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Everyone in Seattle hates AI

jonready.com

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Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#211

Post by [deleted] »

throwout4110 wrote: post #94
hectdev wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the latest tech holy war. Tabs vs Spaces but more existential. I'm usually anti hype and I've been convinced of AI's use over and over when it comes to coding. And whenever I talk about it, I see that I come across as an evangelist. Some people appreciate that, online I get a lot of push back despite having tangible examples of how it has been useful.

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…

[deleted]

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#212

Post by WhyOhWhyQ »

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…

I also would like to see AI end up dying off except for a few niches, but I find myself using it more and more. It is not a productivity boost in the way I end up using it, interestingly. Actually I think it is actively harming my continued development, though that could just be me getting older, or perhaps massive anxiety from joblessness. Still, I can't help but ask it if everything I do is a good idea. Even in the SO era I would try to find a reference for every little choice I made to determine if it was a good or bad practice.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#213

Post by bigstrat2003 »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #161
averyvery wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

This shit right here is why people hate AI hype proponents. It's like it never crosses their mind that someone who disagrees with them might just be an intelligent person who tried it and found it was lacking. No, it's always "you're either doing it wrong or weren't really trying". Do you not see how condescending and annoying that is to people?

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#214

Post by Freak_NL »

hectdev wrote: post #149
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…

I would say it is like that. No one HAS to use AI. But the shared goal is to get a change to the codebase to achieve a desired outcome. Some will outsource a significant part of that to AI, some won't. And its tricky because I'm trying not to appeal to emotion despite being fascinated with how this tool has enabled me to do things in a short amount of time that it would have taken me weeks of grinding to get to and i…

> No one HAS to use AI.

Well… That's no longer true, is it?

My partner (IT analyst) works for a company owned by a multinational big corporation, and she got told during a meeting with her manager that use of AI is going to become mandatory next year. That's going to be a thing across the board.

And have you called a large company for any reason lately? Could be your telco provider, your bank, public transport company, whatever. You call them, because online contact means haggling with an AI chatbot first to finally give up and shunt you over to an actual person who can help, and contact forms and e-mail have been killed off. Calling is not exactly as bad, but step one nowadays is 'please describe what you're calling for', where some LLM will try to parse that, fail miserably, and then shunt you to an actual person.

AI is already unavoidable.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#216

Post by balamatom »

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…

>So, no. I don't think "engineers don't try because they think they can't." I think engineers KNOW they CAN and resent being asked to look pretty and do nothing of value.

Spot. Fucking. On.

Thank you.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#217

Post by wavemode »

My previous software job was for a Seattle-based team within Amazon's customer support org.

I consider it divine intervention that I departed shortly before LLMs got big. I can't imagine the unholy machinations my former team has been tasked with working on since I left.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#218

Post by zdragnar »

throwout4110 wrote: post #175
elictronic wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI is in a hype bubble that will crash just like every other bubble. The underlying uses are there but just like Dot Com, Tulips, subprime mortgages, and even Sir Isaac Newton's failings with the South Sea Company the financial side will fall. This will cause bankruptcies and huge job losses. The argument for and against AI doesn't really matter in the end, because the finances don't make a lick of sense.

Ok sure the bubble/non-bubble stuff, fine, but in terms of “things I’d like to be a part of” it’s hard to imagine a more transformative technology (not to again turn off the anti-hype crowd). But ok, say it’s 1997, you don’t like the valuations you see. But as a tech person you’re not excited by browsers, the internet, the possibilities? You don’t want to be a part of that even if it means a bubble pops? I also hear…

What precisely about AI is transformative, compared to the internet? E-mail replaced so much of faxing, phoning and physical mail. Online shopping replaced going to stores and hoping they have what you want, and hoping it is in stock, and hoping it is a good price. It replaced travel agents to a significant degree and reoriented many industries. It was the vehicle that killed CDs and physical media in general.

With AI I can... generate slop. Sometimes that is helpful, but it isn't yet at the point where it's replacing anything for me aside from making google searches take a bit less time on things that I don't need a definitive answer for.

It's popping up in my music streams now and then, and I generally hate it. Mushy-mouthed fake vocals over fake instruments. It pops up online and aside from the occasional meme I hate it there too. It pops up all over blogs and emails and I profoundly hate it there, given that it encourages the actual author to silence themselves and replaces their thoughts with bland drivel.

Every single software product I use begs me to use their AI integration, and instead of "no" I'm given the option of "not now", despite me not needing it, and so I'm constantly being pestered about it by something.

It has, thus far, made nearly everything worse.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#219

Post by hexator »

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…

Moving to the Cloud proved to be a pretty nice moneymaker far faster and more concretely than AI has been for these companies. It's a fair comparison regarding corporate pushes but not anything more than that.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#220

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

venturecruelty wrote: post #48
ToucanLoucan wrote: post #25

Literally everyone I know is sick of AI. Sick of it being crowbar'd into tools we already use and find value in. Sick of it being hyped at us as though it's a tech moment it simply isn't. Sick of companies playing at being forward thinking and new despite selling the same old shit but they've bolted a chatbot to it, so now it's "AI." Sick of integrations and products that just plain do not fucking work . I wouldn't s…

Oh, I will happily get in your face and tell you your AI garbage sucks. I'm not afraid of these people, and you shouldn't be, either. Bring back social pressure. We successfully shamed Google Glassholes into obscurity, we can do it again. This shit has infested entire operating systems now, all so someone can get another billion dollars, while the rest of us struggle to make rent. It's made my career miserable, for s…

> "shamed Google Glassholes into obscurity"

Except it didn't stick? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43088369

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