This is some of the most knee-jerk content I've seen outside of Tumblr in a while. Fun, engaging, and well written, but totally off base IMO. It's a simple fact of life that we have struck an unexpected (by most) breakthrough with LLMs, and begun meaningfully solving the Frame Problem decades -- or centuries -- before anyone (other than Vinge, who literally predicted it to the year 30y ago: https://users.manchester.edu/Facstaff/SSNaragon/Online/100-F...) thought we would.

We can point out issues with AI all day, such as the ever-relevant impacts of automation on workers in a capitalist society, but this critique is both exceedingly vague and occasionally mistaken.

Once upon a time, everyone was all hot and bothered about Big Data

If your oldest example of a hype cycle is Big Data, you might not be old enough/reading enough history to comment effectively. Big Data is the same hype cycle as AI -- it's called "Machine Learning", and it's been going since full-bore since ~2017: https://subredditstats.com/r/machinelearning

To keep my (central!) critique here very short: "AI" isn't the same as blockchain because some people on forums sound similar when talking about it, it's the culmination of decades of research that started in earnest w/ Judea Pearl's 1984 Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems, or even the hubbub around Marvin Minsky's 1969 Perceptrons. It's an academic discipline, not a buzzword, and any professional or serious critique should engage with such work, not just quote-dunk the CEO of Jack-In-The-Box.

There is no way to opt out of, or disable, this feature.

...Don't use it?

Mozilla Firefox 128.0 released a feature (enabled by default of course) to help advertisers collect data on you.

This is just 100% unrelated, and it's a clap-back to Google anyway. The problem here is the entire industry of Display ads, not Mozilla trying its best to keep them alive along with every other player in the industry (it's not gonna work, but that's a whole separate thread).

Investors (read: fools with more money than sense)... Furthermore, there are a lot of gullible idiots that drank the Kool-Aid and feel like they’re part of the build-up to the next World Wide Web...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect, also this tone isn't very HN-friendly, just in general -- I say as one of the gullible idiots that has hope for the future.

Some solutions are incredibly contentious, though, and I don’t really want the headache. For example: I’m sure that, if this blog post ever gets posted on a message board, someone in the peanut gallery will bring up unions as a mechanism, and others will fiercely shoot that idea down. It’s possible that we, as an industry, are completely in over our heads.

A) Unions are great, but completely orthogonal to this discussion, and B) AI is a subset of capitalism (or, at worst, a synecdoche) not the whole thing.

Hacker News, Lobsters, etc. are full of clueless AI maximalists that cannot see the harms they are inflicting.

Sign me up as one of the clueless maximalists -- again, if I responded in kind, my comment would be flagged and removed. In the end, I think this person is a "cringe" writer "with more money than sense" who creates "binary excrement" because they're an "arrogant" "gullible idiot" who is openly more interested in "shame and ridicule" than academic discussion.