A bit off topic, but about commencement speeches...

Marvin Minsky spoke at my graduation. It was around the time when it seemed like genetic therapies might solve all kinds of problems, and there was a big debate, moral objections, etc.

Most of the talk was a rambling rant against religion holding us back from scientific improvements to life. It did not go over in the mostly christian crowd. I loved it.

I saw him give a graduation speech over twenty years ago, and to be honest, he was not a great public speaker then--he rambled and lost the plot. But twenty years is a long time, so he may be amazing now! I love the quote.

I also saw video of some school president being booed so badly that he never actually gave the speech, while some other admin had to come hold his hand and yell at the tuition paying students.

Ah, here it is. It was CalArts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0vTVWyY47s

Would you prefer the harsh unpopular truth of Erich Schmidt, or a sweet (unintentional)lie of Wozniak?

Because a lot of resentment people have later in life for career choices and failures in their adulthood are based on advice from their youth given from out of touch councilors and boomers who told them them sweet lies like "you can be anything you want to be if you just work hard and apply yourselves, the world is your oyster, etc", which turned out to be BS once their rubber hits the brutal road of the present day competitive jobs market, and the way the government backed system rewards asset ownership over labor, meaning a wrong choice here makes the difference between a homeowner or not.

The housing and tech jobs market today isn't the one Woz had in the 1970s in the bay area. There's a big chance his way of thinking that got him to be the cofounder and CTO of Apple back then would get him chewed out and spit out in the jobs market of today, just like how famous FOSS devs of tools that Google use internally couldn't even get past the resume screen at Google to get an interview. Same how I love my parents and they love me, but their out of touch career and life advice did more harm than good to me, even if that's not what they intended. Just like Woz, they're not malicious, but the world is much harsher today and moves faster than what older people who had it easier in their day can comprehend, so you have to take their advice with a generous portion of salt.

Ultimately just like councilors and boomers, it costs Woz nothing to BS young people with speeches filled with idealistic hopes and dreams that sound good and get cheers, since his set for life financially, only doing computing today as a hobby for fun, but he's not gonna be the one sending resumes looking for jobs based on his own advice, dealing with 7 stage interviews, and then wondering why he's getting rejections and how he's gonna afford rent.

As a Embedded programmer and HW tinkerer, I hate Schmidt and I like Woz, as people I mean, but I'd rather base my important life choices that affect my ability to get a job and pay rent on harsh truths from successful business sharks that I hate, rather than nice sounding but broken fallacies from people I respect. I'm old enough to have lived through this once, and if I were to have the chance to go back and try again, I definitely would pick the other side this time simply based on the fact that the people who did pick the ugly pragmatic side rather than the idealistic side, pulled out ahead, and they always will because that's what the world rewards.

It's not that hard to "read the room" when you're a humanist, and not a sociopathic tech CEO... you just speak your mind, and you realize that your fellow humans are onboard with you

Where's a link to the actual speech? There's no link in the article. Surely you saw the speech to comment how strong of a public speaker he is, and it wasn't based off this one line right?

I'm sorry but that one-liner is reddit level cringe. I want to see the actual speech and more of what he said rather than one line.

> They (we) have to believe human brains still have value and find a way out; for otherwise there'd be no point to try anymore.

Our value isn't predicated on our utility. The simple fact that we are sentient beings, capable of joy and suffering, gives us value. This is why we continue to support and care for the elderly and the disabled - we value them regardless of any practical utility we may derive from them.

If you go through life believing that your value depends on your practical utility, then things like AI are an incredibly scary existential threat. But denial is not a healthy way to cope with this threat. The solution is to recognize the value inherent in us as humans, and to demand public policies that reflect this fact.

Blame Dario, guy has been building something great, while selling snake oil.

Having great tools means more impressive solutions, not fewer blacksmiths.

No AI company is addressing the elephant in the room that you need someone experienced constantly monitoring any agentic workflows. This means that the cost savings of agents are a myth.

My company actually did an internal study of agent usage for coding and found it only improved productivity by 10-20%, basically on the same level as good code templates or an autocomplete.

I don't believe there will ever be any artificial intelligence, not with Markov chains (next token prediction), not otherwise. Especially not now when the current ML hype is already winding down. And yes this is a matter of belief since I don't think any science precludes agi from existing nor is there any reason to be sure it could someday materialize. I honestly would rather believe societal collapse hits us before agi can even be theorized.

Woz is a different kind of geek, appreciates the craft, and can sort out the cruft out of it.

AI will be there, but it'll transform. When I say I don't use AI (i.e. LLMs, chat interfaces, agents and "autocomplete") for coding, research and whatnot, people label me as a luddite. The fact is I know how to use them. I test them from time to time. Occasionally these tools help. More often they hinder.

"Resistance is futile, hand your brain over!" is a hype filled dystopian fatalism noting that future is inevitable. It's inevitable. You can use this correctly, and we don't got back to our senses to understand how to use this correctly and efficiently.

We are just cooking our planet right now, with heat, poisoned water and slop.

Yes! We need them to have hope, but hopefully there can be substance behind it, otherwise it's like when the Hitler Youth got those badges before Hitler killed himself. In the sense that we are awarding people medals when their future is bleak

This too shall pass. Among my software engineering friend group bubble: Every single individual (~12 of us) are actively and seriously tokenmaxing. We have middle-managers who have been given an AI mandate, upper-managers saying "uhh...maybe that brush stroke was too broad" when they look at the bill every month, and zero people in that chain have the authority or even ability to roll it back. This week one of my friends cobbled together an agent that runs in an infinite loop, grabs whatever song they're actively listening to on Spotify, writes it in a file, then instructs the agent to emit tokens for 2-3 minutes on what that song and previous songs that day might mean for that person's mental state, like a little music-based diary. Repeat, run all day, 24/7. Kinda cool. But its just a way to use tokens, because the first thing all these AI labs built was a good coding model, and the second thing they built was a dashboard for admins to track how much their users are using the good coding model.

A TON of companies are getting looted by the AI labs and AI users. Many will not survive. I think Meta will be one of them (a shell of their former selves by 2030). The ones who survive to thrive in the 2030s will be the ones that are relentlessly focused on their customers and products, not the process. If you don't regularly hear both "AI would be awesome for that" and "actually AI probably won't be good for that", your company won't make it. You'll either get lapped by the companies who find the strong use-cases, or you'll get looted by infinite and aimless tokenmaxing. The path through the middle is far more narrow than most companies realize, and some major, major companies are waking up to that harsh reality; for some, too late.

It may be useful outside the current tech rat race. One possibility is that a decade of openly user-hostile business decisions will reach their logical conclusion even faster, and those that haven’t fried our brains with CC may be in a position to pick up customers from these behemoths as they disintegrate.

It is also possible to walk away from tech. To stop chasing the demands of anything for a buck and focus on something real.

I work in infrastructure (backups, networking etc) and no longer in software. I just don't see llms being that useful right now. If I have a problem and ask an LLM the answer is either fabricated or useless, rarely does it know what it's talking about. And yes I know how to describe the problem so that it has a chance to give an useful answer.

Also even with agents, you can't just try and error your way out of some (most) of the problems I encounter without doing harm if the solution fails.

Might be different if used for infrastructure as code or ansible or some such. That I can see.

Companies that use AI well will replace the companies that use AI badly. There is no world in which AI is not used extensively in all employment going forward.

> internal memo requiring all code to be produced from prompts

That is absolutely insane. Thing is I can honestly believe that it happens, which makes it even more insane.

It’s not like code base written by developers before AI were manageable. The term tech debt was there way before AI coding, and was mainly due to changes made by developers.

I see the point of your argument when this is done by inexperienced developers, as they wouldn’t know what’s happening but for those who knows and guide what has to be done, I don’t see much difference. It’s about understanding the outcome, and evaluating the risk.

The kids are smarter than many of us think. We owe to them a world where they can feel hope and see a future. But much of the AI hype is built around declaring how dangerous and futile everything is.

The students cheering Woz is not about truth but about hope.

Woz isn't some kind of monk. He enjoys his tech toys that he can only afford because he's rich. He's just bad at managing his money and lost a lot of it through multiple divorces.

As a recent graduate, both headlines read as plausible and non-contradictory. Students right now are faced with two things:

1. a machine that can do the things asked of them faster, more accurately, and higher quality.

2. the threat that that machine completely or mostly invalidates their education, in particular for getting an entry-level job because they don't exist anymore.

The former headline is a result of point 1 and the latter point 2. They're using it not because they think "it's good, actually" but because they're resigning themselves to their education not mattering for their professional development and taking the easy path. That breeds the resentment that you see with "students are anti-AI".

If some students use LLMs to do tasks faster and at higher quality, that changes the grading curve, so everybody else might have no choice but to do so as well if they want to graduate. It's the "and yet you participate in society" meme.

I don't think those two things are mutually exclusive. Good chance that a few students that cheated or at the least used AI in a major capacity to graduate, still booed when that former Google CEO brought up AI at the graduation speech. Being pro AI when it benefits them and anti AI when it doesn't is just human nature. I'm being a little reductive here though.

> Recently there was a flood of articles about "students are using AI to cheat". Now there's a flood of articles about "students are anti AI".

Sure, both are true, although I think you'll find that they differentiate between "cheating" on their math homework by using AI, and kids who are cheating on exams by sneaking in a smartphone and giving a photo of the problem to ChatGPT.

As far as homework goes, AI is just the new Google, useful perhaps, but hardly outweighing all the anxiety of their future being taken away by AI, or all the societal enshittification by AI that they see all around them.

In case it gets edited, the title of the HN submission is "Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence".

I laughed when I read this, imagining a weird act of self-congratulation in front of a silent audience.

I wonder if other languages are less ambiguous about this. "Steve Wozniak cheered" makes it sound like he did the cheering. But the practice of removing verbs from headlines makes this more ambiguous. "Car collides with bridge" is not a grammatically correct sentence but a perfectly normal headline.

But in this case, "Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI" _is_ a grammatically correct sentence, which means that Wozniak did the cheering, which may be the source of confusion. Or, perhaps it means not that he vocally cheered, but was cheered up emotionally.

Not to me... Maybe a ESL thing

How many people from that era still exist at Apple to be holding a grudge like that? Genuinely curious, since it's been a very long time since he was last involved at Apple.

I worked at apple a couple decades ago. He isn't loathed so much as acknowledged as being uncontrollable. Internally at Apple it is very strict in terms of what you can say and do, like being in a communist country where you never go against Dear Leader. Woz speaks his mind and that is ultimately why he left early on. He also has a conscience and cares about people, something Apple does a great job of pretending to do.

Tim Cook Apple with Palo Alto money and constant surveillance does not jibe with jovial intellectual prankster.. do tell

Do tell me how young people can help with AI shaping, as this just sounds like "how cows can help shape the meat industry"

I wonder how Steve Jobs would've reacted to this GenAI boom. He constantly talked about the intersection of Humanities and tech, as well as fostering creativity by pushing people to their limits (for the better or worse), so I don't think he'd be one of those CEOs that's first in line to get rid of human workers as much as possible. Or maybe he would be and I'm just giving him too much credit.

On an unrelated note, I haven't used an Iphone since 2018 and I wonder if Siri has gotten any better. I do see "Apple Intelligence" being advertised everywhere and besides AI summaries of texts on the notifications bar I haven't seen anything to understand what Apple Intelligence actually means.

There seems to be a mental shift that happens around 30-50 (depending on the person) where the mindset changes from "How can I learn and contribute to world?" to "How can I make the world work the way I want?" and it's very noticeable in the public speaking engagements these people do, as this mindset seems to blend with all their other thoughts and feelings.

Luckily, this doesn't seem to happen to everyone, especially if you aren't a public figure, a billionaire nor a successful startup founder, but that particular combination seems to make it extra likely you experience this transformation.

I was fortunate to get to spend time with woz when I worked at Apple. He's the type of person who is practically silent during a meeting. Then, towards the end, he spoke up and would literally solve the problem we'd been struggling with the entire time.

He's one of the nicest, most down-to-earth people I've ever worked with.

It's a real shame there are no many people like Woz in the bay area

I described a bit of this in reply to thinkingemote, but to:

> And upon graduation when they're told that it's their future they don't like it?

They aren't being told it's their future. They're being told they have no future because AI will remove the world's dependence on them (well, the professional side of it at least).

Seems more like the issue is nuance and consideration or not. One side is saying that it is possible to do things that have value using LLMs. The other side is pointing out that this technology has increasing costs, is requiring data centers that have strongly negative environmental, social, and economic impacts, is promoting rampant, industrialized theft of intellectual property, is inserting errors, hallucinations, and psychotic ideas into all usage, and is at a number of levels doing damage to kids, elders, and professionals who are exposed.

If they did use it then maybe in hindsight they regret it, realize they didn't learn much, realize the temptation to cheat yourself will always be there and that's not a good thing.

My experience as a parent is that gen alpha took note of the fact that their parents being on their phones means less attention, so it's possible they'll have a more sober view of the entire thing.

Plutonians are busy making circular stock deals with ceresians.

I don't know what to say. I may not like it, you may not think it's actually intelligent, you may not think it's going to change the world - but how can you not see that this is revolutionary?

There's a live version of this video but it looks completely different: https://www.youtube.com/live/LHEW8Da5550?si=ZBEesfArnK4HSD1R...

Is the short AI generated? This is confusing.

The entire commencement program is here. Woz speaks at around the 42-minute mark.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4sSfADusN40

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48234320

The point of a graduation speech like this is to get students hyped up about themselves and their future. Surely you see the merit in, amongst a backdrop of a horrible job market, telling students that they have, inherent in them, the stuff of greatness, just as people did (checks watch) 3 years ago before vibe coding?

> Cope bias is powerful.

Have you stopped to consider whether this statement might be more applicable to yourself? "Myopic lies" is at the very least highly exaggerated phrasing, if not itself myopic and a false characterization. If it's not too uncomfortable for you, some honest introspection might be worthwhile.

Would you be excited about technology when it appears based on their stated intentions and revealed track record over the past 15 years of your young life that those driving it fully intend to use it to disenfranchise you further, not empower you?

The reality of the world faced by today's 21 year old college grad is completely unlike the world graduates went into 20 years ago.

> But now we can’t even get them excited about technology?

> What have we done?

Arguably this transition happened a lot earlier; the first half of the 20th century was the time for pure techno-optimism, then somewhere between nuclear weapons, global warming, and reporting like The Silent Spring people realized that there were downsides. Medicine had its peak with antibiotics, the edge blunted by the thalidomide disaster, and now sits in a complex web of paranoia and propaganda.

It's not enough for technology to be "cool" in an apolitical vacuum. People have to believe that there will be benefits for them. And the big pitch from the AI companies is the "great replacement" of all white collar jobs with AI. No wonder they're upset.

Modernity is soulless for the most part. Social media, the 24/7 news cycle, unaccountable mega-corps, the list goes on. I suspect people are tired of the constant psychic damage you endure for just trying to exist in 2026.

Hopefully people are understanding that technology, no matter how cool, does not exist in a vacuum. Technology is defined by who controls it, how it’s used, and what power it enables them to wield. Those concerns are far more important to society than how neat the tech is.

An obvious example is nuclear weapons. Amazing science, incredible engineering, awe-inspiring power. But I doubt you would make the same critiques of people who were anxious about the world they create. A world in which MAD exists is fundamentally different than one where it doesn’t.

Regarding your grandfather, it’s a pretty well-supported hypothesis that younger generations are less happy and more depressed because of technology from the very industry pushing AI onto them! Why should you expect them to be excited about a new world-changing tool from the same set of companies that brought them an infinite doom-scrolling feed of self-doubt, the increased polarization of politics, the viral spread of conspiracy theories, and a higher rate of youth and teen suicide than ever before?

Technology isn’t fundamentally good or bad, but it can have very negative impacts on society. It seems like people are catching on to that fact.

I have noticed a certain personality gloms onto AI and unlike other technologies, it is so easy old people and the technologically illiterate can do it! In fact, old people and morons seem to love it. And it gets annoying really fast. The same people who were web 3, crypto, block chain, nft bros are the biggest supporters of AI. Utility or not when scammy people act the same way as they did for all the other tech trends it is a massive turnoff. I am tired of seeing AI writing and AI images, and instead of people talking about how we are going to use AI to make people’s lives better the only thing people can talk about is how much money some tech bros are going to make and how everyone else is going to lose their jobs because we won’t need them anymore. And your idiot friend from HS has an awesome business idea, which amounts to AI art on a t shirt or AI youtube videos and just needs you to be in on it with them to actually do the work like they are selling Amway.

I think the problem AI has is after the novelty wears off, and if you are not using it for code specifically, it is mostly just a fancy search engine that the dumbest person you know uses to validate their idiocy.

So, yeah, I can see why the kids are over it.

No, young people do not have to be optimistic. They have to think with their own brain, and form their own opinions.

People in the 1980s were optimistic in technology because they didn’t have the chance to see the social upheaval that youth in the 2020s have grown with. Only a complete idiot would remain steadfastly optimistic after seeing what the rise of the internet, social media and mass surveillance has done in the name of this promised technological utopia. Only the sociopath would tell a young person to happily embrace AI in the worst economy in decades while headlines about AI-related job losses are everyday news.

Blind faith in anything leads to terrible outcomes, and that includes technology.

I was inspired by technology when I was young, but not anymore. When I was young it felt like the tech industry was about empowering human beings - Steve Jobs liked to say that a computer was like a bicycle for the mind. Today it feels like the tech industry is about wonton destruction ("move fast and break things") for the purposes of making a tiny number of people fantastically wealthy.

I'm aware that Steve Jobs was a jerk, but I cannot imagine him complaining about how he had to miss some great parties so he could spend the weekend taking food and medicine away from the world's poorest children (as Elon Musk did during his DOGE phase). The ethos was just completely different.

If you’re still writing things like this you are stupid or willfully ignorant. All the boomers at work expose similar opinions and it’s because when the younger generation tries to explain why they feel this way, the boomers stick their fingers in their ears and start yelling.

People are not excited because those companies blatantly disgregard the law, exploit and fuck people over and try to concentrate as much power as possible in their hands. Young people are not stupid, they can see that the increasing wealth gap makes their lives suck more. And they also understand that AI is a hypercapitalistic tool, that, if left unchecked, will only accelerate this trend.

So yes, that kind of curbs the enthusiasm, doesn't it?

Are you seriously going to compare AI with shoes?

My car runs faster than any human. Therefore exercise is a waste of time.

I haven't read the study, but I wonder if one reason comprehension went down was because of over-reliance on AI among students.

Ah studies, those things nobody ever cares to reproduce.

At least you provided a source! Er… wait, you didn’t even tell us your laptop model, describe the paper other than in terms of token size, or where these well rested graduate students (read: unicorns) hide from the rest of the world.

Give it a bit more effort next time.