[securicat]

It takes five minutes to delete your TikTok, Meta, and Instagram accounts. Setting up forwarding rules from Gmail to Fastmail or another provider takes maybe a little longer, after three months hopefully all your emails are going to the new account after changing them. These companies can’t manipulate you if you don’t use their products.

Edit: I know what network effects are, I was talking about steps individual users can (and should IMO) take. We should be helping our friends, family and neighbors find safe and health alternatives like Signal for comms. Build different networks that are actually social and not doomscrolling.

[dakiol]

Same can be said about Claude, Codex, etc. These tools are amazing (technically speaking) but they don't play in our favor (most of us are regular, replaceable employees). Only the usual suspects benefit from AI (executive layer, investors, etc)

Still amazes me how engineers on HN are in awe of AI and LLMs knowing that 90% of us will be affected (we won't be able to bring money to the table) once the higher ups start to normalize even more the usage of AI to reduce headcount. Not everything is about the technical details people, grow up

[fragmede]

It's an iterated prisoner's dilemma with all the other developers in the world, and some are vocally choosing to defect. The only rational strategy then is to also defect.

[dakiol]

Right. It seems then that all these "elite" engineers on HN aren't as smart as we thought (and yeah, I include myself in that bag).

It's deeply sad to see how our most beloved work (those side projects we pour ourselves into purely for the joy of it) will, at the end, be the very reason most of us lose our jobs (not all of us, but the majority). Openai/antrhopic/etc and others simply took all of that and turned it to their advantage. It's capitalism, sure, but it's heartbreaking... I wouldnt mind be out of job for another reason, but not for that one pls

[apsurd]

All is not lost though is it? We can invest our efforts into local models and frontier competitors.

I'm not blind, I have Claude pro (not max) and Cursor subscription. But I'm really hesitant to go balls to the wall on the most powerful models because it isn't sustainable; I don't want it to be. So how much can I get from the older models, the smaller, cheaper ones that will hopefully inevitably be commoditized. I think the harness improvements are making headway. I continue to think Cursor Composer 2 is more than adequate.

Then again if one believes it's a race to the singularity, then that's another story. I don't.

[fragmede]

Why not?

[apsurd]

The most concise answer as of now is because AI has no "will".

LLMs are objectively smarter than any one person so in some definition we've already created super-intelligence. The problem is they just sit there. They have all the answers already, if you think about it. Whenever we ask it something it gives us the answer, it's amazing, we can even say it can synthesize new information. We can agree with all the claims.

But what does it do with that super-intelligence? Nothing. It can't. it doesn't have will. Or interest. Curiosity? Biological imperative. Who knows.

So we create loops and introspection and set them free. Does giving AI a goal make the AI conscious? That's easily silly if you ask me.

(I'm trying really hard not to make this philosophy. I really like the philosophy aspect, but this is my 30 second answer to the question)

[securicat]

As if Claude and Instagram are remotely similar products. But again, these products make it incredibly easy to cancel. If work requires that you use it, make the next job you get not require it or just use it on the job.

[AvAn12]

Both try to maximize engagement. Both (soon to be) ad supported. Both driven by algorithms that show the user what they want to see.

[dakiol]

I see engineers addicted to Claude the same way non-tech people (friends of mine) are addicted to instagram. At the end it's all the same: making multibillion dollar companies richer every day

[joe_mamba]

>These tools are amazing (technically speaking) but they don't play in our favor (most of us are regular, replaceable employees).

I'm a mid programmer at best, like compared to top guys in the industry, who built stuff like OpenClaw or those prodigy 16 year-old coders who became millionaires, and yet I don't fear the LLM assisted coding future. I'm at peace knowing that I will adapt to the LLM programming world using my knowledge in my favor, or adapt to a world where I will no longer be a SW engineer, but something else.

Also I find it ironic and poetic how some SW devs here want us to rise up and fight LLMs and the companies making them for disrupting this profession, when the SW dev profession was so well paid precisely because the SW products they wrote, disrupted other peoples' professions, moving the savings from labor costs into the pocket of employers, who used SW to optimize processes and repetitive labor and not have to hire as many people, yet they never saw an issue with other people losing their jobs. "Learn to code" eh?

Oh how the turntables.

[LPisGood]

I haven’t looked at OpenClaw but I get the impression anyone could build it. It doesn’t do anything technically impressive, does it?

[joe_mamba]

>anyone could build it

Then why hasn't anyone else done it before?

With hindsight, it's always easy to say anyone could have done it too, but there's more to product success than just coding and shipping an app out the door.

The first iPhone was built using COTS(commercial off the shelf) parts that Nokia, Ericsson and Motorola also had access to, and SW tools they also had access to, yet Apple won and buried the other companies because their end-product was way more popular with the customer base. I'm sure engineers from Nokia, Ericsson and Motorola also said "we could have done exactly the same thing with the right leadership" when they saw that.

I also say "I could have done that" when I see how the maker of Flappy Bird became a multi millionaire, or how any other top 100 AppStore slop app has 100+ million downloads.

Coding skills are dime a dozen these days. A lot of people can do 95% of these things now. The differentiator between failure and success, comes with the 5% rest: network effects, market know-how, promotion, timing, outreach, UI, UX, luck, etc.

[LPisGood]

I agree it was a good idea and there’s more to product success, but you were specifically talking about coding skill level.

There are some things I could easily say I (and many others) could not build even in retrospect. Solidworks, for example is beyond a lot of people’s skill level and very difficult to build.

Flappy bird and open claw, not so much.

[gavmor]

Many people have! Nanoclaw, LocalGPT, Moltis, Thoth, Q-Claw... the list goes on.

[Dylan16807]

Well your previous comment sure made it sound like you were talking about level of coding skill.

[afavour]

It's frustrating to see this response so often, as if it weren't blindingly obvious.

After years of near monopoly status these companies have a lock on many people's social lives. To give up Instagram is akin to giving up text messaging. "Just stop using it" isn't helpful advice to those people.

If Instagram disappeared tomorrow it would be different, because everyone would be in the same position. But preaching personal responsibility in an area subject to network effects doesn't work.

[securicat]

Give me a break. No one says “I can’t live without Instagram” literally. There are even studies that show that it makes their users depressed. From inside the company that _makes the product_.

Now, would it be inconvenient to stop, sure, but people need better self control. Put that cookie down!

[afavour]

> No one says “I can’t live without Instagram” literally.

That's a straw man argument. I never said they were.

> There are even studies that show that it makes their users depressed.

What percentage of the population do you think are in the habit of reading academic studies about the effects of the products they use?

It all feels reminiscent of cigarette smoking. The damage was very well known yet people continued to do it. It took extensive government regulation to wean people off their addiction, not a "buck up, chump" motivational message.

[pixl97]

I don't believe the above user is here to have a well thought out discussion, they just want to tell the world how much better they are than the social media addicts.

[securicat]

I never said you did say that.

[idle_zealot]

You can and should do that, but it's not sufficient to individually avoid harm. You still have to live in a world where most people have their behavior manipulated, and that will impact you. Even from a purely selfish perspective you should support efforts to stop this sort of control broadly with legal action.

[securicat]

Fair point, and nothing would make me happier than TikTok and Instagram being shut down, at least for minors.

[bdangubic]

exactly. I did all of OPs suggestions, decade ago (never had TT to begin with) and still live in a sick society surrounded by the influence of these platforms

[toasty228]

It takes five minutes to just stop being depressed, it takes 5 minutes to just stop being addicted

What works for you, and me actually, doesn't work for most people, humans are complex things

[dinfinity]

> It takes five minutes to just stop being depressed, it takes 5 minutes to just stop being addicted

Would you place all the responsibility of drug addiction on drug dealers?

Yes, their practices are predatory, but it is essential to remind the addicts that ultimately change comes from within themselves. They need to change something.

[securicat]

That’s pretty insensitive to people suffering from mental illness. To compare sitting and doomscrolling on social media with something that’s chemically out of balance in a persons body is… a choice.

[peanut_merchant]

The parent was obviously being sarcastic to prove the point through comparison.

[macintux]

They're still distorting our political and social worlds, whether we're participants or not.

[sonicvroooom]

yeah but that's a way they want you to behave in order to set up a control group within the target group that continues to behave as expected. the questions to be answered are not which parts of that control group, and how, nudge which parts of the target group slightly off the predicted and/or confirmed results. they answered that way back when. the question is, how can we react to the unexpected results that we ourselves forced. they can't just go on doing the opposite of what's good for them and bad for the users or vice versa, they have 50 years of data on that, some of which, should be noted, was accidently burned or bombed with a bunch of incriminating evidence shortly before investigators arrived ... which should make even the last sus person understand, it wasn't on purpose

[logickkk1]

"just delete your account" assumes the exit was designed to work. this is the company that called its own prime cancellation flow "the iliad."

[fsflover]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect