Bored of It

What “it” is

• Most readers interpret “it” as modern AI/LLMs, citing lines about reactivated nuclear plants and massive water use.
• A minority argue it could generalize to any hype-cycle tech (crypto, smartphones, the internet, capitalism itself), seeing the ambiguity as intentional satire or a Rorschach test.

Reactions to the piece

• Many find the article shallow, cliché-heavy, and better suited to social media than a #1 HN post; they question its “utility” beyond venting.
• Others say it captures a real emotional state: burnout, sadness, and unease at the pace and direction of tech, even if they don’t fully share the hostility toward AI.
• Some emphasize it’s poetry/satire, not a policy paper, and should be read as reflecting feelings about “the tech era” more broadly.

AI hype, fatigue, and usefulness

• One camp is bored or irritated: every conversation, pub talk, and work meeting “ends up about AI”; constant “maybe we could use AI to…” pitches feel repetitive and shallow.
• Another camp is actively excited: they cite concrete gains in coding, debugging, research, data wrangling, sysadmin work, learning unit tests, fixing hardware, and niche personal projects.
• Several distinguish between being fascinated by the technical guts and being tired of futurist speculation, doomerism, and corporate hype.

Ethics, capitalism, and “best minds”

• Long subthread around the “best minds of our generation” line:
  – Some object that technical brilliance without empathy shouldn’t be celebrated.
  – Others say the quote laments systemic misallocation of talent (toward adtech, engagement hacks, shareholder value) rather than praising those individuals.
• Marketing/ads are heavily criticized as a “cancer” or mugging-by-attention, with AI seen as potentially supercharging this.

Trust, openness, and externalities

• Concerns: garbage-in/garbage-out without expert curation; training on non-consensual data; many “open” models being source-available but encumbered; dependence on proprietary hardware stacks.
• Environmental worries: power and water use, nuclear plant restarts, and the sense of yet another resource-intensive tech wave justified by vague promises.

Social, educational, and cultural impacts

• Reports from higher education of students leaning on LLMs to do coursework, eroding deep learning and academic honesty.
• Workplace stories of mandated AI tools, KPI-driven “AI adoption,” and quality regressions when working systems are replaced by AI-branded ones.
• Broader divide: some see AI as humanity’s best hope to accelerate solutions to aging, disease, and climate; others fear concentration of power, cultural stagnation, or just pervasive low-quality output.

Boredom, age, and “terminally online”

• Douglas Adams’ age-tech quote is invoked to suggest generational resistance, but multiple posters say attitude tracks experience and incentives more than age.
• Some argue that if you’re “bored of it,” you can curate your inputs; others counter that AI’s side effects (spam, fakery, infrastructure changes) are unavoidable even if you disengage from the discourse.