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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

#511

Post by moralestapia »

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),…

Same here, my rate keeps going up ...

I do see a shortage of entry-level positions (number of them, not salaries).

Going through the author's bio ... it seems like he's just not able to provide value in any of the high-paying positions that exist right now; not that he should be, he's just not aligned with it and that's ok.

I can see why he's desperate.

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

#512

Post by thewebguyd »

octorian wrote: post #428
anubistheta wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. I think this is what happens when a persons transitions from a progressive mindset to a conservative one, but has made being "progressive" a central tenant of their identity. Progressiveness is forward looking and a proponent of rapid change. So it is natural that LLM's are popular amongst that crowd. Also, progressivism should be accepting of and encouraging the evolution of concepts and social constructs.…

Just seeing that sentence fragment about "structures of power and violence" told me so much about the author. Its the sort of language that brings with it a whole host of stereotypes, some of which were immediately confirmed with a little more digging (and others would require way too much effort to confirm, but likely could be). And yes, this whole "capitalism bad" mentality I see in tech does kinda irk me. Why? Bec…

> And yes, this whole "capitalism bad" mentality I see in tech does kinda irk me. Why? Because it was capitalism that gave them the tools to be who they are and the opportunities to do what they do.

It's not hard to see why that mentality exists though. That same capitalism also gave rise to the behemoth, abusive monopolies we have today. It gave rise to the over financialization of the sector and declining product quality because you get richer doing stock buybacks and rent-seeking instead of making a better product.

Early hacker culture was also very much not pro-capitalism. The core principle of "Information should be free" itself is a statement against artificial scarcity and anti-proprietary systems, directly opposed to the capitalist ethos of locking up knowledge for profit. The FOSS we use and love rose directly from this culture, which is fundamentally communal, not capitalist.

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

#513

Post by duped »

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.

I have a ton of faith that Apple, Google, and Microsoft will not perish. I'll also observe their software quality is not universally stellar.

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

#514

Post by Glemkloksdjf »

raincole wrote: post #445
GrantMoyer wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, b…

> It's like some cruel joke the universe decided to play on people who like to think hard and understand the systems around them. Yeah. This cruel joke even has a name: The Bitter Lesson. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitter_lesson But think about it: if digital painting were solved not by a machine learning model, but human-readable code, it would be an even more bleak and cruel joke, isn't it?

Interesting that people seem to have this assumption.

"The lesson is considered "bitter" because it is less anthropocentric than many researchers expected and so they have been slow to accept it."

I mean we are so many people on the planet, its easy to feel useless when you know you can get replaced by millions of other humans. How is that different being replaced by a computer?

I was not sure how AGI would come to us, but I assumed there will be AGI in the future.

Weirdest thing for me is mathematics and physics: I assumed that would be such an easy field to find something 'new' through brute force alone, im more shocked that this is only happening now.

I realized with DeepMind and Alphafold that the smartest people with the best tools are in the industry and specificly in the it industry because they are a lot better using tools to help them than normal researchers who struggle writing code.

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

#515

Post by NewsaHackO »

swatcoder wrote: post #167
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),…

The "devaluation" they mention is just the correction against the absurd ZIRP bump, that lured would-be doctors and lawyers into tech jobs at FAANG and FAANG-alike firms with the promise of upper middle class lifestyles for trivially weaving together API calls and jockeying JIRA tickets. You didn't have to spend years more in grad school, you didn't have to be a diligent engineer. You just had to had to have a knack…

I love this post. It really encapsulates a lot of what my take on the situation is as well. It has just been so blatantly obvious that a lot of people have a very protectionist mindset surrounding AI, and a legitimate fear that they are going to be replaced by it.

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

#516

Post by karmakaze »

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

> [...] making it increasingly hard to learn things [...]

I find chatting with AI and drilling it for details is often more effective than other means of searching for the same information, or even asking random co-workers. It's all about how you use it.

> No matter how well “AI” works, it has some deeply fundamental problems, that won’t go away with technical progress. I’d even go as far and say they are intentional.

> AI systems being egregiously resource intensive is not a side effect — it’s the point.

WTF? There's nothing for me to learn from this post.

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

#517

Post by fragmede »

robot-wrangler wrote: post #361
mattgreenrocks wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 c…

> Math that's not maybe related to ML is something HN is guaranteed to shit on.

Eh, I mean here's one about the Ulam spiral that did pretty well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2047857

The fast inverse sqrt that John carmack did not. write also does well. I know there's many more. Are you sure that's not just a caricature of Hacker News you've built up in your head?

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

#518

Post by LPisGood »

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"…

> hacker circles didn't always have this 'progressive' luddite mentality

Richard Stallman has his email printed out on paper for him to read, and he only connects to the internet by using wget to fetch web pages and then has them printed off.

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

#519

Post by dzikimarian »

sosodev wrote: post #443
swatcoder wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "devaluation" they mention is just the correction against the absurd ZIRP bump, that lured would-be doctors and lawyers into tech jobs at FAANG and FAANG-alike firms with the promise of upper middle class lifestyles for trivially weaving together API calls and jockeying JIRA tickets. You didn't have to spend years more in grad school, you didn't have to be a diligent engineer. You just had to had to have a knack…

While that is part of the equation it's not at all that simple. If the average business owner wants a custom piece of software for their workflow how are they getting it now? For decades the answer would have been new hires, agencies, consultants, and freelancers. It didn't matter that most software boiled down to a simple CRUD backend and a flashy frontend. There was still a need for developers to create every piece…

When I first earned money for coding (circa 20 years ago) it was small e-commerce shop. Today nobody does them, because there's woocomerce, shopify, FB marketplace. All dirt cheap and fast.

It isn't devaluation. It's good - it freed a lot of people to work on more ambitious things.

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

#520

Post by ineedasername »

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…

"There is a way out: we need to create a culture that values craftmanship and dignifies work done by developers. We need to talk seriously and plainly about the spiritual and existential damage done by LLMs"

This is the exact sentiment when said about some other profession or craft, countless people elsewhere and on HN have noted that it's neither productive not wise to be so precious about a task that evolved as a necessity into the ritualized, reified, pedestal-putting that prevents progress. It conflates process with every single other thing about whatever is being spoken about.

Also: Complaining that a new technology bottlenecked by lack of infrastructure, pushback from people with your mindset, poorly understood in its best use because the people who aren't of your mindset are still figuring out and creating the basic tooling we currently lack?

That is a failure of basic observation. A failure to see the thing you don't like because you don't like and decide not to look. Will you like it if you look? I don't know, sounds like your mind is made up, or you might find good reasons why you should maintain your stance. In the later case, you'd be able to make a solid contribution to the discussion.

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