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

201–210 of 1001 posts

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#201

Post by doyougnu »

sirreal14 wrote: post #65

As a Seattle SWE, I'd say most of my coworkers do hate all the time-wasting AI stuff being shoved down our throats. There are a few evangelical AI boosters I do work with, but I keep catching mistakes in their code that they didn't used to make. Large suites of elegant looking unit tests, but the unit tests include large amounts of code duplicating functionality of the test framework for no reason, and I've even seen…

I've interfaced with some AI generated code and after several examples of finding subtle and yet very wrong bugs I now find that I digest code that I suspect coming from AI (or an AI loving coworker) with much much more scrutiny than I used to. I've frankly lost trust in any kind of care for quality or due diligence from some coworkers.

I see how the use of AI is useful, but I feel that the practitioners of AI-as-coding-agent are running away from the real work. How can you tell me about the system you say you have created if you don't have the patience to make it or think about it deeply in the first place?

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#202

Post by twodave »

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…

> Semicolons are for when you really can't break two clauses into two sentences with a full stop; a full stop is better most of the time.

IIRC (it's been a while) there are 2 cases where a semi-colon is acceptable. One is when connecting two closely-related independent clauses (i.e. they could be two complete sentences on their own, or joined by a conjunction). The other is when separating items in a list, when the items themselves contain commas.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#203

Post by dwoldrich »

Loughla wrote: post #131
suprjami wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see it that way. Tabs, spaces, curly brace placement, Vim, Emacs, VSCode, etc are largely aesthetic choices with some marginal unproven cognitive implications. I find people mostly prefer what they are used to, and if your preference was so superior then how could so many people build fantastic software using the method you don't like? AI isn't like that. AI is a bunch of people telling me this product can do…

>AI is certainly not reliable enough for me to jeopardize the quality of my work by using it heavily. I mean this in sincerity, and not at all snarky, but - have you considered that you haven't used the tools correctly or effectively? I find that I can get what I need from chatbots (and refuse to call them AI until we have general AI just to be contrary) if I spend a couple of minutes considering constraints and bein…

It would be helpful if you would relate your own bad experiences and how you overcame them. Leading off with "do it better" isn't very instructive. Unfortunately there's no useful training for much of anything in our industry, much less AI.

I prefer to use LLM as a sock puppet to filter out implausible options in my problem space and to help me recall how to do boilerplate things. Like you, I think, I also tend to write multi-paragraph prompts repeating myself and calling back on every aspect to continuously hone in on the true subject I am interested in.

I don't trust LLM's enough to operate on my behalf agentically yet. And, LLM is uncreative and hallucinatory as heck whenever it strays into novel territory, which makes it a dangerous tool.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#204

Post by mips_avatar »

pkasting wrote: post #40

Ex-Google here; there are many people both current and past-Google that feel the same way as the composite coworker in the linked post. I haven't escaped this mindset myself. I'm convinced there are a small number of places where LLMs make truly effective tools (see: generation of "must be plausible, need not be accurate" data, e.g. concept art or crowd animations in movies), a large number of places where LLMs make…

The thing that changed my view on LLMs was solo traveling for 6 months after leaving Microsoft. There were a lot of points on the trip where I was in a lot of trouble (severe food sickness, stolen items, missed flights) where I don't know how I would have solved those problems without chatGPT helping.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#205

Post by rr808 »

There has always been a lot of Microsoft hate, but now its a whole new level. Windows now really sucks, My new laptop is all Linux for the first time ever. I dont see why this company is still so valuable. Most people only use a browser now and some ios apps, there is no need for Windows or Microsoft (and of course Azure is never anyone's first choice). Steam makes the gamers happy to leave too.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#206

Post by basscomm »

Ekaros wrote: post #150
epolanski wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, do it assuming different linguistic backgrounds. It could sound dramatically different by people that speak English but as second language, which are going to be a whole lot of your users, even if the application is in English.

If there is a g in there I will pronounce a g there. I have some standards and that is one. Pronouncing every single letter.

> Pronouncing every single letter.

Now I want to know how you pronounce words like: through, bivouac, and queue.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#207

Post by treis »

pesus wrote: post #137
tptacek wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can imagine reasons why non-tech people in SF would hate all tech. I work in tech and living in the middle of that was a big part of why I was in such a hurry to get out of there.

Frankly, tech deserves its bad reputation in SF (and worldwide, really). One look at the dystopian billboards bragging about trying to replace humans with AI should make any sane human angry at what tech has done. Or the rising rents due to an influx of people working on mostly useless AI startups, 90% of which won't be around in 5 years. Or even how poorly many in tech behave in public and how poorly they treat serv…

There's a long list of things that have "replaced" humans all the way back to the ox drawn plow. It's not sane to be angry at any of those steps along the way. GenAI will likely not be any different.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#208

Post by mgaunard »

binary132 wrote: post #164
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

very little of the trading actually happens on the blockchain, it's only used to move assets between trading venues.

The values of bitcoin are:

- easy access to trading for everyone, without institutional or national barriers

- high leverage to effectively easily borrow a lot of money to trade with

- new derivative products that streamline the process and make speculation easier than ever

The blockchain plays very little part in this. If anything it makes borrowing harder.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#209

Post by hexator »

shepardrtc wrote: post #50

Ok so a few thoughts as a former Seattleite: 1. You were a therapy session for her. Her negativity was about the layoffs. 2. FAANG companies dramatically overhired for years and are using AI as an excuse for layoffs. 3. AI scene in Seattle is pretty good, but as with everywhere else was/is a victim of the AI hype. I see estimates of the hype being dead in a year. AI won't be dead, but throwing money at the whatever U…

Some people really do hate AI, it's not entirely about the layoffs. This is a well insulated bubble but you can find tons of anti-AI forums online.
Post reply on HN