Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Everyone in Seattle hates AI

jonready.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 1001 posts

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#161

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

averyvery wrote: post #144
bccdee wrote: post #41

> Engineers don't try because they think they can't. This article assumes that AI is the centre of the universe, failing to understand that that assumption is exactly what's causing the attitude they're pointing to. There's a dichotomy in the software world between real products (which have customers and use cases and make money by giving people things they need) and hype products (which exist to get investors excite…

Yeah, "Engineers don't try" is a frustrating statement. We've all tried generative AI, and there's not that much to it — you put text in, you get text back out. Some models are better at some tasks, some tools are better at finding the right text and connecting it to the right actions, some tools provide a better wrapper around the text-generation process. Certain jobs are very easy for AI to do, others are impossibl…

This isn’t “unfair”, but you are intentionally underselling it.

If you haven’t had a mind blown moment with AI yet, you aren’t doing it right or are anchoring in what you know vs discovering new tech.

I’m not making any case for anything, but it’s just not that hard to get excited for something that sure does seem like magic sometimes.

Edit: lol this forum :)

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#163

Post by IAmBroom »

ajkjk wrote: post #124

> like building an AI product made me part of the problem. It's not about their careers. It's about the injustice of the whole situation. Can you possibly perceive the injustice? That the thing they're pissed about is the injustice? You're part of the problem because you can't. That's why it's not about whether the tools are good or bad. Most of them suck, also, but occasionally they don't--but that's not the point.…

> like [being involved in creation of the problem] made me a part of the problem.

Yeah, that's weird. Why would anyone think that? /s

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#164

Post by binary132 »

bccdee wrote: post #41

> Engineers don't try because they think they can't. This article assumes that AI is the centre of the universe, failing to understand that that assumption is exactly what's causing the attitude they're pointing to. There's a dichotomy in the software world between real products (which have customers and use cases and make money by giving people things they need) and hype products (which exist to get investors excite…

Bitcoin is at 93k so I don’t think it’s entirely accurate to say blockchain is insubstantive or without value

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#166

Post by hectdev »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #118
throwout4110 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right this is what I can’t quite understand. A lot of HN folks appear to have been burned by e.g. horrible corporate or business ideas by non technical people that don’t understand AI, that is completely understandable. What I never understand is the population of coders that don’t see any value in coding agents or are aggressively against them, or people that deride LLMs as failing to be able to do X (or hallucinate…

> What I never understand is the population of coders that don’t see any value in coding agents or are aggressively against them, or people that deride LLMs as failing to be able to do X (or hallucinate etc) and are therefore useless and every thing is AI Slop, without recognizing that what we can do today is almost unrecognizeable from the world of 3 years ago. I don't recognize that because it isn't true . I try th…

This fascinates me. Just observing but because it hasn't worked for you, everyone else must be lying? (I'm assuming that's what you mean by baseless)

How does that bridge get built? I can provide tangible real life examples but I've found push back from that in other online conversations.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#168

Post by Klonoar »

palmotea wrote: post #102

> But then I realized this was bigger than one conversation. Every time I shared Wanderfugl with a Seattle engineer, I got the same reflexive, critical, negative response. This wasn't true in Bali, Tokyo, Paris, or San Francisco—people were curious, engaged, wanted to understand what I was building. But in Seattle? Instant hostility the moment they heard "AI." So what's different between Seattle and San Francisco? Do…

I live in Seattle now, and have lived in San Francisco as well.

Seattle has more “normal” people and the overall rhetoric about how life “should be” is in many ways resistant to tech. There’s a lot to like about the city, but it absolutely does not have a hustle culture. I’ve honestly found it depressing coming from the East Coast.

Tangent aside, my point is that Seattle has far more of a comparison ground of “you all are building shit that doesn’t make the world better, it just devalues the human”. I think LLMs have (some) strong use cases, but it is impossible to argue that some of the societal downsides we see aren't ripe for hatred - and Seattle will latch on to that in a heartbeat.

Edit: are -> aren't. Stupid autocorrect.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#169

Post by mips_avatar »

vessenes wrote: post #43

Thanks for the post - it's work to write and synthesize, and I always appreciate it! My first reaction was "replace 'AI' with the word 'Cloud'" ca 2012 at MS; what's novel here? With that in mind, I'm not sure there is anything novel about how your friend is feeling or the organizational dynamics, or in fact how large corporations go after business opportunities; on those terms, I think your friends' feelings are a l…

It does feel like without a compelling AI product Microsoft isn't super differentiated. Maybe Satya is right that scale is a differentiation, but I don't think people are as trapped in an AI ecosystem as they were in Azure.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#170

Post by IAmBroom »

exmadscientist wrote: post #68
jasonjmcghee wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the presence of em dashes is a very poor metric for determining if something is AI generated. I'm not sure why it's so popular.

For me it is that they are wrongly used in this piece. Em dashes as appositives have the feel of interruption—like this—and are to be used very sparingly. They're a big bump in the narrative's flow, and are to be used only when you want a big bump. Otherwise appositives should be set off with commas, when the appositive is critical to the narrative, or parentheses (for when it isn't). Clause changes are similar—the e…

OMG, beautifully described! (not sarcastic!)
Post reply on HN