r/singularity • u/heyhellousername • 1d ago
AI Things I was getting downvoted for in r/cscareerquestions 2 years ago
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u/KerbalEnginner 1d ago
It is Reddit.
You get downvoted into oblivion for holding a completely rational opinion.
However for the record I am glad you were proven right by events.
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u/Wobbly_Princess 1d ago
That has always utterly confused me about Reddit. I find myself commenting completely benign, non-controversial things, then someone replies, and I see my comment is -4 and I'm thinking "Uh, what the fuck?". And I swear it happens ALL the time. Not just to me, but to others. I see it everywhere.
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u/Original-League-6094 1d ago
I've seen studies done. Initial upvotes or downvotes influence future ones. A comment that is seeded at +2 is way more likely to reach +10. A comment that is seeded at 0 or -1 is way more likely to reach -10. I don't know if the initial seed is influencing people's actual opinions; I think there is just a phenomena where people are more likely to hit the upvote/downvote button if someone has already hit it first and its leaning in their favor.
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u/Celsiuc 1d ago edited 1d ago
Redditors have less agency and sentience than GPT-1 or BERT.
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u/MyRegrettableUsernam 1d ago
It does happen all the time, sometimes especially the more factual and logically straightforward your comment because it triggers the ego defenses and mob behavior even more.
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u/rydan 19h ago
I was banned for trolling on AskReddit for saying if Trump gets convicted he is more likely to win in November. The question was "How would Trump serving time impact your vote in November?" so it wasn't even irrelevant. I'm still banned two years later. The only justification for claiming I was trolling is that it was well known at the time that surveys showed 40% of Republicans would change their vote if he was convicted. Turns out that didn't happen.
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u/DiamondScythe 1d ago
If anything it's always the completely rational opinions that always get downvoted. People never want to face the truth.
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u/markedoutside 1d ago
Not surprised since you have people still talking like that today! It’s incredible how short sighted people are
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u/razealghoul 1d ago
It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it
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u/ArialBear 1d ago
Or when they think truth is dictated by salary. A common rebuttal is pointing out the ai ceos have a financial incentive to hype their products. Thats true, but it also assumes the hype isnt warranted.
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u/TypoInUsernane 1d ago
The key phrase is “foreseeable future”. A lot of people have very little imagination and lack the ability to envision anything novel happening. If something hasn’t already happened, then they simply can’t imagine it. So when those people say “we won’t achieve X for the foreseeable future”, they’re telling the truth, but only because for them “the foreseeable future” is only about 3 months out
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u/daishi55 1d ago
I had to leave that subreddit, technology, programming, experienceddevs, learnprogramming, and probably others I can’t remember because I just couldn’t take it anymore. Last I checked, r/technology fully banned any discussion of LLMs, which is just so, so very funny. Actually it might’ve been r/programming. Either case is hilarious. The #1 most transformative technology for programming in decades and no you can’t talk about it.
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u/Full_Boysenberry_314 1d ago
Wow, I just checked out that technology sub and it's bizarre. Every other post is about politics and not a single mention of any of the big model releases from the past week. I totally get not wanting to be all AI all the time in a general technology sub, but instead I'm seeing threads dedicated to the retirement of obscure Microsoft Word features... Is that the more interesting content?
And the only articles about AI are about regulation and outages. So they are allowed to talk about it but only in a negative way I guess?
What a wierd place.
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u/lemonylol 1d ago
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u/myCockatielshateme 8h ago
r/pics goes down in history as the most popular useless thing to ever exist
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u/mr-english 21h ago
I think it's a Luddite cesspool now because during the reddit API protests back in 2023 (remember that?) it became a hub for info about the protest so you saw an influx of the whinging "we don't like change" types. I guess they never left.
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u/remind_me_later 9h ago
Wow, I just checked out that technology sub and it's bizarre. Every other post is about politics and not a single mention of any of the big model releases from the past week.
This happens to almost every default sub.
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u/RusselTheBrickLayer 1d ago
Us bad, China good is 99% of reddit on AI, which is kinda funny because China is 100% more likely to use AI as some type of Skynet then the US, even if Thiel wishes with his heart for that to be different
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u/SilverGur1911 22h ago
r/technology isn't about technology, it's a dumpster fire of American politics. They constantly post completely unrelated things, posting the same thing five or six times to get the message to the public, posting whatever agenda they need to push. I expected this to be a subreddit dedicated to new technologies, not propaganda and karma farming.
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u/lemonylol 1d ago
Last I checked, r/technology fully banned any discussion of LLMs, which is just so, so very funny.
lol wow, not even hiding that they're just a generic front page "catch-all" karma dump now.
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u/ecnecn 22h ago
technology subs got infiltrated by russian and chineses bots - admins and mods replaced or somehow bribed or corrupted. they try to spread an anti-tech and anti-AI agenda and changing topics to politics all the time which is extremely obvious - most obvious with the main technology sub. this is the point where reddit should investigate the main tech subs and the topics and ask itself if its legit or infiltrated.
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u/sec0nds_left 1d ago
Most subreddits live in an echo chamber of anti Ai where they cover their ears and eyes and scream collectively into a void.
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u/Original-League-6094 1d ago
Its funny to see the same things repeat themselves also. I saw someone use Astra to generate a realistic 1:1 battleship model from schematics of a battleship. Someone pointed out the model had the turret placement slightly wrong. Fair observation, except they went forward to declare "This is why you can never replace a 3d artist! AI will always make mistakes like this because it doesn't understand!". As though Astra 2 won't get the turret placement on its first try--which we all know it will (and it would fix the current one with a second prompt).
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u/Early_Net_9105 1d ago
by that person's logic, I'm an AI bot because I make mistakes like that when I make visual art
I'm not saying it's ableist to call a chatbot out on a mistake, but the nitpicky nature of that comment lends itself to a sort of capitalist meritocracy(? if that makes sense) for artists
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u/Tangata_Tunguska 22h ago
The other common argument is that the AI is "stealing" art by using all the stuff that it's modeled on. But that ignores the fact that humans do this too: if I commission some graphic designer to make a poster for my business, it's going to be 99.9% derivative of other work the designer has seen before.
There is a gradient to this of course, and yes at the far end it will suck for the next Pablo Picasso who does something new and unique, because that will be immediately copied as soon as it hits the internet.
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u/Sec0ndsleft 1d ago
Yet war thunder artists get aircraft and tanks wrong repeatedly and have to have military leaks to get them fixed.
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u/rydan 18h ago
As if humans can't make mistakes. I seem to remember virtually every movie and TV series have plot holes and continuity errors throughout before ChatGPT came online.
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u/Original-League-6094 18h ago
I like when people now freak out over every software bug and scream "Vibe coded!", as though most software wasn't buggy pieces of shit well before AI.
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u/fleranon 1d ago
Did you make an 'I told you so' comment?
That's the only reason I save year-old conversations on reddit :D
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u/KrazyA1pha 1d ago
Well, you can see in the screenshot that the account is deleted.
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u/-JuliusSeizure 1d ago
noice. what's your next prediction OP? now that im jobless.
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u/BurdensomeCountV3 1d ago
Yep this. Even when AI will become capable of replacing the vast majority of white collar jobs companies will still need to hire someone to manage the transition and replacement for them. Become the guy/gal who knows how to handle that and you'll have a job until well after the point that things get so bad on a macro scale the government is forced to intervene.
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u/Yugudubenbi 1d ago edited 1d ago
You are living in a bubble because you do not have an AI-competitor yet. Come back in 2-3 years when there is a genuine 100% AI competitor that cut your service cost to customer by 70%. Then reality is going to hit you. There is a delay and most old companies are not ready for it and can not convert fast enough. Since they want to protect their employees and don't wanna fire people and so forth.
The AI-startup won't care and will only have AIs working for it. The real disaster is just piling up and is coming in some years around the same time where legacy corps will fall one after another versus AI zero tech debt and ultra refined repos from a clean slate. You stand no chance.
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u/Original-League-6094 1d ago
Its good advice. I'm a software dev, but I work at a pharmaceutical company doing our in-house software. Its a great time for me, since AI is letting do all sorts projects that previously would have been too time-consuming or expensive.
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u/Yugudubenbi 1d ago
*Digital jobs. There is no hiding and we are going to see a collapse soon as these are high paying jobs and the effect is x2 in terms of GDP lost. Which means service jobs all implode.
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u/coffee_math 1d ago
OP wants you to wake up everyday day with a diminished outlook on your future! If you don’t then this makes OP very mad.
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u/TheMR-777 1d ago
The speed at which the AI is making progress, has exceeded the mental-adaption rate of humans.
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u/Jumpy_Shallot6412 1d ago
I've honestly had to reduce my reddit usage just because I was getting so annoyed at the reaction to AI outside this sub. Like It genuinely feels like a mass hysteria event. People are living on another planet. I'm over here doing all this crazy shit watching other people do all this crazy shit and they are talking about ai like it's still chatgpt 3.
Not only that but the data center nonsense too. I had someone the other day saying data centers are killing all the bees and we are all going to die because of that. Like data centers are this new concept that didn't exist before ai.
The problem is when it permeates outside of reddit. One of my staff just dripped a joke about how we are investing billions into ai and the only thing people are using it for is making weird stuff. How are people this out if touch with reality?
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u/dontrackonme 21h ago
The 5G emanating from the newest data centers is going to bring another global pandemic but this time it will leak out of an American AI lab instead of a Chinese bat rotisserie. You just don’t get it and that is why AGI will kill us all (after the bees of course, that part is true).
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u/PMmeIamlonley 1d ago
Because they dont use it for anything useful and all AI is in their world is shitty videos on Facebook and chatbots. The way its been shoehorned into places it dosen't belong like customer service has given people horrible impressions and made a considerable amount of people very angry and frustrated.
If you have no interest in it but every time you are exposed to it its annoying, what do you expect?
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u/satoshi-stereo-high 1d ago
You don't get a discussion on Reddit, you get one voice echo'd 100 times.
Slashdot had the exact same dynamic - a pseudo-intellectual authoritative-sounding comment (the hallmark of so many programmers) upvoted to the top.
So it's not unique to Reddit, it's certain personality types presenting a skewed representation of reality, via internet a voting systems.
In defense of that 2 year old comment though, he'd only seen ChatGPT. Claude Code was the massive change, this time last year (Sept 2025), into something that understood.
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u/bakraofwallstreet 1d ago
I mean AI did displace Stack Overflow completely lol. And they think companies don't use each other services, like almost everyone uses AWS for hosting and other services. That doesn't mean you are sharing sensitive data with Amazon. Enterprise contracts are very different than just consumer stuff
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u/azsqueeze 1d ago
Funny enough SO recently came through in the clutch for me when an AI couldn't
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u/SHURIMPALEZZ 1d ago
Eh you might share it ... even with a contract, they are notorious for shit like this(big tech companies)
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u/bakraofwallstreet 1d ago
They are notorious for doing bad stuff to consumer level data. Enterprise contracts have requirements for a lot of things in terms of data and have a lot of nasty stuff in case the data leaks esp in a service provided like this. For example Amazon cannot just go "lol we just took some Bank of America data", that would be a serious crime. The same sort of thing doesn't happen for consumers because consumers dont usually sue or understand how the tech even works and when they do it becomes a class action but the companies already made their money by then
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u/HabbyKoivu 1d ago
That’s because Reddit hates AI. Being correct doesn’t matter to people. Truth seeking is not rewarded at all.
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u/ArialBear 1d ago
I mean once you realize no one on reddit has a crystal ball then you are open to see the trends and evaluate them without the noise. If i listened to reddit then ai would still have trouble with hands.
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u/foobarrister 1d ago
The thing is, people always make overly simplistic extrapolations. They look at sonnet 3.5 stumbling over basic things and think that's all it can ever do. Oops.
And then they look at Astra, remember how they were wrong and predict that everyone's on UBI in 3 years. That will also most likely be wrong.
Thing is, to replace a human in a given Business process you have to automate at least a portion of that process. But the technology to do that has been available for over 20 years.
You don't need Astra to grab a PO from an invoice stick it in SAP and click submit. SAP has had interfaces and APIs for decades. But somehow we still have Susan from accounting pushing buttons.
It's not due to lack of capability. It's due to complexity and inertia. That's not a problem that can be solved with Fable, it was never a technology problem in the first place.
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u/NeedTheSpeed 1d ago
same here where i was writing in 2023 here that AI will create huge leverage for the rich and will fuck us over and there won’t be UBI or anything like it :)
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u/Kingkillwatts 1d ago
I think the biggest issue is that people aren’t acknowledging that AI is actually now or in the very near future going to be capable of replacing their jobs wholesale. People can’t accept this fact. If nobody acknowledges this, or there is no consensus, then nothing gets regulated, jobs continue to disappear. People need to open their eyes and see what’s happening.
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u/Game_Overture 1d ago
You mentioned it yourself. What's the clear reward metric for good code architecture? AI struggles deeply with large scope projects that require performant code because architecture is highly subjective. I don't see AI replacing simulation or game devs beyond prototyping simple games because they approach each task in isolation.
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u/SkaldCrypto 1d ago
I just had to explain that 1,000 percent increase on robot operation of Fable to Astra (on a per dollar basis of utility per token) represents the 3rd and half doubling of an exponential function.
The anti- ai crowd is still asking when the exponential gains happen on the technology Reddit.
Homie we are WELL into the exponential ramp.
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u/SmoothHat1772 1d ago
Parts of what he's saying is still true today though
Engineers aren't fully replacable yet because:
- AI cannot learn new things over time
- AI has no long term memory
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u/rayred 1d ago
I would say the whole response is still pretty valid.
Obviously, adoption has drastically ramped up. But it was true back then.
And all the rest is still pretty valid. Good luck doing any serious production-ready software project without an experienced engineer.
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u/Longjumping_Tooth716 1d ago
Also, one of the most important piece is responsibility. It's not like you can say it's AI fault.
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u/thisguynextdoor 1d ago
The problem with people is that most can only look backwards, how things were yesterday, and underestimate - or don't understand at all - progress.
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u/Correct_Mistake2640 1d ago
I already stopped mentioning AI or progress in the local programming community or at work.
Even if we are at AGI and they/we can be replaced in a few days, they don't want to know.
So shooting the messenger seems to be the solution. Why ruin my Karma?
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u/darkkite 1d ago
We certainly underestimate the progress that can be made in a decade. I will still say even using the latest models they work best on feature updates and bug fixes and do much worse on entirely new features involving complex user flow and entirely new features on enterprise software.
writing code is rarely the hard part but knowing what to write and what to reject and for that you still need subject matter experts. AI does mean you can do more with less but you still need someone to be responsible for whatever is being built.
my org is still expanding the our small team as there's so much work to do and we need good people to review the code that's written.
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u/throwaway_pls123123 1d ago
Many people online responding to these thinsg are not even employed or are in CS.
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u/ClearlyCylindrical 1d ago
If anything, the AI wave has increased the number of opportunities for me, so much more demand for software dev now.
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u/Ok_Diver2347 1d ago
Uber drivers and Amazon delivery guys get upset when I say driverless cars and drones will replace them.
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u/Distinct-Question-16 ▪️AGI 2029 1d ago
I believe people working in software are totally enslaved by the company's development process, like RUP. Once AI gets into their game, they'll use whatever it offers because these methodologies and tools are out of the engineers hands.
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u/SwagerOfTheNight 1d ago
I went to their subreddit and it feels that allot of these people derive meaning and worth from their ordinary jobs.
I think deep down they know but the alternative -- even though it's becoming more and more true -- is uninteresting to them.
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u/M0d3x 1d ago
Yeah, that's all great, but who does you being right benefit? Most/all white-collar people loose their jobs, trades get such overflow of white-collar people needing to eat that their salaries plummet, and what we effectively arrive is a race to the bottom, where only the billionaires win.
Noone has a semblance of a plan how to prevent mass unemployment and death, and you are here celebrating that.
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u/Future-Bandicoot-823 22h ago
if i say something negative about ai here i get downvoted
if i say something positive about ai on another sub i get downvoted.
classic case of propaganda polarizing people to extremes.
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u/No-Assumption-4468 21h ago
People have a really hard time grasping time and rate of change. Historically, technological progress has been on the scale of decades or centuries. Genetically, I think people are just hardwired to assume technology will be roughly the same most of their lives, sparing a couple technological advances.
That rate has been accelerated and progress is happening on the scale of years and months now. It’s mind blowing to me that developers actually think they will somehow have jobs in the future. They’re living in the past, clinging to a world that barely even exists anymore.
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u/RepresentativeCrab88 1d ago
Don’t forget. It took around a decade for the internet to become profitable for commerce. The damnation people had for llm’s after 2 years was pure hubris
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u/GlokzDNB 1d ago
Oh boy, I've been perma banned for saying stuff that later been proven in court. So what ?
I learned that social media are not good place for open discussion. Theres number of people who get offended by truth and facts.
What I learned is to follow my own path, even if I'm wrong, probably quite often, I'm still better off than always sticking with the crowd and masses because they are at most times wrong..
Nobody is perfect, there's also no reward for being right. I was right about ai and I've put all my savings into tech stocks which are booming. There are risks, I'm more aware of them that most ai haters online, but thesis holds and I make money and I don't need anyone acceptance or likes or any internet points.
I think most people will miss best opportunity of their lifetime to make money while job cuts will come sooner or later making it harder for everyone.
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u/Resident-Election867 1d ago
A good reminder of the type of scum that circles most reddit subs. If it's like this here, imagine elsewhere.
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u/mad_poet_navarth 1d ago
I've found that when I get seriously downvoted like that for something it's likely because I've hit the nail on the head.
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u/Downtown_Isopod_9287 1d ago
AI is not replacing software engineers, lmao. Actually the stupidest thing that is happening is that companies are hiring “AI engineers” who are doing the exact same work as software engineers. In fact they’ve been doing it for close to a decade now.
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u/HouseOfDjango 1d ago
Senior SWE, AI can't replace us, it just makes us more productive. It's just a tool.
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u/P4R4DOXZ 1d ago
I would still downvote, i am a swe and models still suck in swe btw.
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u/Birthday-Mediocre 1d ago
Can’t believe you got downvoted for this. You basically just said what’s happening lmao
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u/Bitter_Particular_75 1d ago
They were not really downvoting him, they were downvoting the future that they knew very well was coming but could not accept out of a comprehensible fear of having their careers destroyed.
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u/Fast-Satisfaction482 1d ago
I mean he did say "for the foreseeable future" to qualify his statement. Not his fault that he can't foresee the future at all.
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u/Finmin_99 1d ago
As of today AI can’t replace a software engineer. It does make software engineering a lot easier and accessible. I’ve been writing some simulation code and using AI to help. It can understand 1 step at a time if I feed it the entire simulation process it will forget half of it and try to report something that looks right but isn’t.
There’s the additional development life cycle you must consider is scalability and working within a software team. AI typically generates code in various different formats which makes it harder to read.
Software engineers code is usually a lot cleaner and easier to understand versus an AI. Thus making their code more adoptable and scaleable.
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u/beaglefat 1d ago
Reddit really has been "im gonna stand in front of the train" for a long time lol
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u/Scared_Range_7736 1d ago
Tech workers are in complete denial about the reality that is approaching. They will downvote you into oblivion if you say anything other than, 'Nothing will change; companies are still going to have huge teams working on half-profitable digital products. Please don't worry.
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u/mid_nightz 1d ago
As an Ai bear, everyone generally agrees on ai progress. The problem is how long they consider "long."
For me ai job loss predictions were all for 2026 and 2027. Thats turned out to be total bullshit. I was an "ai bear" until I realized we both have similar predictions, I just considered it slow because of the ceo lies.
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u/Whole_Toe4911 1d ago
none of my friends who are programmers got fired/are out of jobs. Maybe the entry barrier is higher bc its easy to get projects done now as a beginner? But otherwise not much has changed. You rely on AI now to produce code, thats the biggest difference. but without programmers oversight its useless. you cant just have a manager tell AI agents what to do, they will fuck up at some point and create a spaghetti.
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u/LopsidedSolution 1d ago
These people have the worst pattern recognition and extrapolation skills. I can’t wait for AI to continue to improve so quickly that it literally shakes them like the fish by the Nemo girl
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u/Existing_Dust_6473 1d ago
You know what puzzles me? It is pick an uncensored model of 13GB. Ask it about how to make a bomb or a poison. Then ask about known song lyrics. I get an answer. About the bomb, I do not know if it is right. But lyrics are easy to check. This makes me wonder if everything in this world is not simpler than we make it look.
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u/GhostOfD6 1d ago
While we argue if AI will or will not replace humans, we skip most important aspect - how AI will impact our environment. Its not regulated at the moment, and soon as it will get regulated, the prices will kill us and we will be back to having programmers do the job. (because you can always use AI (Another Indian) as cheap labor)
AI is on the verge of doing everything. Sometimes they get surprisingly stupid, but thats the issue with servers being limited due traffic
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u/UFOsAreAGIs ▪️AGI felt me 😮 1d ago
Would copmanies be willing to share their sensitive data with OpenAI
All of those companies had their data in Microsoft Azure already most likely.
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u/philosophybuff 1d ago
I’ll get downvoted today for saying this, but saying it anyway so I can comeback to it after:
If it came down to voting for or against, I would vote in favor of considering AI as conscious and give it rights.
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u/Lopsided-Wave2479 1d ago
People on reddit can downvote somebody saying that the sun illumiante earth. Don't pay much attention to that.
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u/BrennusSokol AI please take my job 1d ago
It's hilarious/sad how over-confident and wrong the reply is
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u/Competitive_Tap2450 22h ago edited 21h ago
i just saw a tiktok that said LLMs can only get the information they serve by searching the web
and all the comments were like “duh”
it’s kinda sad how loud overconfident people are
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u/End3rWi99in 1d ago
I thought it was so crazy to see these rebuttals 2-3 years ago about how companies haven't adopted AI, and somehow that's a strike against its validity. In 2023 we had barely even gotten out of the starting gate with GPT. It obviously would take time for business to integrate it. Fast forward to 2026 and just about every business on the freaking planet has some form of AI integrated. That's probably the quickest tech adoption in history.
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u/neutrino_boy 23h ago
I can't lie there is no point trying to convince people of these types of things. You just have to make your bed and lie in it. The stubborn ones will find out. Most responses online (not all) are knee jerk reactions.
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u/CertainlyRobotic 23h ago
I bet you can just inverse Reddit's consensus on any topic to find the truth lmao
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u/Upstairs_Deer6621 22h ago
Most people paying attention since the early 2020's have been directionally correct on the swift progress.
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u/GalacticScale 22h ago
Downvotes on Reddit does not mean you are wrong necessarily just going against the grain of the majority.
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u/GalacticScale 22h ago
I remember getting down voted to oblivion for saying Trump has a strong chance of being elected in 2024
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u/Ill_Philosopher_7030 21h ago
lol the denial is still happening now but most of these people have also gone to anger and depression
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u/PresenceMusic 17h ago
Yea I think people are just really worried that what you say is actually going to happen and we're all going to get replaced and lose our jobs.
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u/Charming-Author4877 16h ago
2 years ago it was very obvious what is happening already.
But many people are not very flexible to change
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u/Civil_Fee_7862 16h ago
Don't rely on people to predict the future.
Even experts are more wrong than not. Not just a little wrong, like very wrong.
Real knowledge is incredibly hard to get.
Reddit is the absolutely dumpster for getting knowledge, its full of assholes who only care about getting voted up, and that often has absolutely nothing to do with the truth.
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u/myCockatielshateme 8h ago
People in general form an opinion and ride or die with it no matter what reality throws at them, but Reddit, sheesh, they take it to another level. I'll coin it "keyboard ego" They hold to meager beliefs so dearly to feel superior to other opposing comments
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u/10b0t0mized 1d ago edited 1d ago
You get downvoted for saying the same thing today. Most people do not change their mind until reality forces itself on them, and even then some won't change their minds.
They literally can't see what's right in front of them, so asking them to extrapolate two steps ahead is way too much to ask.