If all of the AI providers just went bankrupt it would be a fairly solid 1 step back, 2 steps forward for humanity.
We weren’t ready for it. And degrading world conditions and crazy leadership make it scary to be a civilian in a world with highly capable AI. One that will soon contain AI-powered terrestrial robots akin to something out of Terminator (<2 years).
Besides, without AI we’d probably invest in net positive short term objectives that redistribute wealth, like clean tech.
(Extremely unpopular opinion because at least half or more of HN are probably working in AI)
Working in "AI" was much more fun before the current hype cycle...
It's definitely turned into another Eternal September of everyone and their brother pretending they've worked in AI for all of human history. I would welcome another long winter
I upvoted you, and mostly agree with you, but: as much as I love using strong small local models sometimes a commercial 'frontier' model is very useful (for me).
I deleted my free OpenAI account (I paid for it until a year ago) and just started a $20/month Anthropic account. My one-year prepaid Gemini account will expire in two months and I will decide then to keep one of Anthropic or Gemini.
Once again: I agree that super-spending on super scaler data centers is a net negative for humanity. For me it is not a matter of price: I am happy paying $20/month and only using energy guzzling models occasionally when I really need them. Sort of like recycling to lesson our burden on the environment: try to minimize AI energy and resource use, but still get work done.
EDIT: we can also use LLMs more efficiently: build software composed of small well tested libraries. It is more energy efficient to write and debug little 200 line libraries than soaking up large projects in your context. Also, working on small composable libraries works better with smaller open models like qwen3.5:35b.
It's not that we are all fans of AI, it's that it's career suicide to ignore AI. If AI were gone for everybody that might be a net positive, but if it exists, it needs to get into the hands of as many as possible else wealth and power will concentrate even greater than it is now.
I’ll admit when it first came out I hated the Gemini summary. It hallucinated a lot. Back then it was useless.
But now I don’t mind it: it’s lightning fast (for an LLM capable of mid level reasoning), but more importantly unlimited and free. And it puts search results alongside the summary so I can ignore it if I like. These days I probably use it on around 90% of searches.
I’m convinced all these blog posts on AI productivity are some kind of high level propaganda trying to create a Folie à deux that AI is much better than it is.
The worst part is that it’s so convincing: not only does everyone who can’t make it work feel gaslit about it, but some people even pretend that it works for them so they don’t feel like they’re missing out.
I remember the last time this happened and people were convinced (for like 2 years) that a gif of an ape could somehow be owned and was worth millions of dollars.
It certainly feels like a lot of the crypto bros have moved on to being AI bros.
I'm chalking my poor experience to being too cheap to pay $200 a month for Claude Max 20x so I can run the multiple agents that need to supervise each other.
Yes, and I’m convinced AI companies either pay or brainwash these people to put out blog posts like this to spread the idea that it actually works. It doesn’t.
I’m not sure, the moment I opened the page there was something unusually satisfying about the buttons (that had bothered me about shadcn), so I guess there is some method to the madness.
Lexus CT200h is one of the best interiors ever designed. The design language was tactile: every single button or control had a different action or feel.
There’s a roughly 7 inch above the vents that flips up whenever the car is off, but using the screen is optional. The screen is up near the road, and it’s very safe to use. There’s a small joystick to move the cursor.
CT also has a stateless “springy gear selector” which works the same way as a manual gear selector, but after selecting the gear it springs back, so it’s stateless. It also has tactile blocking for gears you can’t enter yet. It felt extremely satisfying.
CT got a 10/10 from me, like a small aircraft cockpit. Enough knobs and computers to be exciting, but not OTT. Made a hybrid micro hatchback feel exciting.
BMWs interior pre-iPad-glued-to-the-dash is of the same quality. The automatic gear shifter is stateless, by it has an extremely satisfying clunk, buttons and dials for everything. Note that a stateless gear shifter isn't ideal if you ever need to move your car on a dead battery. In a BMW you need to go under the car and screw in a bolt that pushes the parking pall into neutral.
Whoever started this trend has a lot to answer for. It looks tacky as hell and is a technically-inferior solution to just having a dock that would let a customer bring their own tablet. It's truly the worst of both worlds and a seemingly pervasive problem across multiple manufacturers in the automotive design space.
You can’t have a dock for the users tablet because, despite appearances, the system is actually safety rated, and rated to temperature Class H (125degC) as well.
This is in contrast to consumer electronics which are not hard realtime, also they would probably melt and catch fire if left inside the car in direct sunlight.
No.. just.. no.
This will be a thing for like 1, maybe 2 years, then people will realise it doesn’t make sense to spend $50K of time per annum to replace a $500/month subscription for a better product.
We weren’t ready for it. And degrading world conditions and crazy leadership make it scary to be a civilian in a world with highly capable AI. One that will soon contain AI-powered terrestrial robots akin to something out of Terminator (<2 years).
Besides, without AI we’d probably invest in net positive short term objectives that redistribute wealth, like clean tech.
(Extremely unpopular opinion because at least half or more of HN are probably working in AI)
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