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Why is AI so slow to spread?

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Re: Why is AI so slow to spread?

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can I ask for some examples? I'm not this active on Wikipedia, so I'm curious where a narrative is being spread

I thought about giving examples because I understand why people would ask for them, but I decided very deliberately not to give any. It would inevitably turn into a flame war about the politics/ethics of the specific examples and distract from the reasons why I no longer trust Wikipedia. I understand that this is unsatisfactory, but the only way to "prove" that the motivations of the people contributing to Wikipedia…

Let me guess: you hold some crank views that aren't shared by the people who maintain Wikipedia, and you find that upsetting? That's not a conspiracy, it's just people not agreeing with you.

Re: Why is AI so slow to spread?

#112

Just on the coding side, tools like Claude Code/Codex can be incredibly powerful, but a lot of things need to be in place for it to work well: * A "best practices" repository: clean code architecture and separation of concerns, well tested, very well-documented * You need to know the code base very well to efficiently judge if what the AI wrote is sensible * You need to take the time to write a thorough task descript…

But it also feels way more like a modernized version of those "UML To Code" Generators from the early 2000 rather than the "magic AI" that MS and Google are trying to market.

I'd disagree with that, if given enough compute LLMs can have impressive capabilities in finding bugs and implementing new logic, if guided right.

It's hit or miss at the moment, but it's definitely way more than "UML code generators".

Re: Why is AI so slow to spread?

#113
post #97
post #54

I have been using it for coding for some time, but I don't think I'm getting much value out of it. It's useful for some boilerplate generation, but for more complex stuff I find that it's more tedious to explain to the AI what I'm trying to do. The issue, I think, is lack of big picture context in a large codebase. It's not useless, but I wouldn't trade it for say access to StackOverflow. My non-technical friends are…

One of the issues certainly is that Stackoverflow is absolutely over. Within the last twelve months the number of users just fell off a cliff.

That might be a good thing after all, at least in a certain sense. Stack Overflow has been dying for the last ten years or so. In the first years there where a lot of good questions that were interesting to answer but that changed with popularity and it became an endless sea of low effort do my homework duplicates that were not interesting to answer and annoying to moderate. If this now gets handled by large language models, it could maybe become similar to the beginning again, only those questions that are not easily answerable by looking into the documentation or asking a chat bot will end up on Stack Overflow, it could be fun again to answer questions on Stack Overflow. On the other hand if nobody looks up things on Stack Overflow, it will be hard to sustain the business, maybe even when downscaled accordingly.

Re: Why is AI so slow to spread?

#114
post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought about giving examples because I understand why people would ask for them, but I decided very deliberately not to give any. It would inevitably turn into a flame war about the politics/ethics of the specific examples and distract from the reasons why I no longer trust Wikipedia. I understand that this is unsatisfactory, but the only way to "prove" that the motivations of the people contributing to Wikipedia…

Let me guess: you hold some crank views that aren't shared by the people who maintain Wikipedia, and you find that upsetting? That's not a conspiracy, it's just people not agreeing with you.

Your guess is incorrect. I'm keeping well away from polarised politics as well as anti-scientific and anti-intellectual fringe views.

Re: Why is AI so slow to spread?

#115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can I ask for some examples? I'm not this active on Wikipedia, so I'm curious where a narrative is being spread

Franklin Community Credit Union scandal is a good example, well outlined in this youtuber's (admittedly dramatized) video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0yIGG-taFI

Is their argument documented anywhere in text, rather than an 8 minutes video?

Re: Why is AI so slow to spread?

#116
post #54

I have been using it for coding for some time, but I don't think I'm getting much value out of it. It's useful for some boilerplate generation, but for more complex stuff I find that it's more tedious to explain to the AI what I'm trying to do. The issue, I think, is lack of big picture context in a large codebase. It's not useless, but I wouldn't trade it for say access to StackOverflow. My non-technical friends are…

>I have been using it for coding for some time, but I don't think I'm getting much value out of it. I find this perspective so hard to relate to. LLMs have completely changed my workflow; the majority of my coding has been replaced by writing a detailed textual description of the change I want, letting an LLM make the change and add tests, then just reviewing the code it wrote and fixing anything stupid it did. This…

> I find this perspective so hard to relate to. LLMs have completely changed my workflow; the majority of my coding has been replaced by writing a detailed textual description of the change I want, letting an LLM make the change and add tests, then just reviewing the code it wrote and fixing anything stupid it did.

I use it in much the same way you describe, but I find that it doesn't save me that much time. It may save some brain processing power, but that is not something I typically need saving.

I extract more from LLM asking it to write code Infind tedious to write (unit tests, glue code for APIs, scaffolding for new modules, that sort of thing). Recently I started asking it to review the code I write and suggest improvements, try to spot bugs and so on (which I also find useful).

Reviewing the code it writes to fix the inevitable mistakes and making adjustments takes time too, and it will always be a required step due to the nature of LLMs.

Running tasks simultaneously don't help much unless you are giving it instructions that are too general that will take it a long time executiny - and the bottleneck will be your ability to review all the output anyway. I also gind that the broader is the scope of what I need it to do, the less precise it tends to be. I achieve most success by being more granular in what I ask of it.

My take is that while LLMs are useful, they are massively overhyped, and the productivity gains are largely overstated.

Of course, you can also "vibe code" (what an awful terminology) and not inspect the output. I find it unacceptable in professional settings, where you are expected to release code with some minimum quality.

Re: Why is AI so slow to spread?

#117

It seems that the average employee doesn't currently benefit from completing their job more efficiently; i.e., they have no interest in AI. To accelerate mass AI adoption in workplaces, it may be necessary to expose the average worker to the risks and rewards of business ownership. However, it might be the case that the average worker simply doesn't want that risk. If there's no risk, there can't be a reward. So I ca…

Your underlying assumption is that AI could allow workers to complete their jobs more efficiently if only they could be persuaded to use it. I'm not convinced this assumption is true right now (unless your job involves producing content-free marketing bullshit, in which case yes you ought to be worried).

Re: Why is AI so slow to spread?

#118
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Among non-technical friends, after the initial wow factor, even limited expectations were not met. Indeed. I think that current AI tech needs quite a bit of scaffolding in order for the full benefits to be felt by non-tech people. > Then it was tainted by the fact that everyone is promoting it as a human replacement technology Yeah. This is a bad move. AI is a human force multiplier (exponentializer?). > which is t…

I wouldn't underestimate the anxiety it's causing. Most of my social circle are non-technicial. A lot of people have had a difficult time with work recently, for various reasons. The global economic climate feels very precarious, politics is ugly, people feel powerless and afraid. AI tends to come up in the "state of the world" conversation. It's destroying friends' decade old businesses in translation, copywriting a…

> Corporate enthusiasm for AI is seen for what it actually is, a chance to cut head count

I mean, it is the reason why the usual suspects push it so aggressively. The underclasses much always be pushed down.

It's mostly bullshit, on most areas LLMs cannot reliably replace humans. But they embrace it because the chance that it might undermine labor is very seductive.

Re: Why is AI so slow to spread?

#120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to donate to Wikipedia, but it has been completely overrun by activists pushing their preferred narrative. I don't trust it any more. I guess it had to happen at some point. If a site is used as ground truth by everyone while being open to contributions, it has to become a magnet and a battleground for groups trying to influence other people. LLMs don't fix that of course. But at least they are not as much a s…

Can I ask for some examples? I'm not this active on Wikipedia, so I'm curious where a narrative is being spread

Here are some examples from which you can extrapolate the more serious cases: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lamest_edit_wars
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