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Posted by mips_avatar 12/3/2025

Everyone in Seattle hates AI(jonready.com)
967 points | 1065 commentspage 10
BrenBarn 12/4/2025|
Reminds me of this post from a week or so ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46027290
didibus 12/4/2025||
The article seems full of made up things. The "coworker" isn't a real person, some kind of "composite of people", I'm then curious if the "she" is simply used as "a random made up person".

Then it says: "Engineers don't try because they think they can't." They don't try AI is what I understand, but that contradicts the whole article, that every engineer in Seattle is actively using AI, even forced too.

Then it says: "now believes she's both unqualified for AI work", why would they believe that? She's supposedly has been using AI constantly, has not been part of those "layed off", so must be a great AI talent.

Finally it says: "now believes she's both unqualified for AI work and that AI isn't worth doing anyway. She's wrong on both counts, but the culture made sure she'd land there." Which is completely usubstantiated and also coming from a person trying to grift us with their AI product which they want to promote and sell.

I don't know, it read like a shill article from a grifter.

adverbly 12/3/2025||
Some massive bait in this article. Like come on author - do you seriously have these thoughts and beliefs?

> It felt like the culture wanted change. > > That world is gone.

Ummm source?

> This belief system—that AI is useless and that you're not good enough to work on it anyway

I actually don't know anyone with this belief system. I'm pretty slow on picking up a lot of AI tooling, but I was slow to pick up JS frameworks as well.

It's just smart to not immediately jump on a bandwagon when things are changing so fast because there is a good chance you're backing the wrong horse.

And by the way, you sound ridiculous when you call me a dinosaur just because I haven't started using a tool that didn't even exist 6 months ago. FOMO sales tactics don't work on everyone, sorry to break it to you.

When the singularity hits in who knows how many years from now, do you really think it's one of these llm wrapper products that's going to be the difference maker? Again, sorry to break it to you but that's a party you and I are not going to get invited to. 0% chance governments would actually allow true super intelligence as a direct to consumer product.

comeondude 12/3/2025||
I live in seattle and I love AI lol.

But yea, AI companies should pay into a UBI fund. The value of collective creative output of humanity should go back to the living not the select few.

adastra22 12/3/2025|
UBI will never make financial sense.
waterTanuki 12/3/2025||
UBI isn't about making financial sense it's about keeping the last traces of society duct taped together before it all collapses. Remove all pathways to a middle-class life and you're left with a populace on the precipice of violent revolts.
adastra22 12/4/2025||
What I mean is that it simply would not work. The math doesn't add up. It would directly lead to Weimar levels of hyperinflation. Which is a far worse outcome.
marssaxman 12/4/2025||
Depends on how you define it, I suppose. The State of Alaska has been providing a universal basic income to its residents for almost half a century now, and that seems to work just fine.
hollerith 12/4/2025||
Not enough to live on. In 2022, the payment was $3,284 per eligible resident, and the 2023 payment was $1,312. I could not easily find the 2024 figure. This is is paid once a year, not monthly.

It is called the Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend.

adastra22 12/4/2025|||
Also - importantly - it is not an income tax revenue funded payment. It is a distribution of proceeds from a productive business.

Think of it this way: the entire world pays Alaska residents for the use of their oil, as a sort of tax that is worked into every energy intensive step of industry or petroleum-derived material.

Alaska's oil is only ~1% of world oil production, but its population is approximately 0.01% of world population, so Alaska residents get approximately 100x what the global per capita oil dividend would be. Oil industry is approximately 2.5% of global GDP. Stack all these multipliers together and we could expect a global per-capita total-GDP dividend of between $525 - $1325 per person per year. Exceeding this (as we did with PPP "loans" during COVID) would have compounding economic effects that lead to hyperinflation.

This is napkin math with spherical cow assumptions. Other factors would further limit UBI dividends to be less than this. But it shows that with existing national dividend systems as model, we can't even get within an order of magnitude of the low end of what UBI proponents are advocating.

marssaxman 12/4/2025|||
I'm familiar with it. My point is that one needn't allow the perfect to be the enemy of the good: a UBI does not have to offer a full living income to be worth doing.
adastra22 12/4/2025|||
It doesn't really approach "basic income" if it is, say, $500/yr.
marssaxman 12/4/2025||
You are talking about a full basic income. My point is that a partial basic income is both achievable and useful.
hollerith 12/5/2025|||
I agree.
poutrathor 12/5/2025||
please rework your color gradient text on the landing page of Wanderfugl. On dark mode it is rendered as a rectangle of gradient. My dark mode is handled by Dark Reader the firefox addon. It breaks the flow of presentation.

Also, at the bottom, the beta is opened but it closes the November 15th, so it's close and open at the same time :) (else it's November 2026?)

MagicMoonlight 12/4/2025||
>wanderfugl

That’s probably the worst name for an app I’ve ever heard.

tombert 12/3/2025||
I got a thread on SomethingAwful gassed [1] because it was about an AI radio station app I was working on. People on that forum do not like AI.

I think some of the reasons that they gave were bullshit, but in fairness I have grown pretty tired of how much low-effort AI slop has been ruining YouTube. I use ChatGPT all the time, but I am growing more than a little frustrated how much shit on the internet is clearly just generated text with no actual human contribution. I don’t inherently have an issue with “vibe coding”, but it is getting increasingly irritating having to dig through several-thousand-line pull requests of obviously-AI-generated code.

I’m conflicted. I think AI is very cool, but it is so perfectly designed to exploit natural human laziness. It’s a tool that can do tremendous good, but like most things, it requires people use it with effort, which does seem to be the outlier case.

[1] basically the hall of shame for bad threads.

umanwizard 12/3/2025||
This is making me gain significant respect for Seattle.
sparrc 12/3/2025||
I'm in Seattle at AWS and haven't encountered this attitude towards AI at all. All of my coworkers pretty much love using Cline and Kiro.
scotty79 12/3/2025|
That kind of explained half of comments on HN. When it's your induatry that's being disrupted suddenly a lot of people are on the edge.
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