This doesn't seem like a well-thought-out post. I mean, I probably could have told you that from the fact that it's either pro-AI or anti-AI (in this case the latter), but this is a particularly poorly thought out post. Others here have pointed out the water-wasting red herring, but there are several other pieces of nonsense here — the general environmental doom-mongering, and labeling recursive self-improvement as "mystical", for example.
Me, I pointed Claude Opus 5 at a C codebase I've been working on for years and it immediately found five serious bugs and told me how to fix them, as well as how to use Linux system calls I wasn't familiar with to solve some other problems. And I gave it a new language for PEGs I'd written up a couple of years ago, and it wrote me a working implementation in OCaml that afternoon, fixing several bugs in my example grammars along the way and resolving a conceptual problem I'd had a roadblock on. I asked Fable 5.1 to implement a minimal proof assistant, and it wrote a clone of J-Bob in Python, which I'm studying now. Although there is a certain firehose quality to this stuff, I sure don't intend to use AI to actively de-skill my brain.
That doesn't guarantee that AI will be a beneficial innovation overall, of course! As with most innovations, it probably depends on the balance between people being able to use the innovation to gain control over their own lives, and people being able to use it to gain control over others' lives. (Barring a FOOM scenario, of course, where our prediction ability is nonexistent.)
So, I don't think a pro-AI post can be well thought out, either. It's too early and chaotic to understand what's going to happen, and it may actually be uncertain. Pro and anti are both far too simplistic.
Not criticizing or calling into question the contents of the posts or your rebuttal. Just wanted to point out this is not a Normal HN post or blog. Most blogs have the self removed to some degree or ultimately focus out of the self. This is clearly a journalistic blog, a shared diary entry sort of prose. You can see it in the first paragraph. It is basically intended to be emotive or get across the idea of getting emotions out about a topic, and ironically this is what makes it a not-bad-post.
Basically, I don’t know how well thought out it is, but the prose argues that the point isn’t for it to be an objective take, and that if it were well thought out (ie highly iterated on and more objective or factual than subjective) some personal meaning that was intended to be expressed is lost along the way.
In other words It may have not appealed to you but that’s fine - you might just be outside the target demographic. In any case I don’t think it necessarily should be more well thought out. I prefer that these pieces exist or have their place. I definitely prefer their existence to a world where every personal Blog post has to arise from fiduciary or technical concerns, instead of from the soul. This is a soulful blog. I like it.
It just seems like a lot of hate resulting from dysfunctional responses to life circumstances — admittedly, probably pretty bad life circumstances, from the sound of it. Spreading hate online, especially accompanied by lies as in this case, doesn't seem like a socially positive action from my point of view. The author should have kept it to themself and maybe talked to someone who could give them a better perspective, rather than letting their hate out into the world to multiply.
Amen. I read it because it was shorter than the Effective Altruism community stuff I'd been trying to wade through. It did seem a bit entertaining, but I found the ending a disappointment.
You ought to apply your own standards to your own comments.
The OP is an article that:
1. Raises a number of broad social and ethical concerns about AI.
2. Provides links to back up some of these claims.
Yes, it also vents some frustration and includes personal anecdote, but there's nothing wrong with that. If you think something is a net negative for society, you should be frustrated. That doesn't make an argument "unreasonable" or "not well thought out". In fact, your entire response to the article is just anecdote and broad claims with no evidence or citations to back them up.
If the article author has "a lot of hate resulting from dysfunctional responses to life circumstances" you must have a lot of naivety and kindness as a dysfunctional response to life's circumstances.
If we do not critique things we perceive to be negative developments in society, things won't get better, and we'll let bad decisions slide. A somewhat emotive critique is not "hate". The author at least backed up their points with a few links, which is much more than we can say for your comments.
What you perceive as naïveté is a kind of world-weariness that goes deeper than you can possibly imagine. It turns out that kindness is not in fact naïve. It is the only reasonable response to the human condition, which is far more desperate than you know.
Emotive critiques can easily be hate. Hate is an emotion, so hate-filled critiques like this one are quite emotive.
The historical record of people improving society by critiquing things they perceive to be negative developments in it is not really that great. Yes, that's how we got, for example, the abolition of slavery — but the anti-abolitionists justified their own positions by critiquing the genocide in Haïti, which was itself justified by people critiquing things they perceived to be negative developments in it. For every Civil Rights Movement we have a Great Leap Forward; for every Sherman Antitrust Act we have a Prohibition.
You may not be able to avoid activism, but never forget that other activists spent their lives digging the ditches you're filling up, and others will spend their lives digging them again.
The way out of this is to spend as much of your energy as possible creating positive-sum things rather than in zero-sum struggle.
> You sound like a Panglossian fool. I'm not really sure what to say at this point. You seem totally immunized against reason.
I realize both sides in this argument got unduly personal, but the attack you posted in this comment is particularly not ok. Please don't!
We've had to ask you about this before: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47728150">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47728150. Fortunately it doesn't seem to be a frequent habit but please don't post like this.
> and I'll refrain from that in the future.
At this point you really should’ve just banned them. Second strike and the first one was 1000x worse than this. Is this really the culture you wanna cultivate here? People wishing the worst for other families’ and all they get is a slap on the wrist and a “pretty please don’t do this again”?
Well, for example, in one afternoon, I have a parsing engine to understand, which is 9 pages of code. I thought I knew OCaml, having written a few interpreters in it, but I didn't know the {foo| |foo} multiline string syntax, I didn't know about Printf.ksprintf, I didn't know about Buffer.create, I didn't know about String.escaped, I must have once known about List.exists and List.rev_append and forgotten, I'd never thought of pattern-matching Array.to_list Sys.argv as a way to parse a command line, I didn't know about Sys.file_exists, and now I also have to think about what the parse result should look like and how to use it. And Claude correctly pointed out that the way I had thought about handling things like heredocs (or {foo| |foo} strings) would violate the preconditions for using the Packrat parsing algorithm, and suggested that I use the alternative approach of parameterized productions as in OMeta, which I need to think over.
I think that was the same day I prototyped an approach to using Service Workers from localhost as a platform for persistent mobile apps that don't show up in the app list but also don't rely on the TLS CA system for their security. Which involved learning a lot of stuff about the Service Worker lifecycle and localStorage and IndexedDB that I didn't know before.
I love how well this comment captures the experience of engaging with LLMs as a way to deliberately challenge and expand knowledge.
When I see people worry about LLMs atrophying their mental abilities I assume they haven't thought very hard about ways to lean into using them to expand their mental capabilities.
I'm guessing you've written a well-thought-out, clearly expressed blog post about this that I would absolutely love to read, if only I knew where it was.
I assume that they don’t have time to do that, and are lamenting the fact that exercising those capabilities is no longer on the critical path to getting paid work done.
I have been prototyping some network proxies in a largely "vibe coded" fashion and it has been a mixed experience.
It has definitely accelerated my learning: through the process of writing rigorous plans, I have learned so much about network programming... the intricacies of HTTP2, how to design a fast MITM proxy, performance pitfalls in SSL...
These are things I studiously avoided learning for a decade, now demystified, mostly through Claude patiently rendering many figures and diagrams.
And with Fable, I was able to ship a working Envoy Rust extension in a one-shot.
On the other hand, my grasp on the details is tenuous. Every so often the agent can't progress and I am stuck for ideas, hitting different prompts like they were slot machines. I forget how to solve problems by myself.
I can feel myself becoming supine and dependent on something I know is going to become more expensive, a dependency AI vendors will seek to exploit. It has happened quickly. I do not really consent; it is forced on me by my employer.
One thing I may try this week is typing in all the code myself. With the level of back and forth that I've been happy with so far, Claude Pro seems to only be able to produce about 1000 lines of code a day in two or three five-hour sessions. I can totally type 1000 lines of code in a couple of hours if no problem-solving is needed. So maybe I'll look at Claude's code, switch screens to my editor, and type until I don't know what to type, and repeat.
Obviously there are higher-level design issues that I might not notice while engaging with the code at the byte-by-byte level, but I won't have the embarrassing problem I had a couple of weeks ago where duck.ai wrote me a CPU in Verilog, and after I tested it, I tried to write something in Verilog myself and couldn't even figure out how to write a syntactically correct XOR-gate module. (Verilator's parse errors are not designed as a Verilog tutorial, it turns out.)
This hasn't worked out that well for me. I have to try to do it myself, do something wrong, and ask for an explanation of what i broke. Just typing doesn't leave me with any retention.
Yes! The best part is, at any point they are right there to answer any questions, or to challenge or validate and experiment with any ideas! You can go down fairly deep rabbit holes in either case to understand a topic, and -- unlike any other medium other than a live human expert -- you can hone in only on the areas that matter to you most. Or you can just ask it to do something (as long as it's in the digital realm) and see for yourself what happens.
I always say that since one of the best ways of learning is by doing and given that with LLMs we can do so much so quickly, we are in a golden age of learning for those who really want to learn.
You’d have to live there, in the presence of a data centre for AI which actually wastes water. The numbers people throw around on social media are absurd. I’m pretty sure they do not take into account the circular reuse of water for cooling, and just look at flow rates passing over chips.
While we're talking about Americans using anything but the metric system (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49746745">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49746745), how many golf courses' worth of water is Google's 10.9 billion "gallons" a year?
> As a historical U.S. benchmark, an average 18-hole facility had about 80.7 irrigated turf acres and used approximately 152.5 acre-feet/year—about 49.7 million gallons (188 million litres) annually.
So about 220.
But it's still, ahem, a drop in the bucket compared to the California almond industry.
A while back I satirically suggested <a href="https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/17/spot-birds-not-golf/" rel="nofollow">https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/17/spot-birds-not-golf/ that if hyperscalers wanted to relieve the pressure over data center water use they could buy up a few dozen country clubs and turn them into public parks.
I am sure many smokers in the 1950s also saw the health benefits of tobacco, that they were very happy to experience the increased energy after a smoke and could get more done as a result. I‘m pretty sure none of them felt their lungs and throats deteriorating either.
Likewise, you may not feel like AI is de-skilling your brain. But it probably is. We don‘t have the research (yet) that AI is addictive and causes brain atrophy, but all the evidence is certainly pointing that way, the same way the evidence were pointing that way about tobacco in the 1950s. My only hope is that it doesn’t take us another 2 decades to prove the obvious.
Oh, I definitely feel a strong pull toward the low-effort path of just letting the AI do everything. It's so much better than I am at writing code, after all! This code it wrote for me is beautiful! But it makes terrible mistakes constantly, and when I'm reduced to pleading with it to check whether it's made mistakes, basically there is no hope. And, of course, it would put me in the Homer Simpson position of declining to get up and walk just because there's a motorized wheelchair at hand.
>Likewise, you may not feel like AI is de-skilling your brain. But it probably is.
It is, but why is that a problem? Moving from physical labor on the farm, factory or construction site to sedentary work and lifestyles would also atrophy our muscles so now we pursue physical activities we actually enjoy like gym and sports instead of hanging on to those dangerous and strenuous physical labor jobs just to stay in shape.
Similarly, you will use the AI to churn through the repetitive mundane tasks the AI can do, and then work your brain on the activities you actually enjoy.
Now if you choose to not exercise your brain and dumb yourself down the same way sedentary people don't exercise their bodies and get obese, then I guess that's on you, but we can't force the world to technologically regress just because some people are lazy and don't exercise, the same way we haven't forced construction workers to use pickaxes instead of machinery to tear up a road just to make sure they stay in shape and don't get too fat from sitting in their air conditioned excavators.
>then work your brain on the activities you actually enjoy.
1. As seen in this coountry, most people did not in fact "pursue physical activities they enjoyed". They got much less healthy and then the white collar machines started to churn their brains too. I do not see this ending any differently.
2. As many have noted (and has been known for decades pre-AI), getting more work done in a modern workplace does not reward you with more of your time back. It gives you more work and higher velocity plans. It may even end up compensating you less. There's only more benefit to this if you are your own boss, and so far a lot of those kinds of people are simply selling grifts, not truly disrupting the industry with newfound efficiencies.
>but we can't force the world to technologically regress just because some people are lazy and don't exercise
I didn't want to go too off topic, but since this is such a sticking point I need to make a big note about the US: most of the world is more sedentary than 100 years ago. But the obesity epidemic is mostly US-cerntric.
Which shows that, while we can't force a diet, we can definitely regulate incentives. But the US chose not to. We had all kinds of initatives to try and regulate what we put in our food and what to subsidize. We instead said corporations can do whatever we want and subsidized chemicals that are heavily taxes or banned in many other western countries.
I know that's a scary word for this community, but this analog of regulations can work here in AI as well. We don't need to ban AI (but I'm not opposed to it in primary schools), but we can shape policy to prevent "corporations can do whatever they want" yet again.
We can't regulate incentives. Unless we can somehow go back to how the world was in the 1960s, the incentive today in a global competitive world economy, is to make more money than your economic rivals, otherwise if you only regulate yourself but if they don't, then they will economically dominate you in the long run and turn your government into their puppet, your country into their playground and your people in their sweatshop workers. It's economic neo-colonilism 2.0 electric boogaloo.
Regulations only work if all players in the world adhere to them, but history has proven they don't. They expect everyone else to adhere to the rules and slow down so that they can get ahead of you.
> But the US chose not to
Smart. Then US can be the survivor in this global race. As someone in the EU I am aware of more top EU-born tech companies relocating their offices/R&D to the US than vice versa.
> but we can shape policy to prevent "corporations can do whatever they want" yet again.
I fully agree. But again, this will work if all major nations regulate AI equally, otherwise, AI corporations will move where they have more freedom.
We call tax subsidies "tax incentives" for a reason. You subsidize high-fructose corn syrup, you incentivize society to include cheap oils in their food.
>the incentive today in a global competitive world economy, is to make more money than your economic rivals
On a domestic level this is irrelevant. It doesn't matter how cheaply China makes corn syrup if there's still a cost of importing it into your country. And if it's still a problem, you add tariffs for more (dis)incentive. That was the original way they were supposed to be implemented, not as this massive general tax on doing any business with a country.
And if it's still a problem despite that, direct regulations and bans from usage in market consumption products is a last option. We can , do, and have done all of these for hundreds of ingredients.
>Then US can be the survivor in this global race
I'm talking specifically about food here, you know? You were so focused on the obesity epidemic that I wanted to highlight the actual underpinnings of it instead of leave it at "the world got lazier and fatter, that's progress".
Clearly tariffs don't so much to software. AI needs different solutions.
>AI corporations will move where they have more freedom.
If AI is a societally damaging tool, then I see this as a win. Let them move, let the US economy correct back to rationalism again, and let's improve society instead of CEO's bottom lines.
I also do believe in the invisible hand. If big tech doesn't like potential US regulations, smaller startups will happily compete for that role in the country.
> I didn't want to go too off topic, but since this is such a sticking point I need to make a big note about the US: most of the world is more sedentary than 100 years ago. But the obesity epidemic is mostly US-cerntric.
Note: nearly all of the western hemisphere has obesity rates of >25%. Obesity is also high in the Middle East and Australia/NZ.
The US, with an obesity rate of >40%, is exceptionally obese, but it's not correct to say that obesity is mainly a US problem. It's quickly becoming a worldwide problem.
Agreed. I haven't written a line of code since last November when AI had the big shift into something good.
The average HNer would imagine me scrolling TikTok while I periodically swivel to Claude to type "continue" while my brain shrivels away.
That I can delegate lower level work like implementation means I spend my time at increasingly high leverage positions like deciding what gets built. And any time I want, I can get as granular and inquisitive as I'd like about the lower level work. After all, I probably chose it from a multiple choice AskUserQuestion tool call, each with a blurb and shortlist of trade-offs.
All this talk of de-skilling doesn't make a lot of sense to me because what are these skills people covet so much that defined most of the day to day of a software developer? What, the implementation details of some framework or the intimate details of your company's crappy legacy software stack?
That may very well be true, but as you're describing it, I think of all my fellow engineers, all of them very talented, who moved up into management, arguing exactly the same point of thinking at higher abstraction levels. And after one or two years go by, they will come to me with requests or opinions that are literally the dumbest shit I've ever heard. Like arguing that we (holding most of our data on MariaDB and Postgres) should move everything into Kubernetes custom resources because "the Kubernetes resource model is the best database ever". That's a real thing that I've had an engineering lead say to me. When I asked how you're gonna do an efficient table join on Kubernetes resources, I just got a blank stare.
De-skilling is too broad though. Or maybe not broad enough. I've been using GPS sat nav since it came out, in the Tomtom days. I don't know how to get around to places without a gps to spoon-feed me instructions. My ability to multiply two digit numbers in my head has totally atrophied since my younger years. I also don't know how to ride a horse or grow corn though. Or how to milk a cow or goat. Yet somehow I'm still (for now) able to put food on the table. I can tell you subtle differences between the output of Fable vs Opus, or Sol and Astra. I'm real good at Linux, and it made my career, but honestly Claude is better at it than I am, and it's relentless. I get tired and distracted easily. When people lose one of their senses, the other ones sharpen. Maybe. I have a couple of practices I do to sharpen my mind on memory and recall and cognition. You're right on the brain atrophy, but like the gym replaced manual labor, we should do the same for our minds.
The de-skilling of AI includes your ability to express your thoughts, to communicate your ideas, to come up with new ideas, and creative solutions, to converse with other people. This is an entirely different category then the ability to navigate on highways and city streets.
Also worth noting is that your GPS has probably not de-skilled your navigation abilities when you walk or bike in your local area.
One thing I've learned in life is to accept that I'm in many ways an outlier, which means that even if the research is done, it frequently doesn't apply to me anyway.
Like I wouldn't doubt that research could show that more time spent on youtube is inversely correlated with learning. But if you just use it to watch lectures or tutorials for some skill, obviously you will be an outlier.
Or when "research shows that dieting doesn't work," obviously the result there is "research shows that most people don't maintain a healthy diet," and it shouldn't dissuade you from doing so. Choosing to do so anyway is what makes you the outlier.
And so it will likely go with AI's effect on the brain. Most people will likely use it to avoid thinking, and the research will show it to be a disaster. A small group will use (or already is using) it to challenge them and expose them to new ideas. You can choose to be in the latter group if you'd like.
>You can choose to be in the latter group if you'd like.
And now you inherit the burden of proving you are "one of the good ones" after a mass amount of disappointment from the normal use case. I don't think the "it's okay, I'm different" methodology ever works out unless you can prove you are so utterly beyond the competition that you can't be ignored.
But an outlier is just that. And as we see here, outliers cannot change society single-handedly. You at least need to be an outlier good enough to convince a lot of "normal" people that you are to their benefit and be willing to lead those "normal" people.
You don't need to prove anything or lead anyone or change society. You have a tool in front of you that can help you achieve your goals or distract you from them. You decide how you want to use it. Just do your thing.
> It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
So you're just saying "it's okay I got mine" in that case, and don't care if the rest of society rots because "I can use it well". Fair enough.
And I assume you never need to worry about applying to a W2 job with that mentality
I mean sure I care. I'd love for my kids to grow into a world where everyone around them is a super jacked highly competent and motivated ubermensch, but what are you supposed to do? How are you supposed to get people to not let themselves rot other than to remind them that it's an option, and all they need to do is to decide to take it. If anyone doesn't care, it's the person who's resigned to the inevitability of rot even in the face of someone telling them they're looking at a tool for self-improvement.
>I'd love for my kids to grow into a world where everyone around them is a super jacked highly competent and motivated ubermensch, but what are you supposed to do?
I just gave an example. Use your power to lead and improve your community, and society as a whole. Use your leadership to add guardrails so the tools assist the user, as opposed to the current state of unchecked capitalism that simply extracts funds with no care for results.
You dismissed it and said to focus in yourself. Which is exactly how we get to such a situation.
This contradictory feeling of powerlessness while simultaneously striving to use such tools to influence the community simply shows why the wider population is gaining mistrust for the tech. Telling people to be better people because ot works for you has never ended well.
I influence where I can, and I have encouraged my team at work to use models as learning tools. Probe into their claims. Ask them to prove things with a quick demo/test/PoC. etc. They have tons of embedded knowledge that you can dig out. But running for president of the world so I can demand guardrails is a little out of my scope.
Reminder that this reply chain was about someone saying how they use LLMs for personal growth, and someone replying that they're deceiving themselves. You don't have to get hung up on how to fix society (who were already happy to rot with TV, instagram, tiktok, etc.) and keep that from seeing a useful tool in front of you.
> One thing I've learned in life is to accept that I'm in many ways an outlier, which means that even if the research is done, it frequently doesn't apply to me anyway.
This is a complete logical fallacy. It is quite literally mathematically impossible for you to not be "typical" for at least some aspects of your life. If you weren't, you'd probably be dead, or immortal.
Sure, I expect that if you gave me the LD99 of some poison, I will die. But there are still many things (and my point is this is one of them) where all it takes to be an outlier is to decide to be one.
I am pretty sure that likewise in the 1950s many smokers did indeed decided to be the outlier who smokes occasionally, and for the right reasons, and using the “correct” method/brand of cigarettes. And that every one of them decided that they were not gonna get addicted to nicotine. I am also sure that every single one of them did indeed get addicted to nicotine, and many of them died from cancer.
The majority of smokers did get addicted to nicotine, but significant percentages did not. However, it is true that even many "non-daily" smokers died from cancer as a result of their smoking.
I know that research on tobacco is full of bad science and bad actors, and experts in different fields (such as social psychology) continued to publish bad science on the topic well into the 2000s. This includes your 2002 German paper (which I can’t read because of a paywall).
Your second source says nothing about addiction in the chapter you posted, however they do talk about addiction in chapter 6, and they claim that most people agree that smoking is addictive, but heavy smoking is more addictive.
Still, (chiming in), your claim that " I am also sure that every single one of them did indeed get addicted to nicotine, and many of them died from cancer" could use some evidence to back it up.
My understanding is that only about 35% of those who ever try nicotine become addicted.
If you are going to instead say that nearly everyone who smokes occasionally will become addicted, you need to back it up with evidence, because it's not apparent.
I am speaking general. I don‘t have historical sources either that people spoke like that in the 1950s, and that is a much more glaring omission of citation. If I am wrong about that my whole argument falls apart. But if say 65% of regular tobacco users who use some strategy or otherwise believe the addictive properties of nicotine won‘t apply to them for some reason, then my argument still stands.
I don‘t know the figure here, but if it is true that 35% of those who try tobacco get addicted, and given that we know nicotine is highly addictive, I would guess that most regular users do indeed get addicted (and so would most people).
I am specifically talking about this cognitive bias of believing that the mean behavior does not apply to you. Very few people believe this about cigarettes anymore because the evidence is simply overwhelming and public health experts along with anti-smoking activists were able to (despite incredible odds) shift the common rhetoric closer to what is true.
There is a similar phenomena going on with ads. Most people believe they are unaffected by ads, but in reality they absolutely are. And the advertising industry has vested interest in the general public believing this illusion (otherwise they risk being regulated).
We are seeing the exact same phenomena with AI usage as we did with smoking in the 1950s. All the evidence is pointing towards these products being bad for you and being addictive. Yet most users of AI believe they are not addicted, and that they have found a way to use AI in a way which is less harmful for them. This is bias, these users are wrong, so are you, and so is OP. This is addictive to you, and it is bad for you.
I know research is lacking, but eventually we will have the evidence to show the case as clearly as we do today with tobacco.
On the other hand there's the consensus bias where you believe that everyone else is like you, when in fact they are not (which is why I said this is something I've had to learn to accept).
Sure, for most distributions, most people will be statistically normal, by definition. On the other hand, I know that e.g. state standard test scores when I was a kid said I was 99th percentile academically (and there was some kind of IQ test for the gifted program? I remember I qualified in all 3 areas they tested me), so I have some evidence to hypothesize that I might be an outlier along other psychometrics too. And I'll go ahead and guess that many people here are also not the median in many ways.
I don't think that this makes me somehow immune to lung cancer from smoking, but I might suspect that when I read about others' use of AI and how it rots their minds, they're perhaps not using it to learn Lean (the process of learning has mostly been the AI spits out crap proofs that seem way more complicated than they ought to be, and then I spend some time trying to find ways to simplify it. We have a back-and-forth about different encodings, or ideas for syntax macros, etc. Then I can compare with e.g. Mathlib's solution) or checking their understanding as they work through some notes. I don't know what most people use it for or what they get addicted to, but I believe it might be different from what I do.
With regards to ads, I live somewhere where outdoor advertising is banned, I block ads on my computer, I don't watch TV or movies or "news," and I don't install whatever apps, so there aren't a whole lot of channels for ads to reach me. I suspect again that this is not the typical experience. That said I do view ads as fraud-adjacent and damaging to markets, so fully support strongly regulating or outright banning paid advertising.
This comes across as an athlete excusing their smoking behavior because their superior physical abilities makes them immune to the bad effects of smoking.
I assure you a 99th percentile in 100 m dash may have believed that smoking did not affect them the same way it does an average person, but they would be wrong. And so are you about your AI usage.
You keep assuming that LLM usage is automatically harmful with literally zero reason to believe that, and several anecdotes from people on how they use it positively.
There's simply no reason to even draw a weak analogy to smoking. You'd do much better to draw an analogy to e.g. methylphenidate or amphetamine, which certainly you can abuse and get addicted to, and might even be harmful for the average person (even carrying the possibility of psychosis!), but which carry cognitive benefits with minimal side effects for others.
I'll give another concrete use: the other day I scanned a storybook with my phone and had codex OCR it and compare with a list I've started of words and sound patterns my kid knows how to read so that it could identify irregular words or new sounds for us to go over before we start the story.
Please, concretely, let me know what the adverse effects were there.
I keep saying it because all the evidence (while still not conclusive) is pointing in that direction, just like they were with tobacco in the 1950s (It took another two decades for the evidence of tobacco to become conclusive; and two decades still for regulators to catch up).
We do know that LLMs can cause psychosis, we do know it can cause people to behave in an unhealthy manner, etc. We are seeing more and more evidence that AI usages in education is at least correlated with bad grades. We are seeing people exhibit addictive behavior around AI. There is plenty of reasons to suspect that as we gather more evidence that they will become conclusive about the addictiveness and the unhealthyness of these products. For me this is obvious.
Evidence doesn't point in that direction though, even if we establish correlations.
Like the education effect is pretty obvious: most people will use it to cheat on their homework and avoid learning. Some people will use it to learn new topics or with more depth, and give them additional targeted probing questions to answer (basically, give them more homework). Average achievement will probably drop. The high achievers will probably do even better.
Boiling it down to "it harms your brain" when people are already telling you how to use it to learn more effectively is just silly. Most people are happy to rot their brains. They'll take any opportunity to do it. If you're an outlier, you're probably aware of that fact on some level, and it doesn't make sense for you to make decisions looking at the median who behave completely differently. You have to look at the mechanisms behind the data and interpret under what situations they could plausibly apply to you.
Like I said, the parallels to the 1950s tobacco usage is glaring. People used to say the exact same about cigarettes, that the way they specifically use cigarettes, the way their body is build, the way they control the habit, etc. etc. all leads to them being unique in some way or another making the habit healthy actually.
The evidence were all pointing towards tobacco being both addictive and unhealthy, but it still took two decades for the evidence to become clear and public health experts to be proven right. Maybe in two decades I will be proven wrong and you will be proven right, but I doubt it. When the evidence are all pointing in one direction, it is usually because they are right.
> We do know that LLMs can cause psychosis, we do know it can cause people to behave in an unhealthy manner, etc. We are seeing more and more evidence that AI usages in education is at least correlated with bad grades. We are seeing people exhibit addictive behavior around AI.
Aren't most of these true of amphetamines/methylphenidate also, though? Except the "bad grades" part. Certainly Adderall is habit-forming for some people and has risks for abuse, just like it can contribute to mental breakdowns and psychosis.
Likewise, the psychosis-LLM link is incredibly rare.
It kinda looks like you're overstating the evidence. This is not a good comparison to 1950s tobacco -- by the 1950s, the scientific evidence for tobacco being unhealthy was already quite substantial. The problem was getting that information to the public in the midst of a disinformation campaign. Here, for contrast, the evidence that moderate LLM use in professional settings has overall negative impacts is still pretty light.
I only use LLMs rarely, and I don't have any kind of emotional ties to the issue. I just think your claims extend decently far beyond the evidence.
My impression was that the frontier AI coding models are kind of resetting the barriers to entry/reward ratios to before the dot com boom, when people didn't go into this career for money, and so most folks that ended up in it were the 1% kind of talents who really wanted it. Perhaps that's an elitist thing to say? I don't know. That's not to say that AI is pushing people away from computing, it's just that it's creating such massive low resistance paths to getting to the goal without the "productive friction."
p.s. and at the same time, it's such a fantastic learning tool. It distills the intuition of a whole world and is able to transmit it on demand, like in your examples. It's an interesting dichotomy.
Yeah thats the silver lining in the whole mess: For those of us who enjoy software, hardware and building things, this will be a new golden age and we can filter out all humans and elves.
I don't know, maybe? I think it's opened the doors to a lot of people who don't really want to program, but do want, for example, a studio appointment booking management system. Which is good; people's needs matter just as much if they don't enjoy programming. You can use it to create a pretty wide range of things, which seems like it's going to change the things that get created in hard-to-predict ways.
Structurally, though, I'm sort of pessimistic.
Throughout my career as a programmer, I've earned much more money than electronic engineers whose skills are mostly very similar, and probably much of this happy situation is due to the fact that my productivity depends only on me having access to a computer with GCC and Perl or Python on it, and the internet. If I were living in rural Malawi, I probably couldn't practice my trade, because the US$200 it takes to buy a working laptop is a year's wages there, and people lack the social permission to innovate. (William Kamkwamba's astounding achievements under those circumstances deserve more recognition. Read his autobiography!) But, if I work in any developed economy, that's somewhere between 1 hour and 20 hours of my earnings, so I'm not dependent on investors to create jobs for me.
By contrast, electrical engineers mostly can't ship their designs unless an investor is willing to put up the capital to produce a batch of PCBs or chips — probably three batches or so before you get a fully working product. If you're working on a cutting-edge chip, that's several million dollars, so you're probably not going to save that up while working as an employee. This puts electrical engineers in a much worse bargaining position relative to investors. To a smaller extent, the same thing applies to machinists, auto mechanics, and many other skilled workers: they only get jobs if investors invest to create jobs for them.
The capital-intensive nature of current AI seems like it might push the negotiation equilibrium for programmers two or three orders of magnitude in favor of investors.
But it might not work out that way, and, at least at the moment, I'm finally bringing about numerous projects I'd been procrastinating on for years.
> It distills the intuition of a whole world and is able to transmit it on demand, like in your examples. It's an interesting dichotomy.
The only problem I have at the moment is it's very prone to hallucinations, even now, yes frontier models astra fable with all the bells and whistles. This makes it hard to confidently use while learning because I have to be on the lookout for lies while I'm learning, which is precisely the moment I am least able to distinguish them. So instead theres just a constant low lying dread.
Nonetheless, I am able to get some value out of them. Just not all, everything requires manual effort to duplicate and check which you should probably be doing anyway as part of learning
I mentioned the minimal proof assistant I elicited last night. When Fable 5.1 thought it was done, I asked how we knew the prover was sound (which means, in the jargon, that the theorems that it proves are actually true). It checked and immediately found five different ways it could "prove" false theorems with it (and fixed them).
Then it suggested writing a fuzzer to try to flush out more soundness problems. It loves fuzzers! And usually they are an excellent cost/benefit tradeoff. However, in this case, I questioned whether a fuzzer would ever actually succeed at finding proofs of a theorem it was set to prove, even unsound proofs, and after doing some tests it admitted that the fuzzer it had proposed would have been completely useless.
Then the conversation was incorrectly flagged as me working on a malicious security attack, so I was downgraded to Opus 4.8. I switched back to Fable, renamed the file in its scratchpad, and asked it to please use the term "generative testing" instead of "fuzzing". Thanks to not using the computer-security name for generative testing, there were no further false flags.
Then, this morning, I was reading the spec it proved its program fulfilled, and asked whether a certain trivially incorrect alternative program would also fulfill the spec (a misformalization problem rather than a soundness problem). It churned away for a while, discovering that while, actually, no, that program would be rejected, a different trivially incorrect program would pass, and credited me in the docs with pointing out the issue. I pointed out that in fact the issue it had found was completely different from my stupid misreading of the spec. It fixed the doc.
Fable 5.1 isn't Mythos but it's generally considered to be a "frontier model".
So, from my point of view, the whole experience has been a constant fractal of hallucination, in which I have to constantly struggle to keep my grip (and Claude's grip) on actual reality, because it's so willing to make up surface-plausible nonsense.
______
P.S. Also, in another task today, it thought pip wasn't installed and was trying to figure out how to work around it. But that's not so much a hallucination as a failure to recheck assumptions — I hadn't installed pip on the machine before the first Claude work on it, and it just assumed that was still the case. Also I think that might have been Opus rather than Fable, so it's not as strong a case.
I feel like this pattern is a great way to practice and sharpen critical thinking. It's like a whole new skill to deal with computing systems in this way.
Not the GP, and this is just the free ChatGPT, not a frontier model, but just a few days ago it happily confabulated an entirely incorrect version of the plot of Iain M. Banks’s "Matter" when I asked it to analyze the novel in a certain context. Claude fared better, though it also made some mistakes. I don’t expect the models to know or recall the specifics of the plot of every novel out there, but it would be nice if they didn’t make things up.
Probably over twenty today in my work day alone. Its a normal part of working with agents. They do not always have the context they need, but fail to be aware of this.
Misinterpreting the results of performance testing it had just run to argue for the exact opposite of what the data it generated showed.
Stating something was current guidance (a quick read shows the document it found was from 2016, it was served the last edit date in it's API call, along with newer documents that contradict it).
Assuming what a Jira ticket said without ever reading it with it's tools and then doubling down on the contents it has assumed.
On learning specifically, it constantly gets grammar in foreign languages wrong it can write fluently when prompted correctly but when asked the sort of wrongheaded questions from flawed premises learners commonly make it is prone to making stuff up. I experienced this yesterday when asking about how danish comparisons work.
Heck i mean see <a href="https://alignment.openai.com/misalignment-reports/self-generated-prompt-injections-in-compaction-summaries/" rel="nofollow">https://alignment.openai.com/misalignment-reports/self-gener...
They are prone to make up restrictions for themselves you never asked for. Ive seen this behavior on occasion also.
lol i love playing with food labels. the things it spits out for anything de papa in an otherwise English paragraph is terrifying. ai must solve the spanglish potato problem. also the spanglish con issue.
> I pointed Claude Opus 5 at a C codebase I've been working on for years and it immediately found five serious bugs
These 'serious' bugs aren't important if you've been working on this code base for years and only now they pop up. I suspect - although I'm guessing - that probably a hobby project.
Frankly speaking, although this comment is very dismissive about the opinion blog article - assertively stating that this isn't a well-thought-out post - it seems to me that the personal anekdote is irrelevant and that the blog post in question still fully stands.
It's definitely been a hobby project so far, but suddenly its quality has improved a great deal, which I think greatly improves its chances of graduating to being a daily driver.
I don't think this criticism is very well thought out. There's ample evidence at this point that we are sliding precipitously toward environmental catastrophe and, no, the massive data center build out to support people generating slop illustrations and build toy theorem provers is not helping.
We're not just sliding towards environmental catastrophe — we're deep into it! Ocean acidification is killing corals, we just had the hottest month in recorded history, mass refugee movements from climate disasters are fueling xenophobia and warfare in many parts of the world, and the rate of species extinction keeps increasing, as it has for decades. Extinct species are irreparable environmental damage; they're gone forever.
However, this is not because of massive data center buildouts. Goldman Sachs's projection in <a href="https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/articles/us-data-center-power-demand-projected-to-double-by-2027" rel="nofollow">https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/articles/us-data-cente... is that by the end of next year US data center power demand will have increased from 31GW to 66GW, roughly 17GW per year. The EIA says <a href="https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=87&t=1" rel="nofollow">https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=87&t=1 that the US uses about 95 quadrillion Btu per year (Americans will do anything to avoid using metric units). That's 3200 gigawatts. So the US's data centers are currently using 1% of the US's energy and adding ½% per year, so that in 02027 that number increases to 2%. 99% of the US's energy use is due to non-data-center causes.
And direct energy use is a way in which data centers have an especially large environmental impact. Their other potential impacts, such as cement production, sewage, parking lots, commuters driving to them, and freshwater consumption, are much less than that 1%.
Energy use, by the way, doesn't damage the environment. Burning fossil fuels does. All of China's net new energy production is coming from renewable energy — they're shutting down coal plants faster than they're building new ones, and they're decommissioning gasoline-powered vehicles faster than they're selling new ones. A friend of mine from the US told me that one of the most surprising things about visiting Shenzhen was how silent the downtown was, because almost all the cars are electric there — a much higher rate than for China overall, but even for the whole country, it's over 50% of new cars.
AI might turn out to be a wonderful thing or a terrible thing, but at least for the next decade or two, that won't be because of datacenter buildouts, which are an utterly insignificant fraction of its effect.
> So the US's data centers are currently using 1% of the US's energy and adding ½% per year, so that in 02027 that number increases to 2%.
1% of an entire nation's energy production for a single, non-essential use-case is a lot. For comparison, circa 2016, US farming, which we generally need to live, takes up 1.9% of energy production (<a href="https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/charts-of-note/87964" rel="nofollow">https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/charts-of-note/87964). Hopefully this makes it more obvious that consuming 2% of all energy production, even though the raw magnitude is small, is a lot for a single, non-essential service currently controlled by a handful of companies.
> Energy use, by the way, doesn't damage the environment. Burning fossil fuels does.
I'm aware. The current reality we occupy in the US involves mostly burning fossil fuels to power these tools, and some plants deliberately skirt rulings around environmental safety. Management of resources and the economy is about trade-offs. Yes, in principle a certain activity may not depend on a bad trade, but if your only option right now is a bad tradeoff, it's "in theory" independence from this doesn't mean you should go ahead and do it.
> However, this is not because of massive data center buildouts.
It's because of a number of factors, obviously, but the data center buildouts do not help stem the bleeding, they (currently) exacerbate it. This idea of "well, it contributes to <bad thing> but less than <other bad things> therefore we should do it" is myopic and hopefully it's obvious to you why such a line of reasoning is not going to lead to any mitigation of any kind of crisis.
It's about trade-offs. If the overall ROI is worth the absurd costs, then, yes, it's all worth it. But "hey I (N=1) personally like this tool and get value out of it" does not justify global costs that contribute further to, as you said yourself, irreparable damage.
This isn't even touching on a host of other problems involved in the buildouts, namely making districts decidedly less attractive places to live and displacing current residents by allowing a handful of companies with massive amounts of power to directly disrupt the lives of citizens, for no direct recompense. (<a href="https://www.texastribune.org/2026/07/09/texas-data-centers-ai-power-plants-pollution-state-permits/" rel="nofollow">https://www.texastribune.org/2026/07/09/texas-data-centers-a...) (<a href="https://www.tpr.org/2026-09-17/residents-file-lawsuit-challenging-noise-pollution-from-elon-musks-data-center" rel="nofollow">https://www.tpr.org/2026-09-17/residents-file-lawsuit-challe...)
> AI might turn out to be a wonderful thing or a terrible thing, but at least for the next decade or two, that won't be because of datacenter buildouts, which are an utterly insignificant fraction of its effect.
If the 2% energy consumption ends up being the final tipping point for total climate collapse, you might feel differently about this statement.
As far as sources go, reading further shows wind and solar still expanding. I don't think we can generalize anything from energy consumption of data centers.
Yes, that kind of indeterminate conclusion I can accept. What I cannot accept are people like the parent who want to ignore the very possibility of an issue or the role of this buildout in contributing entirely or who want to claim others are telling "lies" when this is patently not the case.
The amount of sophistry and absolute dogshit argumentation this forum invites now thanks to general boosterism is pathetic.
> A friend of mine from the US told me that one of the most surprising things about visiting Shenzhen was how silent the downtown was, because almost all the cars are electric there
Can that be true?
I've read at some point at which speed on average the sound of tires on tarmac will be louder than the sound of an engine, and it was a surprisingly low speed. I don't recall the exact number, but I remember that it was below the average in-city traffic speed (save stop-and-go averages).
This definitely matches my real-world experience. I can't usually make out engine sounds in passing traffic, because the tire noise is so freaking loud. I certainly couldn't blindly tell electric from ICE by sound of a passing vehicle at, say, 40 or 50 km/h.
Precisely. The parent is responding to what is an argument about the social, ethical long term effects of a technology by effectively saying "don't care, I personally benefit so whatever".
Ironically this kind of response just illustrates the article's point but I doubt the parent has enough self-awareness to recognize that.
I do enjoy fucking, but I don't think I have the emotional bandwidth to fuck everyone.
I think you have misunderstood my comment. I don't know very much about how other people are using AI, or what effect it's having on them. It's much more important what effect it's having on them than what effect it's having on me. But all I can contribute to the conversation is what I'm personally able to attest to, and the approaches that I've found helpful or unhelpful. Hopefully those experiences and those approaches are of value to others — that's why I'm participating in the conversation, after all.
I notice that you don't seem to be participating in the conversation in the same spirit, though — your comment seems to consist entirely of personal attacks, none of which are original or insightful, predicated as they are on a fundamental misunderstanding of the post you're responding to, and it lacks any contribution of your own experiences or techniques. I think you probably should not have posted it.
Totally agree. It is more of a rant than reasoning. Anyone who claims to know how this will end (good or bad) is extrapolating beyond their own knowledge and is vastly oversimplifying what is likely to be one of the most transformative technologies of the last 100 years.
In the last 50 years, only the creation of the Internet compares. Like with the Internet, nuclear, television, etc. it will probably be a mix of good and bad.
I don't like the general dismissal of environmental concerns around LLM use as "doom-mongering". There was some miscalculation or misunderstanding around data center water usage once, and now this keeps being used as a supposed knock-out argument. Water consumption, however big of an issue it may or may not be, is just one of maybe a hundred ways in which LLM proliferation is amoral and anti-environmental.
The same bugs me about cars. Suddenly, driving cars is cool and modern and unproblematic again, because the market is switching to electric engines. As if fossil fuel consumption was the only thing environmentally problematic about building and driving cars! It's not, not by a long shot.
The environmental impact of LLM use also has to be considered in light of the wasteful ways in which they're being employed in general. Sharing and reusing has gone out of fashion. Millions and millions of LLM-assisted programmers, for instance, or now re-inventing and re-implementing the same things, in the most inefficient way, because that's more profitable to the oligarchs than actually collaborating and building on each other's work.
kragen · · focus · HN ↗
Me, I pointed Claude Opus 5 at a C codebase I've been working on for years and it immediately found five serious bugs and told me how to fix them, as well as how to use Linux system calls I wasn't familiar with to solve some other problems. And I gave it a new language for PEGs I'd written up a couple of years ago, and it wrote me a working implementation in OCaml that afternoon, fixing several bugs in my example grammars along the way and resolving a conceptual problem I'd had a roadblock on. I asked Fable 5.1 to implement a minimal proof assistant, and it wrote a clone of J-Bob in Python, which I'm studying now. Although there is a certain firehose quality to this stuff, I sure don't intend to use AI to actively de-skill my brain.
That doesn't guarantee that AI will be a beneficial innovation overall, of course! As with most innovations, it probably depends on the balance between people being able to use the innovation to gain control over their own lives, and people being able to use it to gain control over others' lives. (Barring a FOOM scenario, of course, where our prediction ability is nonexistent.)
So, I don't think a pro-AI post can be well thought out, either. It's too early and chaotic to understand what's going to happen, and it may actually be uncertain. Pro and anti are both far too simplistic.
danvayn · · focus · HN ↗
Basically, I don’t know how well thought out it is, but the prose argues that the point isn’t for it to be an objective take, and that if it were well thought out (ie highly iterated on and more objective or factual than subjective) some personal meaning that was intended to be expressed is lost along the way.
In other words It may have not appealed to you but that’s fine - you might just be outside the target demographic. In any case I don’t think it necessarily should be more well thought out. I prefer that these pieces exist or have their place. I definitely prefer their existence to a world where every personal Blog post has to arise from fiduciary or technical concerns, instead of from the soul. This is a soulful blog. I like it.
kragen · · focus · HN ↗
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voidhorse · · focus · HN ↗
The OP is an article that:
1. Raises a number of broad social and ethical concerns about AI. 2. Provides links to back up some of these claims.
Yes, it also vents some frustration and includes personal anecdote, but there's nothing wrong with that. If you think something is a net negative for society, you should be frustrated. That doesn't make an argument "unreasonable" or "not well thought out". In fact, your entire response to the article is just anecdote and broad claims with no evidence or citations to back them up.
If the article author has "a lot of hate resulting from dysfunctional responses to life circumstances" you must have a lot of naivety and kindness as a dysfunctional response to life's circumstances.
If we do not critique things we perceive to be negative developments in society, things won't get better, and we'll let bad decisions slide. A somewhat emotive critique is not "hate". The author at least backed up their points with a few links, which is much more than we can say for your comments.
kragen · · focus · HN ↗
What you perceive as naïveté is a kind of world-weariness that goes deeper than you can possibly imagine. It turns out that kindness is not in fact naïve. It is the only reasonable response to the human condition, which is far more desperate than you know.
Emotive critiques can easily be hate. Hate is an emotion, so hate-filled critiques like this one are quite emotive.
The historical record of people improving society by critiquing things they perceive to be negative developments in it is not really that great. Yes, that's how we got, for example, the abolition of slavery — but the anti-abolitionists justified their own positions by critiquing the genocide in Haïti, which was itself justified by people critiquing things they perceived to be negative developments in it. For every Civil Rights Movement we have a Great Leap Forward; for every Sherman Antitrust Act we have a Prohibition.
You may not be able to avoid activism, but never forget that other activists spent their lives digging the ditches you're filling up, and others will spend their lives digging them again.
The way out of this is to spend as much of your energy as possible creating positive-sum things rather than in zero-sum struggle.
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dang · · focus · HN ↗
I realize both sides in this argument got unduly personal, but the attack you posted in this comment is particularly not ok. Please don't!
We've had to ask you about this before: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47728150">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47728150. Fortunately it doesn't seem to be a frequent habit but please don't post like this.
dkxjwjxjej · · focus · HN ↗
At this point you really should’ve just banned them. Second strike and the first one was 1000x worse than this. Is this really the culture you wanna cultivate here? People wishing the worst for other families’ and all they get is a slap on the wrist and a “pretty please don’t do this again”?
C’mon now.
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kragen · · focus · HN ↗
I think that was the same day I prototyped an approach to using Service Workers from localhost as a platform for persistent mobile apps that don't show up in the app list but also don't rely on the TLS CA system for their security. Which involved learning a lot of stuff about the Service Worker lifecycle and localStorage and IndexedDB that I didn't know before.
It's just a lot.
simonw · · focus · HN ↗
When I see people worry about LLMs atrophying their mental abilities I assume they haven't thought very hard about ways to lean into using them to expand their mental capabilities.
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zero_shift · · focus · HN ↗
It has definitely accelerated my learning: through the process of writing rigorous plans, I have learned so much about network programming... the intricacies of HTTP2, how to design a fast MITM proxy, performance pitfalls in SSL...
These are things I studiously avoided learning for a decade, now demystified, mostly through Claude patiently rendering many figures and diagrams.
And with Fable, I was able to ship a working Envoy Rust extension in a one-shot.
On the other hand, my grasp on the details is tenuous. Every so often the agent can't progress and I am stuck for ideas, hitting different prompts like they were slot machines. I forget how to solve problems by myself.
I can feel myself becoming supine and dependent on something I know is going to become more expensive, a dependency AI vendors will seek to exploit. It has happened quickly. I do not really consent; it is forced on me by my employer.
kragen · · focus · HN ↗
Obviously there are higher-level design issues that I might not notice while engaging with the code at the byte-by-byte level, but I won't have the embarrassing problem I had a couple of weeks ago where duck.ai wrote me a CPU in Verilog, and after I tested it, I tried to write something in Verilog myself and couldn't even figure out how to write a syntactically correct XOR-gate module. (Verilator's parse errors are not designed as a Verilog tutorial, it turns out.)
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keeda · · focus · HN ↗
I always say that since one of the best ways of learning is by doing and given that with LLMs we can do so much so quickly, we are in a golden age of learning for those who really want to learn.
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simonw · · focus · HN ↗
(... Palm Springs has around 100 golf courses)
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zahlman · · focus · HN ↗
> As a historical U.S. benchmark, an average 18-hole facility had about 80.7 irrigated turf acres and used approximately 152.5 acre-feet/year—about 49.7 million gallons (188 million litres) annually.
So about 220.
But it's still, ahem, a drop in the bucket compared to the California almond industry.
simonw · · focus · HN ↗
(I was only half joking)
runarberg · · focus · HN ↗
Likewise, you may not feel like AI is de-skilling your brain. But it probably is. We don‘t have the research (yet) that AI is addictive and causes brain atrophy, but all the evidence is certainly pointing that way, the same way the evidence were pointing that way about tobacco in the 1950s. My only hope is that it doesn’t take us another 2 decades to prove the obvious.
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PorciiVorbesc · · focus · HN ↗
It is, but why is that a problem? Moving from physical labor on the farm, factory or construction site to sedentary work and lifestyles would also atrophy our muscles so now we pursue physical activities we actually enjoy like gym and sports instead of hanging on to those dangerous and strenuous physical labor jobs just to stay in shape.
Similarly, you will use the AI to churn through the repetitive mundane tasks the AI can do, and then work your brain on the activities you actually enjoy.
Now if you choose to not exercise your brain and dumb yourself down the same way sedentary people don't exercise their bodies and get obese, then I guess that's on you, but we can't force the world to technologically regress just because some people are lazy and don't exercise, the same way we haven't forced construction workers to use pickaxes instead of machinery to tear up a road just to make sure they stay in shape and don't get too fat from sitting in their air conditioned excavators.
zero_shift · · focus · HN ↗
I used to have several good answers, but now I use Claude for everything, I can't remember any
johnnyanmac · · focus · HN ↗
1. As seen in this coountry, most people did not in fact "pursue physical activities they enjoyed". They got much less healthy and then the white collar machines started to churn their brains too. I do not see this ending any differently.
2. As many have noted (and has been known for decades pre-AI), getting more work done in a modern workplace does not reward you with more of your time back. It gives you more work and higher velocity plans. It may even end up compensating you less. There's only more benefit to this if you are your own boss, and so far a lot of those kinds of people are simply selling grifts, not truly disrupting the industry with newfound efficiencies.
>but we can't force the world to technologically regress just because some people are lazy and don't exercise
I didn't want to go too off topic, but since this is such a sticking point I need to make a big note about the US: most of the world is more sedentary than 100 years ago. But the obesity epidemic is mostly US-cerntric.
Which shows that, while we can't force a diet, we can definitely regulate incentives. But the US chose not to. We had all kinds of initatives to try and regulate what we put in our food and what to subsidize. We instead said corporations can do whatever we want and subsidized chemicals that are heavily taxes or banned in many other western countries.
I know that's a scary word for this community, but this analog of regulations can work here in AI as well. We don't need to ban AI (but I'm not opposed to it in primary schools), but we can shape policy to prevent "corporations can do whatever they want" yet again.
PorciiVorbesc · · focus · HN ↗
We can't regulate incentives. Unless we can somehow go back to how the world was in the 1960s, the incentive today in a global competitive world economy, is to make more money than your economic rivals, otherwise if you only regulate yourself but if they don't, then they will economically dominate you in the long run and turn your government into their puppet, your country into their playground and your people in their sweatshop workers. It's economic neo-colonilism 2.0 electric boogaloo.
Regulations only work if all players in the world adhere to them, but history has proven they don't. They expect everyone else to adhere to the rules and slow down so that they can get ahead of you.
> But the US chose not to
Smart. Then US can be the survivor in this global race. As someone in the EU I am aware of more top EU-born tech companies relocating their offices/R&D to the US than vice versa.
> but we can shape policy to prevent "corporations can do whatever they want" yet again.
I fully agree. But again, this will work if all major nations regulate AI equally, otherwise, AI corporations will move where they have more freedom.
johnnyanmac · · focus · HN ↗
We call tax subsidies "tax incentives" for a reason. You subsidize high-fructose corn syrup, you incentivize society to include cheap oils in their food.
>the incentive today in a global competitive world economy, is to make more money than your economic rivals
On a domestic level this is irrelevant. It doesn't matter how cheaply China makes corn syrup if there's still a cost of importing it into your country. And if it's still a problem, you add tariffs for more (dis)incentive. That was the original way they were supposed to be implemented, not as this massive general tax on doing any business with a country.
And if it's still a problem despite that, direct regulations and bans from usage in market consumption products is a last option. We can , do, and have done all of these for hundreds of ingredients.
>Then US can be the survivor in this global race
I'm talking specifically about food here, you know? You were so focused on the obesity epidemic that I wanted to highlight the actual underpinnings of it instead of leave it at "the world got lazier and fatter, that's progress".
Clearly tariffs don't so much to software. AI needs different solutions.
>AI corporations will move where they have more freedom.
If AI is a societally damaging tool, then I see this as a win. Let them move, let the US economy correct back to rationalism again, and let's improve society instead of CEO's bottom lines.
I also do believe in the invisible hand. If big tech doesn't like potential US regulations, smaller startups will happily compete for that role in the country.
Windchaser · · focus · HN ↗
Note: nearly all of the western hemisphere has obesity rates of >25%. Obesity is also high in the Middle East and Australia/NZ.
The US, with an obesity rate of >40%, is exceptionally obese, but it's not correct to say that obesity is mainly a US problem. It's quickly becoming a worldwide problem.
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epidemiology_of_obesity#/media/File:Obesity_rate_(WHO,_2022).png" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epidemiology_of_obesity#/media...
hombre_fatal · · focus · HN ↗
The average HNer would imagine me scrolling TikTok while I periodically swivel to Claude to type "continue" while my brain shrivels away.
That I can delegate lower level work like implementation means I spend my time at increasingly high leverage positions like deciding what gets built. And any time I want, I can get as granular and inquisitive as I'd like about the lower level work. After all, I probably chose it from a multiple choice AskUserQuestion tool call, each with a blurb and shortlist of trade-offs.
All this talk of de-skilling doesn't make a lot of sense to me because what are these skills people covet so much that defined most of the day to day of a software developer? What, the implementation details of some framework or the intimate details of your company's crappy legacy software stack?
Dunno, I have bigger plans for myself than that.
majewsky · · focus · HN ↗
fragmede · · focus · HN ↗
runarberg · · focus · HN ↗
Also worth noting is that your GPS has probably not de-skilled your navigation abilities when you walk or bike in your local area.
ndriscoll · · focus · HN ↗
Like I wouldn't doubt that research could show that more time spent on youtube is inversely correlated with learning. But if you just use it to watch lectures or tutorials for some skill, obviously you will be an outlier.
Or when "research shows that dieting doesn't work," obviously the result there is "research shows that most people don't maintain a healthy diet," and it shouldn't dissuade you from doing so. Choosing to do so anyway is what makes you the outlier.
And so it will likely go with AI's effect on the brain. Most people will likely use it to avoid thinking, and the research will show it to be a disaster. A small group will use (or already is using) it to challenge them and expose them to new ideas. You can choose to be in the latter group if you'd like.
johnnyanmac · · focus · HN ↗
And now you inherit the burden of proving you are "one of the good ones" after a mass amount of disappointment from the normal use case. I don't think the "it's okay, I'm different" methodology ever works out unless you can prove you are so utterly beyond the competition that you can't be ignored.
But an outlier is just that. And as we see here, outliers cannot change society single-handedly. You at least need to be an outlier good enough to convince a lot of "normal" people that you are to their benefit and be willing to lead those "normal" people.
ndriscoll · · focus · HN ↗
> It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
johnnyanmac · · focus · HN ↗
And I assume you never need to worry about applying to a W2 job with that mentality
ndriscoll · · focus · HN ↗
johnnyanmac · · focus · HN ↗
I just gave an example. Use your power to lead and improve your community, and society as a whole. Use your leadership to add guardrails so the tools assist the user, as opposed to the current state of unchecked capitalism that simply extracts funds with no care for results.
You dismissed it and said to focus in yourself. Which is exactly how we get to such a situation.
This contradictory feeling of powerlessness while simultaneously striving to use such tools to influence the community simply shows why the wider population is gaining mistrust for the tech. Telling people to be better people because ot works for you has never ended well.
ndriscoll · · focus · HN ↗
Reminder that this reply chain was about someone saying how they use LLMs for personal growth, and someone replying that they're deceiving themselves. You don't have to get hung up on how to fix society (who were already happy to rot with TV, instagram, tiktok, etc.) and keep that from seeing a useful tool in front of you.
voidhorse · · focus · HN ↗
This is a complete logical fallacy. It is quite literally mathematically impossible for you to not be "typical" for at least some aspects of your life. If you weren't, you'd probably be dead, or immortal.
ndriscoll · · focus · HN ↗
runarberg · · focus · HN ↗
kragen · · focus · HN ↗
<a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/002204260203200220" rel="nofollow">https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/002204260203200220
<a href="https://www.tobaccoinaustralia.org.au/chapter-3-health-effects/3-36-health-effects-of-occasional-smoking" rel="nofollow">https://www.tobaccoinaustralia.org.au/chapter-3-health-effec...
The majority of smokers did get addicted to nicotine, but significant percentages did not. However, it is true that even many "non-daily" smokers died from cancer as a result of their smoking.
runarberg · · focus · HN ↗
Your second source says nothing about addiction in the chapter you posted, however they do talk about addiction in chapter 6, and they claim that most people agree that smoking is addictive, but heavy smoking is more addictive.
Windchaser · · focus · HN ↗
My understanding is that only about 35% of those who ever try nicotine become addicted.
If you are going to instead say that nearly everyone who smokes occasionally will become addicted, you need to back it up with evidence, because it's not apparent.
runarberg · · focus · HN ↗
I don‘t know the figure here, but if it is true that 35% of those who try tobacco get addicted, and given that we know nicotine is highly addictive, I would guess that most regular users do indeed get addicted (and so would most people).
ndriscoll · · focus · HN ↗
runarberg · · focus · HN ↗
There is a similar phenomena going on with ads. Most people believe they are unaffected by ads, but in reality they absolutely are. And the advertising industry has vested interest in the general public believing this illusion (otherwise they risk being regulated).
We are seeing the exact same phenomena with AI usage as we did with smoking in the 1950s. All the evidence is pointing towards these products being bad for you and being addictive. Yet most users of AI believe they are not addicted, and that they have found a way to use AI in a way which is less harmful for them. This is bias, these users are wrong, so are you, and so is OP. This is addictive to you, and it is bad for you.
I know research is lacking, but eventually we will have the evidence to show the case as clearly as we do today with tobacco.
ndriscoll · · focus · HN ↗
Sure, for most distributions, most people will be statistically normal, by definition. On the other hand, I know that e.g. state standard test scores when I was a kid said I was 99th percentile academically (and there was some kind of IQ test for the gifted program? I remember I qualified in all 3 areas they tested me), so I have some evidence to hypothesize that I might be an outlier along other psychometrics too. And I'll go ahead and guess that many people here are also not the median in many ways.
I don't think that this makes me somehow immune to lung cancer from smoking, but I might suspect that when I read about others' use of AI and how it rots their minds, they're perhaps not using it to learn Lean (the process of learning has mostly been the AI spits out crap proofs that seem way more complicated than they ought to be, and then I spend some time trying to find ways to simplify it. We have a back-and-forth about different encodings, or ideas for syntax macros, etc. Then I can compare with e.g. Mathlib's solution) or checking their understanding as they work through some notes. I don't know what most people use it for or what they get addicted to, but I believe it might be different from what I do.
With regards to ads, I live somewhere where outdoor advertising is banned, I block ads on my computer, I don't watch TV or movies or "news," and I don't install whatever apps, so there aren't a whole lot of channels for ads to reach me. I suspect again that this is not the typical experience. That said I do view ads as fraud-adjacent and damaging to markets, so fully support strongly regulating or outright banning paid advertising.
runarberg · · focus · HN ↗
I assure you a 99th percentile in 100 m dash may have believed that smoking did not affect them the same way it does an average person, but they would be wrong. And so are you about your AI usage.
ndriscoll · · focus · HN ↗
There's simply no reason to even draw a weak analogy to smoking. You'd do much better to draw an analogy to e.g. methylphenidate or amphetamine, which certainly you can abuse and get addicted to, and might even be harmful for the average person (even carrying the possibility of psychosis!), but which carry cognitive benefits with minimal side effects for others.
I'll give another concrete use: the other day I scanned a storybook with my phone and had codex OCR it and compare with a list I've started of words and sound patterns my kid knows how to read so that it could identify irregular words or new sounds for us to go over before we start the story.
Please, concretely, let me know what the adverse effects were there.
runarberg · · focus · HN ↗
We do know that LLMs can cause psychosis, we do know it can cause people to behave in an unhealthy manner, etc. We are seeing more and more evidence that AI usages in education is at least correlated with bad grades. We are seeing people exhibit addictive behavior around AI. There is plenty of reasons to suspect that as we gather more evidence that they will become conclusive about the addictiveness and the unhealthyness of these products. For me this is obvious.
ndriscoll · · focus · HN ↗
Like the education effect is pretty obvious: most people will use it to cheat on their homework and avoid learning. Some people will use it to learn new topics or with more depth, and give them additional targeted probing questions to answer (basically, give them more homework). Average achievement will probably drop. The high achievers will probably do even better.
Boiling it down to "it harms your brain" when people are already telling you how to use it to learn more effectively is just silly. Most people are happy to rot their brains. They'll take any opportunity to do it. If you're an outlier, you're probably aware of that fact on some level, and it doesn't make sense for you to make decisions looking at the median who behave completely differently. You have to look at the mechanisms behind the data and interpret under what situations they could plausibly apply to you.
runarberg · · focus · HN ↗
The evidence were all pointing towards tobacco being both addictive and unhealthy, but it still took two decades for the evidence to become clear and public health experts to be proven right. Maybe in two decades I will be proven wrong and you will be proven right, but I doubt it. When the evidence are all pointing in one direction, it is usually because they are right.
Windchaser · · focus · HN ↗
Aren't most of these true of amphetamines/methylphenidate also, though? Except the "bad grades" part. Certainly Adderall is habit-forming for some people and has risks for abuse, just like it can contribute to mental breakdowns and psychosis.
Likewise, the psychosis-LLM link is incredibly rare.
It kinda looks like you're overstating the evidence. This is not a good comparison to 1950s tobacco -- by the 1950s, the scientific evidence for tobacco being unhealthy was already quite substantial. The problem was getting that information to the public in the midst of a disinformation campaign. Here, for contrast, the evidence that moderate LLM use in professional settings has overall negative impacts is still pretty light.
I only use LLMs rarely, and I don't have any kind of emotional ties to the issue. I just think your claims extend decently far beyond the evidence.
foobarian · · focus · HN ↗
p.s. and at the same time, it's such a fantastic learning tool. It distills the intuition of a whole world and is able to transmit it on demand, like in your examples. It's an interesting dichotomy.
a34729t · · focus · HN ↗
fragmede · · focus · HN ↗
kragen · · focus · HN ↗
kragen · · focus · HN ↗
Structurally, though, I'm sort of pessimistic.
Throughout my career as a programmer, I've earned much more money than electronic engineers whose skills are mostly very similar, and probably much of this happy situation is due to the fact that my productivity depends only on me having access to a computer with GCC and Perl or Python on it, and the internet. If I were living in rural Malawi, I probably couldn't practice my trade, because the US$200 it takes to buy a working laptop is a year's wages there, and people lack the social permission to innovate. (William Kamkwamba's astounding achievements under those circumstances deserve more recognition. Read his autobiography!) But, if I work in any developed economy, that's somewhere between 1 hour and 20 hours of my earnings, so I'm not dependent on investors to create jobs for me.
By contrast, electrical engineers mostly can't ship their designs unless an investor is willing to put up the capital to produce a batch of PCBs or chips — probably three batches or so before you get a fully working product. If you're working on a cutting-edge chip, that's several million dollars, so you're probably not going to save that up while working as an employee. This puts electrical engineers in a much worse bargaining position relative to investors. To a smaller extent, the same thing applies to machinists, auto mechanics, and many other skilled workers: they only get jobs if investors invest to create jobs for them.
The capital-intensive nature of current AI seems like it might push the negotiation equilibrium for programmers two or three orders of magnitude in favor of investors.
But it might not work out that way, and, at least at the moment, I'm finally bringing about numerous projects I'd been procrastinating on for years.
RugnirViking · · focus · HN ↗
The only problem I have at the moment is it's very prone to hallucinations, even now, yes frontier models astra fable with all the bells and whistles. This makes it hard to confidently use while learning because I have to be on the lookout for lies while I'm learning, which is precisely the moment I am least able to distinguish them. So instead theres just a constant low lying dread.
Nonetheless, I am able to get some value out of them. Just not all, everything requires manual effort to duplicate and check which you should probably be doing anyway as part of learning
fragmede · · focus · HN ↗
kragen · · focus · HN ↗
Then it suggested writing a fuzzer to try to flush out more soundness problems. It loves fuzzers! And usually they are an excellent cost/benefit tradeoff. However, in this case, I questioned whether a fuzzer would ever actually succeed at finding proofs of a theorem it was set to prove, even unsound proofs, and after doing some tests it admitted that the fuzzer it had proposed would have been completely useless.
Then the conversation was incorrectly flagged as me working on a malicious security attack, so I was downgraded to Opus 4.8. I switched back to Fable, renamed the file in its scratchpad, and asked it to please use the term "generative testing" instead of "fuzzing". Thanks to not using the computer-security name for generative testing, there were no further false flags.
Then, this morning, I was reading the spec it proved its program fulfilled, and asked whether a certain trivially incorrect alternative program would also fulfill the spec (a misformalization problem rather than a soundness problem). It churned away for a while, discovering that while, actually, no, that program would be rejected, a different trivially incorrect program would pass, and credited me in the docs with pointing out the issue. I pointed out that in fact the issue it had found was completely different from my stupid misreading of the spec. It fixed the doc.
Fable 5.1 isn't Mythos but it's generally considered to be a "frontier model".
So, from my point of view, the whole experience has been a constant fractal of hallucination, in which I have to constantly struggle to keep my grip (and Claude's grip) on actual reality, because it's so willing to make up surface-plausible nonsense.
______
P.S. Also, in another task today, it thought pip wasn't installed and was trying to figure out how to work around it. But that's not so much a hallucination as a failure to recheck assumptions — I hadn't installed pip on the machine before the first Claude work on it, and it just assumed that was still the case. Also I think that might have been Opus rather than Fable, so it's not as strong a case.
foobarian · · focus · HN ↗
Sharlin · · focus · HN ↗
inquirerGeneral · · focus · HN ↗
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RugnirViking · · focus · HN ↗
Misinterpreting the results of performance testing it had just run to argue for the exact opposite of what the data it generated showed.
Stating something was current guidance (a quick read shows the document it found was from 2016, it was served the last edit date in it's API call, along with newer documents that contradict it).
Assuming what a Jira ticket said without ever reading it with it's tools and then doubling down on the contents it has assumed.
On learning specifically, it constantly gets grammar in foreign languages wrong it can write fluently when prompted correctly but when asked the sort of wrongheaded questions from flawed premises learners commonly make it is prone to making stuff up. I experienced this yesterday when asking about how danish comparisons work.
Heck i mean see <a href="https://alignment.openai.com/misalignment-reports/self-generated-prompt-injections-in-compaction-summaries/" rel="nofollow">https://alignment.openai.com/misalignment-reports/self-gener...
They are prone to make up restrictions for themselves you never asked for. Ive seen this behavior on occasion also.
jambalaya8 · · focus · HN ↗
therealdrag0 · · focus · HN ↗
[deleted] · · focus · HN ↗
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namuol · · focus · HN ↗
kragen · · focus · HN ↗
revivechristina · · focus · HN ↗
louwrentius · · focus · HN ↗
These 'serious' bugs aren't important if you've been working on this code base for years and only now they pop up. I suspect - although I'm guessing - that probably a hobby project.
Frankly speaking, although this comment is very dismissive about the opinion blog article - assertively stating that this isn't a well-thought-out post - it seems to me that the personal anekdote is irrelevant and that the blog post in question still fully stands.
kragen · · focus · HN ↗
voidhorse · · focus · HN ↗
I don't think this criticism is very well thought out. There's ample evidence at this point that we are sliding precipitously toward environmental catastrophe and, no, the massive data center build out to support people generating slop illustrations and build toy theorem provers is not helping.
kragen · · focus · HN ↗
However, this is not because of massive data center buildouts. Goldman Sachs's projection in <a href="https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/articles/us-data-center-power-demand-projected-to-double-by-2027" rel="nofollow">https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/articles/us-data-cente... is that by the end of next year US data center power demand will have increased from 31GW to 66GW, roughly 17GW per year. The EIA says <a href="https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=87&t=1" rel="nofollow">https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=87&t=1 that the US uses about 95 quadrillion Btu per year (Americans will do anything to avoid using metric units). That's 3200 gigawatts. So the US's data centers are currently using 1% of the US's energy and adding ½% per year, so that in 02027 that number increases to 2%. 99% of the US's energy use is due to non-data-center causes.
And direct energy use is a way in which data centers have an especially large environmental impact. Their other potential impacts, such as cement production, sewage, parking lots, commuters driving to them, and freshwater consumption, are much less than that 1%.
Energy use, by the way, doesn't damage the environment. Burning fossil fuels does. All of China's net new energy production is coming from renewable energy — they're shutting down coal plants faster than they're building new ones, and they're decommissioning gasoline-powered vehicles faster than they're selling new ones. A friend of mine from the US told me that one of the most surprising things about visiting Shenzhen was how silent the downtown was, because almost all the cars are electric there — a much higher rate than for China overall, but even for the whole country, it's over 50% of new cars.
AI might turn out to be a wonderful thing or a terrible thing, but at least for the next decade or two, that won't be because of datacenter buildouts, which are an utterly insignificant fraction of its effect.
voidhorse · · focus · HN ↗
1% of an entire nation's energy production for a single, non-essential use-case is a lot. For comparison, circa 2016, US farming, which we generally need to live, takes up 1.9% of energy production (<a href="https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/charts-of-note/87964" rel="nofollow">https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/charts-of-note/87964). Hopefully this makes it more obvious that consuming 2% of all energy production, even though the raw magnitude is small, is a lot for a single, non-essential service currently controlled by a handful of companies.
> Energy use, by the way, doesn't damage the environment. Burning fossil fuels does.
I'm aware. The current reality we occupy in the US involves mostly burning fossil fuels to power these tools, and some plants deliberately skirt rulings around environmental safety. Management of resources and the economy is about trade-offs. Yes, in principle a certain activity may not depend on a bad trade, but if your only option right now is a bad tradeoff, it's "in theory" independence from this doesn't mean you should go ahead and do it.
> However, this is not because of massive data center buildouts.
It's because of a number of factors, obviously, but the data center buildouts do not help stem the bleeding, they (currently) exacerbate it. This idea of "well, it contributes to <bad thing> but less than <other bad things> therefore we should do it" is myopic and hopefully it's obvious to you why such a line of reasoning is not going to lead to any mitigation of any kind of crisis.
It's about trade-offs. If the overall ROI is worth the absurd costs, then, yes, it's all worth it. But "hey I (N=1) personally like this tool and get value out of it" does not justify global costs that contribute further to, as you said yourself, irreparable damage.
This isn't even touching on a host of other problems involved in the buildouts, namely making districts decidedly less attractive places to live and displacing current residents by allowing a handful of companies with massive amounts of power to directly disrupt the lives of citizens, for no direct recompense. (<a href="https://www.texastribune.org/2026/07/09/texas-data-centers-ai-power-plants-pollution-state-permits/" rel="nofollow">https://www.texastribune.org/2026/07/09/texas-data-centers-a...) (<a href="https://www.tpr.org/2026-09-17/residents-file-lawsuit-challenging-noise-pollution-from-elon-musks-data-center" rel="nofollow">https://www.tpr.org/2026-09-17/residents-file-lawsuit-challe...)
> AI might turn out to be a wonderful thing or a terrible thing, but at least for the next decade or two, that won't be because of datacenter buildouts, which are an utterly insignificant fraction of its effect.
If the 2% energy consumption ends up being the final tipping point for total climate collapse, you might feel differently about this statement.
jakzurr · · focus · HN ↗
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_States#Final_energy_consumption" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_States#Fi...
As far as sources go, reading further shows wind and solar still expanding. I don't think we can generalize anything from energy consumption of data centers.
voidhorse · · focus · HN ↗
The amount of sophistry and absolute dogshit argumentation this forum invites now thanks to general boosterism is pathetic.
Anamon · · focus · HN ↗
Can that be true?
I've read at some point at which speed on average the sound of tires on tarmac will be louder than the sound of an engine, and it was a surprisingly low speed. I don't recall the exact number, but I remember that it was below the average in-city traffic speed (save stop-and-go averages).
This definitely matches my real-world experience. I can't usually make out engine sounds in passing traffic, because the tire noise is so freaking loud. I certainly couldn't blindly tell electric from ICE by sound of a passing vehicle at, say, 40 or 50 km/h.
reaperducer · · focus · HN ↗
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voidhorse · · focus · HN ↗
Ironically this kind of response just illustrates the article's point but I doubt the parent has enough self-awareness to recognize that.
kragen · · focus · HN ↗
I think you have misunderstood my comment. I don't know very much about how other people are using AI, or what effect it's having on them. It's much more important what effect it's having on them than what effect it's having on me. But all I can contribute to the conversation is what I'm personally able to attest to, and the approaches that I've found helpful or unhelpful. Hopefully those experiences and those approaches are of value to others — that's why I'm participating in the conversation, after all.
I notice that you don't seem to be participating in the conversation in the same spirit, though — your comment seems to consist entirely of personal attacks, none of which are original or insightful, predicated as they are on a fundamental misunderstanding of the post you're responding to, and it lacks any contribution of your own experiences or techniques. I think you probably should not have posted it.
kndiencjejd · · focus · HN ↗
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pseudosavant · · focus · HN ↗
In the last 50 years, only the creation of the Internet compares. Like with the Internet, nuclear, television, etc. it will probably be a mix of good and bad.
deterministic · · focus · HN ↗
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Anamon · · focus · HN ↗
The same bugs me about cars. Suddenly, driving cars is cool and modern and unproblematic again, because the market is switching to electric engines. As if fossil fuel consumption was the only thing environmentally problematic about building and driving cars! It's not, not by a long shot.
The environmental impact of LLM use also has to be considered in light of the wasteful ways in which they're being employed in general. Sharing and reusing has gone out of fashion. Millions and millions of LLM-assisted programmers, for instance, or now re-inventing and re-implementing the same things, in the most inefficient way, because that's more profitable to the oligarchs than actually collaborating and building on each other's work.