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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

#521

Post by aforwardslash »

xg15 wrote: post #35
aforwardslash wrote: post #4

Everytime I read one of these "I don't use AI" posts, the content is either "my code is handcrafted in a mountain spring and blessed by the universe itself, so no AI can match it", or "everything different from what I do is technofascism or ". Maybe Im missing something, but tech is controlled by a handful of companies - always have been; and sometimes code is just code, and AI is just a tool. What am I missing?

> Maybe Im missing something, but tech is controlled by a handful of companies - always have been; The entire open source movement would like a word with you.

I suggest you have a look at Bell Labs, Xerox and Berkeley, as a simple introduction to the topic - if you thing OSS came from "the goodness of their hearts" instead of a practical business necessity, I have a bridge to sell you.

I would also recommend you to peruse the last 50 years for completely reproductible, homegrown or open computing hardware systems you can build yourself from scratch without requiring overly expensive or exotic hardware. Yes, homegrown CPUs exist, but they "barely work" and often still rely on logic gates. Can you produce 74xx series ICs reliably in a homelab setting? Maybe, but for most of us, probably not. And certainly not for the guys ranting about "companies taking over".

If can't build your computing devices from scratch, store bought is fine. If you can, you're the exception and not the rule.

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

#522

Post by miningape »

davidmurdoch wrote: post #221
TrackerFF wrote: post #188

I get that some people want to be intellectually "pure". Artisans crafting high-quality software, made with love, and all that stuff. But one emerging reality for everyone should be that businesses are swallowing the AI-hype raw. You really need a competent and understanding boss to not be labeled a luddite, because let's be real - LLMs have made everyone more "productive" on paper. Non-coders are churning out small…

This just happened to me this week. I work on the platform everyone builds on top of. A change here can subtlety break any feature, no matter how distant. AI just can't cope with this yet. So my team has been told that we are too slow. Meanwhile, earlier this week we halted a roll out because if a bug introduced by AI, as it worked around a privacy feature by just allow listing the behavior it wanted, instead of chan…

Fuck it - let them reap the consequences. Ideally wait until there's something particularly destructive, then do the post-mortem as publicly as possible - call out the structures and practises that enabled that commit to get into production.

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

#523

Post by jrm4 »

"Hacker" of course, has overwhelmingly mostly lost the plot. Especially here, but elsewhere too.

"Hacker" was a recognition that there existed a crusty old entrenched system (mostly not through any fault of any individual) and that it is good to poke and chip away at it, though exploring the limits of new technology.

Whatever we're doing now here, it's emphatically not that.

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

#524

Post by thunky »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #253
lupire wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't matter. First, yes, a modern AI will come back and ask questions. Second, the AI is so much faster at interactions than a human is, that you can use that saved time to glance at its work and redirect it. The AI will come back with 10 prototype attempts in an hour, while a human will take a week for each, with more interupt questions for you about easy things

Sure, LLMs are a useful tool, and fast, but the point is they don't have human level intelligence, can't learn, and are not autonomous outside of an agent that will attempt to complete a narrow task (but with no ownership and guarantee of eventual success). We'll presumably get there eventually and build "artificial humans", but for now what we've got is LLMs - tools for language task automation. If you want to ASSIG…

> the point is they don't have human level intelligence > If you want to ASSIGN a task to something/someone then you need a human or artificial human

Maybe you haven't experienced it but a lot of junior devs don't really display that much intelligence. Their operating input is a clean task list, and they take it and convert it into code. It's more like "code entry" ("data entry", but with code).

The person assigning tasks to them is doing the thinking. And they are still responsible for the final output, so if they find a computer better and cheaper at "code entry" than a human well then that's who they're assign it to. As you can see in this thread many are already doing this.

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

#525

Post by swatcoder »

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…

That might happen, but it hasn't yet.

So far, the tools help many programmers write simple code more quickly.

For technically adept professionals who are not programmers, though, we still haven't seen anything really break through the ceiling consistently encountered by previous low-code/no-code tools like FoxPro, Access, Excel, VBA, IFTTT, Zapier, Salesforce etc.

The LLM-based tools for this market work differently than the comparable tools that preceded them over the last 40 years, in that they have a much richer vocabulary of output, but the ceiling that all of these tools encountered in the last has been a human one: most non-programmers don't know how to describe what they need with sufficient detail for anything much beyond a fragile, narrow toy.

Maybe GPT-8 or Gemini 6 or whatever will somehow finally be able to shatter this ceiling, and somebody will make finally make a no-code software builder that devours the market for custom/domain software. But that hasn't happened yet and it's at least as easy to be skeptical as it is to be convinced.

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

#526

Post by dzikimarian »

jhack wrote: post #498

"I personally don’t touch LLMs with a stick. I don’t let them near my brain." Then why should I care about your opinions of them if you have zero experience using them?

I look at these people with fascination. We had digital nomads, guess now we have digital Amishes :-)

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

#527

Post by DoughnutHole »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #473
layer8 wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Blindly” is the operative word here.

That’s almost an oxymoron You can’t be data driven and also blind to the data You might be optimizing for the wrong thing, but it’s not blind, it’s just a bad “model”

The blindness is to reality and nuance.

If you stare at your GPS and don’t pay attention to what’s in the real world outside your windshield until you careen off a cliff that would be “blindly” following your GPS. You had data but you didn’t sufficiently hedge against your data being incomplete.

Likewise sticking dogmatically to your metrics while ignoring nuance or the human factor is blindly following your metrics.

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

#528

Post by jonas21 »

thewebguyd wrote: post #494
m000 wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're missing that a lot of what we call "learning" would be categorized as "busy work" after the fact. If we replace this "busy work" with AI, we are becoming collectively more stupid. Which may be a goal on itself for our AI overlords. As mr Miyagi said: "Wax on. Wax off." This may turn out very profitable for the pre-AI generations, as the junior to senior pipeline won't churn seniors at the same rate. Bu…

> If we replace this "busy work" with AI, we are becoming collectively more stupid. I've seen this same thing said about Google. "If you outsource your memory to Google searching instead, you won't be able to do anything without and you'll become dumber." Maybe that did happen, but it didn't seem to result in any meaningful change on the whole. Instead, I got to waste less time memorizing things, or spending time lea…

Indeed, this line of reasoning goes all they way back to Socrates who argued that outsourcing your memory to writing would make you stupider [1]:

> For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise.

I, for one, am glad we have technologies -- like writing, the internet, Google, and LLMs -- that let us expand the limits of what our minds can do.

[1] https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext...

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

#529

Post by jrm4 »

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…

"Dignifies work done by developers?"

Hmm. No. Not really. I don't think "hacker" ever much meant this at all; mostly because "hacker" never actually was much connected to "labor for money."

"Going to work" and "being a hacker" were overwhelmingly mutually exclusive. Hacking was what you don't do on company time (in favor of the company.)

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

#530

Post by Capricorn2481 »

tokioyoyo wrote: post #87
skydhash wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a calculator gives me 5 when I do 2+2, I throw it away. If a PC crashes when I uses more than 20% of its soldered memory, i throw it away. If a mobile phone refuses to connect to a cellular tower, I get another one. What I want from my tools is reliability. Which is a spectrum, but LLMs are very much on the lower end.

You can have this position, but the reality is that the industry is accepting it and moving forward. Whether you’ll embrace some of it and utilize it to improve your workflow, is up to you. But over-exaggerating the problem to this point is kinda funny.

"You exaggerate, and the evidence is PMs are pushing it. PMs can't be wrong, can they?" Somebody really has to know what makes developers tick to write ragebait this good.

I can't even get the most expensive model on Claude to use "ls" correctly, with a fresh context window. That is a command that has been unchanged in linux for decades. You exaggerate how reliable these tools are. They are getting more useless as more customers are added because there is not enough compute.

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