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Everyone in Seattle hates AI

jonready.com

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Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#451

Post by groby_b »

Freak_NL wrote: post #214
hectdev wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 compan…

As opposed to reaching, say, somebody in an offshored call center with an utterly undecipherable accent reading a script at you? Without any room for deviation?

AI's not exactly a step down from that.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#452

Post by groby_b »

ethbr1 wrote: post #448
groby_b wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are plenty of good tasks left, but they're often one-off/internal tooling. Last one at work: "Hey, here are the symptoms for a bug, they appeared in - go figure out the CL range and which 10 CLs I should inspect first to see if they're the cause" (Well suited to AI, because worst case I've looked at 10 CLs in vain, and best case it saved me from manually scanning through several 1000 CLs - the EV is net positiv…

My internal mnemonic for targeting AI correctly is 'It's easier to change a problem into something AI is good at, than it is to change AI into something that fits every problem.' But unfortunately the nuances in the former require understanding strengths and weaknesses of current AI systems, which is a conversation the industry doesn't want to have while it's still riding the froth of a hype cycle. Aka 'any current w…

> 'any current weaknesses in AI systems are just temporary growing pains before an AGI future'

I see we've met the same product people :)

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#453

Post by chrsw »

Tech company leadership sees AI as a shortcut to success. You know how in project planning meetings engineers are usually asked how they can pull in the schedule by x number of months? AI is now that thing. Obviously, this is a mistake.

The cult of AI maximalists aren't helping the situation.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#454

Post by bigger_cheese »

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

The issue is people trying to use these AI tools to investigate complex data not the throwaway UI part.

I work as the non-software kind of engineer at an industrial plant there is starting to emerge a trend of people who just blindly trust the output of AI chat sessions without understanding what the chat bot is echoing at them which is wasteful of their time and in some cases my time.

This not not new in the past I have experienced engineers who use (abuse) statistics/regression tools etc. Without understanding what the output was telling them but it is getting worse now.

It is not uncommon to hear something like: "Oh I investigated that problem and this particular issue we experienced was because of reasons x, y and z."

Then when you push back because what they've said sounds highly unlikely it boils down to. "I don't know that is what the AI told me".

Then if they are sufficiently optimistic they'll go back and prompt it with "please supply evidence for your conclusion" or some similar prompt and it will supply paragraphs of plausible sounding text but when you dig into what it is saying there are inconsistencies or made up citations. I've seen it say things that were straight up incorrect and went against Laws of Thermodynamics for example.

It has become the new "I threw the kitchen sink into a multivariate regression and X emerged as significant - therefore we should address x"

I'm not a complete skeptic I think AI has some value, for example if you use it as a more powerful search engine by asking it something like "What are some suggested techniques for investigating x" or "What are the limitations of Method Y" etc. It can point you to the right place assist you with research, it might find papers from other fields or similar. But it is not something you should be relying on to do all of the research for you.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#455

Post by Libidinalecon »

sydd wrote: post #227
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 :)

The more I use AI for coding the more I realize that its a toy for vibe coding/fun projects. Its not for serious work. When you work with a large codebase which have a very high complexity level, then the bugs put in there by AI will not worth the cost of the easily added features.

Many people also program and have no idea what a giant codebase looks like.

I know I don't. I have never been paid to write anything beyond a short script.

I actually can't even picture what a professional software engineer actually works on day to day.

From my perspective, it is completely mind blowing to write my own audio synth in python with Librosa. A library I didn't know existed before LLMs and now I have a full blown audio mangling tool that I would have never been able to figure out on my own.

It seems to me professional software engineering must be at least as different to vibe coding as my audio noodlings are to being a professional concert pianist. Both are audio and music related but really two different activities entirely.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#456

Post by DonHopkins »

gishh wrote: post #375
senordevnyc wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> There are many valid critiques of AI, but “there’s not much there” isn’t one of them. I have solved more problems with tools like sed and awk, you know, actual tools, more than I’ve entered tokens into an LLM. Nobody seemed to give a fuck as long as the problem was solved. This it getting out of hand.

But sed and awk are problems.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#457

Post by jansommer »

AI is such a blessing. I use it almost every day at work, and I've spent this evening getting a Bluetooth to USB mapper for a ps4 controller working by having ChatGPT write it for me, for a bigger project I'm working on. Yes, it's going to take some time to fully understand the code and adjust it to my own standards, but i've been playing a game a few hours now and I feel zero latency and plenty of controller rumble that I'm having fun giving some extra power. It pretty much worked with the first 250 lines of C it spew out.

What's gonna be super interesting is that I'm going to have an rpi zero 2 power up my machine when I press the controller's ps-button. That means I might need to solder and do some electrical voodoo that I've never tried. Crossing my fingers that the plan ChatGPT has come up with won't electrocute me.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#458

Post by micromacrofoot »

mjr00 wrote: post #272
senordevnyc wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> There are many valid critiques of AI, but “there’s not much there” isn’t one of them. "There's not much there" is a totally valid critique of a lot of the current AI ecosystem. How many startups are simple prompt wrappers on top of ChatGPT? How many AI features in products are just "click here to ask Rovo/Dingo/Kingo/CutesyAnthropomorphizedNameOfAI" text boxes that end up spitting out wrong information? There's cer…

What's "there" though is that despite being wrappers of chat gpt, the product itself is so compelling that it's essentially got a grip on the entire american economy. That's why everyone's crabs in a bucket about it, there's something real that everyone wants to hitch on to. People compare crypto or NFTs to this in terms of hype cycle, but it's not even close.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#459

Post by [deleted] »

sirreal14 wrote: post #430
dpark wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fairness I’ve seen humans make that mistake. We had a complete outage in the testing of a product once and a couple of tests were still green. Turns it they tested nothing and never had.

> In fairness I’ve seen humans make that mistake These were (formerly) not the kinds of humans who regularly made these kinds of mistakes.

[deleted]

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#460

Post by waterTanuki »

adastra22 wrote: post #397
comeondude wrote: post #382

I live in seattle and I love AI lol. But yea, AI companies should pay into a UBI fund. The value of collective creative output of humanity should go back to the living not the select few.

UBI will never make financial sense.

UBI isn't about making financial sense it's about keeping the last traces of society duct taped together before it all collapses. Remove all pathways to a middle-class life and you're left with a populace on the precipice of violent revolts.
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