The narrative is constantly about "when AGI arrives." We're gonna have UBI, it's gonna solve human labor, it's gonna produce better and more music, cinema, art, and literature than all of human history before it. The AI bros from Altman all the way down to the YouTube commenter say anything to keep the conversation off of the present. It's always the pie in the sky that is perennially almost here. The progress is happening "so fast." Next model update we're all gonna get luxury space communism.

AI is here. We've had a good long look at what it does and what it's used for, and it's not going to be something else. This is what it's for. It's for copyright washing other people's work (shitily). It's for astroturfing social media with product placement comments. It's for presidents to make videos of themselves dropping poop on protestors from airplanes. It's for souless "creators" to earn updoots from other bots for their "street photography" generated images of neon lights on puddles in Tokyo. It's rube goldberg automations that almost always accomplish nothing. It's fanatics claiming that it has multiplied their productivity by some incredible factor, but never showing the receipts, or when they do it's always something trivial like a calorie counter app.

This is it. This is the AI we've heard so much about. I'd say I can't wait for the hype to end, but after living through several cycles, I'm almost certain that whatever hype cycle emerges from the IT sector next will be even worse.

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lukan 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Good start, but you lost me with the claim AI is useless hype.

I am curious, your type seems to become a rare species - I suppose you have never worked with a modern coding agent recently?

Otherwise you have noticed also here many, if not the majority expressing they rarely if ever write code anymore?

If it is a hype, then one that produces lots of working code. Way faster than I can type it. And I am fast.

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eloisius 3 hours ago | parent [-]

> If it is a hype, then one that produces lots of working code. Way faster than I can type it. And I am fast.

I covered that:

> It's fanatics claiming that it has multiplied their productivity by some incredible factor, but never showing the receipts, or when they do it's always something trivial like a calorie counter app.

There is no shortage of "working code" out there. GitHub is reportedly falling over from all the working code. Where's your business? Who's using it? Why aren't products better yet? It's a mirage. Your "working code" is the same thing as gen-AI "street photography" images. No one wants to see them, yet it's pumped out in vast enough amounts that it's choking the spaces that are ostensible for photography. The low quality, low investment nature of it excites the lazy wanna-bes who leave a trail of half-baked, soon-forgotten detritus behind them.

Show us the receipts.

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mondrian 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

You’re making solid points but I do think that, at least, programming is changing to be around AI generation. Even if not much has changed in terms of visible output. AI may add some marginal GDP growth, nothing explosive. Switching from file cabinets to computers didn’t result in face melting productivity gains despite totally retooling how information flows through a business.

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eloisius an hour ago | parent [-]

I don't disagree that it is useful. I, personally use it ping-pong coding problems before I break ground (although I never let opencode out of plan mode). It's marginally better than the plain old internet was for getting help before Google allowed SEO to ruin it, and I believe we're watching that edge get cannibalized in realtime as more and more LLM content ends up in the sources that LLMs synthesize in their answers.

If there are any face-melting characteristics to this whole thing it's how much money has been poured into it.

	▲	lukan an hour ago \| parent [-]
		" It's marginally better than the plain old internet was for getting help" Ok, so as an example, I have a old 2D game of mine. Custom written voxel engine for a shooter game with completely destroyable world. Works great, but 2D. I always dreamed of making it 3D, but never found the time. It would have been a huuuge effort doing it on my own. Some days ago I pointed fable at the engine and basically said, make it 3D. And it did. Took some hours. Not by copying other voxel engines, but by making my engine 3D. (I know because I know there is no game on the market like this) So yes, I knew the domain and thought long and hard about it and the core is handwritten and battle tested and that probably helped steering it in the right direction. But I did not wrote a single line of this new code. And it works awesome. This is not what I call marginally improvement. But you do you.

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lukan 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Sorry, I don't feel the need to proof anything to you. Was trying to have a interesting conversation.

And I mean no wonder github is drowning in garbage, now that anyone can "code"

"The low quality, low investment nature of it excites the lazy wanna-bes who leave a trail of half-baked, soon-forgotten detritus behind them."

But would you also call Linus Torvalds a lazy wannabe?