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echelon 7 hours ago

Good thing the market is bigger than just you.

I've been an indie filmmaker since I was a teenager. Seedance 2.0 and all of the image and video models are such an amazing gift to use. The things you can push these models to do are incredible. I have a full VFX workbench. I can rotoscope, I can pull off effects shots. I can even use these things to articulate non-shotlist things for meetings. It's incredible. The keyboard gave everyone a "bicycle of the mind", now everyone can visually express themselves if they try.

I've professionally been a systems engineer. Five/six nines reliable services that move billions of dollars, etc. I have fallen in love with coding models. I am getting so much more work done that I'm launching easily three times what I did prior to AI tooling. The job we're all in is to provide value - these models are the next generation of compilers. We're working at higher and higher levels of abstraction, and it's brilliant. For those of us who can operate at all of the levels, it's a super power.

I will not go back to pre-AI times. I want to see what things are like in 10, 20 years. When we have at-home Michelin star robot chefs, where our cars can drive us to the beach overnight so we wake up to sunrise on the coast, where I can have an idea for a new take on a music player tagging algorithm and just build that without it consuming weeks of my time.

This is the most excited about tech I've ever been. This is so much better than smartphone incrementalism and stupid web platforms.

Stop grandpa-ing and shaking your fist at clouds. This is literally the jetpack future we were promised growing up. It's the coolest thing since the internet.

an0malous 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Can you share something you’ve made with AI?

I’m an AI hater and the way you describe your uses sounds cool to me and like what I imagined when I was an AI optimist in the early days. The problem is that most of what it produces is still slop, the images, videos, music, and code it generates are definitely impressive but there’s something qualitatively worse about them that I can only describe as a lack of soul. Over time in a codebase, these tools create a complete mess of complexity. Those AI generated Coca Cola ads were terrible, it was just a series of cool shots with no story. The music sounds good and interesting but it’s just missing something. The writing is technically good but the voice sounds inauthentic and there’s never anything that unique or insightful in it.

I think it’ll get better though and we’ll find ways to collaborate with it that make the most of the human and AI abilities, but it seems so overhyped right now.

7 hours ago | parent [-]
[deleted]
munificent 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> The keyboard gave everyone a "bicycle of the mind", now everyone can visually express themselves if they try.

Right, everyone can. So now your film-making vision is simply one infinitesimally small slice of the pie that every viewer is eating. Yes, you can make a movie by yourself. Likely no one will watch it because they're too busy watching other movies made just as cheaply but by companies with marketing budgets.

> I am getting so much more work done that I'm launching easily three times what I did prior to AI tooling.

Great. Have you ever once in your life had a real conversation with a normal person where they expressed, "Man, you know what? I wish I had way more apps on my phone."

Like, yes, there is demand for software that fills unique niches, but really we are reaching saturation.

> When we have at-home Michelin star robot chefs

Eating the world's best meal, alone, while staring at your phone.

> where our cars can drive us to the beach overnight so we wake up to sunrise on the coast

This part sounds nice. Hopefully you can find parking.

> where I can have an idea for a new take on a music player tagging algorithm and just build that without it consuming weeks of my time.

Except you don't have a music player to put that algorithm in because all of the music players are closed source. You can write an open source one (or contribute to an existing one), but those all require local libraries of music, which almost no one has. Because it's not about the software, it's about the access to content.

But, really, why even bother tagging music in the first place? Just treat the tags as prompts and generate an infinite stream of music catered exactly to your mood, on demand.

I get where you're coming from. AI is a massive force multiplier for producing content. But content isn't the point of life.

The future that AI builds is one of perfect solitary meaningless hedonism. Every itch scratched, every base desire satisfied. But there is a hollow void at the center of that. Even a pet dog will lose its mind when given endless food, treats, and toys if it doesn't have an actual person to play with, and I'd like to believe we are somewhat more cognitively sophisticated than dogs.

Think back on the best meals you've ever had. I've had some very good ones. Some were memorable because of the quality of the food. But the memories of meals I hold most dear were dinners I made myself for family, not-very-good cookies my young daughter baked for me, meals shared with friends while travelling, crappy hot dogs cooked over a campfire.

It's human connection that brings us the most lasting joy, and AI is antithetical to it.

simonw 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Hopefully you can find parking.

One of the supposed benefits of true self driving cars is that you never have to find parking near where you're going ever again. Get out, send your car off to park somewhere 5 miles away.

spongebobstoes 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

discovery has always been the problem with art. many people are instrinsically motivated to create, that's why we have so much art

AI is orthogonal to human connection. people like people

munificent 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> AI is orthogonal to human connection.

No two things are truly orthogonal when you have to spend time to use either of them. An hour conversing with ChatGPT is an hour of your life unavailable for talking to a human.

Timon3 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

And now discovery is becoming exponentially harder, because every niche can get flooded with AI slop by companies trying to extract profits from real people's creativity.

Even if you use these tools to create something amazing, what keeps hundreds of variations "inspired by, but totally not copied" of your creative work from popping up? As these models get cheaper and more powerful, this issue will only get worse and worse.

spongebobstoes 6 hours ago | parent [-]

this is the same argument against the printing press, photography, home printers, youtube, etc

it is a bad argument. more accessible tools consistently lead to more creation in a positive way

Timon3 4 hours ago | parent [-]

There is a fundamental difference between those technologies and generative AI. I ask again: what stops companies from creating literally dozens, hundreds or thousands of copies of any creative work you publish? Why shouldn't they create AI artists that copy small artists in a "legally distinct" manner, and at a volume that drowns them out?

As these models get better and better, the only limiting factor is the available compute. Meanwhile data centers are being built like there's no tomorrow.

devmor 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Okay, now produce something meaningfully more appealing than everyone else with the same tools - when you do that, then you have the start of a leg to stand on to claim that it’s worth the cost to everyone.

toomuchtodo 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Enjoy it until the subsidies end and the economics catch up. You can afford it now with broad subsidies, but likely not the true cost.

https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/06/24/ai-coding-a...

https://mimetiq.substack.com/p/the-tokenmaxxing-hangover

https://fortune.com/2026/05/28/tokenmaxxing-is-dead-companie...

https://www.axios.com/2026/05/28/ai-spending-roi-enterprise-...

https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/article/big-techs-27-trill...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrJzjC4kKCY

AWTom 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The cost argument is wrong. Compare Gemini 2.5 Pro to Gemma 4 31B.

Released only 10 months later, a tiny open-weights model outperforms what was once SOTA. Fable and 5.6 Sol will be outperformed by laptop-class models next year.

giantrobot 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Except no one will be able to afford those laptops. The hyperscalers will buy up literally all the RAM and high power GPUs. So you'll be stuck with 8GB of unified memory on anything affordable. A laptop of better capability will cost 50% more than today (at least). That won't be your biggest problem because some C-suite goon with stars in their eyes laid you off because of AI.

Ethee 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If you only ever want frontier model performance then sure, you have to pay to play. But as it is now with open models, some of which I can even run from my gaming PC at home, we're only about 6 months behind frontier performance. Even when the money starts drying up for those at the forefront, the genie is out of the bottle.

toomuchtodo 7 hours ago | parent [-]

And yet, the productivity increases with existing models are meh (ie not 0 but certainly not worth what is being spent) based on the data. Enjoy the tulips while they bloom.

https://www.bok.or.kr/eng/bbs/B0000354/view.do?nttId=1009840...

https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/9/ai-intensifies-work/

AI Doesn't Reduce Work–It Intensifies It - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46955703 - February 2026 (306 comments)

https://hbr.org/2026/02/ai-doesnt-reduce-work-it-intensifies...

AI Doesn't Reduce Work–It Intensifies It - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46945755 - February 2026 (172 comments)

AI-generated “workslop” is destroying productivity? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45337253 - September 2025 (171 comments)

Seven Myths about AI and Productivity: What the Evidence Really Says - https://cmr.berkeley.edu/2025/10/seven-myths-about-ai-and-pr... - October 16th, 2025 ("Despite widespread enthusiasm for generative AI, empirical evidence reveals inconsistent productivity impacts contradicting popular assumptions. Based on recent meta-analyses and systematic reviews, we debunk seven pervasive myths about AI's workplace benefits. AI's productivity gains are highly context-dependent, varying significantly by user skill level and task complexity. Contrary to expectations, human-AI collaboration often underperforms either agent working independently, except in creative tasks. While AI can accelerate individual work, meta-analytic evidence finds no robust relationship between AI adoption and aggregate productivity gains. We call for research on context-specific organizational deployment strategies to capture genuine value.")

The GenAI Divide: State of AI in Business 2025 - https://www.artificialintelligence-news.com/wp-content/uploa... - July 2025

("extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence")

Ethee 7 hours ago | parent [-]

Productivity is typically a broader scale measure against the economy. I 100% agree that the shoehorned adoption of AI into general company processes is more of a negative than a positive. Most people here would agree that AI has only really affected productivity positively in the past 6 months-1 year. So obviously there wont be much general uplift across all industries yet, and obviously that would mean there's not really enough data to go off of empirically yet.

Beyond data and vibes though, I can't think of a single technology in human history that had a forced adoption quite like AI does. To the point where it should be pretty obvious to all of us that a large group of people are going to push back and be unhappy that it's disrupting their work. That doesn't mean that the people who actually like the technology wont find more productivity with it though. It's just when measured against a sea of forced adopters you'll never find a general uplifting trend. People typically don't like change.

toomuchtodo 6 hours ago | parent [-]

With the most politeness I can muster, show me the data. “In God we trust. All others must bring data.” If the data doesn't exist supporting the productivity improvement assertion, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

5 hours ago | parent [-]
[deleted]
nekusar 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

And that's why I pivoted at the beginning of this year to LocalLLMs.

I can afford the hardware I already have. And I can run jobs on it as I see fit. Sure, its slower than the corpo LLMs, but we're already seeing lying, silent downgrading, and advertisements, even when paying for tokens.

When your systems goes tits up or priced out, mine will still work.

jplusequalt 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>Stop grandpa-ing and shaking your fist at clouds.

God forbid people have concerns over companies out in the open talking about replacing their jobs with AI.

echelon 6 hours ago | parent [-]

China is going to mow us over because we're shooting ourselves in the face.

We frankly deserve it.

You won't have any jobs in that scenario either.

jplusequalt 6 hours ago | parent [-]

>China is going to mow us over because we're shooting ourselves in the face.

The difference is that I have more faith in China to prevent mass unemployment than I do in the US.

Jtsummers 6 hours ago | parent [-]

> The difference is that I have more faith in China to prevent mass unemployment than I do in the US.

I wouldn't. They'll just handle it differently than we would in the US.

https://tradingeconomics.com/china/unemployment-rate - It's around 5% per this (and some other sources I found, just linking the one). The population being around 1.4 billion people, that means around 70 million unemployed. That is already mass unemployment despite having a low rate of unemployment across their national population. And that's before getting to their youth unemployment rate which is around 15%, which sets them up poorly for the future.

BigTTYGothGF 6 hours ago | parent [-]

"Mass unemployment" can't be based on raw numbers instead of rate, as otherwise no small country could have it.

Jtsummers 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Alright, what's the threshold? Is the 15% youth unemployment enough to indicate mass unemployment within that demographic at least?

darksim905 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[flagged]

echelon 7 hours ago | parent [-]

I am really starting to dislike how half of the Hacker News community are behaving.

This depressing miasma of pessimism is taking over, and it's absolute garbage.

I don't think many of you like tech as much as you like the current punch card phase of it. You're content to live and die in the world as it is now and don't want to see it transform into something dramatically more capable.

The point isn't to write C++ and Python until you retire. That was never the point. The point is to reshape the world into something more useful to humans, to cure diseases, to bring about limitless happiness and entertainment, and to satisfy everyone's needs.

It's disappointing to see so many of you bitten with this bug.

It feels like the chicken and eagle parable, with many of you content to stare at the ground because that's where you believe you belong.

We've got alien intelligent sand and it's transforming the whole world. I think it's the most exciting thing that has ever happened to us.

edit: flag, flag, flag. Nothing is 'safe'.

This is not the hacker ethos.

This is not the entrepreneur ethos.

darksim905 39 minutes ago | parent [-]

Unrelated but I'm curious about how someone like you and your opinion and belief on UBI, unions for computer security people, and how this alien intelligence future will look like if most people are out of work and can't support themselves with an administration that doesn't care to support the people living on borrowed time.

I get it, eventually the things industrialized and automated industries that us geeks helped bring forth with widgets in the manufacturing world was eventually going to happen to our own industry too. But the way it's being done, with private equity destroying everything we used to hold sacred, it just isn't it, my dude.