You are confusing multiple people making multiple different arguments, and those people your are talking about often aren't articulate enough about their ideas.
There are many mutually independent opinions about AI from IT crowd.
- AI is extremely useful for many individuals.
- AI is extremely damaging to our society as a whole.
- AI companies possibly may be (or at least were) deep in red and possibly would require bailing out.
- AI is not going anywhere.
- A person can use AI extensively AND genuinely hate it and forecast general economic slump because of it at the same time.
And likely many other ideas in the same vein. And by the way, I'm not here saying that I'm anywhere good about describing the issues about AI, those items above are just some examples to illustrate the scope of opinions.
My point is that you can't just take one single argument from a big group of people, deconstruct it (correctly or incorrectly, it doesn't matter) and then claim that ALL arguments of such big group of people are false. It's not a constructive dialog.
PS: also despite the accusations of goal-post shifting, a vast majority of opinions here on HN didn't actually change over the past few years.
"In other words, there seems to be a mysterious divergence between people’s stated and revealed preferences. Why are we commissioning styles that we say we dislike?"
Oh, this is actually pretty obvious to explain. There are several equally big reasons, in no particular order here:
- Modernist/brutalist/bauhaus etc. building with any stated use type is on paper cheaper to build, because it removes all aesthetic features and many functional features - like rain pipes, slanted roof in favor of flat roof, human oriented features like benches etc. It will be much more expensive to maintain in long run, due to the environmental damage from missing functional features, but that's not architect's problem then.
- These buildings are build as a class warfare. Notice the stark difference between designs of private houses where higher class actually lives, and the designs which the are commissioning for the common public.
- Performative architecture. The weirder the art form, the better PR and resulting fame.
Just because something was called bad, predicted to fail and actually didn't fail, doesn't make it "definitively not bad, because it didn't fail, I told you so".
Case in point - Bitfinex was and is absolutely a criminal enterprise and scam, and it didn't have any backing for years in row. But it didn't fail, because many different criminals in the world had decided that it is quite convenient tool and put a monetary IV line in it. And now ruzzians are buying kamikaze drones with it, selling oil to India with it, drug cartels are shuffling around their money with it and so on. Does it mean it wasn't and isn't bad? Of course no. They simply found a rich sponsor to bail them out.
Or the whole 2008 crisis is another popular example.
I'm not saying absence of evidence of wrongdoing is evidence of absence of wrongdoing.
But note, you have very concrete things to claim about Bitfinex. Criminal enterprise, scam, organized crime funding, facilitating arms dealing and embargo avoidance, and so on.
Then you throw in 2008. It's definitely popular but example of what? Bad thing that didn't fail? (Things did fail, hence the crisis? Or you mean the too big to fail attitude?)
Policy proposals (eg. "coordinated AI safety R&D should be exempt from antitrust regulations" or "TARP made money on paper, but the financial sector should pay for the total cost of the crisis") cannot be divorced from the provenance of the source (sex cult, goldbugs, anticapitalists), but the same is true of bluesky screeds.
2008 was a shortened mention of the event when multiple companies by all rights went "bad", i.e. should have went bankrupt on their own merit and performance. But an external entity bailed them out and so they continue to exist and work later on. But does this mean that those companies (like Fannie Mae et. al.) weren't "bad" in 2008? No, it doesn't.
Same logic with pure AI corpos and adjacent dependents. If the doomsayers would ever be right about them being financially unsustainable, then most likely these companies would never get even close to the bankruptcy, simply because they would be bailed by external entities. So we would never be sure if OpenAI and Anthropic were "bad" or not, financially. Because either critics are wrong, or any corporate deficits would be covered by budget money (maybe foreign budget, it happens too).
Except that corporations are not people (well, except one place). A power imbalance between corporations and humans is enough to justify a lot of non-violent behavior which may be considered non-ethical to fellow people, but totally fine towards a corpo. Boycott is one of such traditional ways.
Btw. notice how boycott is often perceived as ok to good, while "cancel culture" as bad, while both are identical if the target is corporation.
Imo, artists boycotting any corporation for any reason at all, even if the Ouija board told them so, are completely justified.
It's not even a "software-generating product". It's only half of it. Most of the heavy lifting is done by absolutely not-AI compilers, analyzers and the like. If not for these programs, written well before AI boom, them LLMs would be no better at programming than they are are at pure LLM based calculations or writing.
It is very hard to debug and fix stuff on Linux if something goes wrong. One can be a greatest network specialist and know all the innards of Linux tools, but then Nvidia driver glitches and whoops... Or dist-upgrade craps DE. or package manager spits out some circular errors with no way to untangle them for a non-expert. Stuff like that.
Basically the problem is not that the "floor" difficulty is a little above "very easy". Linux distributive maintainers and developers have succeeded in lowering the "floor" almost to the Mac or Win levels these past years.
The problem is the "ceiling" is too high, "very hard" in other words.
Also apparently Linux has quite a few failure modes when graphical DEs are run inside VM, to the point of r/Linux just outright telling me "I'm holding it wrong"... ahem... telling me that VMs are unreliable for desktop and I should run it natively. But due to those same personally experienced VM issues, I'm vary about going all-in on native install. Yes, there is dual boot too and I do know the correct order to it (at a guess, not many Win users would, and then risk wiping their old MBR), but for now I'm delaying trying native install (again). A lot of hassle unfortunately, and I'm a procrastinator.
To be honest, I feel that the ceiling is higher in Windows. I just today dealt with a faulty HP Printer driver that caused wuauserv (Windows Update) to report that I had to reboot every day. Finding which files were corrupted in `C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution\` was not an easy task.
I've also this prior week fixed double digit Wi-Fi issues, my institution is dealing with the deprecation of MSCHAPv2, and so on.
Not going to say MacOS is free of issues either - from my experience with screen flickers / blackouts on full screen video playback with quick transitions.
In my experience this year, the grass is not greener in any desktop OS.
In my anecdotal experience, Windows (never used Mac) is a lot more "auto recoverable" compared to a home desktop Linux (among all sorts of distro plus DE combinations). And I was using Win 98 ME, early Vista builds and so on too. It is really hard to bork Windows install to become fully inoperable. It will be screeching and throttling under fifty different viruses and malware installed by a naive aunty in the accounting but it will just somehow work. And GPU driver crashes in my case were self recovering. Linux on the other hand allows way more manual intervention, but it also kinda expects way more manual intervention too. In my experience.
I mean, maybe I'm misrepresenting desktop Linux, that's quite likely (at work I use exclusively CLI destro, so my experience in DEs and drivers is limited). But I'm pretty confident in my ability to generalize Windows state across many installs over past decades, I also had a stint as a all-rounder IT POC in a small journal in the early 00s, so there is that. Windows since NT kernel almost never needs a format/reinstall. Every single unbootable Windows PC was due to a hardware problem, like storage giving up, or burning the power supply, or dead battery, or busted condensers and mosfets. Or an incorrect dual boot install, when MBR gets overwritten. Windows is a very robust OS, despite all the real negative issues in other aspects.
The thing is, Linux is robust too in my experience.
My current laptop is running the latest release 44 of Fedora. That install dates back to version 26 which was something like 9 or 10 years ago, can't remember the exact year. That install migrated from an ssd on a laptop to an nvme on another laptop and then moved to a larger nvme drive. I never had any breakage really. The only problem I ever had on this laptop/install is that sometimes after several long multidays sleep/wake up/sleep/wake-up cycles sound going to a bluetooth device may start having shorts stutter every 10 to 20s that is solved by a reboot. I could probably solve that by restarting pipewire and/or ubloading/reloading a bluetooth module but it doean't happen frequently enough for me to investigate further. And it is nowhere as bad as what sometimes happens on my corporate windows 11 laptop.[1]
Other computer of mine, the "gaming console", is running bazzite, an immutable variant of Fedora dedicated to gaming. Being immutable there is very little breakage possible: if you happened to had an issue with an update you could just boot from the prior version image (not happened in 3 years).
My wife is using similar system with another immutable variant of Fedora called bluefin. It actually started its life as my own secondary laptop when I explored immutable distros under aurora (same base as bluefin but with kde desktop instead of gnome). Migrating from Aurora to Bluefin just involved rebasing image from one distro to another without having to do anything with the user data. All in all pretty robust and painless.
[1] OTOH the sound stack of the windows 11 running on my company issued laptop has had many hiccups to the point some usb or bluetooth devices looks to simoly disappear on a regular basis. A number of times I completely lost the complete sound stack in a middle.of a teams call. I could plug and unplung usb audio devices, bluetooth, usb or jack headsets to no avail. Only rebooting the laptop would make sound work again.I also experience absurd slowness of start menu and even random freezes of explorer windows from time to time on a very lightly used laptop as most of the stuff I do is done on an azure cloud windows desktop (don't get me started on this one, feels like using a raspberry pi 3) via rdp.
> It is very hard to debug and fix stuff on Linux if something goes wrong.
Not these days. Just ask chatgpt or Claude to help out. I did that recently when my nvidia drivers broke somehow. I asked Claude code to take a look. It told me some apt commands to run to uninstall certain nvidia packages and reinstall others. It worked a charm.
(I’m sure the regular chat interface would have worked fine too - I just used Claude code because it was already installed and set up.)
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