Comment by vendiddy
2 months ago
I love coding but I also love AI.
I don't know if I'm a minority but I'd like to think there are a lot of folks like me out there.
You can compare it to someone who is writing assembly code and now they've been introduced to C. They were happy writing assembly but now they're thrilled they can write things more quickly.
Sure, AI could lead us to write buggier code. Sure, AI could make us dumber because we just have AI write things we don't understand. But neither has to be the case.
With better tools, we'll be able to do more ambitious things.
I think there are a lot of us, but the people who dislike AI are much more vocal in online conversations about it.
(The hype merchant, LinkedIn influencer, Twitter thread crowd are super noisy but tend to stick to their own echo chambers, it's rare to have them engage in a forum like Hacker News directly.)
We're the silent majority, I'm pretty sure. If you love coding, you probably love technology, and if you love technology, you probably love AI, which is inarguably the most interesting tech advancement in this decade.
The others, who are not like us? They've got other priorities. If you hate coding but you love AI, you're probably into software engineering because of the money, not love of technology. If you love coding and you hate AI, you're probably more committed to some sort of ideology than you are the love of technology. If you hate coding and you hate AI, well, I hope you throw your cellphone into the river and find a nice cabin in the woods somewhere to hide in.
> If you love coding and you hate AI, you're probably more committed to some sort of ideology than you are the love of technology.
As someone that you may characterize as one of these people, I can share some perspective.
First, I would question the premise that “love of technology” is not itself an ideology.
I do love technology, but not for its own sake. I love solving problems, I love tinkering, and I love craftsmanship and invention.
But technology can also be dangerous, it can set us backwards and not forwards, and its progress is never as inevitable as its evangelists claim. You need to view technology with a critical eye, and remember that tools are tools, and not panaceas.
So I guess I’d ask you — what’s so wrong with choosing to live in a cabin in the woods without a cellphone?
> what’s so wrong with choosing to live in a cabin in the woods without a cellphone?
When did I imply there was anything wrong with that?
> throw your cellphone into the river and find a nice cabin in the woods somewhere
Would that I could...
> I don't know if I'm a minority
No, there's plenty of top-class engineers who love coding with AI. e.g. Antirez.
I love AI as a concept.
I hate the reality of our current AI, which is benefitting corporations over workers, being used for surveillance and censorship (nevermind direct social control via misinformation bots), and is copying the work of millions without compensating them in order to do it.
And the push for coders to use it to increase their output, will likely just end up meaning expectations of more LoC and more features faster, for the same pay.
But FOSS, self-hosted LLMs? Awesome!
How is using Claude over Llama benefitting corporations over workers? I work with AI every day and sum total of my token spend across all providers is less than a single NVidia H100 card I'd have to buy (from a pretty big corporation!), at the very least, for comparable purpose?
How are self-hosted LLMs not copying the work of millions without compensating them for it?
How is the push for more productivity through better technology somehow bad?
I am pro FOSS but can't understand this comment.
> How is using Claude over Llama benefitting corporations over workers?
I'm not sure why you took the very general statement about AI being corp-over-worker to mean paid models vs free models? The technology itself heavily favors corporations, because the resources needed to create and operate the technology is massive, and is largely not available to individuals. Most of the freely downloadable models (and certainly the most popular ones) were trained by corporations. And there are many more models that are not available to individuals, only to corps.
> I work with AI every day and sum total of my token spend across all providers is less than a single NVidia H100 card I'd have to buy (from a pretty big corporation!), at the very least, for comparable purpose?
You don't need an H100 to run SLMs. You don't need LLMs that require commercial-grade memory capacities.
> How are self-hosted LLMs not copying the work of millions without compensating them for it?
Most are, especially when they're training data is closed-source. The ones that have open-source training data tend not to contain infringed-upon copywritten data. There is a huge issue right now with ML models being falsely called "open source", when in fact the source material needed to recreate them is not even known, much less provided publicly, which is probably the cause of the confusion.
> How is the push for more productivity through better technology somehow bad?
It's not, inherently. In practice though, it almost always means that workers are expected to be additionally productive, without being additionally compensated.