Comment by overfeed | Hacker News Reader

Comment by overfeed | Hacker News Reader

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You're not doing yourself any favors by labeling people who disagree with you undereducated or uninformed. There is enough over-hyped products/techniques/models/magical-thinking to warrant skepticism. At the root of this thread is an argument to (paraphrasing) encouraging people to just wait until someone solves major problems instead of tackling it themselves. This is a broad statement of faith, if I've ever seen one, in a very religious sense: "Worry not, the researchers and foundation models will provide."

My skepticism and intuition that AI innovations are not exponential, but sigmoid are not because I don't understand what gradient-descent, transformers, RAG, CoT, or multi-head attention are. My statement of faith is: the ROI economics are going to catch up with the exuberance way before AGI/ASI is achieved; sure, you're getting improving agents for now, but that's not going to justify the 12- or 13-digit USD investments. The music will stop, and improvements slow to a drip

Edit: I think at it's root, the argument is between folk who think AI will follow the same curve as past technological trends, and those who believe "It's different this time".

> labeling people who disagree with you undereducated or uninformed

I did neither of these two things... :) I personally could not care about

- (over)hype

- 12/13/14/15 ... digit USD investment

- exponential vs. sigmoid

There are basically two groups of industry folk:

1. those that see technology as absolutely transformational and are already doing amazeballs shit with it

2. those that argue how it is bad/not-exponential/ROI/...

If I was a professional (I am) I would do everything in my power to learn everything there is to learn (and then more) and join the Group #1. But it is easier to be in Group #2 as being in Group #1 requires time and effort and frustrations and throwing laptop out the window and ... :)

If there is really amazing stuff happening with this technology how did we have two recent major outages that were cause by embarrassing problems? I would guess that at least in the cloud flare instance some of the responsible code was ai generated

> I would guess that at least in the cloud flare instance some of the responsible code was ai generated

Your whole point isn't supported by anything but ... a guess?

If given the chance to work with an AI who hallucinates sometimes or a human who makes logical leaps like this

I think I know what I'd pick.

Seriously, just what even? "I can imagine a scenario where AI was involved, therefore I will treat my imagination as evidence."

Microsoft is saying they're generating 30% of their code now and there's clearly been a lot of stability issues with Windows 11 recently that they've publicly acknowledged. It's not hard to tell a story that involves layoffs, increased pressure to ship more code, AI tools, and software quality issues. You can make subtle jabs about your peers as much as you want but that isn't going to change public perception when you ship garbage.

The whole point is that the outages happened not that the ai code caused them. If ai is so useful/amazing then these outages should be less common not more. It’s obviously not rock solid evidence. Yeah ai could be useful and speed up or even improve a code base but there isn’t any evidence that that’s actually improving anything the only real studies point to imagined productivity improvements

good thing before “ai” when humans coded we had many decades of no outages… phew

A mutually exclusive group 1 & group 2 are a false dichotomy. One can have a grasp on the field and keep up to date with recent papers, have an active Claude subscription, use agents and still have a net-negative view of "AI" as a whole, considering the false promises, hucksters, charlatans and an impending economic reckoning.

tl;dr version: having negative view of the industry is decoupled from one's familiarity with, and usage of the tools, or the willingness to learn.

> considering the false promises, hucksters, charlatans and an impending economic reckoning.

I hack for a living. I could hardly give two hoots about “false promises” or “hucksters” or some “impeding economic reckoning…” I made a general comment that a whole lot of people simple discount technology on technical grounds (favorite here on HN)…

You should give a shit about how the field is perceived because that affects your ability to make a living whether you care about it or not

yea the “ai” is going to ruin this amazing reputation the field had before it :)

It ain't helping

> I could hardly give two hoots about “false promises” or “hucksters”

I suppose this is the crux of our misunderstanding: I deeply care about the long-term health and future of the field that gave me a hobby that continues to scratch a mental itch with fractal complexity/details, a career, and more money than I ever imagined.

> or some “impeding economic reckoning…”

I'm not going to guess if you missed the last couple of economic downturns or rode them out, but an economic reckoning may directly impact your ability to hack for a living, that's the thing you prize.

Amazeballs shit yet precious little actual products.

this is a tool, you use it to create just like you use brush and oils to paint a masterpiece. it is not a product in it of itself…

They were obviously asking where are the masterpieces.

I see the first half of group 1, but where's the second half? Don't get me wrong, there's some cool and interesting stuff in this space, but nothing I'd describe as close to "amazeballs shit."

you should see what I’ve seen (and many other people also). after 30 years of watching humans do it (fairly poorly as there is extremely small percentage of truly great SWEs) stuff I am seeing is ridiculously amazing

Can you describe some of it? On one hand, it is amazing that a computer can go from prose to code at all. On the other hand, it’s what I like to describe as a dancing bear. The bear is not a very good dancer, but it’s amazing that it can dance at all.

I’d make the distinction between these systems and what they’re used for. The systems themselves are amazing. What people do with them is pretty mundane so far. Doing the same work somewhat faster is nice, and it’s amazing that computers can do it, but the result is just a little more of the same output.

Can you show me some of the “amazeballs shit” people are doing with it?

> I did neither of those 2 things

>> ...there are people that are professionals and are willing to put the time in to learn and then there’s vast majority of others who don’t...

being lazy and unprofessional is just a tad different than uneducated :)

They're not logistic, this is a species of nonsense claim that irks me even more than claiming "capabilities gains are exponential, singularity 2026!"; it actually includes the exponential-gains claim and then tries to tack on epicycles to preempt the lack of singularities.

Remember, a logistic curve is an exponential (so, roughly, a process whose outputs feed its growth, the classic example being population growth, where more population makes more population) with a carrying capacity (the classic example is again population, where you need to eat to be able to reproduce).

Singularity 2026 is open and honest, wearing its heart on its sleeve. It's a much more respectable wrong position.

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