zlacker

> tptacek wasn't making this argument six months ago.

Yes, but other smart people were making this argument six months ago. Why should we trust the smart person we don't know now if we (looking back) shouldn't have trusted the smart person before?

Part of evaluating a claim is evaluating the source of the claim. For basically everybody, the source of these claim is always "the AI crowd", because those outside the AI space have no way of telling who is trustworthy and who isn't.

>>cmdli+(OP)
Part of being on Hacker News is learning that there are people in this community - like tptacek - who are worth listening to.

In general, part of being an effective member of human society is getting good at evaluating who you should listen to and who is just hot air. I collect people who I consider to be credible and who have provided me with useful information in the past. If they start spouting junk I quietly drop them from my "pay attention to these people" list.

>>cmdli+(OP)
If you automatically lump anyone who makes an argument that AI is capable - not even good for the world on net, just useful in some tasks - into "the AI crowd", you will tautologically never hear that argument from anywhere else. But if you've been paying attention to software development discussion online for a few years, you've plausibly heard of tptacek and kentonv, eg, from prior work. If you haven't heard of them in particular, no judgement, but you gotta have someone you can classify as credible independently of their AI take if you want to be able to learn anything at all from other people on the subject.

>>cmdli+(OP)
Thomas is one of the pickier, crankier, least faddish technologists I've ever met. If he has gone fanboy that holds a lot of weight with me.