Engineer's Critique: AI Hype, Vulnerability Research, and Industry Gone Mad
A security engineer's scathing essay on AI's dominance, frontier model research, and the waste of resources on vulnerability discovery captures growing skepticism in tech communities.
What to know
- A security engineer's essay critiques AI companies for wasting millions in engineering resources on frontier model vulnerability research that hasn't improved overall security posture, while the industry avoids accountability for exploiting IP, concentrating power, and enabling CSAM and military applications.
- The post resonates strongly on Lobsters (88 pts) and Hacker News (211 pts), surfacing a visible schism: experienced developers on Lobsters increasingly share anti-AI skepticism, while Hacker News has tilted toward AI enthusiasm and 'vibecoding' discourse.
- The core disagreement centers whether AI development is inevitable and necessary (defense camp) versus a choice that companies make to prioritize profit and dominance over ethics (critique camp).
- Commenters extend the debate to open source's historical tension between liberatory and commercial interests, questioning whether current AI hype is new or continuation of existing power struggles in tech.
The dispute Whether frontier model vulnerability research represents genuine technical advancement in security (defense) or wasteful resource allocation that fails to address core security problems (critique). · positions read across 108 posts and comments
AI hype has made tech work worse and misallocated resources on wasteful vulnerability research while enabling exploitation and evading accountability.
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“This article is really salient, and captures really well how I feel about the whole thing. It really can feel like everyone is losing their minds at times.”
ficd · Lobsters ↗
Frontier models represent seismic change for vulnerability research; AI development is inevitable and necessary, even if companies' ethical framing is suspect.
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“If you think vulnerability research matters, and you're trying to argue that frontier models aren't a seismic change for that discipline, you have almost no company.”
tptacek · Hacker News ↗
Companies actively choose to build frontier AI systems rather than being compelled; the 'ethics aside' framing masks deliberate decisions to prioritize profit and power.
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“You are doing it right now in your comment, though, by excusing these companies for building the torment nexus. Like this work MUST be done. It's just not true. Life will continue on after this fallout, just like life continued on before…”
Halkcyon · Lobsters ↗
Jän Schauma Security engineer and authorAnthropic AI companyOpenAI AI company
How it unfolded 7 developments, newest first · click a bar or a number to jump articlespostscomments
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Commenters situate AI discourse within broader open source history
Discussion extends to questioning whether AI hype represents new phenomenon or continuation of open source movement's existing tensions between liberatory and commercial interests.
“"Open source" has always been an uneasy alliance between people who want to build liberatory software and people who are looking for a more effective means of enriching themselves at the expense of others.”
— technomancy -
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I wasn't even going to post it here, because it's just a rant that felt good to jot down, but since it's now been on the hackernews front page and shared elsewhere, it looks like it touched a nerve: (Read the comments at your own risk. There's brain worms there, too.) https://www. netmeister.org/blog/everybodys -lost-their-minds.html
2 more of the top 3 · 84 posts in this stretch
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> Maybe this was always the culture and I just didn’t notice. "Open source" has always been an uneasy alliance between people who want to build liberatory software and people who are looking for a more effective means of enriching themselves at the expense of others. The intent behind coining the term "open source" was to de-fang the free software…
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> Maybe it's faster but explosive diarrhea is also a faster way to produce shit.i'm in the midst of a very large global roll out of a new system including about 24 separate erp integrations. My team's system is dependent on another system coming online first then we go then the integrations come online then a massive data migration happens and…
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Lobsters users observe widening philosophical schism between tech communities
Experienced developers note that Lobsters has developed growing anti-AI consensus while Hacker News has moved in the opposite direction toward AI enthusiasm, reflecting different community values about technology's direction.
“I'm (pleasantly) surprised by the evolution of anti-AI feeling on lobste.rs. There seems to be more and more a general consensus about the whole AI bubble on this place, populated by people usually very experienced with computers. On the other hand, Hacker News seems to have taken the exact opposite direction to the point it became nearly unwatchable if you simply don't want to hear about vibecoding practices and release of new "frontier" models.”
— ploum -
One being a community where anything unrelated to tech is off topic, and the other being the bulletin board of a major venture capital firm where their own startups are given privileged real estate, definitely leads to pretty different selective pressures. At this point I don't even check HN - if it's interesting it will make its way here and the…
2 more of the top 3 · 13 posts in this stretch
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This doesn't seem like a well-thought-out post. I mean, I probably could have told you that from the fact that it's either pro-AI or anti-AI (in this case the latter), but this is a particularly poorly thought out post. Others here have pointed out the water-wasting red herring, but there are several other pieces of nonsense here — the general…
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I’m (pleasantly) surprised by the evolution of anti-AI feeling on lobste.rs. There seems to be more and more a general consensus about the whole AI bubble on this place, populated by people usually very experienced with computers. On the other hand, Hacker News seems to have taken the exact opposite direction to the point it became nearly…
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Lobsters commenters identify systemic problem with 'ethics aside' framing
Discussion surfaces tension between defenders of AI development and critics who reject the premise that such systems must be built; commenters argue companies have choice not to pursue these technologies.
“You are doing it right now in your comment, though, by excusing these companies for building the torment nexus. Like this work MUST be done. It's just not true. Life will continue on after this fallout, just like life continued on before this technology.”
— Halkcyon -
> I also wanted to add that the "ethics aside" argument also drives me nuts. You are doing it right now in your comment, though, by excusing these companies for building the torment nexus. Like this work MUST be done. It's just not true. Life will continue on after this fallout, just like life continued on before this technology. > I don't…
2 more of the top 3 · 3 posts in this stretch
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> If you actually thought your product will kill all humans, then you could, you know, like, just stop building the torment nexus. ... Alas, that wouldn't cockblock your competition... I don't especially enjoy that I keep defending large corporations I don't agree with. But if you're going to believe their reasoning, for sake of argument, then…
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Previously if I didn't want to talk about my work and/or didn't want to be asked to fix somebody's broken computer, I would say I was a mathematician. Sadly, AI has ruined that response now too.
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Hacker News and broader tech community engagement deepens
The essay reaches 211 points on Hacker News with 111 comments, attracting more diverse commentary including some defense of AI research value and disagreement over vulnerability research merit.
“If you think vulnerability research simply doesn't matter, you have a lot of company in that opinion. It's something Bruce Schneier used to argue, and Marcus Ranum, and a bunch of other people… But if you do think vulnerability research matters, and you're trying to argue that frontier models aren't a seismic change for that discipline, you have almost no company.”
— tptacek -
Ditto. And this topic comes up pretty much all the time in casual conversation, especially if people know or learn about what I do for a living. My standard response is "I don't have a polite way to talk about this with you."
2 more of the top 3 · 5 posts in this stretch
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@ jschauma Well put. > So no, I'm not going to set ethics aside and then actively offer myself up as tribute to self-amputate my brain. I'm sorry if everybody else can't get rid of the brain slugs, but at this point I'm just looking to get off this ride. https://www. netmeister.org/blog/everybodys -lost-their-minds.html
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I was looking for up to date information on Data Center energy usage. The most recent thing, prior to the [reference in this article](https://news.bloomberglaw.com/environment-and-energy/us-data-centers-set-to-burn-more-natural-gas-than-most-nations), was this article from a year and a half ago…
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Post gains traction on Lobsters; community response emphasizes alignment with essay
The essay reaches 88 points on Lobsters with 24 comments, where experienced engineers validate the piece's framing of widespread industry disorientation.
“This article is really salient, and captures really well how I feel about the whole thing. It really can feel like everyone is losing their minds at times.”
— ficd -
This article is really salient, and captures really well how I feel about the whole thing. It really can feel like everyone is losing their minds at times.
1 more of the top 2 · 2 posts in this stretch
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For anyone confused by this story’s tags: I used the “suggest” feature to try to change the tags from [ai, culture] to [ai, culture, rant], but that resulted in the tags changing to just [culture]. That’s probably because someone else had suggested [vibecoding, culture]. In that case, [Lobsters…
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Schauma publishes essay attacking AI hype and resource waste
A security engineer's detailed blog post criticizes the AI industry for exploiting intellectual property, concentrating power, generating CSAM, supporting military targeting, and squandering engineering resources on frontier model vulnerability research that has not actually improved security posture.
“Spending upwards of 75% of my time directly or indirectly dealing with AI every day has absolutely robbed me of most of my enjoyment of my work.”
— Jän Schauma - 4 days quiet
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Social media sentiment captures disorientation with AI shift
Early signals of widespread frustration emerge on X about the state of tech culture.
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Everyone has legitimately lost their minds
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Also covered reported alongside — the timeline has no entry for these yet
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2 outlets Everybody's Lost Their Minds
first by HN Best, 9d ago · also HN Frontpage
What people are saying 11 voices from 3 sites · best of 108 · verbatim
- Why has Hacker News drifted toward AI enthusiasm while technical communities like Lobsters developed skepticism?
- Is the current AI hype cycle new, or does it represent continuation of existing tensions in open source between liberatory and commercial interests?
- Sep 18
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Much more agreed with @ jschauma on this topic. If this class of LLM ever realizes more intelligence than ours, it will be because we devolved, not because the algorithm evolved. https://www. netmeister.org/blog/everybodys -lost-their-minds.html
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Excellent point here - LLMs are not becoming more intelligent than us by actually improving, they're just doing it by making us stupider 😆 https://www. netmeister.org/blog/everybodys -lost-their-minds.html
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>Now imagine that we had spent all these resources on doing the basics: ensuring your organization has an up-to-date and comprehensive asset inventory with fine-grained package listings; building infrastructure that supports regular, frequent, and automated OS and applіcation updates; automatically rebooting systems when they hit, say, 30 days of…
- Sep 17
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> these AI models not only lend themselves to generation of Child Sexual Abuse MaterialErr, how exactly does the generation of questionnable material abuses a child? Assuming there's no actual CSAM in the training corpus, the causal link between that and children being actually exploited seems tenuous at best, similar to drawings of Japanese…
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Everybody's Lost Their Minds Link: https://www. netmeister.org/blog/everybodys -lost-their-minds.html Discussion: https:// news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4 9745570
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I am sure many smokers in the 1950s also saw the health benefits of tobacco, that they were very happy to experience the increased energy after a smoke and could get more done as a result. I‘m pretty sure none of them felt their lungs and throats deteriorating either.Likewise, you may not feel like AI is de-skilling your brain. But it probably is…
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I think there were always two camps when it came to writing code, a strong bimodal distribution. People that care about the perceived code quality (aka the ‘craft’) and people who treat the code as a means to an end. At least I always felt this tension. And there is always an exception, and a person can shift between two camps during the same day…
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Not criticizing or calling into question the contents of the posts or your rebuttal. Just wanted to point out this is not a Normal HN post or blog. Most blogs have the self removed to some degree or ultimately focus out of the self. This is clearly a journalistic blog, a shared diary entry sort of prose. You can see it in the first paragraph. It…
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> I no longer feel like I align with communities that I used to, but it also doesn’t feel like I’ve changed, more like “everyone” else has. I don't feel like I even align with my coworkers who have gone all-in anymore. The tools I've used that have gone all-in on AI have all seemingly stagnated, tech culture has homogenized towards one thing, the…
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I always thought “you’ll get left behind if you don’t get into AI” was ridiculous, but now the communities I associate with have gone all-in on LLMs and I don’t want to follow them there, so it feels kind of true. This week I’ve been at OSFC which I had thought of as having a certain hacker culture: rebelling against the establishment of big tech…
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I agree that everyone's lost their minds, but so has this guy.LLMs are actually producing a lot of pretty good stuff, can debug things that would have taken an entire team a week, and the people running AI companies are also generally like the most boring supervillains imaginable. All true.It is also completely screwing up the global economy, and…