Comment by olivierestsage
4 days ago
Best possible ad for Weird Al.
How did we get here? Why am I, a lifelong tech enthusiast, on a tech enthusiast board championing someone for resisting technology? I’ve been on HN for years but it’s starting to feel absurd ever since I’ve been out of sync with the whole AI thing. Thanks for listening to my Ted talk.
There's a meme that goes:
Person A: I'm a tech enthusiast! I have the latest smartphone, smartwatch, smart car, smart TV, smart home... all networked together and automated to make my daily life easier.
Person B: I work in tech. The last piece of tech I bought is a printer from 2004, and I keep a loaded gun nearby in case it starts acting funny.
Once you understand how the sausage is made and what the incentives are, you become very suspicious of every hot new tech integration that comes along.
But humans just don't write commercial software anymore. Don't expect to keep doing that for a living.
I will never understand some smart appliances.
Like...a smart TV so you don't need a second device to play your streaming services? I kinda understand, though I think it's a silly move. If my Fire TV stick gets deprecated, I can buy a new one for under $50. If my TV itself gets deprecated, I'm spending $1500+ for a new one. But like...the number of people who have their heads in the sand when it comes to pervasive ads being injected by their TV is appalling.
But why does anybody need a smart washer (either clothes or dishes)? I need to be physically there to load it. There's literally nothing to be gained by having an app. Sure, sometimes I want a delayed start for whatever reason, but literally every washer already has that function without an app.
I don't even see the purpose of WiFi-connected light bulbs. The only time I'm turning a light on or off is when I'm entering or leaving the room, in which case I'm passing by the light switch anyways.
While I agree with you on ideally having a dumb TV - being able to install TailScale on your TV and then using your exit node in another country (to watch that other countries local IPTV) is a really nice convenience. And you can no longer buy a dumb TV, at least not in typical living room sizes.
The dishwashing machine being able to notify you ahead of time that you're low (but not already out) of softening salt or rinse aid liquid is also convenient - but indeed also solvable with display on the machine itself.
But the automation like lights, or blinds/shutters... Being able to open/close shutters from your bed (or automatically in the morning as part of waking you up), or turn on/off lights based on motion/presence detection - is actually useful.
Of course you shouldn't need Internet to operate it. And many people use Home Assistant exactly because they don't want their "smart devices" to talk to the cloud.
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My favorite response to this was a fellow dev who immediately replied “you let your printer near a GUN?!”
HN is full of people who are far more on the “enthusiast” side than the cynical greybeard side.
Are the "enthusiasts" that you speak of enamored by something like a WIFI-enabled clothes washer?
There used to be more of us cynical greybeards.
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Please don’t be sweepingly dismissive of people by framing like this. Printers lack mobility and firearms would only activate their defensive ink cloud reflexes, as every expert office IT worker knows (including you!). So the group B you’re describing is being portrayed as both excessively paranoid and blatantly incompetent in order to dismiss the views of tech experts that reject A.I. and support your own claim that they’re, to paraphrase your intent in last century’s terms, ‘dinosaurs’. That’s not a respectable form of rhetoric and your use of it paints both you and group A, the one whose beliefs you’re trying to promote, with a broad brush of skeptical disbelief.
Office Space: Laser Printer murder scene
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjsSr3z5nVk
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This has always been just a meme. Plenty of the people I know who know the most about tech are also very excited about it. Person B in this example is often miserable for a lot of other reasons that have nothing to do with tech, doesn't understand tech as deeply as the meme suggests, and pattern matches cynicism into everything.
Not just a meme. In my experience it is quite accurate for a large percentage of techies - especially the more hardcore they are.
It's the fresher ones, with less experience, that are more excited by stuff like "smart appliances" and the latest gadgets and trends. Or manager types nominally "in tech", but who haven't been in the trenches since forever. People who "who know the most about tech" only superficially, in that the know the most about the latest slop and trends.
The cynicism is borne out of experience.
I think cory doctorow had the best lens through which to view the issue: "who does this technology do things for and who does it do them to?"
even tech enthusiasts can see that a major chunk of the populace is increasingly falling on the "to" side, so championing resistance makes a lot of sense.
As is often repeated here, "technology is a force multiplier".
AI has been multiplying the wrong things (for the common people) at an amazing rate, while the good things it multiplies have been few, arguable, and lagging behind.
Usually to be enthusiastic about new tech, it needs to be the reverse. New tech that multiplies the "good things" first while the wrong things catch up later (see Internet, cars, commercial aviation, smartphones).
Sure, fellow software engineers who spend 8+ hours a day writing code see it as the opposite, since AI _is_ seen as doing the "good things" (i.e. writing code). But eventually the bad things will catch up with us too.
> fellow software engineers who spend 8+ hours a day writing code see it as the opposite, since AI _is_ seen as doing the "good things"
Dunno about that. I work in writing infrastructure code (telco space), and while we do use Claude Code (Optus 4.8/Fable 5/etc) there still needs to be extremely thorough review and a close watch kept on its output.
AI generated code that's not carefully managed is not suitable for really important things. At least, not the stuff I've seen it generate so far both for my colleagues and myself.
The general public has never been enthusiastic about new tech until well after the benefits start rolling in and are undeniably obvious. https://pessimistsarchive.org/
AI is no different. People like to think they have some special new insight as to why "it's bad this time!" but the average person has always reacted to change with FUD.
The difference is that previous technology like the internet or later the web had benefits which were obvious much faster. The average person is hearing about AI from their boss saying anyone who doesn’t use it will be laid-off sooner, not from their buddy talking about how much time they saved sending email instead of postal mail or doing their shopping online instead of driving around or mail order. Not everyone instantly jumped on those, either, but the pull was attraction rather than coercion.
Usually this happens after the naysayers have been forcibly evicted from economic and social life
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Generated content has a real duality to it. I would describe it as It feels great to use. It feels terrible to have it used on you.
Very few people appear happy to receive generated content. It is fun to make however.
We as a society will probably figure this out(and look back fondly on the days of real handcrafted artisanal writing) but for now there is a lot of tension between the two sides.
I know I loose all interest in a thing when I learn it is generated.