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Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

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Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#531

Post by namaria »

belter wrote: post #451
diggan wrote: post #5

Interesting that every comment has "Help improve Copilot by leaving feedback using the or buttons" suffix, yet none of the comments received any feedback, either positive or negative. > This seems like it's fixing the symptom rather than the underlying issue? This is also my experience when you haven't setup a proper system prompt to address this for everything an LLM does. Funniest PRs are the ones that "resolves" t…

This whole thread from yesterday take a whole different meaning: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44031432 Comment in the GitHub discussion: "...You and I and every programmer who hasn't been living under a rock knows that AI isn't ready to be adopted at this scale yet, on the premier; 100M-user code-hosting platform. It doesn't make any sense except in brain-washed corporate-talk like "we are testing today what…

"Big data" -> "Cloud" -> "LLM-as-A(G)I"

It's all just recycled rent seeking corporate hype for enterprise compute.

The moment I had decided to learn Kubernetes years ago, got a book and saw microservices compared to 'object-oriented' programming I realized that. The 'big ball of mud' paper and the 'worse is better' rant frame it all pretty well in my view. Prioritize velocity, get slop in production, cope with the accidental complexity, rinse repeat. Eventually you get to a point where GPU farms seem like a reasonable way to auto-complete code.

When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging. Any bigger excavator you send down there will only get buried when the mud crashes down.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#532

Post by namaria »

nyarlathotep_ wrote: post #477
Draiken wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right on the money. I've been amongst the most productive developers in every place I've worked at for the past 10 years while not using an IDE. AI is not even close to as revolutionary as it's being sold. Unfortunately, as always, the ones buying this crap are not the ones that actually do the work. Even for writing tests, you have to proof-read every single line and triple check they didn't write a broken te…

I've encountered LLM generated comments that don't even reflect what the code is doing, or, worse, subtly describe the code inaccurately. The most insidious disenchanting code I've ever seen has been exactly of this sort, and it's getting produced by the boatload daily now.

I really don't understand what is going on. I try to, I read the papers, the threads, I think about it. But I can't figure this out.

How can it be that people expect that pumping more energy into closed systems could do anything else than raise entropy? Because that's what it is. You attach GPU farms to your code base and make them pump code into it? You're pumping energy into a closed system. The result cannot be other than greater entropy.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#533

Post by solarwindy »

strogonoff wrote: post #522
solarwindy wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The managers may believe that's what they're asking their developers to do, but doesn't this whole charade expose the fact that this technology just does not have even close to the claimed capabilities? I see it as wishful thinking in the extreme to suppose that probabilistic mashing together of plagiarized jigsaw pieces of code could somehow approach human intelligence and reasoning —and yet, the parlour trick is co…

Philosophy becomes key. True human intelligence is not very well defined, and possibly cannot be divorced from concepts like “consciousness” or “agency”, at which point claiming that the thing is “like human” opens the operator to accusations of running a torture chamber or being a slave owner of entities that can feel.

Agreed, though long before such qualms come to the fore I'd like to see even a shred of evidence that this entire approach to AI is at all capable of formulating mental models of the kind that have enabled humans to produce all the wonderful mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, philosophy, poetry, literature, art, etc. of the past several centuries.

I see the supposed reasoning tokens this latest crop of models produce as merely an extension of the parlour trick. We're so deep into this delusion that it's so very tempting to anthropomorphize this ersatz stream of consciousness as being 'thought'. I remain unconvinced that it's anything of the sort.

This comes to mind: "It is difficult to get anybody to understand something, when their salary depends on them not understanding it."

This latest bubble smacks ever more of being a con.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#534

Post by friendzis »

nirui wrote: post #494

I recently, meaning hours ago, had this delightful experience watching the Eric of Google, which everybody love, including he's extra curricular girl friend and wife, talking about AI. He seemed to believe AI is under-hyped after tried it out himself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=id4YRO7G0wE He also said in the video: > I brought a rocket company because it was like interesting. And it's an area that I'm not an ex…

> During my use of AI (yeah, I don't hate AI), I found that the current generative (I call them pattern reconstruction) systems has this great ability to Impress An Idiot

I would be genuinely positively surprised if that stops to be the case some day. This behavior is by design.

AS you put yourself, these LLM systems are very good at pattern recognition and reconstruction. They have ingested vast majority of the internet to build patterns on. On the internet, the absolutely vast majority of content is pushed out by novices and amateurs: "Hey, look, I have just read a single wikipedia page or attended single lesson, I am not completely dumbfounded by it, so now I will explain it to you".

LLMs have to be peak Dunning-Krugers - by design.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#535

Post by raxxorraxor »

bwfan123 wrote: post #308
yubblegum wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This field (SE - when I started out back in late 80s) was enjoyable. Now it has become toxic, from the interview process, to imitating "big tech" songs and dances by small fry companies, and now this. Is there any joy left in being a professional software developer?

It happens in waves. For a period, there was an oversupply of cs engineers, and now, the supply will shrink. On top of this, the BS put out by AI code will require experienced engineers to fix. So, for experienced engineers, I see a great future fixing the shit show that is AI-code.

So many little scripts are spawned and they are all shit for production. I stopped reviewing them, pray to the omnissiah now and spray incense into our server room to placate the machine gods.

Because that shit makes you insane as well.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#537

Post by namaria »

teleforce wrote: post #92

>I can't help enjoying some good schadenfreude Fun facts schadenfreude: the emotional experience of pleasure in response to another’s misfortune, according to Encyclopedia Britannica. Word that's so nasty in meaning that it apparently does not exist except in German language.

It just means 'shameful happiness'.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#538

Post by strogonoff »

solarwindy wrote: post #533
strogonoff wrote: post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Philosophy becomes key. True human intelligence is not very well defined, and possibly cannot be divorced from concepts like “consciousness” or “agency”, at which point claiming that the thing is “like human” opens the operator to accusations of running a torture chamber or being a slave owner of entities that can feel.

Agreed, though long before such qualms come to the fore I'd like to see even a shred of evidence that this entire approach to AI is at all capable of formulating mental models of the kind that have enabled humans to produce all the wonderful mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, philosophy, poetry, literature, art, etc. of the past several centuries. I see the supposed reasoning tokens this latest crop of models…

> We're so deep into this delusion that it's so very tempting to anthropomorphize this ersatz stream of consciousness as being 'thought'. I remain unconvinced that it's anything of the sort.

Coincidentally, I’m listening to an interesting episode[0] of QAA that goes through various instances of how people (sometimes educated and technically literate) demonstrate mental inability to adequately handle ML-based chatbot tech. The podcast mostly focuses on extreme cases, but I think far too many people are succumbing to more low-key delusions.

As an example, even on this forum people constantly point out that unlicensed works should be allowed in ML training datasets because if humans are free to learn and be inspired then so should be the model—it’s crazy to apply the notions of freedom and human rights to a [commercially operated] software tool, yet here we are. Considering how handy it is for tool’s operator, hardware suppliers, and whoever owns respective stocks, some of this confusion is probably financially motivated, but even if half of it is genuine it’d be alarming.

[0] https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/qaa-podcast/id14282093...

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#539

Post by sensanaty »

insin wrote: post #495

Look at this poor dev, an entire workday's worth of hours into babysitting this PR, still having to say "fix whitespace": https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/pull/115826

The amount of effort here, talking to a black box, is genuinely depressing. I think I'd last maybe 1 day max if I were forced to work this way. They're instructing it, line-by-line, in an async fashion on what to do with the code. For every comment you leave you have to internalize the AI slop reply that just tells you what you want to hear. It's obvious the person doing the review here knows what they're doing, and it's obvious that it would take them so much less time to implement these changes than what copilot is spewing back at them.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#540

Post by -__---____-ZXyw »

nirui wrote: post #494

I recently, meaning hours ago, had this delightful experience watching the Eric of Google, which everybody love, including he's extra curricular girl friend and wife, talking about AI. He seemed to believe AI is under-hyped after tried it out himself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=id4YRO7G0wE He also said in the video: > I brought a rocket company because it was like interesting. And it's an area that I'm not an ex…

I started watching it, but had to stop because I was at great risk of becoming physically sick when he led with the "new move" stuff. Ugh.

Kudos to you for having the strength to get through it, and for living to tell the tale!

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