frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Open Source @Github

fp.

Open in hackernews

Banning AI will not make it go away

https://vishal.rs/essay/banning-ai-will-not-make-it-go-away
18•vishalontheline•59m ago

Comments

krat0sprakhar•29m ago
> Whenever I find a use for AI, it so drastically cuts the time to accomplish tasks that I’m left wanting to do more with my (finally copious) free time!

I get what the author is trying to say but this does not match my experience nor does it match the employee productivity findings from AI adoption in enterprises.

jamesjhare•24m ago
the goal of proselytism is always the same -- to help the proselytizer convince themselves they are not the mark
happytoexplain•24m ago
Yeah, the hidden implication here is that they do not meaningfully review or design what the AI creates. Which is not actually an invalid AI use case, but it is highly misleading to leave it unstated.

(And of course there is the uncharitable alternative - that they are simply incompetent. But we don't actually need to go there.)

sudb•21m ago
I was going to say that this surely depends on the type of work being done with AI but then a small dive into your HN profile shows you're working on SWE agents at Google?

I am struggling to reconcile your viewpoint with this but may have found the wrong profile!

munk-a•19m ago
It's possible to be frank about the misuse of AI in a lot of corporate settings today and also view it as a tool (or a step in tool development) that has the potential to be quite valuable.

Also, there are plenty of non-development related uses of AI that are genuinely valuable - document extraction and data repair are strong domains for application.

scott01•20m ago
In my experience, using chats merely as stack overflow replacement, e.g. for providing obscure API usage examples, is a huge time saver — otherwise I would’ve had to lurk around game engine sources, examples, comments, sometimes forum posts, etc. AI code reviews definitely help finding issues, especially when I work on something for more than a week and inevitably forgetting things.
Gigachad•19m ago
This is true but it's completely negated when someone wastes my time asking them to review their AI slop wall of code, or when it actually goes live and blows up production.
conqrr•18m ago
Yeah, AI works great for everyone in vacuum, but works for no one in a group.
happytoexplain•16m ago
This is my experience. It's a huge time saver for learning something that you would have had to previously Google or wade through multiple pages of documentation for, as long as you develop an intuition for when to fact-check it. It's a slightly less huge time saver for one-shotting simple functions/scripts ("write a function to download everything in a given time range from this paginated API and save it to files"), assuming you actually review what it outputs. But neither of those things are where most time is spent in software.
ungreased0675•14m ago
Of course conformity is the easiest choice. But don’t lie to yourself that it’s the best choice.
mikeruhl•14m ago
Bad take, if you ask me, on several points:

- I think we’ve all learned with social media that sometimes tech companies create products with good intentions that are later weaponized against their users.

- The foundation of agentic LLMs is fully precipitated on creative and knowledge theft. They stole our bread and now want to sell it back to us, one token at a time.

- Banning AI has an intention to slow down its adoption while society weighs in on its projected consequences. When did we as a society collectively agree tech entrepreneurs get to release anything they want without any oversight?

This “just accept it” attitude is democratically lazy and so very ignorant of history of what rich people in power tend to do to the working class when they don’t need their labor anymore. There’s blood in the machine, friends.

munk-a•14m ago
Some people want to fully ban AI and put the genie back in the bottle[1] but I'd much rather it simply be demystified and genuinely costed.

I think most people would prefer to find a useful application of a tool compared to being compelled by corporate overlords to clock in at a certain level of token spend. It isn't magic or a cure-all - it's something that's very useful sometimes and insanely expensive (in dollar cost and wasted effort of real humans) other times. Right now we seem to be in a weird honeymoon phase where it gets used for everything disregarding how much utility or cost it will have in that setting.

1. It's impossible because for decades we've had plenty of neural network applications and other ML uses that are quite useful.

happytoexplain•11m ago
AI is very useful. But this is a great example of a destructive attitude from which I earnestly pray most engineers escape. This is, in my opinion, the kind of person who is destroying the world I love so much.

Frankly, as much as I would prefer an in-between solution, it might not be feasible. If I could press a button that made AI disappear forever, I would, despite the sacrifice. The downsides as compared to the upsides, in practice, are just so overwhelming.

somewhereoutth•10m ago
Banning smoking from indoor spaces did in fact make it go away [from indoor spaces].

Actually, the analogy is compelling - an addictive habit that is pleasurable to the user, profitable for the supplier, but others around them must suffer the effluent with consequent deleterious effects on [mental] health. And similarly, the worst [mental] health effect is of course on the user themselves.

As with smoking, probably we can't/shouldn't stop individuals from indulging in this habit, but surely we can protect the rest of society.

WCSTombs•9m ago
> The barrier to entry for a creative person to benefit from AI is nothing.

The barrier is low, but the benefit is negligible or even negative. You're outsourcing your creative process to some mega-corporation. What you get back from it might be interesting to you, but it won't be to a lot of other people except maybe as a novelty, because it's from the same megacorp that sells its services to everyone else. I know some people seem to genuinely enjoy the outputs of the AI models now, but the novelty hasn't worn off yet.

Also, congratulations, you get to live with the stigma of being an AI slop pusher. And if you try to pass the work off as your own, good luck hiding the truth for the rest of your life, because you'll never regain trust if people find out.

Stop Building Spas for Internal Tools: The Modern PHP Alternative

https://www.gridphp.com/blog/stop-building-spas-for-internal-tools-the-modern-php-alternative/
1•gridphp•2m ago•0 comments

Apple becomes second $5T company as investors flee AI stocks

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jul/28/apple-second-ever-5tn-company-as-investors-fle...
3•devonnull•2m ago•0 comments

Timing of When Ingredients Are Added to Recipes

https://old.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1v9bq7i/oc_timing_of_when_ingredients_are_added...
1•embedding-shape•3m ago•0 comments

From Cracker Barrel to Boeing, Companies Are Turning to Retired CEOs

https://www.wsj.com/business/from-cracker-barrel-to-boeing-companies-are-turning-to-retired-ceos-...
1•petethomas•5m ago•0 comments

Async-Profiler and OpenTelemetry Spans

https://krzysztofslusarski.github.io/2026/07/27/spans.html
1•mfiguiere•10m ago•0 comments

TSMC is accelerating Arizona factory build-out to capitalize on AI 'megatrend'

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/20/tsmc-arizona-fab-capacity-ai-chip-demand.html
2•gmays•12m ago•0 comments

Cursor and Together AI deliver real-time, low-latency inference at scale

https://www.together.ai/customers/cursor
1•inferhaven•14m ago•0 comments

There's Hope in Hard Truths

https://shannadige.com/blog/hard-truths/
1•shannadige•14m ago•1 comments

Epic diarrhea outbreak has 40% of Americans avoiding fruits and veggies

https://arstechnica.com/health/2026/07/epic-diarrhea-outbreak-has-40-of-americans-avoiding-fruits...
4•ValentineC•15m ago•0 comments

Watch out for missed warnings on vendor C++ toolchains

https://blog.poly.nomial.co.uk/2026-03-31-watch-out-for-missed-warnings-on-vendor-cpp-toolchains....
1•luu•15m ago•0 comments

ReFrame – The EPaper Camera

https://reframe.camera/
1•phil294•17m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Resultant Engineering Website

https://resultant.tools/
1•will2092347•19m ago•0 comments

What Happened to Ashton-Tate and DBase

https://dfarq.homeip.net/what-happened-to-ashton-tate-and-dbase/
1•symisc_devel•19m ago•0 comments

Shiftall mutalk 2 Wireless Soundproof Microphone

https://haruyama365.com/products/shiftall-mutalk-2-wireless-soundproof-microphone
1•gregsadetsky•22m ago•0 comments

Agenthound – Offensive security framework for AI agent infrastructure

https://github.com/adithyan-ak/agenthound
1•akoffsec•22m ago•0 comments

Tyler Cowen on reading fast, reading well, and reading widely (2020)

https://www.driverlesscrocodile.com/books-and-recommendations/tyler-cowen-on-reading-fast-reading...
2•downbad_•22m ago•1 comments

How to pay your rent with your open source project (2020)

https://plausible.io/blog/open-source-funding
1•downbad_•22m ago•1 comments

eBay reaches $56M settlement with e-commerce newsletter writers

https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/28/ebay-reaches-56m-settlement-with-e-commerce-newsletter-writers-...
1•rndsignals•23m ago•0 comments

WhistlinDiesel Cybertruck Durability Test #3 [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ey0ZAaF2L4E
2•Bender•23m ago•0 comments

Agency Is the Job Now

https://www.drjoshcsimmons.com/writing/agency-is-the-job-now
2•joshcsimmons•23m ago•0 comments

American Airlines flights grounded nationwide due to IT outage: FAA

https://abcnews.com/US/american-airlines-flights-grounded-nationwide-due-outage-faa/story?id=1351...
6•computerliker•24m ago•1 comments

Alpha Inference

https://alphainference.app/
1•Estebanmtl•26m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Magpie, a CLI to Turn Your AI Agent into a Bookkeeper

https://github.com/kyle-visner/magpie
1•kvisner•28m ago•0 comments

From GPT2 to Kimi3

https://twitter.com/waterloo_intern/status/2081762065392541951
1•ridiculous_leke•30m ago•0 comments

I built an iOS camera that cryptographically verifies media at capture

https://www.apexverify.tech/
1•therisinggg•33m ago•0 comments

Parsers don't have to be complicated

https://bkaradzic.github.io/posts/scanner/
2•smusamashah•35m ago•0 comments

Nearly 9/10 game industry workers: GenAI use should be disclosed on storefronts

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/nearly-nine-in-ten-games-industry-workers-believe-genai-use-should-...
3•bookofjoe•36m ago•0 comments

The harness is all you need (mostly)

https://github.blog/ai-and-ml/github-copilot/the-harness-is-all-you-need-mostly/
1•yruzin•38m ago•0 comments

Oxide Joins Anthropic's Project Glasswing

https://oxide.computer/blog/oxide-anthropic-project-glasswing
1•lwhsiao•39m ago•0 comments

AE Studio recruiting pirates to recover treasure located by AI

https://ae.studio/jobs/pirate
3•adtse•41m ago•0 comments