krapp

It's weird that "should we still learn" is even a question begin asked on this forum of ostensibly intellectually curious people.

I guess a lot of folks really did just get into programming for the money and hated every minute of it.

Yes, you should learn coding if you want to. You should learn anything you want to learn.

I refuse to give my intellect over to the machine just to blindly consume its homogeneous excretions. I will keep doing what I've always done regardless of how well an AI could do it. I don't need to justify doing so, and neither do you, nor does anyone. It's OK to be a human.

The purpose of Show HN is to "show something you've made that other people can play with. HN users can try it out, give you feedback, and ask questions in the thread" (https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html)

That isn't possible with many AI generated projects because OP didn't write the code, probably doesn't understand the code and can't discuss the code or their process in creating it (because said process doesn't exist.) There is little if anything of substance to discuss or play with to satisfy intellectual curiosity, and in many cases the projects themselves wouldn't pass muster if written by a human, they're just vibe-coded slop.

There have been exceptions which have done well (ex:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49550375) but in that case AI was used in a specific technical context by someone knowledgeable who definitely wasn't "vibe coding" anything. But again - if a human had done all of that work, it would still have been a worthwhile post.

Show HN can't simply be a place where people post slop and everyone claps at how cool the latest models are. It can't simply be advertising for LLMs.

And I don't think you know what you're talking about. Good day.

I assume given the nature of HN that a lot of people use it as a training ground or an experiment, they just do it because they can. Some people may also believe that using an LLM is a more efficient and productive way of interacting with the site, and that it generates higher quality content than they themselves could. I suspect at least one person has tried training an LLM on their own content and posting through it. Maybe they want to farm karma, although I don't know why they would.

showdead does exactly what it says on the tin - it shows you dead comments.

That doesn't actually answer any questions, but I doubt mathematicians are entirely thrilled about the prospect of having their field automated, even if they still get paid.

I really do wonder sometimes whether these questions you post are trolling or if you truly don't understand how humans work on a fundamental level.

Have you considered that mathematicians aren't writers?

Or that your original framing was having no one, rather than "only a few people," read your work?

Do you think mathematicians would be content with having no one but AIs read their work? I don't think so.

The Soviets launched the first satellite, put the first animal into space, launched the first lunar probe, got the first photographs of the dark side of the moon, put the first human in space, put the first woman in space, put the first craft with more than one crew member into space, did the first spacewalk, sent the first probe to Venus, got the first pictures of another planet, and launched the first space station.

The moon landing was fine and all, a moment of global historic import (and propaganda value, with the US putting their flag on it like they owned the damned thing) but that's still just one victory in a race that was otherwise entirely dominated by the Soviets, and on balance what the Soviets did was of greater scientific merit than anything the US would achieve for years. Americans didn't even care about space until Russia flew Sputnik over their heads.

Companies get outcompeted, individual coders don't. And not everyone wants to be the Thomas Kinkade of coding, just cranking product out as fast as possible. And products that "use the latest tools" don't always "outcompete" those that don't. Most of what gets vibe coded - as demonstrated by what gets posted to Show HN - is qualitatively worse than the equivalent human-written software. It certainly isn't better, and there's no indication that velocity to market leads to market dominance.

To metaquote a recent thread - where is the vibe-coded replacement for Photoshop that outcompetes it? or Word? Why aren't vibe-coded games dominating Steam?

The speed alone doesn't translate to productivity and productivity alone doesn't translate to quality.

The entire draw of coding with LLMs is that you can generate programs without knowing how to code. That's literally what "vibe coding" is. Why would it surprise you that people who do know how to code, and don't hate the process the way a lot of AI enthusiasts seem to, might not find them useful?

You'll find plenty of people on HN who have this experience,but they just tend to be ridiculed or told they just haven't used AI correctly or enough. Admitting you don't use LLMs for everything, or god forbid at all, is like telling Christians you don't want to be saved.

>How is it possible that out of the millions of Americans, a guy who cant even read or send his own emails managed to work his way to the top of political system.

Because Americans don't vote for competence, they vote for entertainment value.

We do know that whales have distinct regional dialects. I would assume that any animal complex enough to have aspects of their behavior not entirely determined by genetics (in other words, taught by parents or peers) exhibits regionally distinct behavior. So yes, dogs probably have "accents." Naively, it seems like it would be weird if they didn't.

Companies will do whatever creates the most lock-in for the user and generates the most profit for themselves.

Ask yourself what's in their best interest as a business? That's probably what they'll do.

There are many religions in which "the gods" are neither omnipotent nor omniscient, but rather just more powerful beings than humans and still subject to the metaphysical laws of the universe, if not entirely to its physical laws.

Although clearly the model people are working with when they describe AI as a religion or they invoke AGI or the Singularity is based on the Abrahamic faiths rather than paganism or animism. I assume a lot of people with such beliefs also believe in some sort of simulated universe (as proxy for a metaphysical/supernatural realm) and that a sufficiently intelligent AI would simply be able to take root on reality... somehow. That direct analogy between technology, raw intellect and Godlike omnipotence has been a staple of science fiction for decades. Two early examples I can think of offhand being "the Jesus Incident" and Asimov's "The Final Question." And of course it's all over pre-LLM AI accelerationist stuff written by the likes of Ray Kurzweil and Rudy Rucker, Charles Stross' Accelerando, Vernor Vinge's Fire upon the Deep, the Culture series, etc.

Yet people do treat AI as a religion, both in terms of believing in a higher power and as a culture. They have a deep faith in using AI as a moral virtue and they view people who don't use it or who oppose it as heretical, foolish or evil, while seeing themselves as having transcended mundane humanity to some high transhuman state of being. They'll say the latter either needs to be "saved" and "accept the faith." They feel the same ecstatic joy using AI that religious people sometimes feel in church, or when they don't they feel deep personal guilt and shame. They base their entire identity around AI, seeking to find ways to incorporate it into their lives the way new converts have to make everything about their religion.

Some people literally run a "model" of ChatGPT in their minds which they ask questions of, the way people pray to God, because they implicitly trust "the voice of God" more than their own. People use AI for moral guidance, as a primary source of truth, and for emotional connection. And then people who believe in the Singularity believe AI will become so intelligent that the rules of reality will simply cease to exist and the Eschaton will reward the faithful with infinite abundance and eternal life and punish the unbelievers with endless torture. There is a theology and an eschatology at work. You can see it in almost every AI related thread now. The language of AI and the language of religion are intersecting.

I don't think viewing AIs as gods is the wrong analogy, rather like any religion it's wrong outside of an academic sense because obviously gods aren't real. Viewing AI as simply a tool in the same vein as printing presses is ignoring the greater cultural context forming around it, and that context is worth paying attention to. One claim theists often make is that the secular world fails to provide the sense of belonging, meaning and community that religion one did, and it seems obvious that modern always-online and always-commercial society alienates and dehumanizes people, leading to a longing for real connection that it can't provide. AI is clearly filling that void for many people, and it is becoming a secular religion in many real ways.

Aliens and advanced technology aren't going to be involved.

And they made them into paint called "mummy brown." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mummy_brown

Back-and-forth conversation isn't high quality by definition, it's just the baseline for not being bad enough to downvote. I think Hacker News wants the baseline to be some degree of exceptional.

So the typical American, when selecting for a political job, holds a man with no political experience but who was so corrupt and inept as a businessman he managed to bankrupt a casino in higher esteem than candidates with actual success and experience in the field selected for?

Fine. The typical American is an idiot and they get what they deserve, then.

>The Democrats continue to insist that this isn't the case. And keep losing.

It shouldn't be the case, the Democrats are correct (at least about that, although I suspect they never actually "insisted" on anything of the sort,) Kamala Harris and Hillary Clinton were more qualified than Trump and deserved to win, and I hope this whole clownshow of a country burns to the ground.

I leave the floor to you, matchbok3. I've exposed myself to Hacker News for too long and I need time in the screaming box.

How we got here is Obama got elected and white people lost their goddamn minds about it.

No. The actions of ICE are a reaction to how much Trump and his base hate brown people. This administration doesn't even believe climate change is real, Trump infamously called it a "Chinese hoax."

>Fielding left-wing candidates with no accomplishments makes Trump happen. It's not that complicated.

Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State and a Senator from New York, while Kamala Harris was a District Attorney and Attorney General, and then Senator for California before serving as Vice President.

Also only in the fetid delirium of Republicans and Trumpists are either of them even remotely left-wing.

Every time SCOTUS makes a decision they invent new laws or nullify existing laws. Every case they take is a question about whether certain laws "make sense," and that determination is based entirely on learned, but subjective, personal opinion.

Take for example laws which depended on Roe V. Wade being a Constitutional right no longer existing, and laws created after that right was repealed, because said right didn't make sense to the current Justices (despite being established law for nearly 50 years.) Did the wording of the Constitution change over those intervening years? No. Justices who agreed that Roe was a right died or retired, and were replaced by justices who disagreed, and the Constitution means whatever a majority of Justices say it does. Or the Supreme Court deciding that the 2nd Amendment's definition of "militia" included every American citizen, thus creating a right to personal firearm ownership where none existed before.

Or more accurately, the Constitution means whatever a majority of Justices decide that the hypothetical ghosts of the Founding Fathers, if summoned into a pentagram, would themselves decide. It just happens to be the case that the original intent of the Founding Fathers always correlates to the political bias of the majority. Crazy how that works.

And of course the Supreme Court's power of judicial review itself was never granted by the Constitution. They just made it up because it made sense to them.

People will just roll their eyes at you and say "the human mind is nothing but a dice roll too" and call you a slope-headed neanderthal before continuing apace.

Humans are perfectly capable of writing code for old systems. Not all of the documentation that exists, exists on the web. If it doesn't, operations can be discovered by reverse-engineering the hardware, mapping the memory, etc. People do this all the time.

I think you may need to update your priors a bit. AI is already replacing professionals. Developers are already losing jobs. LLMs and agents are already running in the hot loops of our technological civilization, unsupervised, with root. Institutional knowledge and skills are already being lost.

>Feel free to extrapolate a reading like "I think LLM tech and a century of tinkering could achieve computer performance similar to what it appears the entirely fictional, voiced by Majel Barrett, Star Trek computers has".

But that doesn't mean anything. "Similar to" is vague enough that it could include video game NPC dialogue.

Fair enough. Your logic is unassailable. There is literally no difference between fiction and reality and no need to understand anything beyond "LLM talk therefore Star Trek real."