Comment by nradov
1 day ago
It's disturbing how many arrogant elitists comment on HN essentially claiming that most other humans are NPCs. Do you ever actually talk to regular people outside the tech industry bubble? They're not as stupid or unaware as you seem to think.
I have to say as someone who works in AI that currently the least interesting people to talk to are other people in AI.
My favorite people to talk with are tradespeople because they can do things I can't and they know things I don't. And we're really not all that different once you're really start talking.
One of the worst things about talking with people who use lots of AI (less applicable to those who actually work on building AI) is their decreased resilience to opposing views.
AI has infinite time (and likely human evaluation incentive) to spend on couching pushback in the softest possible terms.
Humans outside of grade school honors classes generally don't have the time to preface "You're wrong" with "That's a brilliant thought, I see where you're going. How about we also consider an additional perspective..."
Seems to me that people with "decreased resilience to opposing views" have been increasing in number since well before LLMs.
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That's a very uncharitable read!
I just read it as people having different priorities and yes, some of those being online brainrot (that I also partake in), alongside various medical conditions, economic conditions and other outside factors decreasing the ability to get things done.
We've all seen what brilliant people like John Carmack or Linus Torvalds can do, and if we turned this into a measuring game or something then most of us statistically would indeed be "NPCs", but I don't think we need such optics.
Even without that, we can acknowledge that some people will have a really large impact on how the future goes and we can hope/demand that they do their best. I might not be smart/committed/lucky enough to change the world much, but so aren't most folks - I'll do what I can and I hope that the ones that will have larger impact will do good, too.
This is just a more asinine version of Great Man Theory, but in this case the great men are some very confident futurist dudes writing comments on the internet.
> some very confident futurist dudes writing comments on the internet
What an odd take, why would I suggest that? I meant that people who have the means to do meaningful work, especially high impact work, should do so - generally that'd mean research or in the case of IT, writing good software.
> Great Man Theory
You can see the sibling comment, would you not agree that there's some software and research out there that's very useful to humanity as a whole? Where I and the other critical commenter seem to disagree is that I don't expect another Einstein, but still acknowledge that some people will just achieve much more than others due to a variety of factors.
For example, it's hard to take risks when you're struggling to pay bills due to the economy being in a bad state, and it's hard to build great things when you're in a locale where nobody cares for whatever it may be. It's also hard to make much of an impact, where disproportionate amount of time goes fighting against illness that life has inflicted upon you.
It doesn't make everyone else useless (like me paying my taxes and working on relatively boring software is still good, just low impact), just that those who have the means to do more, should!
2 replies →
How can someone "statistically be an NPC"??? You mean anyone who is not in the 99th percentile in tech is an NPC? Your take is braindead. Even having infinite intelligence and work ethic wouldn't allow you to accomplish the things that people in the 20th century were able to simply due to the field maturing significantly since then. We can't really ever have another Einstein or Von Neumann for their respective fields, that doesn't make the rest of the people in those fields NPCs.
> How can someone "statistically be an NPC"??? You mean anyone who is not in the 99th percentile in tech is an NPC? Your take is braindead.
I don't care for your outrage because I don't buy into the culture that might be passionate about using the term "NPC" and attaching much additional meaning to it, I'm working with the vocabulary presented. You could substitute that for "normies" if you care for Internet slang, or in other words "average people" - everyone else. In this context, when not talking about some very committed and talented people who, by being in the right place and time, can advance entire areas of research or technology.
> Even having infinite intelligence and work ethic wouldn't allow you to accomplish the things that people in the 20th century were able to simply due to the field maturing significantly since then.
That is also an odd standard to set, just look at how much "Attention Is All You Need" changed things and where we are now. Same with what Carmack did for VR. What about WireGuard, PyTorch, Stable Diffusion, FlashAttention, LoRA? Even within the supposedly mature fields people are still making immensely useful new tech and research that benefits many and that they build upon.
It might not always even be a single individual, but groups of people collaborating and through repeated failures eventually producing something really good!
Again, I see nothing problematic with the original comment's conclusion:
> So if you are able to fly above the AI-generated addictions and have the privilege of time to do it, see what you can do.
I read the rest as commentary on how many won't really have the means/circumstances/capabilities to do so, but the ones that do, should.
I don't get what other words you're trying to put in my mouth, I might not be a fan of the original phrasing, but the point itself isn't bad.
HN is what you get when you mix tech and autism.
Not so far off target!
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If you believe there is something more than collections of atoms and interactions between them to humans, you are free to disprove all of existing physics. Show your result or paper.
The "NPC" is your own imagined addition, haven't seen any advocates of humans being, just like anything else in the world, physical, say this means they are "NPCs". You seem to think systems of atoms HAVE to be "NPCs".