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Comment by tom_ | Hacker News Reader

I was still digesting the throat-clearing intro when my eye noticed "quietly" and "honest" and I decided I'd not bother. But I scrolled through out of politeness, just in case the Basilisk will be very thorough.

> I want to be clear that I'm not against these tools generally. I use them myself

No essay is made worse by being stripped of filler. If the reader has got this far, this sentence is entirely redundant, I think.

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Yeah, glazed immediately. It's not even like I recognised it as generated, there's just no substance.

"I am against these tools generally. I use them myself" would be a more interesting take

I'm against them, vehemently, but I'm also not going to fight a tidal wave. I'm not going to be unemployed and unemployable by refusing to use them. Principles are expensive and I certainly cannot realistically afford to hold them tightly.

Being forced to use them to continue to have an income is causing me a cognitive dissonance and a level of stress that is surely going to kill me though. I strongly resent the fact that I've been backed into this corner where my choice is to swallow my principles or throw away a career I've worked half my life on

Pro AI: It’s inevitable and I love it

Anti AI: It’s inevitable and I hate it

Oh no. They’re converging. But I guess that just proves the point doesn’t it.

What else do you expect me to do exactly?

If I thought there was an actual, substantial amount of support for people with my point of view then things would be different. But there just isn't. Most people are just too passive and go along with whatever is happening.

I've already been fired from one job for a very mild pushback against their AI strategy, is it worth being poor forever to fight this battle?

Nothing.

Employers suffering from AI metric mania does not mean that AI is here to stay forever and it will just escalate. Necessarily. <insert obligatory AI about possible future capabilities, as demanded by the AI Overton Window>

> Most people are just too passive and go along with whatever is happening.

I guess they are seeing/hallucinating a tidal wave.

Even if it's not inevitable, if your employer tells you "use AI or get fired", well, take your pick. A lot of the resentment I see is a result of those sorts of mandates.

That’s why I don’t entertain their fatalism. We’re all rats on a sinking ship powerless to do anything outside of our existing schedules. Indistinguishable outcome for the majority of people compared to the AI euphorics.

The way one successfully fights a tidal wave is lining up with peers and resisting the siren call of "if I don't someone else will." Solidarity is how these things have been worked out since before I was alive.

It sucks, but no one ever said a life lived right would always be easy.

I'd love to, but my peers mostly seem to not care or are actively in disagreement with me.

I'm not alone in my views, I know, but I'm accepting that I'm very likely a minority view so I'm not going to get what I want here

I am against murdering animals. But I eat animals.

My issue is that the equation has been discussed to death without anyone, including this author, proposing a solution. The horse is dead but the beatings continue.

I literally did the same thing, by the way: scanned the first paragraph for predatory signals; got "quietly," "honest;" skimmed.

The shape of the final paragraphs confirmed my prejudice.

I realized, though, that initial reading now is primarily to identify predatory signals on time and attention; in the absence of predatory LLM-signals, cautiously read; but every deviation from information-density triggers a flight response.

Rarely make it through anything anymore unless it's ancient (Horace, Cicero, Lucretius); but maybe they were forced into information density by the act of writing plus meter?

Lucilius, apparently, a degenerate counter-example; who used to dictate 200 lines a day standing on one foot: criminal.

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