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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

#371

Post by cjs_ac »

carlosjobim wrote: post #302
fileeditview wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The era of software mass production has begun. With many "devs" just being workers in a production line, pushing buttons, repeating the same task over and over. The produced products however do not compare in quality to other industry's mass production lines. I wonder how long it takes until this comes all crashing down. Software mostly already is not a high quality product.. with Claude & co it just gets worse. edit…

Why didn't programmers think of stepping down from their ivory towers and start making small apps which solve small problems? That people and businesses are very happy to pay for? But no! Programmers seem to only like working on giant scale projects, which only are of interest to huge enterprises, governments, or the open source quagmire of virtualization within virtualization within virtualization. There's exactly o…

Solving these problems requires going outside and talking to people to find out what their problems are. Most programmers aren't willing to do that.

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

#372

Post by marcosdumay »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #330
j4coh wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't believe companies can reliably tell expert and non-expert developers apart, to sort them so efficiently to play out like you say.

The companies that can will remain and the companies that can't will perish. Not necessarily quickly nor gracefully, but the market stops all bucks.

You are assuming no government intervention or anti-competitive measures.

Neither has been true for a really long time.

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

#373

Post by GrantMoyer »

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"…

I largely agree with this, but at the same time, I empathize with the FA's author. I think it's because LLMs feel categorically different from other technological leaps I've been exited about.

The recent results in LLMs and diffusion models are undeniably, incredibly impressive, even if they're not to the point of being universally useful for real work. However they fill me with a feeling of supreme dissapointment, because each is just this big black box we shoved an unreasonable amount of data into and now the black box is the best image processing/natural language processing system we've ever made, and depending on how you look at it, they're either so unimaginably complex that we'll never understand how they really work, or they're so brain-dead simple that there's nothing to really understand at all. It's like some cruel joke the universe decided to play on people who like to think hard and understand the systems around them.

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

#374

Post by hamdingers »

ceejayoz wrote: post #209
lxgr wrote: post #193

> I find it particularly disillusioning to realize how deep the LLM brainworm is able to eat itself even into progressive hacker circles. Anything worth reading beyond this transparent and hopefully unsuccessful appeal to tribalism? Hackers have always tried out new technologies to see how they work – or break – so why would LLMs be any different? > the devaluation of our craft, in a way and rate we never anticipated…

> Hackers have always tried out new technologies to see how they work – or break – so why would LLMs be any different? Who says we haven't tried it out ?

> I personally don’t touch LLMs with a stick. I don’t let them near my brain. Many of my friends share that sentiment.

FTA.

I know tons of people where "tried it out" means they've seen Google's abysmal search summary feature, or merely seen the memes and read news articles about how it's wrong sometimes, and haven't explored any further.

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

#375

Post by mkoubaa »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #330
j4coh wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't believe companies can reliably tell expert and non-expert developers apart, to sort them so efficiently to play out like you say.

The companies that can will remain and the companies that can't will perish. Not necessarily quickly nor gracefully, but the market stops all bucks.

If the market is allowed to behave like one*

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

#376

Post by Aldipower »

thunky wrote: post #110
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),…

> What exactly is being de-valuated for a profession You're probably fine as a more senior dev...for now. But if I was a junior I'd be very worried about the longevity I can expect as a dev. It's already easier for many/most cases to assign work to a LLM vs handholding a human through it. Plus as an industry we've been exploiting our employer's lack of information to extract large salaries to produce largely poor qua…

> assign work to a LLM

What are your talking about? You seem to live in a parallel universe. Every single time I tried this or someone of my colleagues, this task failed tremendously hard.

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

#377

Post by marcosdumay »

thunky wrote: post #110
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),…

> What exactly is being de-valuated for a profession You're probably fine as a more senior dev...for now. But if I was a junior I'd be very worried about the longevity I can expect as a dev. It's already easier for many/most cases to assign work to a LLM vs handholding a human through it. Plus as an industry we've been exploiting our employer's lack of information to extract large salaries to produce largely poor qua…

Rest assured that LLMs are completely incapable of replacing mildly competent junior developers. And that's fundamental to the technology.

Instead, it's them that benefit the most from using them.

It's only management that believes otherwise. Because of deceitful marketing from a few big corporations.

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

#378

Post by LocalH »

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"…

A good start (albeit the most basic one) would be to encourage budding hackers to read through the Jargon File.

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

#379

Post by shadowgovt »

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"…

Hackers in the '80s were taking apart phone hardware and making free long-distance calls because the phone company didn't deserve its monopoly purely for existing before they were born. Hackers in the '90s were bypassing copyright and wiping the hard drive of machines they cobbled together out of broken machines to install an open source OS on it so that Redmond, WA couldn't dictate their computing experience.

I think there's a direct through-line from hacker circles to modern skepticism of the kind of AI discussed in this article: the kind where rules you don't control determine the behavior of the machine and where most of the training and operation of the largest and most successful systems can, currently, only be accessed via the cloud portals of companies with extremely questionable ethics.

... but I don't expect hackers to be anti-AI indefinitely. I expect them to be sorting out how many old laptops with still-serviceable graphics cards you have to glue together to build a training engine that can produce a domain-specific tool that rivals ChatGPT. If that task proves impossible, then I suspect based on history this may be the one place where hackers end up looking a little 'luddite' as it were.

... because "If the machine cannot be tamed it must be destroyed" is very hacker ethos.

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

#380

Post by billy99k »

pksebben wrote: post #333
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"…

Likely progressive, but definitely not luddite [0]. Anti-capitalist for sure. I struggle with this discourse deeply. With many posters like OP, I align almost completely - unions are good, large megacorps are bad, death to facists etc. It's when we get to the AI issue that I do a bit of a double take. Right now, AI is almost completely in the hands of a few large corp entities, yes. But once upon a time, so was the i…

How are unions any better than mega corps? My brother is part of a union and the leaders make millions.

He's pigenholed at the same low pay rate and can't ever get a raise, until everyone in the same role also gets a raise (which will never happen). It traps people, because many union jobs can't or won't innovate, and when they look elsewhere, are underskilled (and stuck).

You mention 'deepseek'. Are you joking? It's owned by the Chinese government..and you claim to hate fascism? Lol?

Big companies only have the power now, because the processing power to run LLMs is expensive. Once there are break throughs, anyone can have the same power in their house.

We have been in a tech slump for awhile now. Large companies will drive innovations for AI that will help everyone.

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