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Everyone in Seattle hates AI

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Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#391

Post by xorcist »

dwaltrip wrote: post #153
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…

You can vibe-code a throwaway UI for investigating some complex data in less than 30 minutes. The code quality doesn't matter, and it will make your life much easier. Rinse and repeat for many "one-off" tasks. It's not going away, you need to learn how to use it. shrugs shoulders

Perhaps. But does it matter? There is a million tools to investigate complex data already. Are you suggesting it is more useful to develop a new tool from scratch, using LLM-type tools, than it is to use a mature tool for data analysis?

If you don't know how to analyze data, and flat out refuse to invest in learning the skill, then I guess that could be really useful. Those users are likely the ones most enthusiastic about AI. But are those users close to as productive as someone who learns a mature tool? Not even close.

Lots of people appreciate an LLM to generate boiler plate code and establish frameworks for their data structures. But that's code that probably shouldn't be there in the first place. Vibe coding a game can be done impressively quick, but have you tried using a game construction kit? That's much faster still.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#392

Post by paddleon »

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.

obviously not a native French speaker

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#393

Post by zwnow »

cs02rm0 wrote: post #368
layer8 wrote: post #311

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. "Engineers don't try" doesn’t refer to trying out AI in the article. It refers to trying to do something constructive and useful outside the usual corporate churn, but having given up on that because management is single-mindedly focused on AI. One way to s…

> the other engineers have lost all ambition for anything else Worse, they've lost all funding for anything else.

Industries are built upon shit people built in their basements, get hacking

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#394

Post by 59nadir »

mips_avatar wrote: post #75
vunderba wrote: post #24

From the article: > I wanted her take on Wanderfugl , the AI-powered map I've been building full-time. I can at least give you one piece of advice. Before you decide on a company or product name, take the time to speak it out loud so you can get a sense of how it sounds.

I grew up in Norway and there's this idea in Europe of someone who breaks from corporate culture and hikes and camps a lot (called wandervogel in german). I also liked how when pronounced in Norwegian or Swedish it sounds like wander full. I like the idea of someone who is full of wander.

In Swedish the G wouldn't be silent so it wouldn't really be all that much like "wonderful"; "vanderfugel" is the closest thing I could come up with for how I'd pronounce it with some leniency.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#395

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#396

Post by josephg »

senordevnyc wrote: post #244
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…

I’ve been an engineer for 20 years, for myself, small companies, and big tech, and now working for my own saas company. There are many valid critiques of AI, but “there’s not much there” isn’t one of them. To me, any software engineer who tries an LLM, shrugs and says “huh, that’s interesting” and then “gets back to work” is completely failing at their actual job, which is using technology to solve problems. Maybe AI…

It really depends on what you’re doing. AI models are great at kind of junior programming tasks. They have very broad but often shallow knowledge - so if your job involves jumping between 18 different tools and languages you don’t know very well, they’re a huge productivity boost. “I don’t write much sql, or much Python. Make a query using sqlalchemy which solves this problem. Here’s our schema …”

AI is terrible at anything it hasn’t seen 1000 times before on GitHub. It’s bad at complex algorithmic work. Ask it to implement an order statistic tree with internal run length encoding and it will barely be able to get off the starting line. And if it does, the code will be so broken that it’s faster to start from scratch. It’s bad at writing rust. ChatGPT just can’t get its head around lifetimes. It can’t deal with really big projects - there’s just not enough context. And its code is always a bit amateurish. I have 10+ years of experience in JS/TS. It writes code like someone with about 6-24 months experience in the language. For anything more complex than a react component, I just wouldn’t ship what it writes.

I use it sometimes. You clearly use it a lot. For some jobs it adds a lot of value. For others it’s worse than useless. If some people think it’s a waste of time for them, it’s possible they haven’t really tried it. It’s also possible their job is a bit different from your job and it doesn’t help them.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#398

Post by etempleton »

Jblx2 wrote: post #238
SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

I wonder if this issues isn't caused by people who aren't programmers, and now they can churn out AI generated stuff that they couldn't before. So to them, this is a magical new ability. Where as people who are already adept at their craft just see the slop. Same thing in other areas. In the before-times, you had to painstakingly handcraft your cat memes. Now a bot comes along and allows someone to make cat memes the…

AI is better than you at what you aren’t very good at. But once you are even mediocre at doing something you realize AI is wrong / pretty bad at doing most things and every once in awhile makes a baffling mistake.

There are some exceptions where AI is genuinely useful, but I have employees who try to use AI all the time for everything and their work is embarrassingly bad.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#399

Post by Aeolun »

rconti wrote: post #191
SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

> 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. Or your job isn't what AI is good at? AI seems really good at greenfield projects in well known languages or adding features. It's been pretty awful, IME, at working with less well-known languages, or deep troubleshooting/tweaking of complex codebases.

> It's been pretty awful, IME, at working with less well-known languages

Well, there’s your problem. You should have selected React while you had the chance.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#400

Post by vasvir »

sleepybrett wrote: post #141
wk_end wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Managers everywhere love the idea of AI because it means they can replace expensive and inefficient human workers with cheap automation. Among actual people (i.e. not managers) there seems to be a bit of a generation gap - my younger friends (Gen Z) are almost disturbingly enthusiastic about entrusting their every thought and action to ChatGPT; my older friends (young millennials and up) find it odious.

Mangers should realize that the thing AI might be best at is to replace them. Most of my managers don't understand the people they are managing and don't understand what the people they are managing are actually building. They job is to get a question from management that their reports can answer, format that answer for their boss and send the email. They job is to be the leader in a meeting to make sure it stays on…

MANNA https://milweesci.weebly.com/uploads/1/3/2/4/13247648/mannap...
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