Maybe you think this is a witty comment, but ironically it illustrates exactly the problem with outsourcing your thinking to a machine. All they needed to do was raise the instance limit, which they immediately did when they saw the surge of traffic.
No expensive tokens needed, no agents needed, no outsourcing their work to some calculator. The problem was solved even faster than an LLM would have, and they maintained full control and understanding of their systems while solving the problem. It's almost like human expertise is great.
And you know, the whole "maybe ask AI thing" is exactly what everyone is making fun of. Any engineer worth their salt should be able to look at a system crashing under heavy load and come up with a few proper solutions to the problem that don't involve "ask ChatGPT", but people have completely replaced their thinking with this "I'll just ask the calculator" laziness. It's sad, pathetic to see really.
To me this is such a weird take. I'd imagine you don't have a clear understanding of how 95% of the things you interact with on a daily basis is made. So many things from Shampoos, to Microwaves, to your car, to how your coffee is sourced and made. You are perfectly fine giving away your full control and understanding to another intelligence/s for these things. This could be a bad idea, and historically has been for some people. They were eating food that contained things that weren't healthy for them or they are allergic to some product. However, a majority of people still live this way as long as most of them get a good result from the process. Most people only care about giving an input and getting the same output.
Well, they're using Render which you'd think they'd be able to handle HN traffic. Not a good look for Render as a service, especially when their first item under product is autoscaling.
to the people claiming "hugged to death", this website works for me while on a train in rural Germany (anyone who lives in Europe should be all too aware about phone network quality here).
As for the content: fully agree. Human touch is a value in itself. Unfortunately, modern capitalism does not provide incentives to take care about value, because (by capitalism's metrics) value is inefficiency.
This (and all the disgusting "hugged to death, you're dumb, use AI" comments that have replaced HN's normal venom-less "hugged to death" comments) makes me want to leave Hacker News.
It’s a mixed bag. You have insufferable mouth breathing morons who think AGI is here, and on the other hand you have rational - dare I say enlightened - individuals such as yourself.
Why would anybody hate a harmless human skill, like art, or carpentry? Why act like this ever, in any situation? This attitude has nothing to do with pro-AI or anti-AI. It's just pointless, horrible bitterness.
All these "principled" people telling others that "they practice what they preach" shooting themselves in the foot with their "production" site down and hugged to death on the front page.
Just ask the AI to set up your site for better uptime if you don't know how to.
A website flaming out and dying in the face of unusual traffic is a perfectly reasonable business decision. These "witty" comments are effectively self owns.
No AI needed for the design and build of custom metal either, and with a similar long human effort that I am privilaged to be aware and part of that I am quite certain cant be handled useing any computational averaging.
Funnily enough, I have had and am right now involved in a project that the customer tried to have AI design, but that
the most basic calculations were wrong.
It's worse, as even humans working with highly developed design and estimating software, cant deliver accurate shop plans for real world projects that involve irregular surfaces or curves, and changing slopes that must be measured on site.
AI will help you enjoy your cubes and parallograms, and cover them with realistic textures.
My wife got an email from a new hire (now even a new hire yet: she's still on a trial basis), a 23 years old, where she explains that she doesn't want to use AI. That she doesn't like what AI does. On a funny sidenote: the email is obviously 99% llmish, which is hilarious.
That's one extremity: crazy people who refuse to learn a new tool.
Then on the other extremity you have the even much crazier ones: those who believe they've got an intelligent machine that is going to solve all their work problems during the day and then, at night, that is going to enlighten them by revealing them who god really is.
Where the heck are the reasonable people who use AI for what it is: a tool that can be extremely helpful at times and extremely sucky at other times but that is still, on average, a time saver?
I use LLMs daily to piece together technical reports and smooth out rough drafts. It saves me hours of time / week.
I also use it to augment my technical work, because I don't want to be out of a job one day with no marketable skills, except driving an agent harness.
There is a percentage of the population that thinks LLMs are actually intelligent and truly can't tell the difference.
I think others just want to live life as a passenger, not think, and have AI do all the work.
>others just want to live life as a passenger, not think, and have AI do all the work.
Fuck, doesn't everyone? The future we were promised is one where machines did all the work leaving humans free to pursue a richer existence, whether that's creative pastimes or just laying on a beach.
Instead of democratizing the future, essentially every technological advance since the printing press has served only to increase the concentration of wealth and power at the top.
I can't imagine actually wanting to work if you didn't have to.
We're here -- I use AI for low-complexity toil, one-off scripts, search & discovery, and as a sounding board for new perspectives.
I still design and build systems myself. If a snippet comes out of an LLM I'm keen to use it's filtered through my brain as well. Polished and transformed to align with my vision. After all, I'm on the hook for supporting it and bringing it to my team.
I'm sure most of us are just sick of the mania around this and choose to avoid interacting with content relating to it.
> a tool that can be extremely helpful at times and extremely sucky at other times but that is still, on average, a time saver?
I can tell you that while I use AI, it's basically a compressed version of stackoverflow to me. I don't bother with agents because I simply don't have that much code to write. The nature of code didn't change. Less code is better code, and it's a strong smell when people claim that they needed an agent to save time.
When I do have a new project, there's an extremely high chance that I can reuse existing code from another project that already has passing tests, or I am experienced enough to know what exactly needs to be done. I can probably finish my part within the sprint or faster. The agent can only introduce risk to the project timeline or code quality.
This isn't me being arrogant or "anti-AI". The hard part of software development has always been collecting consistent requirements from various stakeholders. I'm pro-AI in the sense that, when used correctly, it helps junior devs learn and otherwise shines a spotlight where the real bottlenecks are (project management and delays).
I'm the op on this one (not the author). Gotta say, I had higher hopes for the community here.
Isn't it worthwhile to examine our patterns of thinking and work? Shouldn't alternative perspectives such as these spark conversation, rather than sly jibes?
HN grew from curiosity and good-faith. Y'all are not showing up.
it's funny when a site posted on a tech board goes down from traffic. it's funnier when the site is making some kind of principled stance about the power of handmade tools, which presumably made the site, which went down.
Everyone knows that AI would never build a tool that would cap bandwidth based on how much a user is paying for hosting. Famously anthropic charges you the same amount for claude usage regardless of how many tokens you use, extending towards infinity.
I imagine everyone has a point at which they feel a movement has pushed its rhetoric just that bit too far. When one takes a lofty and high-minded position, one can find oneself exposed to ridicule.
In case it helps the authentic human connection: I too wrote this with my human hands and did not use AI.
Hey, I’m the author of this article. Just thought I’d share some context, since HN is a little outside the intended audience:
- We’re a tiny design studio specialising in fonts, so our website was (maybe predictably) not set up to handle a big traffic spike. It should be stable now.
- This article was written in response to some font industry discussions on the same topic. It’s a collection of thoughts rather than a manifesto, and there’s nuance which it doesn’t go into. I’m not a die-hard AI hater, just opposed to careless use of it within this narrow field.
For font design, and art beyond what could be called boilerplate art, real art, not just something to quickly throw on a website so you have something there, AI is not a good tool.
I think AI will take over many jobs, firstly in the arrangement of characters and words into stock text, or coding. But art, not just pictures, is something that will take longer and may never happen. Design is very similar.
Good art makes you feel something, and you need the human experience to feel that before you can make that and make other people feel that.
When you write without AI you cultivate your team’s understanding which cultivates communication and teamwork and immediate understanding during downtime and emergencies. Build your team, not the product
What sort of human hands make computer fonts? Are you there coding in the ones and zeros on some sort of breadboard, wiring up the data using an oscilloscope and rare earth magnets?
There seems to be this idea that using AI is the same thing as walking away and not touching it. Like that you would just say to the computer, do the thing and then not look at it, read it or edit it in any way. What's the world where you're describing where you wouldn't select and edit and refine? You know, with software as an example, how that works with AI is that you spend all day opting it and refining it and you do it over and over and over and you're guiding it and you're shaping it. So it's not like the computer does it. You're still there. I mean, you're making a typeface. You're not chiseling something into stone. You're making a program of sorts that will make shapes. And I don't know why there would be any world where you would just walk away from your first prompt and call it done.
To answer your first question: almost all good fonts start with sketches on paper. Every tool has a kind of grain, a sort of ‘shape language’ it pushes you towards making, and the bézier curves fonts use internally are surprisingly opinionated.
The first few months of any new typeface involve switching between physical and digital drawings frequently, trying to make sure no single tool has too much influence over the shape.
AI might be just another tool, but its grain is super unpredictable. Refining AI-generated sketches is more complicated, and ultimately the skills it requires can only be developed through firsthand practice of analogue techniques. I literally studied stonecarving (along with calligraphy, brush lettering, etc.) in order to be able to make better digital fonts.
My point, and maybe it's overly simplistic, is that at some point you are using the computer to make computer fonts. At some point the ideas go into the computer and you are using computer tools to build the font. They start in the shower or from the finger feel of carving stones whatever, but before and after AI computer fonts are built with computer software tools. Carving rocks, sure, human hands.
The idea that AI is different, in kind, than any of the many other tools that you use is silly to me -- at no point is it desirable for you to throw out your brain. As you say, every tool has a different sort of "grain", which is neither good nor bad but does in fact influence the final product.
Where you lose me is why would you implicitly throw out your process? What about this tool gives the idea that you should not keep the parts of the process that is valuable, on paper etc? AI probably would do better fiddling with the beziers or whatever, what would be the reason that it's ipso facto a bad idea? Who is saying that?
I'm not sure basically what the other side of your argument was supposed to be.
It’s not about throwing out the process, it’s about making sure the end product is the result of intentional decisions rather than just going with the flow of whatever tool is being used. The grain isn’t intrinsically bad, but in a performant typeface you’re going to be reading for hours at a time, over-reliance on a single tool will noticeably harm the readability.
By switching between digital and analogue drawing tools, you’re translating the work between different media, and the act of translation is what smooths over the bumps of any single tool.
AI might eventually become good at fiddling with the béziers, but doing that part manually is an essential part of the process. If you don’t fully understand how the béziers naturally behave (and when to lean into or push back against that, for both aesthetic and technical reasons), the end result will be meaningfully worse.
Grandiose enough for internal documentation and self-motivation but otherwise uninteresting. It's Yet Another Meaning And History Post of the variety you've seen posted a few dozen times. Has the flavour of someone still discussing tabs and spaces. In an odd irony, it's mostly like the content it disparages.
As always, I don't really care what tools a creative uses to manifest their idea in the world, I care how good the product is.
AI, just like the coding language you choose is a TOOL. Tools can be wielded expertly or crudely. At the end of the day your customer doesn't care who you are they care about your product.
64 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 44.8 ms ] threadNo expensive tokens needed, no agents needed, no outsourcing their work to some calculator. The problem was solved even faster than an LLM would have, and they maintained full control and understanding of their systems while solving the problem. It's almost like human expertise is great.
And you know, the whole "maybe ask AI thing" is exactly what everyone is making fun of. Any engineer worth their salt should be able to look at a system crashing under heavy load and come up with a few proper solutions to the problem that don't involve "ask ChatGPT", but people have completely replaced their thinking with this "I'll just ask the calculator" laziness. It's sad, pathetic to see really.
Please use AI (or anything) to fix your site.
Which while absolutely correct does not at all address your question.
As for the content: fully agree. Human touch is a value in itself. Unfortunately, modern capitalism does not provide incentives to take care about value, because (by capitalism's metrics) value is inefficiency.
Later: The villain cat has the catchphrases 'Purrrfect' and 'You must be kitten me'. The snake character makes lotsss of sss noissesss.
Just ask the AI to set up your site for better uptime if you don't know how to.
Such juvenile behavior can only be attributed to the general unease and defensiveness demonstrated by members of the AI cult in the face of criticism:
“Your blasphemy against our god has been duly punished… you must pray for his forgiveness.”
My wife got an email from a new hire (now even a new hire yet: she's still on a trial basis), a 23 years old, where she explains that she doesn't want to use AI. That she doesn't like what AI does. On a funny sidenote: the email is obviously 99% llmish, which is hilarious.
That's one extremity: crazy people who refuse to learn a new tool.
Then on the other extremity you have the even much crazier ones: those who believe they've got an intelligent machine that is going to solve all their work problems during the day and then, at night, that is going to enlighten them by revealing them who god really is.
Where the heck are the reasonable people who use AI for what it is: a tool that can be extremely helpful at times and extremely sucky at other times but that is still, on average, a time saver?
I use LLMs daily to piece together technical reports and smooth out rough drafts. It saves me hours of time / week.
I also use it to augment my technical work, because I don't want to be out of a job one day with no marketable skills, except driving an agent harness.
There is a percentage of the population that thinks LLMs are actually intelligent and truly can't tell the difference.
I think others just want to live life as a passenger, not think, and have AI do all the work.
Fuck, doesn't everyone? The future we were promised is one where machines did all the work leaving humans free to pursue a richer existence, whether that's creative pastimes or just laying on a beach.
Instead of democratizing the future, essentially every technological advance since the printing press has served only to increase the concentration of wealth and power at the top.
I can't imagine actually wanting to work if you didn't have to.
I still design and build systems myself. If a snippet comes out of an LLM I'm keen to use it's filtered through my brain as well. Polished and transformed to align with my vision. After all, I'm on the hook for supporting it and bringing it to my team.
I'm sure most of us are just sick of the mania around this and choose to avoid interacting with content relating to it.
I can tell you that while I use AI, it's basically a compressed version of stackoverflow to me. I don't bother with agents because I simply don't have that much code to write. The nature of code didn't change. Less code is better code, and it's a strong smell when people claim that they needed an agent to save time.
When I do have a new project, there's an extremely high chance that I can reuse existing code from another project that already has passing tests, or I am experienced enough to know what exactly needs to be done. I can probably finish my part within the sprint or faster. The agent can only introduce risk to the project timeline or code quality.
This isn't me being arrogant or "anti-AI". The hard part of software development has always been collecting consistent requirements from various stakeholders. I'm pro-AI in the sense that, when used correctly, it helps junior devs learn and otherwise shines a spotlight where the real bottlenecks are (project management and delays).
Isn't it worthwhile to examine our patterns of thinking and work? Shouldn't alternative perspectives such as these spark conversation, rather than sly jibes?
HN grew from curiosity and good-faith. Y'all are not showing up.
In case it helps the authentic human connection: I too wrote this with my human hands and did not use AI.
- We’re a tiny design studio specialising in fonts, so our website was (maybe predictably) not set up to handle a big traffic spike. It should be stable now.
- This article was written in response to some font industry discussions on the same topic. It’s a collection of thoughts rather than a manifesto, and there’s nuance which it doesn’t go into. I’m not a die-hard AI hater, just opposed to careless use of it within this narrow field.
Appreciate the more reasonable comments!
I think AI will take over many jobs, firstly in the arrangement of characters and words into stock text, or coding. But art, not just pictures, is something that will take longer and may never happen. Design is very similar.
Good art makes you feel something, and you need the human experience to feel that before you can make that and make other people feel that.
There seems to be this idea that using AI is the same thing as walking away and not touching it. Like that you would just say to the computer, do the thing and then not look at it, read it or edit it in any way. What's the world where you're describing where you wouldn't select and edit and refine? You know, with software as an example, how that works with AI is that you spend all day opting it and refining it and you do it over and over and over and you're guiding it and you're shaping it. So it's not like the computer does it. You're still there. I mean, you're making a typeface. You're not chiseling something into stone. You're making a program of sorts that will make shapes. And I don't know why there would be any world where you would just walk away from your first prompt and call it done.
The first few months of any new typeface involve switching between physical and digital drawings frequently, trying to make sure no single tool has too much influence over the shape.
AI might be just another tool, but its grain is super unpredictable. Refining AI-generated sketches is more complicated, and ultimately the skills it requires can only be developed through firsthand practice of analogue techniques. I literally studied stonecarving (along with calligraphy, brush lettering, etc.) in order to be able to make better digital fonts.
The idea that AI is different, in kind, than any of the many other tools that you use is silly to me -- at no point is it desirable for you to throw out your brain. As you say, every tool has a different sort of "grain", which is neither good nor bad but does in fact influence the final product.
Where you lose me is why would you implicitly throw out your process? What about this tool gives the idea that you should not keep the parts of the process that is valuable, on paper etc? AI probably would do better fiddling with the beziers or whatever, what would be the reason that it's ipso facto a bad idea? Who is saying that?
I'm not sure basically what the other side of your argument was supposed to be.
By switching between digital and analogue drawing tools, you’re translating the work between different media, and the act of translation is what smooths over the bumps of any single tool.
AI might eventually become good at fiddling with the béziers, but doing that part manually is an essential part of the process. If you don’t fully understand how the béziers naturally behave (and when to lean into or push back against that, for both aesthetic and technical reasons), the end result will be meaningfully worse.
As always, I don't really care what tools a creative uses to manifest their idea in the world, I care how good the product is.
AI, just like the coding language you choose is a TOOL. Tools can be wielded expertly or crudely. At the end of the day your customer doesn't care who you are they care about your product.