maplethorpe
maplethorpe on Hacker News
If you ditch generative AI you go back to needing to pay an artist/designer for their work, and they likely charge more than ChatGPT because they might have rent/bills and that sort of thing to cover.
I don't think the people pushing that narrative genuinely believe what they're saying. They're just influencing public opinion.
> But don’t be the out of touch Kung Fu master, heir to lifetimes of tradition, that gets mauled by an amateur MMA fighter.
I have an issue with this analogy, since a professional MMA fighter is a highly skilled individual who has honed their body through years of training.
A more apt analogy might be "don't be the kung fu master who believes they can survive an atomic bomb, dropped from far above by a pilot who does not understand how it works, but who has nevertheless been gifted the ability to deploy it."
Well no I, wasn't doing that either. Because it would be kind of silly to take someone else's code and say "I made this" just because I ran some build script, wouldn't it?
You could do this before AI, though. Just download a big repo off github and build the binaries yourself. Or is that not enough obfuscation to convince yourself you made it?
> we cannot RSI
Speak for yourself.
You could train an LLM on a dataset that intentionally excludes certain data, and see if it is able to extrapolate outside of its dataset and come up with those excluded items independently.
For example, remove all code from your training data, and then see if the model can code regardless.
Yes, things are really great everywhere else.
You're speaking directly to his marketing trap.
I don't post there anymore but I do still check my DMs once a week, because every now and then someone will find my work through there, and I need people to find my work in order to survive. I unfortunately can't easily trade that in for a platform that no one visits.
I know you're being facetious, but I genuinely think Thomson Reuters should be investing in NFTs as much as it is in AI. NFTs (while some of the shine has admittedly worn off) are an emerging infrastructure for digitally native ownership, and that's precisely the sort of institutional problem Thomson Reuters is positioned to solve (think tax records, medical records, etc).
People in tech suddenly tossing NFTs to the side because AI came along makes no sense to me. HN should be as bullish on NFTs now as it was in 2021. Jumping on to the AI train and acting like NFTs are bad now makes us seem flippant.
> I hope that we’ll collectively decide that it’s rude to pass off LLM writing as your own, but I wouldn’t bet on it.
I think it could happen.
When everyone first started tagging each other's face and location, I immediately hated it. It felt like an incredible violation of privacy, and I couldn't understand why anyone would do it. Now, finally, the zeitgeist is starting to catch up, and it's common to hear even "normies" worry about who is snooping on their data.
This process took about 20 years. I suspect LLM etiquette will take roughly the same.
> I'm intrinsically motivated to work on my software projects because I want them to exist
Isn't that extrinsic motivation? You're motivated by the desire to bring something outside of yourself into existence. The software project doesn't exist within you.
I'm choosing to (mostly) switch off the news and continue learning things I find interesting anyway. Maybe the world will punish me for it at some point, but I guess I'll have to deal with that when it happens. The alternative is too depressing otherwise.
Costs will continue to come down. That's how technology works. They will continue to come down further and further until they cross the threshold and become negative, and when that happens, instead of it costing you money to use GPT 5.5, you'll actually receive money! LLMs will become magic money generating machines, and I personally can't wait.
Why are the leading models capable of regurgitating full copyrighted works such as "Harry Potter" and "On the Road"? Did they hire someone to type those out for them?
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.02671
I wanted to know my real score so I intentionally picked the answer most likely to be wrong in those instances.
Not always. I once got accused of cheating at University because my take-home assignment was so much better than my in class work. At home there was no pressure to perform. I could practice and try things.
It was a "Keurig", and I had to put a pod in it and wait a few seconds. Is that not espresso?
I make espresso at home by grinding/tamping it myself so I admittedly don't know much about the pod version or whether that still counts as espresso.
I did go to an American coffee house while I was there. It was called something like "Phil's" and there were no lattes to be had.
Really? The Last time I was in an American office, there didn't seem to be any milk around. They had an unrefrigerated bottle of "creamer" next to the coffee machine, but I was too scared to try it. I'm still not sure what it is, or how I'm supposed to use it.
> I’ve been trying to ask people a different question: sure, we’re more productive now but to me, the AI era is only serving to plunge us deeper than ever into producing more, more, more, faster, faster, faster. And for what? What’s it all for?
Many devs here have stated that the fun part for them is seeing the end product, not the act of creating it. Using AI is an act of need satisfaction.
Unfortunately, cloning a GitHub repository or downloading a Squarespace template doesn't hit the spot, because you can see exactly where the code came from, so your brain knows you were not the one responsible. AI's greatest feature is that it obfuscates provenance. You can now happily clone that repository or download that template without the feeling that you're cloning someone else's repository or downloading someone else's template.
On the other hand, one of my recent launch posts received comments such as "this is the sort of thing that is now possible with AI!", when I didn't use any AI at all.
This still means that 40% of consumers aren't turned off at all. That seems promising for AI bulls.
The fact that anything I post online will now get slurped up by a machine and regurgitated for people who have no idea it was my work that made their prompt come to life.
I get where you're coming from, and I agree to some extent, but I do think our tendency to weight criticism more favorably than praise (as if praise is "chaff" and criticism is automatically valuable) can be dangerous. This negativity bias unfortunately led me to adopt less-than-optimal ways of working in my younger years, because I assumed the people offering me criticism knew what they were talking about, when this wasn't always the case.
So while criticism can be valuable, I think it's worth reflecting an equally critical eye back at the person who is offering it, as upon closer inspection they may not be worth listening to at all.
I'm sorry to hear that. If it's any consolation, people often say I act like an alien pretending to be a human. Maybe it's just the price I pay for being an inquisitive person.
One time a project I made appeared at the very top of the front page. It attracted many negative comments. Some saying it was barely usable. Others saying I'd built it wrong, and offering half-baked advice on how I should have done it instead. That project later went on to get me lots of work and recognition, and even won me a few industry awards.
HN posters tend to be overly critical, often tripping over themselves to demonstrate how they're smarter than the creator of whatever it is they're commenting on. In my experience, they rarely are.
I might be the only person at my job that doesn't use it, but it feels like I'll be found out by upper management sooner or later. Maybe I'll need to use a library I'm unfamiliar with, I'll take longer than expected to grasp it, and then people will start asking questions. Every time a manager puts a random call in my calendar, I'm worried it's going to be about this.