Comment by stego-tech
4 hours ago
Frustratingly, these attitudes have been around long before LLMs, and they'll continue to exist long after. To those individuals who have staunchly refused to broaden their horizons or empathize with their fellow man, these posts are direct threats to the wagons they've hitched themselves to, a challenge to their own narrow passions because they exist in a zero-sum environment where if even one person doesn't think and act like them, then clearly they're in the obvious wrong.
Conflating a preference for manual creation with opposition to the existence of a tool should be the single biggest signal flare that they are someone who will not argue with you in good faith. They're the ones who barnstorm every single one of these posts to denigrate the author rather than even attempt to empathize with their plight or evaluate the validity of their arguments. Surely the current cohort of HN commenters have seen this repeatedly in just the past five years as technical circles have jumped from cryptocurrency to blockchain to NFTs to LLMs to GenAI; every single one is a "must have", every single one something we "must learn or be left behind forever", and every single one refused to be evaluated on its merits in favor of simply embracing something new for its novelty.
I have given up debating with these people, because they do not wish for debate, they wish for dominance. I have better things to do with my time - as do you, as do all of us - than to give a moment of consideration to a viewpoint that relies on pithy quotes out of context and a reductionist narrative of history to justify their own superiority over others, in lieu of nuanced discourse.
Remember that it is not the obligation of the status quo to defend itself, rather the obligation belongs to those advocating changes to justify and defend their position and its benefits. In that regard, the pro-AI camp continues to come up hollow and empty.
Wonderfully put, thank you. Ultimately, we’re supposed to be “engineers,” and that means (for our jobs) assessing tools and practices in terms of their net benefit on the products we create: there is no free lunch, and a thing’s downside is often proportional to its upside, so it seems wise to approach these things with caution and to have the kind of nuanced discussions that you note have been lacking.
I’d also hope, though, that as humans, we can recognize that tools do not exist in a vacuum, and that their effect on ourselves and society at large can be net negative even if they have a net positive effect on our work (whether due to something fundamental to the tool or due to the way it is being applied at scale). We can’t responsibly leave these discussions out of our analysis of the tool itself and its fitness for purpose, because we are members of society, and our adoption/use of the tool helps to determine that societal impact.
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