Why I'm Boycotting AI
177 comments
·March 27, 2025jasode
nightfly
> People keep bringing up the "fake intelligence" vs "real intelligence" argument but it actually doesn't matter.
It matters because you have to keep it in mind when judging its output EVERY TIME. You can't trust it to not tell you to poison yourself, or invent people/things that don't exist, or make up stories about people that _do_ exist.
ghaff
Right. Because people never make statements that are mistaken or even just patently untrue.
benterix
Except that telling someone a lie, especially in professional context, can be completely discrediting, especially whenever trust is crucial. I work with people able to say: "I don't know", "I'm not sure", "Hard to say", "I need to do some extra work to verify this". Working with such people is very efficient because you don't waste context on fact-checking their every utterance.
Can they be wrong? Absolutely, but it's relatively rare. Will they decide to just lie to me? Extremely unlikely, given the stakes.
xigoi
People can be held accountable for making wrong statements.
nightfly
And now we have a machine to channel all those mistakes/lies!
em-bee
but that is not relevant to ad-detecting. the worst ad-detecting can do is false positives, eg detect an ad inside a scene where someone is watching said ad on tv as part of the story or something like that. so your basic point still stands, you have to check if what it detects is really an ad, but beyond that the use of AI for ad-detecting is benign and harmless.
drivingmenuts
If you're having to constantly check the output, seems like it's not much of a stretch just to do the detecting yourself.
ben_w
> You can't trust it to not tell you to poison yourself, or invent people/things that don't exist, or make up stories about people that _do_ exist.
My mum was a big beliver in homeopathy and Bach flower remedies. Kept sneakily dosing me and my dad with one "for memory". She ended up with Alzheimer's just shy of 20 years younger than her mum.
I could name a lot of elected officials over the years that made up stories about people, the hard part is picking one sufficiently uncontrovertial that nobody will object to the example.
What matters is the rate at which these things happen, given AI is now sufficiently competent at presenting as a human to be a problem for those who need to know they're discoursing with a human (job interviews, grading essays, is this video call really with your relative who really needs an emergency payment or is it all fake, political propaganda).
Asraelite
You've completely missed the point of the parent comment. It doesn't matter if it occasionally hallucinates, because there are many use cases where that's okay and you can generate enormous value anyway.
nightfly
I got their point and disagree with it because it's a highly cherrypicked example used to broadly dismiss a real and valid concern
reaperducer
Hallucinate === Lie
eviks
> People keep bringing up the "fake intelligence" vs "real intelligence" argument but it actually doesn't matter.
> What's important is if it is useful.
Except the usefulness expectations almost completely rely on the intelligence (it's right there in the name)! Without this you wouldn't have so much hype&money in this topic. So the complaint is rightfully directed at the core selling point
edanm
Why not just... use the product and see if it's useful? What does it matter what it's called, what does it matter if it's hyped or not, what does it matter if investors are or aren't throwing too much money into it.
You, individually, can try out the product and see if it's useful for you. Many people have done so and found it extremely useful for themselves (myself included).
eviks
Strange question, why would you "just" ignore all the information out there? But then why would you pick this specific products among a million of others? You wouldn't even know about it without the hype!
satisfice
Your analysis assumes that we can readily know if it’s useful. But we often can’t.
Consider these absurdities: “I don’t need to test this new drug before releasing it to market, as long as it is safe and effective!
Or “I don’t need to worry about phishing scams. I can click on any link as long as it is safe.”
Or more to the point: “This food tastes good, so it must be good for me. There’s no need for hygiene and food safety laws.”
I don’t trust LLMs, because I have tested them, and continue to test them, and they are patently unreliable. They can still be useful in a momentary, self-contained way. But my studies have led me to use them only for answers that are easily verified.
_heimdall
> People keep bringing up the "fake intelligence" vs "real intelligence" argument but it actually doesn't matter.
It matters because they called it artificial intelligence. The point I sew people bring up, though, boils down to whether its intelligent at all, not fake vs real. Debating whether "artificial" and "fake" are synonymous would be an odd stance to take, its the "intelligence" part that is the sticking point.
Beyond just the name, it matters because the risk of it going wrong is different. If it is a useful tool but not intelligent, the risk is mainly in how people will use it. That's no different than any technology.
If it is intelligent, the risk is in how it will use itself. It depends on how you want to define intelligence but, at least in my opinion, the ability to determine your own goals and desires is a prerequisite for intelligence. From that view, we can only hope that an AI is aligned with us...and given that we have all but abandoned both the alignment problem and the interpretability problem that doesn't seem likely.
soco
I don't think we have a different usage based on the label "intelligent" or "not intelligent". I would leave this discussion to (armchair) philosophers, and focus on the utility and risks - which are exactly the same, regardless of the label we put on the box, because the products in the box do exist and act in the same way. An automaton with access to the red button can kill humanity just the same as an AI with access to the red button - the problem is giving it access to the red button, which the AI fans often seem all to happy to give.
_heimdall
Words matter though, if one wants to call it intelligence we first have to define what that means then use that definition. Plenty of people have tried to define it and there's isn't one answer for that, but I've never seen anyone argue that intelligence boils down only to computation. To call these tools intelligent means that there is more to it than computation, and that's an important difference.
The risks aren't the same here. Computation, if we want to say these "AI" tools are nothing more than complex math, is only as risky as the person using it.
Intelligence is potentially more dangerous, regardless of what traits you may think is required in addition to computation to make it intelligent.
We don't actually know how these LLMs work at time of inference and we can't analyze the trained dataset to understand why it would give an answer. That's fairly benign under the "its just computation" view, but that black box is full of unknown risk with any definition of intelligence because we don't actually understand how the thing works, why it does what it does, or what it will do next.
null
reaperducer
E.g... create a ad-skipping device that uses so-called "artificial intelligence" to detect commercials during sports broadcasts and automatically mutes the tv.
We had that in 1990's VCRs with no "AI" required. It also fast-forwarded through the commercials during recorded programs.
It worked pretty good on my Panasonic.
jasode
>We had that in 1990's VCRs with no "AI" required. It also fast-forwarded through the commercials during recorded programs.
Yes, I owned several of those Panasonic VCRs with the "Commercial Advance™" feature. Also had a Hitachi VCR with same feature licensed from ADLE. The heuristics used a combination of detecting a fade-to-black screen transitions and higher audio levels of loud commercials. It was simplistic criteria but was "good enough".
The problem is that VCR required 2 separate passes of the VHS tape. The 1st pass was to record the video and then the VCR automatically rewound the tape and the 2nd pass played it back to itself to analyze and mark the ad segments.
That approach does not work to watch live feeds of sports broadcasts. To use the Panasonic VCR approach, one would have to "record" it first -- which defeats the purpose of watching the game live. To instantly block live ads without any waiting, you need technology with more "intelligence" or "smarts" or whatever people want to call it.
My point is that if you hype up a "live-tv-ads-skipping device" with "Unicorn Fairy Dust Technology" -- people won't complain that the company called it "unicorn whatever" -- as long as it actually works and improves their lives. It's when such a device does not work (e.g. Apple Intelligence fiasco) is when the meta analysis and lectures about such as "you know, that device doesn't actually have any horses inside of it with a horn coming out of its head".
reaperducer
That approach does not work to watch live feeds of sports broadcasts
You are correct. However, in your rush to defend your position, you failed to read what I wrote.
The VCR had both the ability to skip recorded commercials, and also mute live commercials.
Read the comment again.
thefz
> What's important is if it is useful.
Precisely why I don't use AI. It is not. I can't trust it bar for some "research this for me" followed by a thorough review of the source material, which is something I am already really adept to do myself, so no value here.
getpokedagain
Is search, even legacy search like a table of contents or the Dewey decimal system not useful? It may not point you to what you want either.
LLMs are an ok iteration on search with up and downsides.
One of the upsides is better contextual hinting from the users input. One of the downsides is that it also makes it trivial to spew out so much bullshit content that soon I doubt it will be able to train on most of the public internet anymore.
benterix
> create a ad-skipping device that uses so-called "artificial intelligence" to detect commercials during sports broadcasts and automatically mutes the tv.
OK so there are a couple of approaches to this issue, e.g. based on audio signal level, constant audio patterns, constant video patterns - and you don't really need to involve machine learning here. You can call it automation and it is perfectly fine.
People have been using the term "AI" in so many contexts for so many things that it's almost meaningless because it's so vague.
ChrisMarshallNY
> I still have not downloaded an AI app of any kind to my phone.
If he has an iPhone, there’s no need to download it. It’s already there.
That said, he has some good points.
Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately), we won’t be able to “opt out,” forever. At some point, ML is bound to become endemic.
It’s like those stupid scan-guns that supermarkets in my area are starting to ask customers to use. They are scan guns that you pick up, as you go in, and scan each purchase. When you check out, you just scan a barcode on the cashier stand, and Bjorn Stronginthearm’s your uncle.
I refuse to use them, as the only reason they exist, is to fire cashiers.
Sooner or later, however, I am unlikely to be able to avoid them.
WmWsjA6B29B4nfk
> I refuse to use them, as the only reason they exist, is to fire cashiers.
That's great, why would I pay someone to do something I absolutely don't mind doing myself, and even save some time while doing it. Do you also still pay someone to pump fuel into your car?
nightfly
> Do you also still pay someone to pump fuel into your car?
Until like two years ago I did (now-rural Oregonian). Now I pay the same for gas, getting it no faster and having to do the work and even sometimes I now even have to deal with loud commercials they put on the pumps. The only upside is it's easier to fill up late at night, yay.
_DeadFred_
I don't voluntarily assume legal risks that come in to play if I make a mistake.
That and I've been in public restrooms and seen how few people wash their hands. I hate having to touch public screens. Touch public screens and then handle my food? Pass.
ryandrake
If I'm expected to start doing something that they formerly paid employees to do, I'd expect to get something in return, like a grocery discount or something.
It's like if restaurants started making you cook your own food. Why even bother to go?
ChrisMarshallNY
> if restaurants started making you cook your own food. Why even bother to go?
Ever been to a Korean steak house?
;)
You pay a fair penny to cook your own food.
ChrisMarshallNY
> Do you also still pay someone to pump fuel into your car?
In my town, you actually have to let them. There's a law. I think it has something to do with smoking morons blowing themselves (and others) up.
Like I said, I do it on a human principle; not because it's not a good idea.
They are annoying, though, because they chirp at you with ads, as you pass items on the shelf.
pixxel
[dead]
whstl
> I refuse to use them, as the only reason they exist, is to fire cashiers.
This reminds me of when the bus company of my hometown transitioned to having a driver + cashier to only having a driver that takes cash. Half of the workforce just gone overnight. Of course the writing was on the wall with electronic ticketing, but still.
It makes me feel I'm part of a "First They Came" situation. Sure maybe these people found other jobs for themselves (or so I tell myself) but still.
nasmorn
This is a strange example because have you heard of the combine harvester. It made, together with other farming machines, useless what 90% of people used to do
_heimdall
The combine wouldn't have been useful without monocropping practices, and those are only possible due to chemical pesticides and herbicides.
I'd point to the poisons we're willing to dump on our fields as the primary reason for so many jobs being replaced. The combine is just what replaced them, not the root cause of why they could be replaced.
whstl
Yeah, I happen to own washing machine AND a dishwasher (luxury!), so I totally understand.
My point is that it's still weird seeing people getting fired.
Gigachad
In most cities, public transport service frequency and coverage has expanded massively. So they halved the workers per bus and doubled the number of busses.
whstl
I wish this was true for my hometown. :/
protocolture
People get shitty about bullshit jobs and then when they do get cleaned up by ATMs or some other efficiency turn around and pine for them.
smackeyacky
That’s not entirely fair. Jobs automated out of existence weren’t bullshit jobs.
Bullshit jobs are HR and project management. Made up fluff nobody really needs.
lukan
"I refuse to use them, as the only reason they exist, is to fire cashiers"
But that's not a great job in the first place and I am not a fan of keeping jobs for the sake of it. So we do need to figure out a way of income for those who cannot make a transition, but my mission is not to keep cashiers.
ghaff
Right. Let’s eliminate all the online access to government services and make people go into eg DMV offices like the good old days.
_heimdall
> Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately), we won’t be able to “opt out,” forever. At some point, ML is bound to become endemic.
I don't hear people wanting to opt out of ML though, they want to opt out of AI.
Beyond just the bad name of these tools though, one absolutely can opt of out then. It just depends on how far one is willing to go to avoid using them and what all they will give up in the process.
thunky
> I refuse to use them, as the only reason they exist, is to fire cashiers.
Jobs are not supposed to exist for the sole purpose of generating paychecks. There is supposed to be real work that needs to be done.
A "dig a hole and fill it in" job is a symptom of a society unable to benefit from it's own progress.
Other animals don't do busywork as a means of survival.
_DeadFred_
Other animals can just eat the food they find and sleep wherever. Humans have decided other humans should just die if they don't work.
automatic6131
>I refuse to use them, as the only reason they exist, is to fire cashiers
They are a much faster, more convenient experience than standing in line waiting for a cashier lane, scanning items after picking. It's just great, as the customer.
I'm glad they still have 1-4 cashier lanes for refuseniks, pensioners and people without the loyalty card (etc) who don't want to deal with it. Everyone's happy.
reaperducer
They are a much faster, more convenient experience than standing in line waiting for a cashier lane, scanning items after picking.
I'll have to start shopping in your town.
At every supermarket in my city, there is a long line of people waiting to use the self checkouts. I keep an eye on the last person in that line, and I'm almost always done first by using a human cashier.
People just buy into the "tech=better" meme without even thinking.
whstl
I also noticed this. I think we just want to avoid human interaction, I also do this myself, but I have no illusions that the self-checkout is faster, or that I'm doing the right thing.
nightfly
You only have to hear "place the item in the bagging area, and then scan the next item" 100x and sometimes extra aggressively random. Oh, and then something scans twice and you have to wait 5 minutes because they only have one human helping with 8 different scanning stations. Or the scan gun starts beeping really loudly and not scanning anymore for some reason, and you have to return it to the dock, take it out again and hope it starts working. Or you're left handed or standing in a way the system doesn't like and the camera thinks you're trying to steal something so you have wait, again for the one human to come over review the footage look puzzled and tell the computer that yeah everything is okay
Gud
Are you from the UK?
I travel a lot for work(200+ days a year) and so I see the best and the worst. In every country I've been, the self checkout is implemented differently. Only in certain countries, low trust societies, do you have to wait for the scale to calculate the weight of the goods to prevent shop lifting
In Switzerland as an example, self checkout is a breeze. There is no such scale at all. Fast, highly efficient with good software.
Same in Sweden, though for some reason some grocery stores in Sweden insist on being a member before you can use the self checkout lanes. I think because they were early adopters of the technology and weren't sure they could trust their customers(hint: they could). Another annoying thing is that you have to scan your receipt to exit the store. This you usually don't have to do in Switzerland.
I've seen the same type of inefficient system you're accustomed to in the UK at pretty much all the stores over there and in Rimi in Riga. Frankly it works a lot better in Latvia than the UK, though still annoying and disrupts the workflow.
ghaff
They also don’t work well for large orders or things that aren’t bar coded. They’re mostly good for a small number of bar coded items. And some stores have probably excessively trimmed human cashiers.
JohnFen
> It's just great, as the customer.
I don't agree at all. I think they're a terrible customer experience. I stopped using them a while back and am much happier for that. I'm not alone -- some stores have already started staffing more checkout lanes and removing some self-checkout kiosks.
jamil7
They’re maybe more convenient for the shop but the lines seem equally long where I am as people aren’t as fast as a cashier. I don’t notice any difference in efficiency other than I now need to scan and look everything up myself. So a net loss for me.
ChrisMarshallNY
Yup. They are more convenient.
But they still exist to fire cashiers.
Thanks for the "broad-brush" of folks that you don't agree with.
galangalalgol
Why should we protect the existence of jobs that are both unnecessary and make the customer experience worse? Aren't we still in the situation that there are more positions for unskilled labor than applicants?
wegfawefgawefg
sir why dont we dig the trench with spoons instead of shovels, that way we can hire ten times as many men for twice as long!
bravetraveler
"We do what we can because we must."
Endure, don't embrace. Or whatever, I'm a random on the internet - not a cop.
protocolture
> AI is super evil and will destroy us all
Ok why is that
> AI is basically text-predict combined with data mining. That’s it.
That sounds fine.
Its like when you hear a conservative pundit claim that all antifa are weak people who need extra genders, and then in the next breath complain that they are an effective, brutal, brick throwing, pundit punching street militia.
Pick a lane.
>As for a machine writing a novel for me in a matter of milliseconds — I have no idea how that could possibly generate authentic pride or produce anything other than a cavernous inner emptiness?
So now its issue is that it doesnt give you good feelings?
Aeolun
> As for a machine writing a novel for me in a matter of milliseconds — I have no idea how that could possibly generate authentic pride or produce anything other than a cavernous inner emptiness?
From my experience trying this. It isn’t quite that easy. The AI has a massive amount of difficulty staying on track and remembering earlier facts when writing a story. There is zero risk of them replacing writers for anything but short stories for now.
protocolture
More or less my experience.
Sudowrite literally breaks out the story into chapters, and has you arrange all the facts of the story so they can be summarily accessible at all times.
Aeolun
Even making a massive snowflake for the whole story didn’t quite do it for me. It would forget relatively unimportant things, like the character had said something to someone, then three scenes on misremembers what they actually said.
DonsDiscountGas
The issue is that some work is just something we want to be done, and other work is something we want to do for the joy/satisfaction of it. And a big part of the conflict is that the same task is likely to fall into different categories for different people. When I read a novel I don't really care about the author or what they went through to write it, but the author obviously feels very differently.
_heimdall
> Its like when you hear a conservative pundit claim that all antifa are weak people who need extra genders, and then in the next breath complain that they are an effective, brutal, brick throwing, pundit punching street militia.
Those two aren't mutually exclusive.
I haven't met many (any?) Antifa members and wouldn't begin to categorize them, but a person can both want non-binary genders and throw bricks.
ben_w
I belive the claim is that *saying* "only weak people need extra genders" is incompatible with also *saying* "they are physically dangerous due to capacity for violence".
The comment does not itself appear to be making the claim "wanting extra genders is weak", but rather is criticising those who do say that.
_heimdall
> It's not saying "wanting extra genders is weak", it's criticising those who do say that.
Sure, I get that. I wasn't trying to make that point.
I take issue with the idea that weak people can't be violent or physically dangerous.
It depends a bit on what kind of weakness they mean, but physically weak people can still throw bricks or pull triggers and emotionally weak people can still lash out when they feel they have no other choice.
I'd actually argue that weak people are more likely to be more violent if/when they do lash out because it may be a last resort for them. Bottle things up for too long and they tend to blow up.
thefz
> So now its issue is that it doesnt give you good feelings?
The issue is that novels used to have value because they required effort and time. Now being able to produce one means its value dropped significantly. Only for the artificial ones, though, of course.
protocolture
Then they should be happy that their novel has either maintained or increased its value due to its humaniness.
Tepix
> But I’m still paying the price for that: every time I log in to my bank account now, it’s like peeling barnacles off the hull of a ship to get rid of all the new charges that Apple and Google have concocted.
That part isn't very convincing. I have no charges on my bank account from Apple or Google.
Anyway, i think a potential reason to reject AI is what Kurt Vonnegut has laid out in his 1952 novel "Player Piano": Do we want automation take away jobs we actually like? I highly recommend reading this book, it is once again very relevant today.
DonsDiscountGas
Automation takes away "jobs" but it doesn't make the actual activity forbidden. You can still do things without being paid for them.
Tepix
If you identify with your job and it becomes worthless (noone wants to pay for it), it's going to mess with your self-esteem.
Lerc
I think this statement concisely embeds the premise that might be the root cause of much of the problem.
That premise is "For something to have worth, someone has to be willing to pay for it".
That is only true for the narrowest definition of worth. If worth is reduced to a property to facilitate trade and nothing else then it works.
Worth can also carry a sense of non-tradable value, It can be meaningful. You can do something because you like doing it and someone else could be glad you were doing it. Requiring a financial transaction to turn that goodwill into self esteem seems to be a fundamental problem with our society.
Mindwipe
New Android phones do prompt you (with a six month trial) to sign up to the Google One tier with Gemini 2 included as part of set up now.
nisegami
I think that the concern that AI will take away creative jobs is missing the forest for the trees. I want to write more about my thoughts on this but the gist of it is those jobs may become rarer, but that doesn't have to mean that creative endeavors will cease. I think we need a broader reimagining of what employment means to individuals and to society.
lieks
I have different reasons for avoiding AI.
I enjoy understanding what my programs do to the deepest level, so making or using AI are both boring; they remove the fun part of programming and leave only the boring parts (mainly debugging). I haven't liked the current ML field since the beginning (early 2010s in my case) for this reason.
I want a tool, not a slave. I don't want it to be "smart", but an extension of my body. A thinking body part is always more annoying to deal with, because you have to reverse-engineer what it's doing to get it to do what you want.
I don't think this reasoning applies to everyone. I think it's fine for other people to use ML algorithms. I just don't want them myself.
omnimus
Also dont forget about deskilling. Right now its fine because you are able to debug. But it would get gradualy lot harder if you are not flexing that muscle.
lucb1e
> Also dont forget about deskilling
de-skilling (reducing skills), not desk killing, for anyone else as illiterate as me
TiredOfLife
>I want a tool, not a slave. I don't want it to be "smart", but an extension of my body.
Yup, that is exactly what AI autocomplete is. AI does the boring parts, you do the thinking.
>I haven't liked the current ML field since the beginning (early 2010s in my case) for this reason.
That is your problem. You are stuck in 2010s. But the last couple years have had giant enormous leaps.
ghaff
Since you need to understand your programs at the deepest level I assume you write in assembly and don’t use third party libraries.
zahlman
There was an era when car owners were expected to be their own mechanics.
When that started going away, I wonder if the people who lamented the loss ever got hit with "I assume you fractionate your own petroleum".
"Deepest level" in GP presumably refers to the deepest level of the existing source code.
tailspin2019
> I wonder if the people who lamented the loss ever got hit with "I assume you fractionate your own petroleum".
Those were the days. Nothing like that delicious smell of crude oil vapour as the fractionation column warms up…
archagon
Layers of abstraction vs. predigested programming slop.
WithinReason
> It really would have been social suicide to try to make my way in the 2010s professional class with anything other than a MacBook Pro and an iPhone
Can someone explain this part? It's not something I can relate to at all. Maybe because I'm not from the US?
JimDabell
> The upside was a few years feeling like I was part of the future as I sipped my lattés and floated through the dawning post-industrial era with my sleek silver Apple gadgets.
This too. The author just has the drama on everything turned up to a thousand percent. It’s incredibly irritating and made me stop reading.
akoboldfrying
Thanks for this. These two snippets (yours and GPs) saved me some reading time.
ghaff
MacBooks are common in tech circles but they’re fairly low market share overall. And in my circles iPhones are common but Androids are not rare.
That statement is simply false even in the US.
quitit
There's quite a bit of hyperbole in the article, but that part reads like a marketer's dream. Imagine that: The idea that all you need to do to solve your social cohesion problems is to buy something. How incredible would such a proposition be!
We all know very well that buying something isn't the difference between why our peers will or won't engage with us. However devaluing others into superficial strawman is an accessible coping mechanism for social rejection.
When children say something like this, it's because they're not aware they're being bullied and buying the <thing> isn't going to fix it. When an adult says it, it's a bit more concerning - it shows that they perhaps have certain unaddressed social anxieties, or are avoiding dealing with their antisocial behaviours that are leading to their social rejection.
eru
Probably, I was also objecting to that (and also don't live in the US). But I wouldn't read too much into that sentence: it's just part of the author's self-indulgent style.
JohnFen
I'm in the US and I can't relate to it either. I don't doubt that there are subcultures where this is a thing, but it was never a universal issue.
harvey9
It seemed he applied for a job at a place where they judge you on what laptop you carry at the interview. I have seen that attitude in the UK too.
ghaff
Why would I carry a laptop at an interview?
CalRobert
To give a demo?
Maybe it’s not fair but I find a Framework running Linux gives a good first impression.
astura
Who even carries a laptop to a job interview?
borgdefenser
In the US, Apple has done an all time great job marketing their products.
I don't think there is much more too it. "If I didn't buy Apple it would hurt my career". Obviously, completely absurd but how else can you grow a company to be worth 3.3 trillion selling tech gadgets at a massive premium.
It is easy to convince oneself too that this marketing is factual reality after spending so much money too. I mean that new iphone wasn't an expense, it was a career investment!
friendzis
Really? Not even being from US, I can attest that simply carrying a silvery laptop or a phone with the half eaten apple logo literally opened doors. Salespeople would have nearly empty iphones besides their personal androids just for the purpose of showing off.
The "one of us" mentality has shifted to other things over the years, but some industries still live on the image.
ddtaylor
I have a serious question: is there any good collection or list of people who have rejected technologies when introduced?
I'm not talking about entire societies of people like the Amish.
I'm talking about people who otherwise use technology, but then do something like this publicly etc.
I want to know if time even remembers these people beyond that one tid bit. I am curious if they went on to do anything else or what technologies "caused" them to defect.
zahlman
>is there any good collection or list of people who have rejected technologies when introduced?
Sounds hard to curate. Do you have a specific threshold of notoriety in mind? There could be tons of average people doing this and no good way to find out about it.
archagon
I mean, Stallman, if you count software commercialization as technology.
There are plenty of game developers who reject game engines in lieu of building their own from varying levels of scratch. Jonathan Blow, for example, made a number of successful and artistically meaningful games that heavily leveraged his custom tech stack.
smackeyacky
I refused to use ratcheting spanners and air tools and other useful things when working on cars or bikes. I was so very wrong.
There is a time and place for an air powered ratchet or big rattle gun. To think “my muscles will atrophy and I’ll stop thinking of clever ways to loosen that thing” is just wrong. It’s confusing the desired outcome with the method.
I did resist copilot up until recently and now laugh at myself. Use it to power through the boring template crap and leave yourself the juicy morsels. It’s faster and more satisfying.
zahlman
> I did resist copilot up until recently and now laugh at myself. Use it to power through the boring template crap and leave yourself the juicy morsels.
I don't want a tool to help me power through the boring template crap.
I don't want to power through the boring template crap.
I don't want the boring template crap to exist.
I want to be actively working on things that make the boring template crap cease to exist.
theshrike79
Advanced tools are really useful when you get to the intermediate level. Then you can speed up the boring stuff and spend more time on advanced things and learning.
There is still value for beginners to do things the hard way for a while. Write the unit tests by hand, see how they all repeat the same pattern 90% of the time. Now you see the pattern and you can use LLM-assisted intellisense to speed it up.
And because you know how they're supposed to look like, you can see when the LLM goes off the rails.
Trasmatta
> Because AI is no good for us — no good for our minds, creativity, or competence — and as it gets jammed down our throats, we are the only ones with the power to refuse.
I think there are a lot of risks with AI, but I'm not convinced that it's intrinsically bad for "our minds, creativity, or competence". In many ways it's let me be MORE creative in the ways I want to be, by helping me overcome obstacles that were always blockers in the past.
protocolture
Ditto. Its crazy how efficient it lets me be with my hobbies
theshrike79
"AI" automates the simple things with crazy efficiency.
Like I did a bunch of RSS-feeds for sites that don't have them (or they're crap quality). I just gave Cursor (Claude 3.7 I think) the HTML page and told it to write a parser that generates an Atom feed with Go from the page.
In most cases it was right on the first go, a few I had to adjust to make them look right in FreshRSS.
It even automatically suggested caching entries in a sqlite db to reduce load on the original site. This was for feeds that only have a link with no content, the application opens the link, fetches the relevant content and adds it to the custom feed.
haunter
My only use case of ChatGPT:
random CLI app I don't know how to use > explain in plain english what I want to achieve > ChatGPT outputs the command I need
Ok, not random but I use it for FFmpeg all the time. Example from yesterday when I needed to convert a TrueHD audio file into stereo FLAC: https://i.imgur.com/5ib99qh.png
100% works and it's perfect
theshrike79
I'm still waiting for someone to create a SLM (small language model) specifically focused on just being an interactive man-page.
"I want to find all mp4 files, convert them to AV1 and move them to this directory" -> SLM generates script and maybe even runs it automatically Claude Code -style. All locally with no internet needed.
balnaphone
This exists, just use https://github.com/sigoden/aichat with local ollama and a model like qwen2.5-coder:7b or better (e.g. gemma3:12b).
Add this to ~/.bashrc :
# bind Alt-e on the command line to replace text with command
_aichat_bash() {
if [[ -n "$READLINE_LINE" ]]; then
READLINE_LINE=$(aichat -e "$READLINE_LINE")
READLINE_POINT=${#READLINE_LINE}
fi
}
bind -x '"\ee": _aichat_bash'
find . -type f -name "*.mp4" -exec ffmpeg -i {} -c:v libaom-av1 -crf 30 -b:v 0 -c:a copy ~/Videos/{}.mkv \;
zahlman
>random CLI app I don't know how to use > explain in plain english what I want to achieve > ChatGPT outputs the command I need
I think there was a recent Show HN with a wrapper for this process.
kristiandupont
You may be able to boycott it now, but I am pretty sure there will come a time where that's not feasible if you want to participate in society, the same way it's no longer feasible to "boycott the internet".
JohnFen
Lots of people never use the internet, just as lots of people don't have a smartphone. Both are minorities, but they happily get along and fully participate in society anyway.
_heimdall
Oh I do know a few people who legitimately don't use the internet and still participate in society. Its more possible than it seems when most people are online constantly.
xnx
> create a ad-skipping device that uses so-called "artificial intelligence" to detect commercials during sports broadcasts and automatically mutes the tv
Is someone working on this? I'd love to contribute. I have this idea every time I see someone watching commercial TV. The volume (and volume!) of ads is insane.
I was easily able to make a podcast ad remover with LLMs, but real-time ad muting of a video stream is something I haven't tried yet (possibly easier because of closed captioning?).
>AI is basically text-predict combined with data mining. That’s it. It’s a super-Google that goes into the body of texts and rearranges the words into a very pleasing facsimile of a cogent argument. There’s no “intelligence” behind it, in the sense of a computer actually thinking.
>AI is more or less the same thing — it uses our wonder to convince us of a simulacrum of intelligence when what we are really witnessing is, in a sense, our own childish excitement at a trick of anthropomorphisation
People keep bringing up the "fake intelligence" vs "real intelligence" argument but it actually doesn't matter.
What's important is if it is useful.
E.g... create a ad-skipping device that uses so-called "artificial intelligence" to detect commercials during sports broadcasts and automatically mutes the tv. People would embrace AI like that instead of complaining about it.
If a pundit tried to advise the consumer who wants to avoid ads, "you know, that ad-skipping technology is _just_ fancy linear algebra and there's no _real_ intelligence behind it! You're dumbing down your brain by letting the AI mute the ads automatically instead of you doing it yourself." ... that's not a compelling argument. The usefulness of blocking ads outweighs any theoretical thresholds for real intelligence.
A lot of generative AI is not useful, so people will complain about it by falling back on the "it's not real intelligence" argument.