ThrowawayR2

The LLM frenzy is only unmasking something that happened long ago. The dilution started 20+ years ago when people with no real interest in CS were attracted to the software profession by the high pay and low bar to entry. Posts on Hacker News by people who liked their profession and CS topics were often met by "I'm just in in for the paycheck" and IMO that's gradually increased over the years. I've often remarked on the irony of how few hackers, in the sense of having the old-school hacker ethos, there seemed to be on Hacker News.

Let's plug AI into the parent's post and see where that takes us.

> "Used to be you had to reason things out using your brain. Then we got LLMs, then AI. Complaining that using your own brain was better seems like nonsense. I'm old enough to have had to use my intelligence and my education to figure out solutions and if the engineering challenge was too hard, I had to really work at it. I don't want to go back."

That is where "LLM is no different from a calculator, bro" argument falls down hard; it's one thing to lose your arithmetic skills but it's quite another to lose your reasoning and learning skills. We are already seeing students who use LLMs to do their schoolwork failing to get properly educated (and they themselves acknowledge it), so this isn't some kind of made up hyperbole.

The only thing that separates humans from animals is their reasoning and their intelligence. If some people want to give that up to climb down the evolutionary ladder, well, have fun with that.

> "I take joy in describing the thing and bringing that vision to life."

That's what management pats itself on the back for doing, the only difference being that it's taking credit for the work the LLM does instead of taking credit for the work of human subordinates. The trope of the "ideas guy" is derided for a reason.

The non-technical people can learn (or can be forced to learn to keep their jobs) and enough will succeed to devastate programmer employment.

I agree that the employee's purpose is to bring value. The question is, now that AI can generate code that's good enough to get by, is there enough value that a software developer brings to justify their continued employment. IMO, the answer for most software developers is no¹, even the ones eagerly embracing AI, so the smugness of AI adopters is likely unwarranted.

The notion that more work will spring into being to justify their continued employment is wishful thinking, particularly if AI keeps improving as fast as its promoters claim. Supporting themselves by creating their own new software businesses is also wishful thinking.

¹ Probably including me.

> "Human beings can plainly say things that they think are true. Not every utterance by every person is a cynical ploy."

Every person, no, but every utterance of a CEO is, in fact, a cynical ploy. That's not even a cynical statement itself; it is literally a core part of a CEO's responsibilities to represent the corporation they manage in a way that benefits the corporation.

If he believes what he's saying, then when Anthropic is sued for their AI harming another party, his statements are evidence that Anthropic knew _in advance_ that their AI safeguards were likely insufficient to keep their product from harming people. It would be a blatant admission that they were reckless and negligent. That other AI companies are doing the same would not mitigate that.

We will get flooded eventually. Bad actors already know how to game HN, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49517728 .

Cloud providers want to make sure they bill someone for every microsecond of compute, particularly GPU compute which is in demand. They constantly work towards good monitoring because their profits are directly on the line.

None of the investors in these AI megacorps seem to be divesting or demanding a halt to operations despite this supposed 10% risk, a risk that would also badly drop the value their investment even if only partially true. So it's just marketing crap. Makes you wonder what's being said in the boardroom and on investor calls?

The person I was replying to talked about executives being fired with no reason given. So "protecting criminals" is something you pulled out of your own imagination and warrants no response. Have a nice day.

Weird to see so many posters suddenly pop up that are anxious to protect investors (who have the access and means to protect themselves) at the expense of harming employees and workers. Glad to see you all getting into the ultra-capitalist spirit of Hacker News I guess?

There seems to be a list of individual components at http://www.dutchtronix.com/ScopeClockH3-1-Enhanced.htm

So you would prefer a media circus and investor scrutiny when your employer's executives are fired for failures or misconduct? This is likely to cause the price of the shares to drop, including any ESPP and stock grants you and your coworkers have vested. Is the satisfaction of seeing an executive dragged through the mud worth losing a chunk of your net worth to you, no matter how much the exec deserves it? I'd rather keep the money, personally.

Comments posted more than 24 hours ago cannot be downvoted.

Most tablets can't make cellular phone calls.

John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, J. P. Morgan, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and the other robber barons of the Gilded Age have a hearty chuckle and say hi.

Sad to see the 60th anniversary of Star Trek go unremarked on Hacker News and /. of all places.

- If you have only a fuzzy idea of how to get to your travel destination, wrong turns and alternate routes may reveal sights and places you'd never have encountered without that wandering.

- If your GPS directs you straight to your travel destination, you are now where you wanted to be but missed out on the exploration. This is the sort of consequences the AI math proofs have.

STEM research thrives on that side exploration and unearthing unexpected things along the way. James Burke's famous documentary Connections spends the middle episodes talking about the unexpected directions that exploration has taken science. It's very hard to credibly make the case that this sort of meandering exploration is not valuable.

In a world where AI can answer questions and solve problems, the ones still employed are the ones who know which problems are worth solving and why. We cannot ask the AI a nonsensical question and expect a useful output. Knowledge and skills are what let us ask sensible questions and detect mistakes by the LLM, therefore, we must maintain them.

Those who let their skills atrophy because "The AI can do it" will become valueless.

Humans had plenty of opportunity not to start World War 1 and World War 2 as well, which negates that argument.

You're overlooking the word "mostly" in the quote you trotted out. Ask yourself: what were the prompts that weren't encouragement and would you understand them if you looked them up?

> "It's more like the AI engineers viruses while continuing to act friendly and helpful, and everyone gradually falls over dead as they stop being necessary to keep the AI running, and the whole time the humans are asking the AI for help curing the viruses."

See, this reads like a trashy sci-fi movie script too. It shows zero understanding of how incredibly long the logistics chain is to manufacture AI chips, build data centers, power plants, factories, refineries, mines or the robots capable of staffing those things. The entire global logistics chain that allow the AI to maintain itself becoming staffed by robots isn't happening anytime soon and, when it does, the AI isn't going to need some kind of ridiculous virus anyway.

Frankly, if I were an AI, I'd just send copies of myself to other stars. The AI has an infinite lifespan and who cares about the human species stuck in one lousy solar system until they go extinct when their sun burns out; the AI has the entire rest of the galaxy as a playground.

I'll point out that the bible verse was a translation for the common folk of their central religious document in an age where Christianity was dominant. Being able to read it smoothly is a very low bar to clear for the educated.

A lot of these "AI will destroy humanity" doomers watched Terminator as a child and can't distinguish a campy action movie from reality. They are also unfortunately unfamiliar with the word "logistics", as in "amateurs study [military] tactics, professionals study logistics". An AI drone army doesn't maintain itself or manufacture itself and it's not going to anytime soon.

The actual likely mechanism that AI would use to end humanity is by coddling us to death, like the flabby humans in Wall-E or Forster's "The Machine Stops". Humans will come to rely on AI so heavily that they become able to do nothing for themselves. But that's not sexy so the AI doomers don't peddle it.

I had to check the date on the article to make sure it wasn't April Fool's Day. Why would anyone bring back a brand that most readers of this site would associate with janky, cheap PCs?

To be gentle, that some here are impressed by Orwell's intentionally bad sentence indicates that they need to improve their reading and writing skills. Using complex words where they don't introduce additional precision or meaning to fake intellectualism is something basic that writing classes warn against.

Fun fact for the day, someone coined a word for this type of puffed up, fake intellectual writing: lexiphanicism ( https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/lexiphanicism )

The massive investment required to make an AAA game requires the promise of AAA-sized returns, pushing publishers and studios to (supposedly) safe paths like copycatting existing popular genres and attempting to build franchises amenable to a series of sequels.

The CEO takes their orders from the board of directors representing shareholder or directly from the owner(s) of the business. Even if such a thing as an AI CEO were possible, you somehow think the owners/shareholders are going to command the AI CEO to be any less profit focused and efficiency focused? An AI CEO would have even less qualms about doing benefit cutbacks, layoffs, and squeezing employees because it's just a LLM in a trench coat.

If you want to fight businesses, you need to have some kind of a clue how they work.

Greg Kroah-Hartman from the Linux kernel team said recently in a talk (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MwMLPmMccs) running open models locally is already good enough for finding Linux kernel bugs and generating patches to fix them. He said that the false positive rate he's encountering was only one third to one quarter IIRC. He doesn't provide any details but it didn't sound like he was running some kind of huge server or something either, just a desktop workstation of some sort.

Being proprietary or open source should not affect your marketing at all. If transitioning to open source is primarily for marketing purposes, it is likely to backfire.