My clear-eyed perspective is that AI companies and their supporters are getting away with a massive crime against humanity, so it’s probably relatively more difficult for me to contain my frustrations than the people who are happy about it. When you plunder a little you get punished according to the rules, but these companies have proved when you plunder enough you get to start writing the rules.
"The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic." is usually misattributed to Stalin, but it says that's not a new phenomenon. Now that you've said it out loud, how does that make you feel? It doesn't change anything. The "crime against humanity" of doing some work and charging money for it, is kind of a non-starter for conversation though.
This is your comment. Is it not? Unless this is not your comment, I don’t understand what could possibly be the confusion.
> There is still a vocal anti-AI crowd here. The problem is that they don't seem to be very good, overall, at upholding HN commenting guidelines. (This is probably just a fatigue effect.) I keep seeing green accounts making pithy, uncivil snipes on this topic, with heavy use of sarcasm and reference to anti-AI "thought-terminating cliches" (e.g. mentioning the topic of water use and expecting that mention to stand in for an entire argument, while not acknowledging any of the well-established refutations).
The point of my comment is to make two observations: one that there is indeed still a vocal anti-AI crowd here, and another about their usual conduct. It did not in any way assert that they don't have a point, just that they often lean on bad arguments.
The confusion is that I was talking on the meta level of what the discourse is like, and you are trying to engage in the object level of that discourse itself.
That said: the fact that you can make your anti-AI argument without being incivil supports my first observation, and doesn't in any way detract from the second. For that matter, your allegation of a "massive crime against humanity" doesn't even specify the crime, let alone attempt to evidence it. And while still civil, it is loaded with emotionally charged rhetoric.
Zahlman doesn't get it. He has been cancelled by industry shills on Python infrastructure and now apparently thinks the industry will appreciate him for backing it up here.
Classic programmer mistake. The industry only understands one thing: Constant opposition like in the 1990s and early 2000s, which were better for the profession and the Internet at large.
