logoalt Hacker News

simonwyesterday at 3:08 PM4 repliesview on HN

I find this attitude baffling.

Things are allowed to get better more than once!

The idea that "yeah, you said technology had improved in the past, and now you're saying it has improved again" is a gotcha just seems incoherent to me.


Replies

jcranmeryesterday at 3:36 PM

The context for some of these posts are yet-another-null-result coming out, saying that AI isn't having the expected objective result, with the posts defending AI by saying that it totally changed just after the cut-off the research. Evolutionary step changes are definitely a thing, but the problem isn't that AI is having such step changes, it's that you're saying that the most recent step change is the one that shows the improvement, and every study that comes out saying "no, that wasn't," the response to that is, "no, there's a new change that is totally the key inflection point!"

Or, put differently: if a study comes out next year saying they don't see major impacts from AI in 2026, will you admit your viewpoint as being wrong, or is your response going to be "no, there was a massive inflection point in September 2026 that completely invalidates the paper"?

codinhoodyesterday at 3:21 PM

I keep running into this as well. Someone shared a link to a study from last year telling me that AI doesn't make programmers as productive as they think. The study was obviously done months prior to it's release. So evaluating the state AI even further back.

But this didn't seem to concern them. The study said X, therefore it applies to today.

I'm just not sure it's worth it to argue with others about it at this point. Not that I'm 100% all behind AI coding, but I'm just shocked people are still this resistant.

show 1 reply
hfthkgghndyesterday at 3:16 PM

[dead]