Tell HN: The saddest irony of my/our craft | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: The saddest irony of my/our craft

21 pointsdakiol18 comments

So I wouldn't mind to lose my job for almost any other reason. Bad market, company pivot, even my own stupid mistakes... fine, thats life. But losing it because of the love I put in my open source projects? C'mon man, that one really pisses me off. I had side projects on weekends just for fun like everyone else, stack overflow answers at 2am for strangers I never gonna meet, and repos nobody paid me for..

Honestly that kinda of culture was the best thing about being a dev and now it became the training set. I hate how openai/google/anthropic/etc scraped it all, learned from it, and now they sell our love back to us as a product. Sure, I get it, it's capitalism, whatever, but I feel like the biggest fool out there. I guess I just have to accept it, put my head down and keep going. There's one thing I dislike most though: the people around here that glorify AI/LLMs. It's just a matter of time until the higher ups normalize reducing even more headcount because of AI, 90% of us will be affected. Not everything is about the technical details people!

Same here, but with free information. I trained the Google AI overviews that are killing my website and the internet in general.

I sometimes wake up so angry about it, but what can we do?

We can go back to web rings. Web rings were great.

I am curious like, what are we going to do about it?

How do we stop them?

We can make an open letter to the AI labs and the employees (they can be anonymous confirmed signatories of course) so that they can reconsider their business models.

I think the only _real_ power we have, as consumers (not employees) is to not use or pay for such tools/services. If you can, pay for tools/services that value the opposite. That's what I do, at least.

But don't the businesses pay for the tools/services?

I'm thinking of ways how we can stop them

> I'm thinking of ways how we can stop them

Going in with an adversarial approach is just going to end up in conflict and burned bridges. You want to get a deeper understanding on why everyone is doing what they are doing, then help people find a path forward that meeting their goals in a healthy way.

If LLM vendors are doing it for the money, you need to show your employers that following the AI vendors' leads doesn't help the company, it just sends their revenue to vendors. You need to show how to achieve the same business results without using the AI tools.

And that is possible - I'm a consultant, and all the AI-First companies I've worked with have some truly awful results going on internally. Their metrics looks good, they are delivering code, even delivering and selling new features and products. But they are also piling up internal tensions and debt that are going to invoke a huge cost some day in the future. If you can show them those tensions and costs, you can change how they operate.

Indeed. Remember also that as an employee the power dynamic doesn't work in your favor for "stopping" anything.

As a consultant it isn't as skewed, but still a little bit. In any case, what codingdave said is spot on.

As I see it, there's no incentive to find a better path forward. We're in the age of "good enough". It doesn't even need to actually be any good, just "good enough". Tensions are rising and technical debt is sky high. Thing is, as long as the money keeps on pouring, there's no incentive to solve any of that. With AI taking over most of trivial programming tasks, and the current downsizing trend, even if the last few reasonable people in a company finally get fed up and leave, there's plenty of meat for the grinder.

Actually you hit the core differences between human/ai code > stack overflow answers at 2am for strangers , its innovation , human innovate / ai dont

AI only scraped the text. It can't learn the passion you had at 2 AM. But.. it's just sad

Things ebb and flow don’t be so attached

The problem is not the AI/LLMs technologies. It is the greed. Earn more money, and the money to be more important than the people. It is not a capitalism thing. It is bad culture, attitude, and egoism, IMHO.

Capitalism and the free market wasn't built for our economy. It was built for scarcity, not abundance. The idea was that competition would lower prices to the level of cost. This works for the price of iron or textiles, but since software, we've seen prices set to even lower than costs (pirated DVDs, open source).

It broke a long time ago, back in the modern industrial-agricultural revolution. People say communism is worse, but the problem is that communism was a response to capitalism. When communist revolutions trigger, then the higher ups decide that maybe all we need is a patch instead of a rewrite, and start tightening laws. But these are just patches. Things like ad-driven models and consulting on open source are patches as well.

Capitalism will continue to break every time there is an industrial revolution. Robots took jobs but added a few, computers added plenty of jobs, but with AI we might not be so lucky.

>> People say communism is worse, but the problem is that communism was a response to capitalism.

Capitalism of a sort, but not how we understand it today. If we're talking about the Russian revolution of 1917 that wasn't really "capitalism" as we would describe it today. It was closer to feudalism with a very small aristocracy controlling all the resources, while treating the "workers" with extreme brutality.

Even then it's arguable that the 1st world war was the spark that made the revolution possible. Partly because the extensive mobilization allowed for "worker leaders" to become visible (ie at NCO levels) while at the same time swelling the army numbers (and it was those conscripted army folk that provided the back-bone to the revolution itself.)

While it's fair to say "the workers had no access to capital" - and that was certainly a part of the problem - the underlying factor was the aristocratic system.

Bear in mind that Russia at the time was still very much in the "monarchy" stage, unlike France (French Revolution) or the UK (English Civil War) which are much clearer as being "against the monarchy". The Russian revolution lead to Communism (more accurately described as Authoritarianism) than some form of elected parliament. (The English and French systems had elections, but voting was limited in lots of ways.)

The problem with Communism was less about the political ideals, and more about implementation. China is communist today, and doing really well. But the system is unlike Leninism or Stalinism. (Or indeed different to Mao's China.) "Communism" works best when there is a lot of local control and less central control. Central control (Lenin, Stalin et al) failed for much the same reason the Tsars failed - too few people benefiting from the system as a whole.

Ironically what we're seeing now (in the US) is the consolidation of wealth to the few. The tendency to authoritarianism in govt. I'm not sure that the US form of Capitalism (as we see it today) is "worker friendly".

I would suggest that Europe is on a better path - a broad mix of democracy (ie multi-party voting), socialism (an understanding that a society does better when looking after the bottom) and capitalism (the ability to start your own business, make profits and so on.) Allowing, but then tempering, the rampant greed for ever larger piles of money, and social control, seems like a win.

Just like in the Age of Electricity, the Age of Steam, and the Internet Age, there will always be people like you who complain.

:-) same thing happened when computer arrived and don't know why this quote stayed with me.

"Either you're part of the steamroller or you're part of the road."

If not AI then something else would have been there to disrupt.

Cheers

Not sure if it was the intent, but this is a rather grating and shallow reply. Is that unattributed "quote" meant to be an appeal to inevitability?

If so, I'd just like to point out that none of this is inevitable, and the argument of "If I don't do it, someone else will" is a lazy excuse for abdication of social responsibility and the common good, a textbook race-to-the-bottom mentality. It's possible for a critical mass of individuals behaving ethically to prevent the "someone else" from taking actions that are harmful to society overall in the name of "disruption", as much as those bad actors would try to convince us otherwise.

Oh boi, imagine this: Someone discovered fire, and the people distributing raw meat had the same fear.

Someone invented the wheel, and the people carrying things on their shoulders had the same fear.

The list is long. Labeling a perspective "grating" or "shallow" is easy when you don't stop to ask what the other person actually meant. If you disagree, it’s usually better to ask for clarification than to assign a "lazy" motive to a stranger. My point wasn't an appeal to "social irresponsibility." There is a massive difference between "If I don't do it, someone else will" (an excuse for an action) and "Something else will" (an observation of evolution). I was not defending the ethics of corporations. I was pointing out the inevitability of change. The world moves forward regardless of whether we find the process "grating." So, NietzscheanNull (I hope it is borrowed from F. Nietzsche), it is not about a race to the bottom, it is about the reality of the road.

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