Are you living with your head under a rock. AI has absolutely made my life worse, and is set to do so further. I know very few people who are seriously enthusiastic about it.
"All evidence suggests more AI is better" is ignoring an awful lot of the evidence, and the doom is already happening all around you and you just can't see it.
Really don't understand this sentiment. Whatever you imagine you can now build; whatever you wish to learn you can learn; all for virtually nothing. How does that make life worse?
I think pessimism clouds your judgment and AI is the scapegoat. Doomerism is just yet another dogmatic religion predicting ends times, with all the usual associated dogma.
What you imagine is what you manifest. Better to be optimistic and wrong then pessimistic and right.
Better to envision a positive future and help make it happen; ignore the doomers who can only envision destruction, as that is all they are capable of.
Everything looks brown, it's crammed together, those not-photos make it feel really cramped in the third column, it looks like every other AI-generated menu and it's lost the clarity the old menu had.
And yes, there's a very long history of food places using unrealistic images of someone else's version of the food on the menus. That doesn't mean that it's okay to now use LLM versions of the food, because I never thought it was okay to use those stylised photos either.
This helped my nostalgic craving for those pedantic old school HN comments which I seem to see less of nowadays...But frankly as a kid playing in the pool often revolved around pretending to be some kind of sea creature.
Reminds me of the scene in The Social Network (2010) where Mark Zuckerberg points out the absurdity of playing a looping video of the Niagara falls in the background during a Caribbean themed party: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9R8uYUXLUc
The obvious answer is because the old, crudely drawn sign did (and to go deeper, you'd have to ask the janitor who drew it.) Now it's become completely detached from its origin and pointless.
The only reason this question is answerable is because the poster saw the old sign. When everybody is gone who saw the old sign, they'll just continue doing it for no reason. When somebody asks about it, some creep will babble about Chesterton's Fence.
Preschools decorate lists with little pictures on the sides. In most preschools that I’m aware of the person who makes that list makes minimum wage and has 4-8 children to keep alive while she’s making that list.
Trawling through bad documentation and even worse Stack Overflow answers to figure out how to use some API was not using my brain functions. It was wasting my time and making me lose the flow of the important parts of my work.
I used to lose entire days trying to figure out some stupid error in a build chain or trying to upgrade through some library's breaking change. Now I can get it done in a few minutes and I don't believe I've lost out on any great "problem solving opportunities."
> I used to lose entire days trying to figure out some stupid error in a build chain or trying to upgrade through some library's breaking change.
Shouldn't the takeaway here be that depending on poorly maintained libraries is a risk? Code is a liability, not an asset. The habit that modern web developers inspired of depending on a new library for everything before ever thinkng about the problem first is bad actually. GenAI is a force multiplier for putting bandaids on bandaids and managing complexity, not extracting simplicity.
I don't use GenAI enough to lose entire days on it but when it "halucinates" fictional answers complete with broken citations and invented links that go nowhere, I am so glad I don't have to use this stuff for work.
Even well-supported, well-documented projects. I'm in the middle of a Spring Boot upgrade, which includes a collection of Hibernate updates. These are well-supported projects with -- theoretically -- fantastic documentation. But when something goes wrong, trawling them for what's happened is tedious and doesn't teach me much; you end up chasing down uncommon threads. The death of StackOverflow doesn't help much either. Previously, web searches might have found a commiserator, but that's all gone now.
A concrete example: during one of the updates, previously working code started throwing an OptimisticLockingException. Only in one place, annoyingly. My thought was that Hibernate was more strict about something it had previously been lenient about. I went down two or three false threads in the docs; I debugged the old version and the new version and read the guts of Hibernate but couldn't figure out why the persistence path had changed so significantly (or why it'd throw an OptimisticLock, it was saving a brand new row!). I was really struggling.
I set Opus on it, and it found the relevant section of the docs and zeroed in on the issue in the code: we were generating and setting an ID on a class that had an annotated @GeneratedValue. Old Hibernate said "whatever"; new Hibernate changed the persistence code so in this situation it calls `merge` instead of `save` (update rather than create AFAICT); there was no existing entity with the generated ID (of course, it's a new entity!); it fails.
While my hypothesis was broadly right, that _particular_ issue would've taken me days to chase down -- but the LLM correctly diagnosed in minutes with links to relevant documentation.
I vaguely hate LLMs, but this one saved me from a days long side quest that would've held up delivering the actual value of the project. I hope this doesn't sound like my brain is no longer functioning.
(edit -- reading it back I'm starting to write like one of the fucking things, which is probably the part of them I hate the absolute most)
My challenge for anyone who still thinks like this is pay for Claude or Chatgpt and use the thinking version of the latest model for every web search you would do. See how long it takes for it to make a mistake. I can't remember the last time and I use chatgpt quite a bit every day.
The model reads the webpage before it gives it to you so the odds of a stale link are effectively nil these days. And the odds of it being exactly what you were looking for are quite high.
The models are so much better than they were even a year ago, and it seems many people have an outdated view of their capabilities.
Your idea about web devs picking a package before thinking about the problem is legitimate. What would be cool is if you could have something help you break down both the problem and the packages to choose from (or if it's worth rolling your own). AI is fantastic at this.
As said banging your head against arcane documentation or the infuriating Internet [1] isn't using your brain. And skipping the mundane parts let's you use your higher functioning brain so much it's exhausting. Thinking on the harder problems all day is exactly where I want to be.
2) absolute freedom to post whatever you like and have it shoved in people's faces by the algorithm is harmful
3) usually when people are "hungry for the raw, real truth" they're actually chasing a bunch of conspiracy theories