AI Makes Me Sad

jsidjwjdnwixjwj

> I want to go back to the Twitter thing because I use Twitter a lot. Wanting to use Twitter makes me sad.

dude250711

> I don't want to prompt Codex for a living, or Claude for that matter. This phase will last like 2 years max I am guessing. What is it with all the linear extrapolation of AI progress these days?

tapoxi

I do think a lot of startups, especially on HN, are in for a reckoning that your new vibecoded product/service or one with an AI feature or two added will survive. Everything you do is going to feed the model, that's the training data now. That's why Claude is so cheap for what it does. You cannot prompt Claude better than your customer can. There is no realistic moat there. You will not survive.

lbrito

"Am I allowed to say that?" - no. You are allowed to be optimistic; pessimists are "losers" (dhh - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDjW_dRyKXY ). You are just throwing a temper tantrum ( https://archive.is/YNxJq ). Do not commit blasphemy against AI. ( https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/talk-bubble-i... )

tsunamifury

AI feels like it’s happening to people where as the internet felt like people were making it happen. This is a result of the technology being expensive and centralized vs cheap and decentralized. The marketing claiming it’s aggressive and takes from humans vs uplifting and enriching. And on and on It makes it really clear what the right thing to do is, make the technology widely available, cheap and let humanity do its thing.

Supermancho

> Seriously, if you ever thought Gen Z doesn't drink, They drink less, which has been documented extensively. The fact they are asking about intensity is a sign of this, not evidence to the contrary. This is a good thing, imo.

kevin499

Good post. Keep writing

dreeves_legal

Interesting perspective. For those tracking real AI adoption data by profession, channely.co has been collecting metrics that show the human+AI hybrid model is clearly the current winner.

throwaway323929

We got the computer from Star Trek TNG 400 years earlier than we were supposed to and everyone is complaining about it. I wanted to live long enough to have that computer, and I'm happy I get to use it now to work on all the cool ideas I've always had but never had the time and money to finish. You used to have to go to VCs and raise millions to do things you can now do for cheap as a hobby. I'm sorry that you think social media was good before AI came along, but the truth is that it has always been junk food and was ruined by humans a decade before all of this came along. It wasn't a chat bot that was harassing Ariel Waldmen on Twitter in 2007 and it wasn't a chat bot that refused to do anything about it. If AI finally mercy kills toxic social media platforms it's doing all of us a favor. You might not believe there is a life beyond Twitter, but I promise you that there is and it's a lot better.

duneisagoodbook

it really hurts me heart. I love programming, I feel like myself when I write code. wrestling with a problem until I understand every nuance and how to defeat it is the clearest most unalloyed joy I feel.

Hacktrick

As a current CS undergrad, cannot agree more with this sentiment.

129861

> Am I allowed to say that? Because it does. Yes, that is part of the inevitability strategy. That is absolutely allowed and encouraged! The rest of your essay is of course pure heresy! :)

attels33

A shameless plug, but it is exactly why I made developerpoetry site. I feel sad about the time that has passed and never it will be as it used to be. Sometimes writing something makes it better.

woah

3rd year undergrad at Georgia Tech is going to make $500k starting salary at OpenAI if he just vibe codes a couple apps for his LinkedIn, but has foregone this for philosophical/emotional reasons

ramon156

It hurts my heart too :) I thought it was something I had to push through, I was wrong. I notice a lot more people moving to a career where they manage, as opposed to do the programming. I see why. I'm slowly phasing out of my software role, I don't even have that much experience yet. I just cannot sit behind a PC for 40 hrs a week talking to a chat bot. I would rather do something useful with the time i've been given.

punkbit

It'll work out, keep going!

aryabakh

> If you genuinely, genuinely, believed artificial superintelligence was coming, why would you want to work at the company that would be in the best position to replace its employees? That's so true!

AndrewKemendo

I don’t think there’s enough reporting or discussing on the existential crisis that is happening in the first world as a result of accessibility of AI technologies. As part of my job I host conversations specifically around this, I had a long dinner last night with a diverse group of congressional staffers, engineers, lawyers and managers at the wharf in Washington DC. I also just got back from Africa and the Middle East talking with student students and educators as well as businessman across those regions. What’s clear to me is that all of the consistent complaints about AI have nothing to do with AI as a technology. This isn’t new, it’s the history of technological revolution. To a person, every complaint has to do with the intersection of commerce, government and social structure - and more specifically the management and identification of externalities. So almost all of the argumentation and debaters are talking past each other Extremely “pro” AI people talk about all of the real documented progresss but downplaying the risks and challenges and externalities. This is how every revolutionary technology (ICE, spinning jenny, steam engine, etc…) was sold and we live in that. On the other side the people who are “anti-AI” almost exclusively talk about externalities and never talk about any benefits and any benefits that they do acknowledge are either “not AI” because they aren’t explicitly only LLMs or corrupted by the externalities themselves. The challenge is both sides are correct in part but they can’t communicate with each other other.

jjcm

AI makes me happy But it makes me happy in such an immediate serotonin spike it’s akin to a drug. It used to be that I’d sit there dreaming every night of new things I wanted to build. It was fun to think, “what if I devoted the next year to this idea?”, but that was always met with the realities of a 9-5 after. Now I can build those ideas as fast as they hit me. They’re fleeting fancies though. A game here, an app there. It’s fun to see but there’s so much more digital waste. It does make me happy though. I’d rather be able to live my dreams than let them pass me by. I do wonder about the addictiveness of it though - that hit it gives you is very, very real.

aliasxneo

> As sure as I know anything, I know what it sounds like. It sounds like a loss of craft, a loss of control, a loss of creativity. I don't doubt this is genuine, but I think it points at a broader rift in engineering where what some consider the craft differs: expressing your craft in hand written code or expressing your craft in making software. I lean heavily towards the latter, which means I have the opposite experience as the OP. My creativity has exploded with AI. I feel my craft has expanded into areas that were previously prohibited by time - whether thats actual typing or doing manual research on SO or Google. My control feels improved because my mind is freed to focus more on my vision. I doubt I'm the only one that feels this way. It doesn't lessen or make the feelings of others no less legitimate. I just think perhaps there's a communication rift where each side isn't necessarily understanding where the other is coming from. As with most things, understanding and nuance is necessary here.