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Hacker News · Mar 1, 2026 · Collected from RSS

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I’m sure you’re wondering why I called you all here today. Well, to be honest, I didn’t actually call for all of you; some of you probably shouldn’t be here. You folks might want to quietly find your way to the exits right here and right now.For those readers who are sticking around, I suspect I’m going to lose a fair number of you along the way. We’re going to attempt to thread a pretty tough needle here and I won’t be too terribly offended if some browser tabs get closed before we get there.And hell, may as well say it: The opinions expressed here belong solely to me and do not reflect the views of my employer, and they probably don’t reflect the views of anyone else’s employer either.This is for the people who look at the world and feel like everything and everybody has gone crazy. People who maybe have this nagging feeling deep inside that something isn’t right here, but may be unsure about speaking up for fear of being ostracized at work or in social circles. Those of us who pause, look at this barrage of everything happening around us every day, and simply want to say no.If anyone out there has thought for the very first time that this might finally be the new trick that makes them feel like an old dog, or if you’re a fresh graduate who spent years working through school toward an almost-certain career path that seems now to be crumbling into dust underfoot, you are the intended audience.I’m writing this to tell you that it’s not just you. But more importantly, you’re not wrong. You are free to feel what you feel and think what you think. And I, for one, am tired of listening to people who tell me to suppress those parts of myself and surrender to a new way of being that I never asked for and frankly do not want.Pull up a chair and endure yet another goddamn article about generative AI.Gotta blame it on somethingIn 1989, a musical act called Milli Vanilli had a number one hit titled “Baby Don’t Forget My Number.” Its success, alongside the earlier single “Girl You Know It’s True,” secured them a spot on the Club MTV Tour. During one of the performances, a technical glitch caused their pre-recorded vocal track to skip and repeat, clearly betraying the fact that they had been lip-syncing to the voices of other singers. It didn’t take long before news broke that the performers on the stage that night had never sung any of their music—live or album versions.In the fallout from this incident, their record label severed ties with them, their Grammy award was rescinded, and their albums were pulled from shelves. The performers, Fab Morvan and Rob Pilatus, never found any lasting success after the dissolution of the group. Lawsuits were filed by groups of customers who felt that they were sold fraudulent goods using deceptive practices. To this day, the name Milli Vanilli remains tainted by the scandal.Maybe it’s just me, but I feel that same kind of treachery when somebody tries to pass off a piece of AI-generated work as if it were their own voice. There’s always that moment—whether reading the text, examining the image, or listening to the spoken language—where I clock the presentation as “not quite right.” Then the realization hits that I’ve been engaging with nothing of any particular substance, then I become a little pissed off at having my time and attention wasted by somebody who didn’t care enough about what they were doing to actually do that thing.Recently that feeling of indignation has started becoming displaced by something a bit more melancholy. AI restaurant reviews praising a dish that definitely is not offered on the menu, and the attentive service provided by a named member of the staff who doesn’t exist. Video recommendations featuring an algorithmic guess at the swimming motions of a newborn sea otter or the simulated smile of a down-on-his-luck war vet reuniting with a service dog. Has anybody with a mouth ever tasted this cookie recipe? Has anybody with an actual butt contributed any of the five-star reviews listed next to this dining chair?We’ve got enough content to infinite-scroll for the rest of our waking lives. Yet so much of it is pointless, undesirable, lacking substance, or actively harmful. It is above all joyless—like listening to a Breaking Rust album There has been plenty of commentary regarding the apparently 100% AI-produced track “Walk My Walk,” but there is some real gold in the Singles and EPs category on (one of) Breaking Rust’s artist pages on Spotify. In particular, a relatively recent cover of “Photograph” that answers the question “What if we got Ben E. King’s backing band, put a Temu clone of Chris Stapleton’s voice on top of it, and did an Ed Sheeran song that went for eight and a half minutes?” It is not pleasant and it does not need to exist.If that’s not to your taste, there’s also an eleven minute version of Passenger’s “Let Her Go” up there. (Everything okay with your end of sequence tokens, buddy? Just concerned is all.) while eating a sleeve of unsalted saltines and somehow forgetting that it wasn’t always this way.Look at LinkedIn for chrissakes. “A senior engineer was tasked with such-and-such,” “The consultant billed for sixty hours,” “Our backlog had grown to over a thousand tickets,” “When I saw the 350,000 line pull request the junior engineer had opened,” and on and on. These are not real things that have happened to living people. They are the result of somebody prompting a chat bot to “make me sound smart and insightful to a room full of people who have long since turned their brains off” while conveying nothing novel or actionable. I have recently started referring to these “thought” “leadership” social media posts collectively as AIslop’s Fables.If you’ll indulge me, I’d like to take a brief tangent and try my hand at writing one of these ridiculous things myself:Two engineers—the systems architect Ass and the solution consultant Weasel—chanced to travel in company down a forest aisle. The Ass walked purposefully several paces ahead of the Weasel, who dawdled merrily along. At last they paused at a fork in the codebase.The Ass, ever considerate of the broader consequences of his actions, contemplated deeply the choice before him. The Weasel, uninterested in such unrewarding efforts, took rest at the base of a widespreading trie, finding great pleasure in the cool shade of its stable branches.So offended was the Ass at this display of poor work ethic, he deigned to question the Weasel’s technical ability. “How foolish you should be,” he brayed, “to remain unbothered by the fact that your house contains one appliance called a washing machine and another called a dishwasher. Until you see the absurdity of it, you have no business designing an API!”It was in that moment, and all at once, when Jupiter cast down a fierce reallocation of resources that made both of their roles redundant.Anyway. I find that when I mentally filter out all the obvious AI flourishes—the empty fluff, the excessive emoji, the formatting smells, the Ghibli-inspired scenes that really, really love using every available shade of brown—there’s sometimes not a whole lot of genuine human connection left in there. And in that empty space, I begin to wonder: Where did all the people go? What are they all doing behind the artifice they’re showing here? Why am I wasting my time and energy wading through these shallow yet unbounded seas of nothing?For a while I was able to navigate around it by really curtailing my use of social media. I only looked at LinkedIn for the S-tier trolling of a select group of professional shitposters. Reddit no longer occupied any appreciable amount of my time. There were entire classes of Hacker News submissions that I refused to read the comments on. Including the comments about this article, should such comments ever materialize. I experimented with a small set of browser customizations to eliminate YouTube video recommendations and the site’s ill-conceived Shorts.In place of all that, I started spending much more time in smaller private communities of people with shared interests, personalities, or life experience. We’d swap links to things we thought might be interesting to the group. We wouldn’t chase trends, we didn’t let ourselves get overloaded with shiny distractions from outside the circle, and we evolved it into a shared space that suited all of us best. Spending time in these small isolated groups really laid bare how dogshit the social landscape on the broader internet felt in comparison.I was all set to leave that part of my life behind me. Then it followed me to work.If a clod be washed away by the CThere are lots of different jobs out there, and a fair number of them are done on computers. As a matter of fact, when people ask me what I do for a living, I sometimes simply wave my hand and say “Computers” in a kind of no-you-really-don’t-want-to-know-what-Kubernetes-is kind of way. I suspect most office workers have a similar aspect of their job that they don’t like to dredge up during polite conversation.I’m a software engineer on paper, and that’s the framing I’ll use here because it’s the one I know best. But I’m sure that those working in design, marketing, visual art, customer service, writing, all sorts of disciplines have felt it too. This ever-louder voice booming from on high to integrate large language models (LLMs) and other generative AI products into every conceivable point in your workstream. Maybe against your will. Probably against your own interests.In the software engineering world, at least until quite recently, we all wrote computer code. Some of us wore the title “coder” like a badge of honor to describe our profession. I never much cared for it. We spent basically the entire 2010s loudly promoting “Learn to code!” as the cure for all of the ails of that era. And coders entered the profession in droves. With a teeny-tiny bit of help from years and years of interest rates near zero, the industry flourished.There are a bunc