> AI systems exist to reinforce and strengthen existing structures of power and violence.
Exactly. You can see that with the proliferation of chickenized reverse centaurs[1] in all kinds of jobs. Getting rid of the free-willed human in the loop is the aim now that bosses/stakeholders have seen the light.
Everytime I read one of these "I don't use AI" posts, the content is either "my code is handcrafted in a mountain spring and blessed by the universe itself, so no AI can match it", or "everything different from what I do is technofascism or <insert politics rant here>". Maybe Im missing something, but tech is controlled by a handful of companies - always have been; and sometimes code is just code, and AI is just a tool. What am I missing?
> LLM brainworm is able to eat itself even into progressive hacker circles
What a loaded sentence lol. Implying being a hacker has some correlation with being progressive. And implying somehow anti-AI is progressive.
> AI systems being egregiously resource intensive is not a side effect — it’s the point.
Really? So we're not going to see AI users celebrating over how much less power DeepSeek used, right?
Anyway guess what else is resource intensive? Making chips. Follow the line of logic you will find computers consolidate powers and real progressive hackers should use pencil and paper only.
Back to the first paragraph...
> almost like a reflex, was a self-justification of why the way they use these tools is fine, while other approaches were reckless.
The irony is off the roof. This article is essentially: when I use computational power how I like, it's being a hacker. When others use computational power their way, it's being fascists.
As a crappy programmer I love AI! Right now I'm focusing on building up my Math knowledge, general CS knowledge and ML knowledge. In the future, knowing how to read code and understanding it may be more important than writing it.
I think its amazing what giant vector matrices can do with a little code.
The big tech will build out compute in a never seen speed and we will reach 2e29 Flops faster than ever.
Big tech is competing with each other and they are the ones with the real money in our capitalistic world but even if they would find some slow down between each others, countries are also now competing.
In the next 4 years and the massive build out of compute, we will see a lot clearer how the progress will go.
And either we hit obvous limitations or not.
If we will not see an obvious limitation, fionas opinion will have 0 relevance.
The best chance for everyone is to keep a very very close eye on AI to either make the right decisions (not buying that house with a line of credit; creating your own product a lot faster thanks to ai, ...) or be aware what is coming.
> And yeah, I get it. We programmers are currently living through the devaluation of our craft, in a way and rate we never anticipated possible.
I'm a programmer, been coding professionally for 10 something years, and coding for myself longer than that.
What are they talking about? What is this "devaluation"? I'm getting paid more than ever for a job I feel like I almost shouldn't get paid for (I'm just having fun), and programmers should be some of the most worry-free individuals on this planet, the job is easy, well-paid, not a lot of health drawbacks if you have a proper setup and relatively easy to find a new job when you need it (granted, the US seems to struggle with that specific point as of late, yet it remains true in the rest of the world).
And now, we're having a huge explosion of tools for developers, to build software that has to be maintained by developers, made by developers for developers.
If anything, it seems like Balmers plea of "Developers, developers, developers" has came true, and if there will be one profession left in 100 year when AI does everything for us (if the vibers are to be believed), then that'd probably be software developers and machine learning experts.
What exactly is being de-valuated for a profession that seems to be continuously growing and been doing so for at least 20 years?
The amount of negativity your positive comment has received looks almost overwhelming. I remember HN being a much happier place a few years ago. Perhaps I should take a break from it.
People working in one of the coolest industries on Earth really do not appreciate their lives nowadays.
The only way to create senior programmers is for someone to hire juniors and let them grow.
I'm not worried for my job, I can work _with_ AI very well. I'm not precious about my processes or ways of working.
What I AM worried about is that if companies stop hiring juniors because they (try to) replace them with AI, we'll no longer have new seniors and the craft itself will deteriorate.
And then there is the moderate position: Don't be the person refusing the use a calculator / PC / mobile phone / AI. Regularly give the new tool a chance and check if improvements are useful for specific tasks. And carry on with your life.
If as the author suggests AI is inherently designed to further concentrate control and capital, that may be so, but that is also the aim of every business.
I really enjoyed how your words made me _feel._ They encouraged me to "keep fighting the good fight" when it comes to avoiding social media, et. al.
I do Vibe Code occasionally, Claude did a decent job with Terraform and SaltStack recently, but the words ring true in my head about how AI weakens my thinking, especially when it comes to Python or any programming language. Tread carefully indeed. And reading a book does help - I've been tearing through the Dune books after putting them off too long at my brother's recommendation. Very interesting reflections in those books on power/human nature that may apply in some ways to our current predicament.
At any rate, thank you for the thoughtful & eloquent words of caution.
So, you want to rebel and stay as organic-minded human? But the what exactly is "being a human"?
The biological senses and abilities were constantly augmented throughput the centuries, pushing the organic human to hide inside deeper layers of what you call as yourself.
What's yourself without your material possessions and social connections? There is no such thing as yourself without these.
Now let's wind back. Why resist just one more layer of augmentation of our senses, mind and physical abilities?
I see this play out everywhere actually be it code, thoughts, even intent, atomized for the capital engine.
Its more than a productivity hack, its a subtle power shift decisions getting abstracted, agency getting diluted
Opting in to weirdness and curiosity is the only bug worth keeping which will eventually become a norm
Well, there are two aspects from which I can react to this post.
The first aspect is the “I don’t touch AI with a stick”. AI is a tool. Nobody is obligated to touch it obviously, but it is useful in certain situations. So I disagree with the author’a position to avoid using AI. It reads like stubbornness for the sake of avoiding new tech.
The second angle is the “bigtech corporate control” angle. And honestly, I don’t get this argument at all. Computers and the digital world has created the biggest distopian world we have ever witnessed. From absurd amounts of misinformation and propaganda fueled by bot farms operated at government levels, all the way to digital surveillance tech. You have that strong of an opinion against big tech and digital surveillance, blaming AI for that, while enjoying the other perils of big tech, is virtue signaling.
Also, what’s up with the overuse of “fascism” in places where it does not belong?
This piece started relatively well but devolved by the end.
Is AI resource-intensive by design? That doesn’t make any sense to me. I think companies are furiously working toward reducing AI costs.
Is AI a tool of fascism? Well, I’d say anything that can make money can be a tool of fascism.
I can sort of jive with the argument that AI is/will be reinforcing the ideals of those in power, although I think traditional media and the tooling that AI intends to replace like search engines accomplished that just fine.
What we are left with is, I think, an author who is in denial about their special snowflake status as a programmer. It was okay for the factory worker to be automated away, but now that it’s my turn to be automated away I’m crying fascism and ethics.
Their friends behave the way they do about AI because they know it’s useful but know it’s unpopular. They’re trying to save face while still using the tool because it’s so obviously useful and beneficial.
I think the analogy is similar to the move from film to digital. There will be a tiny amount of people who never buy in, there will be these “ashamed” adopters who support the idea of film and hope it continues on, but for themselves personally would never go back to film, and then the majority who don’t see the problem with letting film die.
and demonstrate your mastery ,to the muterings of the golly gee's
it will last several more months untill the , GASP!!!, bills ,maintenance costs, regulatory burdens, and various legal issues
combine to, pop AI's balloon, where then AI will be left automating all of the tedious,
but chair filling, beurocratic/secretarial/appretice positions
through out the white collar world.
technology is slowly pushing into other sectors, where legacy methods and equipment
can now be reduced to a free app on a phone, more to the point, a free, local only app.
fact is that we are way over siliconed going forward and that will bite as well, terra bite phones for $100, what then?
I recently had to write a simple web app to search through a database, but full-text searching wasn't quite cutting it. The underlying data was too inconsistent and the kind of things people would ask for would mean searching across five or six columns.
Just the job for an AI agent!
So what I did is this - I wrote the app in Django, because it's what I'm familiar with.
Then in the view for the search page, I picked apart the search terms. If they start with "01" it's an old phone number so look in that column, if they start with "03" it's a new phone number so look in that column, if they start with "07" it's a mobile, if it's a letter followed by two digits it's a site code, if it's numeric but doesn't have a 0 at the start it's an internal number, and if it doesn't match anything then see if it exists as a substring in the description column.
There we go. Very fast and natural searching that Does What You Mean (mostly).
No Artificial Intelligence.
All done with Organic Home-grown Brute Force and Ignorance.
108 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 95.8 ms ] threadExactly. You can see that with the proliferation of chickenized reverse centaurs[1] in all kinds of jobs. Getting rid of the free-willed human in the loop is the aim now that bosses/stakeholders have seen the light.
[1] https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/17/revenge-of-the-chickenize...
What a loaded sentence lol. Implying being a hacker has some correlation with being progressive. And implying somehow anti-AI is progressive.
> AI systems being egregiously resource intensive is not a side effect — it’s the point.
Really? So we're not going to see AI users celebrating over how much less power DeepSeek used, right?
Anyway guess what else is resource intensive? Making chips. Follow the line of logic you will find computers consolidate powers and real progressive hackers should use pencil and paper only.
Back to the first paragraph...
> almost like a reflex, was a self-justification of why the way they use these tools is fine, while other approaches were reckless.
The irony is off the roof. This article is essentially: when I use computational power how I like, it's being a hacker. When others use computational power their way, it's being fascists.
I think its amazing what giant vector matrices can do with a little code.
The big tech will build out compute in a never seen speed and we will reach 2e29 Flops faster than ever.
Big tech is competing with each other and they are the ones with the real money in our capitalistic world but even if they would find some slow down between each others, countries are also now competing.
In the next 4 years and the massive build out of compute, we will see a lot clearer how the progress will go.
And either we hit obvous limitations or not.
If we will not see an obvious limitation, fionas opinion will have 0 relevance.
The best chance for everyone is to keep a very very close eye on AI to either make the right decisions (not buying that house with a line of credit; creating your own product a lot faster thanks to ai, ...) or be aware what is coming.
Thanks for the fish and enjoy the ride.
I'm a programmer, been coding professionally for 10 something years, and coding for myself longer than that.
What are they talking about? What is this "devaluation"? I'm getting paid more than ever for a job I feel like I almost shouldn't get paid for (I'm just having fun), and programmers should be some of the most worry-free individuals on this planet, the job is easy, well-paid, not a lot of health drawbacks if you have a proper setup and relatively easy to find a new job when you need it (granted, the US seems to struggle with that specific point as of late, yet it remains true in the rest of the world).
And now, we're having a huge explosion of tools for developers, to build software that has to be maintained by developers, made by developers for developers.
If anything, it seems like Balmers plea of "Developers, developers, developers" has came true, and if there will be one profession left in 100 year when AI does everything for us (if the vibers are to be believed), then that'd probably be software developers and machine learning experts.
What exactly is being de-valuated for a profession that seems to be continuously growing and been doing so for at least 20 years?
People working in one of the coolest industries on Earth really do not appreciate their lives nowadays.
I'm not worried for my job, I can work _with_ AI very well. I'm not precious about my processes or ways of working.
What I AM worried about is that if companies stop hiring juniors because they (try to) replace them with AI, we'll no longer have new seniors and the craft itself will deteriorate.
I do Vibe Code occasionally, Claude did a decent job with Terraform and SaltStack recently, but the words ring true in my head about how AI weakens my thinking, especially when it comes to Python or any programming language. Tread carefully indeed. And reading a book does help - I've been tearing through the Dune books after putting them off too long at my brother's recommendation. Very interesting reflections in those books on power/human nature that may apply in some ways to our current predicament.
At any rate, thank you for the thoughtful & eloquent words of caution.
The biological senses and abilities were constantly augmented throughput the centuries, pushing the organic human to hide inside deeper layers of what you call as yourself.
What's yourself without your material possessions and social connections? There is no such thing as yourself without these.
Now let's wind back. Why resist just one more layer of augmentation of our senses, mind and physical abilities?
Opting in to weirdness and curiosity is the only bug worth keeping which will eventually become a norm
The first aspect is the “I don’t touch AI with a stick”. AI is a tool. Nobody is obligated to touch it obviously, but it is useful in certain situations. So I disagree with the author’a position to avoid using AI. It reads like stubbornness for the sake of avoiding new tech.
The second angle is the “bigtech corporate control” angle. And honestly, I don’t get this argument at all. Computers and the digital world has created the biggest distopian world we have ever witnessed. From absurd amounts of misinformation and propaganda fueled by bot farms operated at government levels, all the way to digital surveillance tech. You have that strong of an opinion against big tech and digital surveillance, blaming AI for that, while enjoying the other perils of big tech, is virtue signaling.
Also, what’s up with the overuse of “fascism” in places where it does not belong?
Is AI resource-intensive by design? That doesn’t make any sense to me. I think companies are furiously working toward reducing AI costs.
Is AI a tool of fascism? Well, I’d say anything that can make money can be a tool of fascism.
I can sort of jive with the argument that AI is/will be reinforcing the ideals of those in power, although I think traditional media and the tooling that AI intends to replace like search engines accomplished that just fine.
What we are left with is, I think, an author who is in denial about their special snowflake status as a programmer. It was okay for the factory worker to be automated away, but now that it’s my turn to be automated away I’m crying fascism and ethics.
Their friends behave the way they do about AI because they know it’s useful but know it’s unpopular. They’re trying to save face while still using the tool because it’s so obviously useful and beneficial.
I think the analogy is similar to the move from film to digital. There will be a tiny amount of people who never buy in, there will be these “ashamed” adopters who support the idea of film and hope it continues on, but for themselves personally would never go back to film, and then the majority who don’t see the problem with letting film die.
cachonk!
snap your cuffs, wait fot it eyebrows!
and demonstrate your mastery ,to the muterings of the golly gee's
it will last several more months untill the , GASP!!!, bills ,maintenance costs, regulatory burdens, and various legal issues combine to, pop AI's balloon, where then AI will be left automating all of the tedious, but chair filling, beurocratic/secretarial/appretice positions through out the white collar world. technology is slowly pushing into other sectors, where legacy methods and equipment can now be reduced to a free app on a phone, more to the point, a free, local only app. fact is that we are way over siliconed going forward and that will bite as well, terra bite phones for $100, what then?
Just the job for an AI agent!
So what I did is this - I wrote the app in Django, because it's what I'm familiar with.
Then in the view for the search page, I picked apart the search terms. If they start with "01" it's an old phone number so look in that column, if they start with "03" it's a new phone number so look in that column, if they start with "07" it's a mobile, if it's a letter followed by two digits it's a site code, if it's numeric but doesn't have a 0 at the start it's an internal number, and if it doesn't match anything then see if it exists as a substring in the description column.
There we go. Very fast and natural searching that Does What You Mean (mostly).
No Artificial Intelligence.
All done with Organic Home-grown Brute Force and Ignorance.
Because that's sometimes just what you need.