gortok
I vocalize this feeling I have, not because the author has done anything to warrant it, but here, in this forum, we commonly have folks saying “so what if it’s AI?”, and by bringing up these feelings we have around the industry, we can have the conversation and (hopefully) have other folks think twice about whether they would use AI to write their book.
I want to read this book and have added it to my list of things to read; and your vouching for the author does help. One underlying issue I have (that is a me problem) is that I know nothing about this particular area, and therefore know nothing about the experts in this area, so I rely on human vouching.
1. AI generated text works off of whatever model it came from, whatever prompt was used, and probabilities. It’s been described as a “next token predictor” and that, for the purposes of this answer, is how I’m describing it as well. First problem: it’s only as good as the above.
2. Because of the above, its accuracy relies on probabilities. It can confidently give me wrong information, and as someone who would read this book to learn a topic I don't already know, I have no frame of reference to know whether I’m being fed accurate information.
3. Since it greatly speeds up the time it takes to physically write material, there is a possibility the author didn’t closely vet the information provided by the LLM as a next token predictor. That means it could be wrong in subtle ways, and the only way for me to know is to rely on knowledge I don’t have.
4. Had AI not been used, I could conceivably go on the past work of the author, rely on the person who has the expertise who wrote the forward, or the fact that physically writing a book takes prohibitively long enough that the dopamine from having written a book doesn’t outweigh the amount of time it takes, and if you are going to take months to years to write a book, you’re going to not want that effort to be in vain. You’re going to do your diligence and not just “wing it”.
AI makes it relatively trivial to appear knowledgeable and to get that dopamine rush from saying “I’m an author” and appearing to be an expert in a field without being an expert in a field. For some, that temptation is too great and there’s no way to know without the passage of time. Time for folks to review the book who know the subject matter. Time for reviews. Time for folks to put signs up that say “don’t trust this material.” In the meantime we still have that content out there, further infecting new AI models and people into believing it’s accurate.
That’s why the use of AI is dangerous, and is especially dangeorus without disclosure.
This author has done nothing to deserve that scrutiny, but I can’t escape the feeling now of having to be guarded when I see a new book online with a relatively short history (spring 2026 is the earliest version of this text), as I can’t be sure it’s either “AI-enhanced” or AI-written.
I don’t like this feeling and it dampers any enthusiasm I once had for being excited about stuff like this.
That aside, if the author did write this themselves without AI, kudos to them and their acheivement!
But.
They may peak at 500B before this bubble bursts, simply because other major industry players are betting on AI as a means to get folks to believe in their own stock.
It’s belief all the way down, until you get to the point where “the market” starts asking where the return on investment is, and why they haven’t seen it yet. By that time, the investors have gotten their return and cashed out, and it’s the pension funds and the retail traders that are holding the bag.
And of course, at some point AI’s promise will be delivered in a form or fashion as yet unknown to us, but that is still years away, and until folks recognize that LLMs as they exist to day are not the path to that, they’ll continue to believe in this valuation.
We are witnessing the natural outcome of pursuing higher profits at the expense of everything else; at some point it becomes “as crappy as the market will bear”, and we all lose out. For some of us it may manifest as having to get our car serviced every few thousand miles because the parts are of poor quality (but cheap!). For some of us it may manifest as no longer desiring sweets because they’re now poorly made with substandard ingredients created in a lab somewhere.
It can also manifest in ways that are a threat to public safety; like rollercoaster rides that weren’t properly designed or tested because schools now pursue profits above learning; or because manufacturers somehow rely on regulators to do their job for them.
However it manifests, it’s hard to point to higher prices and lower quality goods and services and say this is the best that capitalism has to offer. If this is it, if this is the capitalist system working as intended, it’s no wonder movements like the Democratic Socialists of America are taking hold.
I can’t adopt Passkeys if I’m not certain they’re going to work as well as my password manager and Authenticator app, which is to say 100% of the time.
When sites ask to set up passkeys, it’s usually native passkeys (especially on iOS). And figuring out how to get the flow to set up a LastPass key by default seems unusually difficult.
I also use a MacBook, windows desktop, an iPhone and iPad. I use Firefox, edge, brave across these devices.
When I say “passkeys are a trap” they are a usability trap where no one can attest with certainty that I won’t wake up in a painful situation because I decided to adopt passkeys.
Once independent agencies are no longer independent, partly due to the expansion of the unitary executive viewpoint in both the Supreme Court and the current executive branch, and the rather obsequious Congress we have that instead of being “jealous to protect its power” is kowtowing to anything the Trump administration wants.
The supreme courts ruling on presidential immunity, chevron deference, and the dismantling of the ideas of an independent agency have all come together to create a dangerous situation for all of us.
The Supreme Court, whether because the of their own alignment with partisanship or some other more nefarious reason, have gutted the idea of an independent agency (except for the Federal Reserve, which is special, but not for any legal reason, but rather because even conservative SCOTUS is not willing to risk the fallout of logically applying their unitary executive view of government to the Fed).
So Congress put a lot of regulatory power in these once independent and non-partisan agencies, and that’s gone. Combine that with a president that is overtly partisan and vindictive, and you have a problem where SCOTUS has created a situation that has elevated the whims of a president above the law Congress created.
We will be feeling the affects of this decision for generations, and I wouldn’t be surprised if this was the catalyst for the failure of the American form of government.
Our system cannot sustain when coequal branches of government kowtow to politics.
The issue now is that my entire life is literally on my phone.
The issue now is that there is a 100-mile ‘border search exception’ in place. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_search_exception
Now, within 100 miles of the border, should CBP choose to, they can search me without a warrant and search everything in my phone, and even retain it if they’d like. If I want to challenge that, I need tens of thousands of dollars and time.
This is the very definition of an unreasonable search; but to change that we have to change the politicians and change the judiciary. It’s up to us, but until we get it changed, we may as well consider the 4th amendment a dead letter, and that means trouble for all of us.
What happens when the adoption of AI destroys the middle 60% of the bell curve of programmers and technologists? How will the middle class of people spend money on products/services if they don’t have a job?
We can’t both create wealth and destroy jobs with nothing to replace them.
America has little to no manufacturing base.
Technology and finance has been its differentiator economically speaking for job creation. Both are at risk from AI adoption. Businesses have to sell to someone, and at the moment it’s not clear — if the stated goals of revenue are to be believed, how that can happen.
Mail in voting has been something that the elderly, infirmed, workers, and folks in the military have done for decades. It's remarkably secure and quite auditable. The issue the right has with it is that the folks that vote by mail (the military notwithstanding) are typically democrats.
From that perspective, it makes sense to limit "vibe-coded" projects, since they don't fit in that traditional paradigm.
Now, there are big feelings around vibe-coding and a strong aversion to change, so I can imagine this is a rather jarring experience for folks that want to vibe-code and want to have the dopamine hit of sharing that with other folks in a forum that obstensibly is meant for folks to edit code together.
If I'm reading something on the internet, I'm either reading it to learn, or I'm reading it to be persuaded. If I wanted the LLM to teach me (thank you, no), I would ask an LLM. I'm reading your website/newsletter/email because I want to hear from you.. If you can't be bothered to put your time into writing it and teaching me what you think, why should I be bothered to read it?
Seriously. It seems like there’s an issue every other week. It would historically be normal to provide post mortems, and maybe I’ve missed them but seems like there are almost weekly issues and no follow up into the core reasons why.
I bring it up because the more we tolerate that and the more we reward that behavior on HN, the more we will get that behavior.
Second, all of them.
And the idea would be to tax high net worth (HNW) individuals. Not on their salary, because part of the game is that capital is taxed less than labor, and stocks aren’t taxed until you realize a gain. So what do ultra rich folks do? They take loans against their stocks (same stocks that public sector unions use to fund their retirement pensions), and can realize just enough to pay off the loan (or roll over the loan) and they get far better interest rates on their loans than you or I do.
So we either tax them against the loans they take out against their stock, or we tax their unrealized gains at their face value, or tax those loans as income against HNW individuals.
There are several ways to ensure folks that have made billions are taxed, but right now we aren’t willing to make those policy choices to tax them — and we even give their circumstances preferential treatment, even though we’re willing to make no concessions for folks that make $30,000 a year and are fighting for their next meal.
Legitimately we should have had this day one for a whole host of reasons (not the least of which is the issue of inadvertently using output from generative AI as training data for Generative AI).
But bigger than that is that while there are folks that want to be able to have a machine do their textual output for them with as little energy on their part as possible, the rest of us have to deal with the impact of that call on their part.
The purpose of communicating with other humans is not utilitarian, psychologically it is the pathway to connection and forms a large basis of how we are able to get along without eradicating ourselves as a species. Using generative AI to replace that humanity seems unthinkable to me, and having markers that help us differentiate serves as a way to keep others from gaslighting us, which undermines trust and communication.
I realize as a stereotype technical folks see communication as a means to a utilitarian end, but it's so much more important than that, so much so that even this small action of watermarking generative AI output can keep untold disasters from occurring because humans didn't know other humans were using it.
And practically speaking, I don’t see a LLM being able to do this. Perhaps a specialized language model trained only on “good” release notes and commits, but putting that much effort into the training data goes against the whole mantra of using an off the shelf model in the first place.
I realize for folks that need to write release notes that it’s not fun, and it’s hard to write well, but using AI to do it just makes it worse.
Intelligent life-forms can generate probabilistic outputs based on inputs, but being able to generate probabilistic outputs based on inputs is not what makes us intelligent.
LLM-based “AI” is able to use its vast corpus of inputs and calculate the most statistically likely output in a given situation. It is probabilistic, and when you are dealing with probabilities in a situation where certainties, not probabilities, matter, you’re going to get dinged on credibility massively when your LLM-based “AI” gets the probabilities wrong at best, or in this case, claims a line of code generates a vulnerability when it is, in fact, a code comment.
LLMs are text-prediction engines. They are not Artificial Intelligence, and shouldn’t not be treated in any form or fashion as if they possess intelligence. What bothers me about this entire situation is that presumably the folks that relied on the LLM-based “AI” to generate these vulnerabilities knew (or should have known) enough about their tool to know this would happen, but did not.
Now, we all pay the consequence, to the tune of hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars of wasted productivity from teams that have to deal with the resulting fall-out of this usage of “AI”.
A human must verify everything an LLM presents as fact. Everything. If you don’t, we all pay the price. LLMs do not remove the onus of responsibility on the human being, if anything they amplify it because LLMs can generate lots more output more quickly that needs to be verified than humans can.