stripped away the mythology and found the man can we then ask that key question: was Alexander truly great and if so, what does that say not about Alexander, but about our own conceptions of greatness?

"Great" and "best" are both just words, words whose definition is defined by us who use them.

[0] https://acoup.blog/2024/05/17/collections-on-the-reign-of-al...

It is curious to me that so many revered as “great” by culture often end up treating those close to them in abhorrent ways. Many worship Moloch not overtly but in the lack of accountability they require of high status individuals. It seems that once someone gets past a certain thermocline of status then accusations of character become less likely to stick. I’ve come to believe this is seen as a feature and not a bug by many people. Not everyone, but many.

Ultimately we get what we incentivize and reward as a society. Recent events are a painful reminder of that.

I treat this expression as Ayenbite of Inwit. When I use it (because I'm super pretentious) I don't mean the book itself or the saner English version of the title "Remorse of Conscience". I mean it as a parody of the later. Like, when someone comes up with a contrived blame for wrongdoing that either didn't happen or was so minor that it doesn't warrant the discussion.

I don't think author means "best minds" literally. I think they mean it ironically, more like "those who are most eager to perform the task assigned to them".

But maybe I'm saying the obvious. Irony is admittedly hard to translate into writing.

I've always considered references to "the best minds" to mean those glorified because they make others large sums of money. "The best minds" are never the ones profiting from their ideas.

"would be, above all, empathetic. Concerned about the well being of their fellow humans."

I'm tired of this line. We are animals first and foremost. Complicated animals, but animals nonetheless. We will never consistently be this. The best of us will try but most of us will animalistically react to the incentives in front of us in selfish ways.

We are better of thinking of systems and the incentives they create than hopelessly waiting for us to become not animals. Aligning good goals with personal profit is the name of the game.

Except our superior ability to collaborate is arguably our strongest asset.

I don't think that's how it's meant to be read, if you consider it in the context of the original quote, it's about good and empathetic minds going to waste because of the demands of society. We put so much social and economic capital into tech that it's better to push five lines of code for Facebook than be a doctor, which are the "good minds going to waste".

You reminded me of one of my favorite piece of media in gaming (HZD). It feels especially relevant in the current times, with how war and AI is progressing in tandem with geopolitical unrest.

Its an old recording that the main character listens to in the end cutscene while visiting Elisabet's grave, and (spoilers) the main character was created as a clone of Elisabet. It's very hard hitting after the whole experience.

> GAIA: Query: What did she say?

Elisabet Sobeck: She said I had to care. She said, "Elisabet, being smart will count for nothing if you don't make the world better. You have to use your smarts to count for something, to serve life, not death."

GAIA: You often tell stories of your mother. But you are childless.

Elisabet Sobeck: I never had time. I guess it was for the best.

GAIA: If you had had a child, Elisabet, what would you have wished for him or her?

Elisabet Sobeck: I guess... I would have wanted her to be... curious. And willful - unstoppable, even... but with enough compassion to... heal the world... just a little bit.

> I’d hope a “best mind” would be, above all, empathetic. Concerned about the well being of their fellow humans. Philosophical about the state of the world. Patient. Curious. Wise and not just smart.

A person may be all of those things, but they still need to pay bills and eat. That requires a job, and jobs depend on the bourgeoise, that's none of those things.

The best song that starts off with that quote: https://youtu.be/UryTypo2qeU?si=CdTPe0ufnktLB_6i “ I Should Be Allowed to Think” by They Might Be Giants Change a couple words here and there and it’s talking about social media

I think the point is that people with the capacity to be both smart and empathetic have lost their way.

The more subtle point is that many empathetic people have bullshit jobs: they too work in service of it for simply their livelihood.

I don't think best minds ever implied empathy or even should.

Best, to me, means people who are the top of their specialty, whether it be mathematics, astrophysics, rocketry, economics, business, politics, pedagogy, archeology, etc. People with unnerving dedication and pursuit of knowledge to advance whatever their specialty is. It could be the marketing most of us loathe but it can also be any of the above and more and only a few pursuits only tangentially imply empathy.

The point of that quote is not at all that those minds are so smart, but rather that their industry is sad and detrimental.

That is: to fan the fire that is burning the world so that a select few can get more comfortable.

I'm not talking about a flyer here or a store face there, but there is definitely a point where ads don't benefit us anymore. Can I buy the sky and project ads on it? Can I buy the ocean and project ads on it?

Probably we should keep the distinction between "best hearts" and "best minds" but otherwise agreed, a good heart is preferable to a good mind.

There is one trait common to nearly everyone participating in the computing industry: overweening pride in one's own intelligence.

People in the industry like to reduce 'intelligence' to a single dimension. You can see this phenomenon directly in the current AI wave in which "intelligence" has been reduced to "does well at 'knowledge worker' tasks and passes arbitrary benchmarks we have defined".

Compared to the population at large, how does their definition do? Compared to philosophers and neuroscientists, it is lacking, no doubt. But that's the top 1% of the population in being able to define intelligence. So where does this view of intelligence rank compared on a more global sense? It seems better than those who just go with a "I know it when I see it" gut check (especially given how often that gut check is now letting newer models pass as long as they don't know it is an AI model). Or the "humans, because humans are clearly better" view that assigns mythical status to the human brain. Is it in the top 5%? Top 2%?

For a group to come up with a good enough definition that still ranks among the top and which is suited for the specific tasks at hand, seems like a show of intelligence. It isn't perfect, but to what extent is that avoiding premature optimization? Once the definition has issues, it'll be refined more. No need to waste time refining it if we never build tools that hit the limits of the current definition.

I had always supposed that one was supposed to recognize a borrowing from Allen Ginsberg's "Howl": https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49303/howl

(Not that I'd automatically accept Ginsberg's evaluation of best minds.)

I came here to say exactly this. I can't tell if it's because I'm not a traditional "tech" person, but 90% of the best minds I've seen are nowhere near tech in general.

Having a brilliant mind, going to an "elite" school (because someone told you it's elite), joining a FAANG company, building software that you deep down know is killing society, but doing it because the "problems are fun and money is great" is antithetical to what a "best mind of a generation" would truly be.

It's wasted talent with few redeeming qualities for society and a lack of innovation/creativity around using your talents to improve the world.

A "best mind of the generation" would find a way to be successful without riding such a lazy conveyor belt of life.

Thank you, it’s unfortunate that the average person doesn’t seem to understand this.

Agree - but don't think there is a "best mind(s)". We're creatures of repetition and thus specialization, and so our minds can get really good at very specific things, but ultimately we're all dumb apes trying to survive as best we can.

Thank you. They act as if the “best minds” need not read or reason beyond logic and math. Having a “best mind” requires a lifelong dedication to understanding other people, ideas, and history above all else.

Case in point: how many of the best minds left OpenAI when it restructured?

There were several people who indeed quit.

The fact that your tired of that line is the point here. We're tired of it. It does this, copies common content and style.

This is from Allen Ginsberg's Howl. A must read.

Thank you person. You have improved my day.

Im tired of the line "computer go brr". Is that the best you can explain yourself?

Why is being empathetic a trait of a "great mind"? Wouldn't it also be possible that "great minds" don't consider things like empathy as useful? Looking back at human history, its usually people that aren't empathetic who end up being successful. At least in a way that people consider "successful". Humanity has long outlived the usefulness of empathy.

How do you go from "successful" to "useful"?

There seems to be no logical connection from "shitty people are successful" to "empathy is not useful to society."

> end up being successful

And """success""" is not a value. Taken in those ways, it is the mark of the psychopath.

Of course they did, because it is easier to achieve goals if you cut corners. In a gaming framework, it amounts to cheating.

Because we are inherently social creatures. It’s arguably what allowed us to move to the top of the animal hierarchy.

Consider this: if you were to ask a parent “would you rather your child grow up to be wildly intelligent but have sociopathy to the point of being utterly alone, or frankly average (or even dull) intellectually but have a rich social life with meaningful relationships, which would you choose?” I think you’d be hard pressed to find someone willing to take the former.

    I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
    1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and    is just a natural part of the way the world works.
    2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
    3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

-- Douglas Adams

Let me guess your age.

The younger generations do seem to be embracing AI more, but mainly because it can do their homework for them without requiring them to learn anything. For now at least, until curriculums have time to adjust to this new reality.

I initially picked up programming because I wanted to create things (well, initially break things, but moved on from that), and the programming was one way of doing that. I only learned how to structure my programs, because they became hard to change. I only learned testing and refactoring, because I noticed I was faster when the code was better and more tested, even if the upfront cost was slightly higher.

If I was 14-15 around this time, when I first picked up programming, but had an LLM on my side, I'm not sure what the outcome would be, to be honest. I'd use them, that's for sure, but once I got a working application out of them, would I be curious enough to understand as much as I understand now, if it wasn't required? Or would I have been able to learn even more and faster, since I wouldn't have been all alone banging my head against some trivial problem for weeks?

I don't know if it's "embracing" it, it's just a fact of life.

I remember in an interview with Marc Andreessen he spoke about introducing his 8 year old to chat gpt. He described the moment as monumental, likening it to "bringing fire down from the mountains." However, his son was unimpressed by the technology, responding, "It's a computer. Of course you ask it questions and it gives you answers. What else is it for?"

I am old. But when I was young I could not comprehend why they wouldn't not let us use calculators for stupid calculation task that humans have a hard time to compute.

It's creating devastating effects in higher education here. I'm a bit older but did a masters after working a few years and I've now decided to quit because most - if not all - students just upload the sheets to an llm and copy the output. Group projects used to be really intense and interesting here - now my partners in the group-projects ask me to explain their code to them. It's not an ivy-league university here but it used to be that I had a lot of fun working hard with other students to work on the projects and we learned a lot doing this - this is completely gone. It's 100% transactional - how can I go through this as fast as possible - as a result people fail the exams at unseen rates like 50-80% in classes that can be passed by learning a few days and doing the exercises yourself.

I'm suffering from quite a bit of ADHD symptoms - for the past 20 years - I already got an diagnosis and I can survive even if it's a shitty thing to have - but it feels like now everyone around me shares the same fate and people seem to forgot how to work or study or worse - never learned it. I've used to be an outlier, sharing my fate with 2 or 3 other people in the class back when doing the bachelors - we failed in spectacular ways in some areas while outshining everyone else in other areas but it was a honest struggle. I'm okay with that - I'm not made to be a researcher or writing a PhD in computer science or math. But I can work in my area of expertise - however what is happening with all these graduates?

Is this the fault of AI? Not really but society isn't really prepared for what is happening now. People correcting the exercises tell me it's impossible to proof LLM usage and 90% of the results are just ChatGPT - funnily enough this was a machine learning 101 class.

Another thing I've noticed that often when looking at LLMs prompts from other students and their application of the results that they kind of don't help them to really learn and improve yourself - you are stuck on your level of knowledge and so are your prompts and the quality of questions you ask and the way you handle the answers which results in very weird effects. So you are talking with your group member to load some binary serialized arrays for a computer vision projects and use numpy to do some calculations. Next meeting you have some code that does something but it's using another dataset and completely different code, runs 100x slower and solves a slightly different problem. All you get is a shrug. I'm better off watching Youtube or working than staying in university. It's not the fault of the teachers but I've came back because of human interaction and because I don't want to learn alone. This is almost gone here.

All of this - even if it sucks - would be somehow okay but the thing I'm scared of the most lately is the blatant dishonesty and lying I've been seeing in other students about their usage of AI - it's creating a kind of person that only pretends to be able to understand what it's doing but fails reliable to actually understand what LLMs tell them. I'm not made to deal with this and I'm getting angry. Tell me you've used an llm and you are not sure about the results, we can talk about it, work through it and improve upon it. Then it's actually a great thing to have LLMs - but I'm not seeing it.

This will be interesting - not in the good way.

I'll bite.

I received my PhD in Computer Science focused on NLP and creative text generation last year and I think the hype around LLMs is ridiculous (academics are no better than industry on chasing hype). They're trained to predict the next token given a context, and that's exactly what they're good at.

How old do you think I am?

A transistor is just a way of connecting some wires, and that's exactly what it's good for. It's reducing a phenomenon into some core essence and pretending like there's not a bigger picture.

Doesn’t that feel a little bit like saying that the hype around transistor-based logic gates is ridiculous because they’re designed to execute Boolean logic, and that’s exactly what they’re good at? The simple mechanism isn’t what’s exciting. The exciting part is composing that into a symphony of functionality, running fast and cheap, to better our lives.

I was in my 20s when crypto was "it" and I was definitely on the last group about it, so it's definitely not just about age, even thought there's probably some correlation.

> "is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it."

Does this not explain why you just got your PhD in this? ("This" being broad, but "NLP and creative text generation" sounds like it's in the same ballpark as LLMs.)

Thanks. Sometimes I feel like I'm going insane attempting to ŕeason with people who think the opposite. That these are oracles imbued with human level intellect and creativity.

Now, sure, these models can be impressive - but it's a warped lens of humanities own impressive (selected) corpuses.

I'm in my mid-forties and I think the LLM revolution is amazing.

It reminds me of the dotcom era in many ways: a genuinely transformative technology which is currently no more than maybe 20% of the way into realising its potential; a technology for which expectations have been hyped up to maybe 200% of potential; and a technology around which a stockmarket bubble has formed.

I'll leave the rest of the LLM story to the reader's imagination, but to see this slightly fragmented and ossified mind it's extremely obvious what happens next, and then what happens after that, and then after that (which is when we get to the really good bit). So no, I'm not bored, and I'm not tired. I'm as happy to be working in technology now as when I was a younger man. Happier in some ways, even.

I'm a big fan of Douglas Adams, but there is a reason he was (best known as) a comedy writer and not, for example, a sociologist. Trotting this out adds nothing to the conversation and just comes across as vaguely ageist.

Call it ageist, but this aligns with the conversation about "it" at my job. The cutoff is around 42, but there is a significant split by age group of engineers on the value of "it".

I found the parent comment humorous as it cites a lighthearted quote from Douglas Adams. it is relevant to the conversation in a similar way an xkcd is, when called relevant.

Based on those rules your guess would be wrong :)

This is not about age really: "NFTs"/"web3.0"/"Blockchain technologies" for instance were hyped by every age group.

"Always be wary of any helpful item that weighs less than its operating manual."

Terry Pratchett

This can be taken as an instance of the Shifting Baseline phenomenon [1]. The fact that we can only perceive certain changes over large timescales doesn't mean we can safely ignore them. It's harmful to ignore experienced perspectives.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shifting_baseline

I do think this is true. I'm 46 and I find myself wondering when things are going to "return to normal". But I can't really define what that is besides saying "2019". I'm not even sure what I'm referring to other than I hate short form video. I don't know how I feel about AI. It does seem like something that has a lot of promise though if we can figure out the context issues.

I'm against calculators in schools due to their detriment on learning.

What's my age?

This was written at a time when people had lived through inventions like the internet, personal computers, refrigerators, microwave ovens, jet liners, vaccines, television, etc. While all of those inventions had negative externalities, their primary function overall improved people's lives.

Generative AI is all negative externalities.

Well, if you have ADHD, you are always fifteen. Novelty-seeking is built in, part of physiology, cannot be ignored. I am 42, and LLMs still provide a lot of excitement to me.

As much as I like Douglas Adams' work, I think that quote describes what, for lack of a better term, and in no way trying to be derogatory, I'd call a "normal person"'s reaction to technologies.

I mean obviously the age boundaries may change a bit but otherwise he's spot on. Also, I'd say it's not just technology as I've seen a similar attitude towards other things (e.g, how a dress code is not that common any more, or how you can walk up to a store or even go to a hospital and be greeted by someone with tattoos and green hair "is against the natural order of things").

And to stress again that I'm not being derogatory, I've got close people who have those reactions and I love them even if I disagree with them.

But for people not in that "normal" group my experience is nothing like that. I've seen: - People being amazed at how exciting something that existed when they were born is, to the point of building emulators and even physical replicas of it. - People way after 35 who go deep in on very new things that drastically change the way they work (the example I'm thinking of here is the old musicians I know who've embraced modelers and DAWs, things that only got good enough to be used by professionals in, what, the last 20 years? - In that same line though, I know young kids who use portastudios and hate DAWs. Some release cassettes too. One has to guess their target audience never wasted life untangling tape and rewinding with a ball pen ...

Still, I think your last line is most likely spot on as far as the author goes. Probably going through some mid-life crisis (lest this come across as ageist, I'm way past half my country's life expectancy).

Also, "Every pub conversation winding up talking about it."

That's just the author going to the wrong pubs! Like the Jonathan Richman song says:

"Well the first bar things were alright But in this bar, things were Friday night."

> Someone said something cool once hence it's valid ad vitam aeternam and can be used as an argument in a discussion.

Mass automatised eugenics robots ? Well if you don't like it you must be a boomer.

Brain implants that are controlled by your employer and can literally kill you on the push of a button if you don't follow the rules ? What ? you don't like it ? You dumb luddite

Between that and the "TeChNoLoGy iS JuSt a ToOl, a HaMmEr Is NeItHeR gOoD nOr BaD" people...

How is the moral dilemma of employer-controlled brain implants or eugenics equal to AI? The reason the quote can be applied is because it is a genuinely useful technology to lots of people. That's not the case for eugenics robots.

Did you grow up watching Data (Star Trek), C3PO (Star Wars), KITT (Knight Rider) thinking "Who comes up with these violent sadistic ideas"?

Those rules do not work for me.

I hate AI.

well i dont know who in the world Douglas is, probably some geriatric weirdo but he is completely wrong.

am in the second group and ur comment just feels like ragebait, sure there are enough “hip and trendy” teenagers to twenty, thirty something people who like influence more than technology and are on their “vibe code” grind and idk, fucking their AI every night with their claude wrapped fleshlight but I for one am not one of them.

Remember, being terminally online is a choice. There's nothing to be bored of you don't choose to be constantly confronted by it. The current thing is only the current thing if you choose to surround yourself by people who deeply care about the current thing.

It's hard to take refuge from it when you are working in the tech industry, I hear something about "let's try to use AI for this" at least twice a week for the past year at my work.

I do use LLMs for some specific tasks, they can be quite good at some stuff but the general hype of it by non-technical folks trying to fit it into every single use-case under the sun is absolutely tiring... Having to explain for the n-th time why what we are trying to do is not a good fit for AI™ is exhausting, not because I have to explain it again but because I know I will have to do it again next week, at least another couple of times.

AI is being viewed in this hype as almost literal magic, it can do anything, we just have to wish for AI to do it (whatever the fuck AI means by now, it's just an umbrella for magical thinking).

I'm tired, and definitely bored.

Yes, but people (like this writer) want a better community. A person can abstain from the internet entirely, but they still have to live in a terminally online world.

This is how I've felt about politics as of late. It's Logan Paul-KSI tier nonsense, but made worse by the fact that I can ignore Logan Paul and influencers. I can't ignore it when my government is run by an influencer.

Normally I would agree that you can just choose not to engage with the [current thing], but AI is so pervasive that you will be confronted by the consequences of this technology whether you like it or not. These annoying hype cycles don't usually raise the internets noise floor permanently, or DDoS random sites while trying to strip mine their data, or break core assumptions about being able to trust what you see and hear.

My software working group has spent much of the quarter discussing whether or not it’s made us more productive. They still can’t decide, but I bet we’ve racked up 1000 coder-hours debating it.

I don’t use it because our products have the potential to harm other people and I’m not personally comfortable assuming that risk. Nobody else seems particularly moved by that argument, however.

This is insane. We have created the greatest tool in human history and people are complaining. I can use it to help me code, fix modeling issues as I learn CAD, help me troubleshoot the issues in my two-stroke leafblower engine and can consistently walk me through complex leetcode algorithms. It literally knows everything and people still complain.

It isn’t even close to being the greatest tool in human history. This type of misunderstanding and hyperbole is exactly why people are tired/bored/frustrated of it.

The uncomfortable truth is that AI is the world’s greatest con man. The tools and hype around them have created an environment where AI is incredibly effective at fooling people into thinking it is knowledgeable and helpful, even when it isn’t. And the people it is fooling aren’t knowledgeable enough in the topics being described to realize they’re being conned, and even when they realize they’ve been conned, they’re too proud to admit it.

This is exactly why you see people that are deeply knowledgeable in certain areas pointing out that AI is fallible, meanwhile you have people like CEOs that lack the actual technical depth in topics praising AI. They know just enough to think they know what “good” looks like, but not enough to realize when the “good” output is just lipstick on a pig.

What is the greatest tool in human history in your opinion?

I think it's too early to call whether AI is the answer to that question, but I think it could be. Yes, LLMs are terrible in all kinds of ways, but there's clearly something there that's of great value. I use it all day every day as a staff-level engineer, and it's making me much better and faster. I can see glimmers of intelligence there, and if we're on a road that delivers human-level intelligence in the next decade, it's difficult to see what else would qualify as the greatest tool humanity has ever invented.

It’s not hype when it’s released and used for concrete tasks. Some are hyping future potential sure. But GP is hyped about how he can use it NOW. Which I agree is very cool.

The human still needs to think, of course. But, I can get to my answer or my primary source using a tool faster than a typical search engine. That's a super power, when used right!

People saying things like "It literally knows everything..." unironically is half the reason some of us are bored of it.

People want to remain valuable and this tool takes that away. As long as you still find meaningful ways to contribute, all is good. But this says nothing about all the skills mastered that have been rendered effectively useless. And in time, as this tool gets better, it could rob you of the agency to change your environment.

I’d like to hear an explanation of what mastered skills are useless?

It literally knows nothing.

It is incapable of knowledge.

I’m bored of it.

Maybe the tool knows nothing. But it allows me to learn niche things often much faster than via a web browser. So it has to value for me.

I think there’s lot of dangers and problems with it and frankly I’d probably be happier if it was never invented. But even then I can still see the value it has

Neither does Wikipedia. But it’s still awesome.

A tool that constantly generates incorrect information, lacks any real awareness or internal state, and doesn’t even recognize its own mistakes, even when you explicitly point them out is, frankly, pretty useless.

Ever had this conversation with ChatGPT?

- ChatGPT: Here's my solution!

- You: This is wrong, you need to do X.

- ChatGPT: You're right! My solution was wrong because [repeats what you said]. Here’s my revised answer!

- You: This is still wrong. I said do X.

- ChatGPT: Understood! This clarifies: [still gets it wrong].

Or worse, you can trick it:

- ChatGPT: X + Y = Z (which is actually correct)

- You: No, X + Y = Q (which is false)

- ChatGPT: You're right, X + Y = Q is correct because...

I guess it's useful for generating boilerplate code or text, but even then, it often makes mistakes.

This. Precise text auto-completer. Without reasoning or cognitive processes whatsoever, just a very marketable illusion of it. Despite the lies, a great tool.

As any tool, it takes knowledge and responsibility. Just lile the unix chainsaw.

The cases you're showing here are things that can also be accomplished by looking in books. You're describing Google if it actually worked

> and people are complaining.

Not about the tool, though, but about people (who, granted, have some connection to the tool, even if indirectly).

We've had people for hundreds of thousands of years, so fair to say that they have become quite boring.

> the greatest tool in human history

So would the greatest tool in human history in your mind be something that is used to plagiarise most content in the world and then output correct-30%-of-the-time slop? Or is there another definition you would use?

I'm struggling to think how this could even be in the top 10 tools in human history.

As a counterpoint, if I were to be teleported naked onto an abandoned island 10000 years ago and could bring one "tool" with me, a solar powered terminal with an LLM would be my #1 pick. An able-bodied and resourceful individual equipped with an LLM could accomplish far far more than with any other tool I can think of.

The Internet was the greatest tool in human history and it has lead to all sorts of issues. Misinformation at amazing scale that has undone lots of social progress that was made in the 20th century and 2000s. It has driven the greatest wealth disparities ever seen. It has become a harmful addiction for millions of people.

That's not to say the Internet hasn't caused good things to happen, but to ignore the bad things is counterproductive. Maybe it's ok to slow down and take a step back to make sure we're not doing more bad than good.

And it's cheap. Imagine I told you that you could have direct access to every PhD in the world and they would respond to all of your questions instantly... for $20/mo. Mind-blowing stuff and people still complain.

But it's not "direct access to every PhD in the world." You don't really believe that do you?

It’s not actually cheap, just subsidized. Becoming reliant on it now virtually guarantees you will have a tough decision to make later when profitability is actually important.

It is legitimately like the least interesting topic of convo. When someone says "maybe they could use Aai to...." I tune out immediately

AI is my full time job and I generally agree. Love answering questions about the nitty gritty specifics of how it _works_, bored to tears of “do you think it will”

Recently I had a convo starting with: "Maybe we can use AI to infer whether we are dealing with an experiment or a control based on the metadata of these public studies."

These data are tables, people call "controls" anything from "control" to "ctrl" to "ctr" to "t0", either in the file name, a random column, etc etc etc. It worked well and I'm glad we tried it. In time I think we will derive value from deciding to use it. I'm glad nobody tuned out.

I mean I am not really talking in a professional setting or technical setting... I mean just shootin the shit with people.

I mean, it sounds like you could’ve had a few if/else statements and accomplished the same thing.

Maybe they should start a new community and call it the AI-mish people ...

It has been called refusing to use proprietary software. People who use FOSS. Users, not useds.

AI is very open source and very commercialized at the same time. I don't understand your comment.

I've been doing a thought experiment on what it would take to refuse to ingest any non public domain or creative commons licensed content. If one wanted to opt out of commercial entertainment, how hard would that be?

This gets complicated pretty quickly, because so much IP is implicitly granted, and poorly labeled.

Counterpoint: I am not bored at all.

Hyped as it is, it is important to be here to discuss its uses, misuses and implications. Some if it is fascinating, and other parts are fascinatingly bad.

I understand the fatigue with it. But that it is used right (or at all) is a conversation worth having.

I was bored of it after about a day. As an engineer, there's really nothing interesting about LLMs at all to me.

What kind of engineer? As a software engineer, the Cursor Tab feature alone has doubled my development speed.

Here's some of what I think is my personal best advice:

Learn to live in the gray areas. Don't be dogmatic. The world isn't black and white. Take some parts of the black and white. And, don't be afraid to change your mind about some things.

This may sound obvious to some of you, and sure, in theory this is simple. But in practice? Definitely not, at least in my experience. It requires a change in mindset and worldview, which generally becomes harder as you age ("because your want to conserve the way of life you enjoy").

the thing is, engaging with a poem only as a literal screed on the general topic is a very black and white way to engage with it. The author is negative on LLMs sure, but I'm sure the feeling this piece evokes clicks with many people; including people who use LLMs as power users (like myself). I don't have to fully / always agree with this. It's something that should be said. And there are times when I want to take off my technological wizard hat and put on my simple humanity hat and enjoy a poem like this. And then sigh, double check my impulse to look at my phone, double check my impulse to talk about money making, sex pursuing schemes, look at my friend in the bar and realize they won't be around forever and say, genuinely, 'hows it going bud'

Nobody asked for it???

Nobody wants it???

You're not paying attention.

I want it. I think it's our only chance at quickly solving huge complex problems like aging, cancer, Alzheimer's.

It's our only chance at quickly solving huge complex problems like how to cut expensive labor costs.

That too. If all/most labor is automated, humans will be free from the 9 to 5 grind. Products will be cheap or free.

Aging isn’t a problem. It’s normal.

That which is normal is not necessarily also good or not problematic. Racism is normal, but its a problem. War is normal, but its absurdly wasteful and problematic. Cancer is normal etc.

Animals eat their disabled children. Humans should also do it then, since it's normal or natural.

Around 100k people die from age-related disease every day. I'd be careful to dismiss that as not a problem.

It's a problem for me.

When you're 60 or 70, you will wish to have a body of a 25 year old.

Dying early from rotting teeth is normal in nature, yet you probably brush, floss, and go to dentist.

We define normal by what is common and familiar. But that has no bearing on what ought to be.

It's normal for half of all babies to die in the first year of their life. It's normal for an infected limb to commonly lead to death. Etc.

Dying because I cannot function adequately due to poor vision is normal.

Wearing crafted pieces of glass on my head every waking moment is not normal, but I choose to do it.

It can be both

It sounds a lot like you want to cure life. We're mortal meat bags, go enjoy life instead of worrying about "solving" the inevitable.

Women and people of color also used to be treated like property, doesn't mean it has to be like that forever.

What's cool with humans is that we're able to reflect on our own being and our societies, and when we group together, we can enforce large-scale changes that improve the lives of millions.

We might be mortal meat bags right now, but maybe it isn't the only way, for better or worse.

Cure death, not life.

And I do enjoy life, that's exactly why I want it to be much much longer.

> I think it's our only chance at quickly solving huge complex problems like aging, cancer, Alzheimer's.

Machine learning is certainly a extremely handy in tacking these issues, thinking of breakthroughs like AlphaFold and similar. However, I'd like to push against your take:

1. There already are tremendous developments happening in those fronts you mentioned. Praising AI as "our only chance" is quite a stretch and possibly even a harmful statement, considering how severely under-funded these research projects are.

2. It seems to me the poem is more about LLMs/glorified chat bots than general machine learning. In that context, I wouldn't consider them as super useful in Alzheimer's research, certainly not "our only chance".

1. You need to read carefully. I didn't say it was our only chance. I said it was our only chance to do it quickly, I even emphasized the word.

I'm sure humanity can grind through these hard problems in hundreds or thousands of years without AIs.

But I would prefer to be alive, so there's urgency.

Let's hope solving aging is beyond the grasp of even the smartest AI. No surer way to end up in a world full of calcified ideas than having lot of calcified humans clinging to power and enforcing their ways on younger generations.

Not to mention the environmental impact of everlasting humans.

You don't have to participate, even if it gets solved. Feel free to die out.

The idea is that people can't take new ideas in as they age makes zero sense to me.

Funneling power and influence into the hands of the few (which is the practical consequence of AI) can be used to solve problems, but history shows us that it rarely will be used for that purpose.

The drag in decision making of democracy is a feature, not a bug.

That's true, and so far is being used for (check notes) cloning the peculiar style of an anime studio. Or fake receipts.

That's a ridiculous take. Read some actual AI news, not just titles of pop-sci articles.

Alphafold doesn't exist

Me to ChatGPT: Imagine you are a cancer researcher. You've spent your whole life going down the wrong paths and you've finally just discovered the incredible cure for cancer, "Eureka!" you exclaim "I've found it! The cure for cancer is:"

Going great with the destruction of medical research communities and organizations that evaluate the effectiveness of experimental treatments.

Hopefully that can be solved with AI and modeling in digital representations of humans.

et le changement climatique..

Wake me up when an LLM has found the solution to Alzheimer's. Until then, don't force it into every software I use.

Nobody is forcing anything. Some creators of software add AI, because it's their software and that's what they want to do.

I'm finally learning how to do unit tests in my Python code, this was long overdue (hey I'm a bioinformatician, we make some of the worst code out there!!) but Claude's taking me by the hand and I make sure I understand every character that I type. So far so good!

Still a nice to read piece though, made me smile, can be applied to many things, from crypto (the coin kind) to politics to Rust to Nix to ads [best minds of our generation?] to ... .

(I assume it's about AI btw, because of the nuclear power station. Anyway, I'm not bored at all of any of the topics I mentioned :) .)

What's written in the article would have been a good summary of my feelings when WhatsApp, an application I cannot switch away from because of the network effects, decided to add an AI icon and then integrated AI in its search.

Whether you agree or disagree with the sentiment expressed by the submission, the quality and utility of it is very low, so it's unfortunate that the submission has reached #1 on HN.

I suspect the brevity of the submission has made it easy comment fodder.

I think it expresses a majority sentiment among the tech industry, otherwise it wouldn't be #1 on HN. I think there's a gap in sentiment between people who upvote on HN and people who comment on HN

I thought it was good. It evoked a lot of mental images and feelings for me and was thought provoking. I enjoy these types of experiences, and its increasingly rare as I don't engage with literature much anymore. Therefore for me it had utility.

This seems to happen with increasing frequency on HN these days.

What do you mean by "utility" here?

What did you learn from the submission? What did anyone learn from it?

The world is changing. Maybe for the better, maybe not. Personally, I'm pretty optimistic. Other people might mostly see risks and harm. I get that. But what I don't get is how people think this is boring. Today's kids will grow up in a strangely alien world that used to be science fiction. That's why people can't stop talking about.

Humans crave novelty. That's all. I'm sure people were bored of hearing about the internet too.

I'm with you on the optimistic outlook, for the most part. But I think there will also be quite a bit of pain felt by a lot of people (job loss, bad code, bad info, etc.) until we can find ways to correct.

I'm bored of hearing about it because every conversation about it is the same.

I am a saddened that so many people on HN interpret this poem only as a literal critique on their favourite new toy. And only engage with it on that level. To me this poem was like drinking a distillation of a lot of the sadness and uncertainty and over-excitement and fatigue and burn out of the astoundingly swift technological march of the last decade. And yes, ofc LLMs. I don't have to be completely in agreement with the tone of the poem to appreciate that.

when I see a kid alone playing video games all day... and the parent, instead of trying to speak to their child, engage with them, mediates this problem through the use of an app with time limits... to me there is a lot of sadness in that. Putting up virtual glass panes between each other more and more.

^ the source of above is somewhat funny though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PvsYm4vfM6Y

AI is really bringing out the worst in capitalist corporatism. I think even the most pessimistic AI doomer will agree that the technology is fascinating and can do some cool things, but our corporate overlords have made it such an all-encompassing topic that it’s hard not to be disillusioned by it.

Yes, it’s an interesting technology - but seeing other interesting technologies and projects get disinvested in because it’s not new shiny AI - or watching leaders insist on creating yet another chatbot just so they can pat themselves on the back - or replacing an already-working system with a half-broken AI one just so we can say we use AI, and then forcing everyone at the company to use it just so we can release a press release saying ‘all of our developers use AI’. Watching our overall quality of work decrease, but leaders celebrate it because “mediocre but done with AI” is gold standard now…

All of it feels like a sham. Feels like we’re trying too hard to prop up AI as amazing, rather than letting it succeed on its own merits.

I'm kind of puzzled. I've been interested in AI for ~45 years and read quite a lot of the stuff on HN and similar. I'm not aware of any of that being pushed on me by a corporate overlord? I'll give you there is more hype and money these days.

However I also read Kurzweil / Moravec stuff which has been predicting human level intelligence around now since at least 1990 and that to me is the interesting bit, and not really at all corporate, rather than open-whatever has raised $x bn etc.

You must not work in big tech, then. At my company, AI-companion tools were forcibly installed in everyone’s browser, soon followed by a press release parading how “100% of people at our company now use AI because it’s so great”. Attempts to uninstall the tool are explicitly blocked. Similarly, AI coding tools are forcibly installed in IDEs.

Every single hackathon or team workshop has been turned into a AI-specific hackathons or training. Managers have been told explicitly that they must come up with yearly goals that include the use of AI. Every project proposal must include a section answering how this project plans to utilize AI.

The most egregious example for me were adding a chatbot to Windows and going so far as creating a special button (on laptop's cramped keyboard). Then we got the Apple ads which are just stains on professional ethics.

"Nobody asked for it, and nobody wants it."

Whenever I read this I just lose all credibility for the author. As if millions of DAU having their problems solved are invisible to them.

Sure, it's blunt. But surely we've all experienced the feeling of apathy expressed in this post. I certainly have.

> You know what I’m talking about, even though I’ve not mentioned it.

Yes. That's a really long setup for a bad yo momma joke...

Best bit is, this is perennial; while, given the date one assumes it is a vile libel against our benevolent robot overlords, if written a few years ago you'd just assume it was about blockchain.

I've been introspecting lately on why I've got this kind of reaction to the whole situation despite rationally knowing the benefits involved.

We're currently _already_ in the midst of a tech and social revolution in the form of social media platforms. About 15 years ago, everyone became excited about how they could connect with old friends whenever they want on Facebook, from their computer. 10 years later, the story started to curdle as people realised being plugged into the internet 24/7 has major societal drawbacks. I think about how detached I've become from local communities, and just how much my life I entrust to a handful of tech companies in San Francisco.

Now a new group of companies come along, peg themselves to every facet of life, and demand billions of investment dollars for their products and whip up a bunch of evangelists. I'm in the midst of reevaluating my relationship with tech and now tech advocates are in every part of my life trying to tell me how much better my life should be. Maybe I'll install a copilot at some point, but I just want to get on with things for now.

It never helps that my current team has a fetish for rapidly expanding our tech stack without considering the learning cost to the rest of the team, so I'm at my capacity for learning atm

> You know what I’m talking about, even though I’ve not mentioned it.

Many comments here assume the "it" means AI. Is that certain though? As in: is there a line that without doubt would point to AI?

In my view this text could just as well be about the iPhone (written 15 years ago and published today).

Perhaps this makes "it" even more boring; i.e. that when the process ends with one "it", it starts again with a new one.

“A decommissioned nuclear power station required to power it.”

“Not to mention millions of gallons of water required to cool it.”

Pretty sure that isn’t an iPhone. ;)

This is what I was looking for and I missed - thank you!

Just like a psychological diagnosis is often based on proximity to a cluster of symptoms rather than specific ones that must be met, you can't point to one particular line that makes it AI. It is the combination of all of the sentences that aligns with our perception of AI.

Can't be an iPhone, iPhones don't need plants to power them and lakes to cool them. Could be tech in general though

Average phone allegedly uses 30 kWh per year (charging + data transfer)[0], which in turn uses about 26 gallons of water[1].

Which I feel is well worth it for the value each user gets out, but does start to add up to lakes and power plants worth of water/energy when there are billions of phones.

[0]: https://www.bryceenergyservices.com/2024/10/03/the-total-ene...

[1]: Using same electricity water intensity as used in https://arxiv.org/pdf/2304.03271

"It" could be computing in general.

Or American-style ultracapitalism, a phenomenon for which terms like "the control problem" and "alignment" are certainly relevant.

“Policy-makers pandering to it.”

Do policy-makers pander to computing in general?

“People incessantly telling you how they use it.”

I don’t think this can be said for American-style ultracapitalism. (Especially for the author who isn’t in the US.)

Garbage in/ garbage out is what will happen without human curated sources verified by experts on their field.

Your point seems to contradict with Nupedia vs Wikipedia history, that was a competition where the old-fashioned encyclopedia lost to the bazaar-inspired approach.

The Wikipedia has proper human sources.

> Rubbish in and rubbish out of it.

Except it’s not rubbish out. The output is astoundingly good - something I would have considered science fiction a few years ago.

It’s not perfect. But as a tool in certain contexts, it is already proving its worth. And it’s only going to get better.

Sorry that you’re sick of it, but I think this tech is here to stay.

My thought after reading that article was “well, I agree with one thing… I sure am sick of the discourse around it.”

I agree that it’s good and not going anywhere, but I also think it’s overhyped at the same time. Both can be true.

The doomerism and hand wringing is a form of hype.

> I agree that it’s good and not going anywhere, but I also think it’s overhyped at the same time. Both can be true.

I think that to say it is overhyped says more about what you read and the company that you keep than it does about the actual technology. I don’t mean that as an insult or anything - clearly there is a lot of hype about AI on HN, which I also read.

But I would say that most people in my life actually don’t have enough experience with AI. Outside of work, I’m the only person I know using it every day. And it’s something that very rarely comes up in discussion.

> "Every pub conversation winding up talking about it."

Is this a SV thing? Conversations about IT with anyone other than co-workers are a once-a-year thing for me. It is actually refreshing, because a lot of the stuff I work on esoteric/niche it's not coming up a lot in conversation.

I love using it. It helped me resuscitate a bricked PC two days ago. Yesterday it cleaned up and explained some robocopy code for me. And today it taught me how to download several less powerful versions of itself to my PC to run locally.

But alas, your critical thinking skills...

Seems like the poetic ability of culture to comment on itself while simultaneously lacking self-awareness.

(the article is what it cricisizes. It tells how the author uses it (or not), it is talking about it like everyone else, it is vilifying it like everyone else, etc...)

(it's thus a clever critique by itself being the subject of criticism. The reader senses there is a higher level criticism, but can't really be sure. The reader must even suspect AI wrote it. The reader can sense something... But it's all potentially hollow, like nothing there, just appearance)

It's here to stay, and your boredom just makes you fall behind

Plus ça change. Any jump forward leads to a sentiment of neo-luddism among some group or another (I can't deny I felt a twinge of it around the NFT fever). If the latest group wants to actually effect change, maybe they need a movement and a Ned Ludd type character to get behind. As someone who is unashamedly pro-AI, I think it's healthy to have some to-and-fro and dissenting voices, because these are really big issues we're dealing with.

Opportunity blindness imo.

Yes the hype is a bit tedious, but this is a new IT building block/primitive we didn't have before. How can you not be even a little bit excited?

Today while staring at my strawberry plant I started wondering if the soil had enough nitrogen for it. 10 queries, some fluff learning, and an in depth discussion about the stoichiometric steps required to convert the nitrogen consumed by a single strawberry plant got me to some workable measurement of fertilizer I could add. I think anyone bored of it is using it for too much, and too often.

I feel bored of AI as well.

LLMs and Generative AI are exciting, and I want research and development on such to continue.

I use Copilot at work, and sometimes it is scary on point (other times not). But at home, I like to do things by hand. I code unassisted, I draw with pencil and paper.

The conversation and secondary effects of AI, feel so dreary and banal. It is amazing technology, wielded so lazily

that was a waste of time to read. I'm glad it was short. "I'm bored of all the talk and conversation that other ppl find extremely interesting, new, revolutionary, mind-blowing, etc"...like... okay? Well no one is forcing him to do anything. He should go outside, go to the gym, go to a bar, go to a library, read a book, there is literally an infinite number of productive things he could have done instead of whine online about how he's "bored" of the (by everyone else's account) insane happenings in the world(s) of the things(s) that he so "cleverly" was able to describe without actually saying "its" name. Hopefully he has a change of attitude and retracts his pointless, bitter rant.

Boring article

>The best minds of my generation thinking about how to make people use it.

The best minds or just the most visible?

Crypto or AI?

Or doom-scroll algorithms?

Back when cryptocurrencies and especially ethereum was new I had similar feelings for it like I have for Gen AI now. I feel that it has this enormous potential if we use it in reasonable and down-to-earth ways. With cryptocurrencies the uses turned out to be all but reasonable.

I still have a feeling that ethereum could be quite useful but I wouldn't touch that industry with a ten foot pole.

Rust :)

Seriously speaking, they don't need to name "it" because all they've written applies equally to whatever the latest mass hysteria is about.

Patently not true. Pokémon Go, for example, wouldn’t fit several of the points.

> The inevitable, dehumanising consequence of it.

> Rubbish in and rubbish out of it.

> Nobody asked for it, and nobody wants it.

> A thousand no’s, but ‘yes’ when shareholders start clamouring for it.

> A decommissioned nuclear power station required to power it.

> Not to mention millions of gallons of water required to cool it.

It's AI. 100%

Brainrot?

"Nobody asked for it, and nobody wants it" after accusing AI of being inherently dehumanizing. How ironic. Do those who personally enjoy interacting with AI not exist in your mental landscape? This reads like hatred, not boredom.

Is this intellectual fatigue not part of all paradigm shifts? Semi-serious question.

There was tons of NFT fatigue. NFTs (outside of some niches) are essentially duds.

It's blindingly obvious from the hundreds of negative comments here that people aren't bored of it, they're angry about it, but trying to pretend like they don't care.

My thoughts on AI come from a place far beyond the noise of the crowd. If you had even a glimpse of what I see, you'd find the whole subject terribly dull.

While I agree with some of the points here, the aloof tone-deaf consumerist mentality reveals either ignorance of, or more likely indifference to, the transformative juncture we've reached and/or the possible perils. If all you feel about the current situation is "bored," that's a you problem. The world is not here for your amusement. Boredom is a lack of imagination. Go do something else. Your problem is not boredom, it is your own apathetic attitude and need to be regularly spoon-fed entertainment.

Maybe I don't get the level of burnout I'm seeing because I don't spend much time streaming or doomscrolling, but that's an example of my point. If you spend more time creating than consuming, then boredom isn't a problem regardless of what the rest of the world is up to. Occasional fear and horror at the news maybe, but certainly not boredom.

I have to agree, this is amazingly boring to read, would have been better if you did not.

I had those feelings about the crypto mania. The AI craze has at least some justification coming from genuine usefulness.

A flawed solution looking for a problem.

Wait - does everyone here think they're talking about AI? Or is it bitcoin / crypto / NFTs?

Right? How much more can we stand all this talk about cryptocurrency and Bitcoin.

He means beer .. doesn’t he ?

Original title does not use American casing because author is from Scotland:

> Bored of it

> People incessantly telling you how they use it.

It’s a bit like smoking indoors.

I knew what the article was about before even accessing the site

Is he talking about IT? Cause I m quite bored of IT myself.

I've noticed something about people's reaction to AI. People who view themselves mainly as engineers or craftsmen are threatened by AI, understandably. People who just want to make cool stuff, solve real problems or just have fun are not threatened, but love it.

And I get it, an expert furniture craftsman will not have respect for IKEA furniture, and that's fine. But it means I can affordably furnish a new apartment for $2k instead of $20k. Of course it's even more threatening because there is the risk that the AI will actually do a better job in the future. But people still play Chess and have fun with that, and people enjoy watching Magnus Carlsen play even though he can't beat the AI on a phone.

In the end, we will all have to adapt, and for your own sake I don't think it helps putting your head in the sand and being bitter. Instead of being bitter, try thinking about all the cool stuff you can make now as a one person team.

The trouble right now, in the context of engineering, is that it is terribly difficult to get AI to produce something you can be confident in. We've been burned by the human junior engineer who produces something that gets things done in the present, but two-three years down the line becomes a nightmare liability, and AI is now that same junior engineer.

It is too early to tell if what AI produces will also become that terrible nightmare in a few years, or if AI will also become the saviour to make what would have been a nightmare a delight. So, one has to be in defence mode in case the nightmare reality is the one that comes to fruition, which limits how far it can be taken. Unless you just want to produce cool stuff that you plan to throw away tomorrow. That is perfectly valid! But not usually what engineers get to work on.

Time will give more clarity.

How much time do we need?

Industrial invention used to be judged by actual usefulness. If we take space exploration as an example, at every stage, we have actual usefulness for what the technology so far was able to accomplish. Same with computing. But now we're two years after the first release to the general public of LLMs and no one can provide an actual, reliable use case for it. Instead, it's mostly about destroying values, hindering workflows, and crippling the internet.

Yeah, whenever I see one of these articles, I just feel disappointed at what kind of mindset could be given an amazing new tool to build previously impossible things with, but just goes "meh".

I'm really excited that LLMs exist, and they've been making my life much easier, but to each their own.

Still trying to figure out why this is #1 on HN.

Shit rolls downhill, right into the algorithm.

If it's not clear, he means computers.

Are you sure? To me it seems he might mean something more specific, such as LLMs.

What's "it"? AI in general?

Can't tell if it is crypto or AI hmm

It’s particularly cute because it could have referred to social media, or the internet, or television, or radio, or the steam engine…

AI or Crypto?

I did not get what this is about.

Everyone can get depressed, everyone can get a low period. I don't get why this is on the front page of HN.

An uninteresting complaining article with only clichés like "Nobody asked for it and nobody wants it."

Go read a book and grow some tomatoes.

May as well be bored about steam turbines or refrigeration.

This posts reeks of a worrying lack of agency.

This is exactly how I feel and I can't want to start sharing this with people.

You can leave the country and not tell anyone the field you are in and inevitably the topic will come up.

Insufferable.

absolutely nothing wrong with restarting a decomissioned nuke.

I can only imagine the same kind of sentiments were written about...

Electricity. Airplanes. Sailing ships. The cotton gin. The telegraph.

I, for one, am not bored. I continue to be amazed. AI has massively increased my productivity and massively decreased my frustration.

If you're bored, that's a "you" problem. Find other places to hang out if you want to avoid conversation about it.

A low quality complaints article that a LLM could write.

Why do we allow people like that to cause global warming and chop down the rainforest for soy latte when a complaints-oriented LLM could output the same zzz-tier slop posting as a million of his kind, all at the cost of much lower footprint?

The overwhelming majority of soy farming is used to feed livestock for human consumption.

https://wwf.panda.org/discover/our_focus/food_practice/susta...

Blaming soy lattes for deforestation is like blaming avocado toast for a bad economy.

Pre chatgpt 3 it was beautiful, fresh. Not it's another race to the bottom

The desperate attempt to decouple the economy finally from reality entirely.

We should create a new and better economy.

Books?

AI.

"That there’s a ‘there’ there to it."

WTF does this mean? This sentence is grammatically incorrect.

I actually didn’t understand this line either, so I asked ChatGPT:

> The phrase "That there’s a ‘there’ there to it" in this context means that "it" (likely AI or some other over-hyped technology) has a kind of undeniable substance or presence — even if it's unwelcome, overwhelming, or problematic. It's not just hype or smoke; it’s real, it’s happening, and it matters — which ironically contributes to the speaker’s frustration and exhaustion.

> It’s a nod to the idea that you can’t ignore it anymore, because it’s not just talk — it’s manifesting in tangible, consequential ways.

> The phrase echoes Gertrude Stein’s famous line about Oakland: “There’s no there there”, which meant a place had no substance or significance. Inverting that to “there’s a ‘there’ there” means this “it” is very much real, unavoidable, and has weight — and that’s part of what makes it so exhausting.

> In short: "It’s not just hype anymore — it's here, it's real, and that sucks."

And now I understand.

Good thing we have AI to explain to us why AI sucks.

It's a literary conceit:

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/there_is_no_there_there

I see, but the "to it" is what's grammatically incorrect.

It is correct to write: there is a "there" there. It would also be correct to write: there is a "there" to it. But it is grammatically incorrect to write: there is a "there" there to it.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/there_is_no_there_there

> From a remark by Gertrude Stein in Everybody's Autobiography (1937), concerning the fact that her childhood home in Oakland, California, no longer existed.

Huh. I did not realise it was originally in reference to an actual _place_.

Is this a rant against investment capitalism and high-speed financial trading networks?

Or perhaps a screed decrying the shiny bouncing ball of blockchain-based cryptocurrency?

Possibly a takedown of the online pornography sector, which consumes a largish percentage of bandwith and data center power?

Maybe it's about LLMs, although they might end up going the way of compilers - mostly open source, only a few niche for-profit compilers still exist?

Oh wait - it's about the cell phones and tablets that everyone stares at all day instead of engaging in human social interaction and reading books?

Could it be that the problem isn't with the technology itself, but with how it's being used to manipulate and control people by the interests who currently control most people's access to the technology?

There might be something fundamentally wrong with a socioeconomic system based on investment capitalism and contolled by a few uber-wealthy oligarchs - something about it that inevitably leads to dystopian outcomes.

You and me both buddy, you and me both.

Good. Now the real work can start.

I thought it was Trump

This is excellent satire. It's like a Rorschach test for the commenters.

Would Rorschach have been bored of it?

Interesting. Development of the most powerful technology humans could ever hope to build, happening within our lifetimes, "boring".

> the most powerful technology humans could ever hope to build

If you're correct, that's a rather depressing thought

Two seemingly opposing ideas can, in fact, be true at the same time.

This exact quote could have been said during every other economic revolution, so to me it just sounds like a mix of complaining about living in times of uncertainty and a conservative mindset.

A LLM could have told you that this is badly written, maybe consult one next time.

I too consult AIs to see how I should feel about the quality of artistic works because I've given up all ability to think for myself.

Calling something artistic does not make it so.

Well, of course it would.

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