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I don't care how well your "AI" works

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Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#361

Post by robot-wrangler »

mattgreenrocks wrote: post #311
easterncalculus wrote: post #244

> I find it particularly disillusioning to realize how deep the LLM brainworm is able to eat itself even into progressive hacker circles. That's the thing, hacker circles didn't always have this 'progressive' luddite mentality. This is the culture that replaced hacker culture. I don't like AI, generally. I am skeptical of corporate influence, I doubt AI 2027 and so-called 'AGI'. I'm certain we'll be "five years away"…

> This is the culture that replaced hacker culture. Somewhere along the lines of "everybody can code," we threw out the values and aesthetics that attracted people in the first place. What began as a rejection of externally imposed values devolved into a mouthpiece of the current powers and principalities. This is evidenced by the new set of hacker values being almost purely performative when compared against the old…

I realized recently that if you want to talk about interesting topics with smart people, if you expect things like critical thinking and nuanced discussion, you're currently much better off talking literature or philosophy than anything related to tech. I mean, everyone knows that discussing politics/economics is rather hopelessly polarized, everyone has their grievances or their superstitions or injuries that they cannot really put aside. But this is a pretty new thing that discussing software/engineering on merits is almost impossible.

Yes, I know about the language / IDE / OS wars that software folks have indulged in before. But the reflexive shallow pro/anti takes on AI are way more extreme and are there even in otherwise serious people. And in general anti-intellectual sentiment, mindless follow-the-leader, and proudly ignorant stances on many topics are just out of control everywhere and curiosity seems to be dead or dying.

You can tell it's definitely tangled up with money though and this remains a good filter for real curiosity. Math that's not maybe related to ML is something HN is guaranteed to shit on. No one knows how to have a philosophy startup yet (WeWork and other culty scams notwithstanding!). Authors, readers, novels, and poetry aren't moving stock markets. So at least for now there's somewhere left for the intellectually curious to retreat

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#363

Post by zkmon »

zero-st4rs wrote: post #144
zkmon wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Capacity for intention and will were already driven by augmentations that were knowledge and reasoning. Knowledge was sourced externally and reasoning was developed from externally recorded memory of past. Even the instincts get updated by experiences and knowledge.

I'm not sure if you wrote this with AI, but could you provide examples? Knowledge is shaped by constraints which inform intention, it doesn't "drive it." "I want to fly, I intend to fly, I learn how to achieve this by making a plane." not "I have plane making knowledge therefore I want and intend to fly" However, I totally understand that constraints often create a feedback loop where reasoning is reduced to the limi…

I agree that you are an agent capable of having an intention, but that capability needs inputs from outside. Your knowledge and reasoning doesn't entirely reside inside you. Having ability of intention is like a car engine, waiting for inputs or triggers for action.

And no, I don't need AI for this level of inquiry.

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#364

Post by shadowgovt »

I think the author makes some very good points, but it's perhaps worth noting that they are the current status quo. I do find myself wondering if the author re-evaluates in a future where the technology gets cheaper, the executable AI engine fits on a standalone Raspberry Pi, and retraining the engine is done by volunteer co-ops.

... but, it is definitely worth considering whether the status quo is tolerable and whether we as technical creatives are willing to work with tools that live within it.

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#365

Post by llm_nerd »

csmantle wrote: post #41
embedding-shape wrote: post #20

> And yeah, I get it. We programmers are currently living through the devaluation of our craft, in a way and rate we never anticipated possible. I'm a programmer, been coding professionally for 10 something years, and coding for myself longer than that. What are they talking about? What is this "devaluation"? I'm getting paid more than ever for a job I feel like I almost shouldn't get paid for (I'm just having fun),…

> programmers should be some of the most worry-free individuals on this planet, the job is easy, well-paid, not a lot of health drawbacks if you have a proper setup and relatively easy to find a new job when you need it Not in where I live though. Competition is fierce, both in industry and academia, for most posts being saturated and most employees face "HR optimization" in their late 30s. Not to mention working ove…

"Not in where I live though"

I mean, not anywhere, and the data absolutely annihilates their ridiculous claims. In subsequent posts they've retreated back to "yeah, but someone somewhere has it worse", invalidating this whole absurd thread.

Their comment has little correlation with reality, and seems to be a contrived, self-comforting fiction. Most firms have implemented hiring freezes if not actively downsizing their dev staff. Many extremely experienced devs are finding the market absolutely atrocious, getting zero bites.

And for all of the "well us senior devs are safe" sentiment often seen on here, many shops seem to be more comfortable hiring cheap and eager junior devs and foregoing seniors because LLMs fill in a lot of the "grizzled wisdom". The junior to senior ratio is rapidly increasing, and devs who lived on golden handshakes are suddenly finding their ego bruised and a market where they're fighting for low-pay jobs.

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#366

Post by chemotaxis »

easterncalculus wrote: post #244

> I find it particularly disillusioning to realize how deep the LLM brainworm is able to eat itself even into progressive hacker circles. That's the thing, hacker circles didn't always have this 'progressive' luddite mentality. This is the culture that replaced hacker culture. I don't like AI, generally. I am skeptical of corporate influence, I doubt AI 2027 and so-called 'AGI'. I'm certain we'll be "five years away"…

> It's why people can't post a meme, quote, article, whatever could be interpreted (very often, falsely) as AI-generated in a public channel, or ask a chatbot to explain a hand-drawn image without the off chance that they get an earful from one of these 'progressive' people.

It happens, but I think it's pretty uncommon. What's a lot more common is people getting called out for offloading tasks to LLMs in a way that just breaches protocol.

For example, if we're having an argument online and you respond with a chatbot-generated rebuttal to my argument, I'm going to be angry. This is because I'm putting an effort and you're clearly not interested in having that conversation, but you still want to come out ahead for the sake of internet points. Some folks would say it's fair game, but consider the logical conclusion of that pattern: that we both have our chatbots endlessly argue on our behalf. That's pretty stupid, right?

By extension of this, there's plenty of people who use LLMs to "manage" their online footprint: write responses to friends' posts, come up with new content to share, generate memes, produce a cadence of blog posts. Anyone can ask an LLM to do that, so what's the point of generating this content in the first place? It's not yours. It's not you. So what's the game, other than - again - trying to come out on top for internet points?

Another fairly toxic pattern is when people use LLMs to produce work output without the effort to proofread or fact-check it. Over the past year or so, I've gotten so many LLM-generated documents that simply made no sense, and the sender considered their job to be done and left the QA to me.

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#367

Post by quantummagic »

mattgreenrocks wrote: post #311
easterncalculus wrote: post #244

> I find it particularly disillusioning to realize how deep the LLM brainworm is able to eat itself even into progressive hacker circles. That's the thing, hacker circles didn't always have this 'progressive' luddite mentality. This is the culture that replaced hacker culture. I don't like AI, generally. I am skeptical of corporate influence, I doubt AI 2027 and so-called 'AGI'. I'm certain we'll be "five years away"…

> This is the culture that replaced hacker culture. Somewhere along the lines of "everybody can code," we threw out the values and aesthetics that attracted people in the first place. What began as a rejection of externally imposed values devolved into a mouthpiece of the current powers and principalities. This is evidenced by the new set of hacker values being almost purely performative when compared against the old…

> we need to create a culture that values craftmanship and dignifies work done by developers.

Mostly I agree with you. But there's a large group of people who are way too contemptuous of craftsmen using AI. We need to push back against this arrogant attitude. Just as we shouldn't be contemptuous of a woodworking craftsman using a table saw.

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#368

Post by cjbgkagh »

eithed wrote: post #252
cjbgkagh wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had hired 3 junior/mid lvl devs and paid them to do nothing but study to improve their skills, it was my investment in their future, I had a big project on the horizon that I needed help with. After 6 months I let them go, the improvement was far too slow. Books that should have taken a week to get through were taking 6 weeks. Since then LLM have completely surpassed them. I think it’s reasonable to think that some…

But this is an issue of worker you're hiring. I've worked with senior engineers who a) did nothing (as - really not write any thing within the sprint, nor do any other work) b) worked on things they wanted to work on c) did ONLY things that they were assigned in the sprint (= if there were 10 tickets in the sprint and they were assigned 1 of these tickets then they would finish that ticket and not pick up anything el…

Sure there is a wide spectrum of skills, having worked in FANG and top tier research I have a pretty good idea of the capability at the top of the spectrum. I know I wasn't hiring at that level. I was paying 2x the local market rate (non-US) and pulling from the functional programming talent pool. These were not the top 1% but I think they were easily top 10% and probably in the top 5%.

I use LLMs to build isolated components and I do the work needed to specialize them for my tasks and integrate them together. The LLMs take fewer instructions to do this and handle ambiguity far better. Additionally because of the immediate feedback look on the specs I can try first with a minimally defined spec and interactively refine as needed. It takes me far less work to write specs for LLMs than it does for other devs.

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#369

Post by llm_nerd »

embedding-shape wrote: post #124
Xenoamorphous wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the US seems to struggle with that specific point as of late, yet it remains true in the rest of the world Are you sure about that?

No, I'm just pulling anecdotes out of my ass/am hallucinating. Is there something specific you'd like to point me to, besides just replying with a soundbite?

How about you tell us where the market is good for devs? It is heinous in Canada and all of Europe that I'm aware of.

Are you in China? India?

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#370

Post by AlexandrB »

skydhash wrote: post #117
fennecfoxy wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except it's more a case of "my phone won't teleport me to Hawaii sad faec lemme throw it out" than anything else. There are plenty of people manufacturing their expectations around the capabilities of LLMs inside their heads for some reason. Sure there's marketing; but for individuals susceptible to marketing without engaging some neurons and fact checking, there's already not much hope. Imagine refusing to drive a c…

> Imagine refusing to drive a car in the 60s because they haven't reach 1kbhp yet. Ahaha. That’s very much a false analogy. In the 60s, cars were very reliable (not as much as today’s cars) but it was already an established transportation vehicle. 60s cars are much closer to todays cars than 2000s computers are to current ones.

It's even worse, because even with an unreliable 60s car you could at least diagnose and repair the damn thing when it breaks (or hire someone to do so). LLMs can be silently, subtly wrong and there's not much you can do to detect it let alone fix it. You're at the mercy of the vendor.
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