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Everyone in Seattle hates AI

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Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#651

Post by sfink »

deaux wrote: post #503
Xeronate wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it true that it's bad for learning new skills? My gut tells me it's useful as long as I don't use it to cheat the learning process and I mainly use it for things like follow up questions.

It is, it can be an enormous learning accelerator for new skills, for both adults and genuinely curious kids. The gap between low and high performancer will explode. I can tell you that if I had LLMs I would've finished schooling at least 25% quicker, while learning much more. When I say this on HN some are quick to point out the fallibility of LLMs, ignoring that the huge majority of human teachers are many times mo…

Fallibility isn't the problem. It's probably a net benefit for learning.

Promoting dependency is the problem. Replacing effort is the problem. Making self-discipline be a thing only for suckers is the problem.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#652

Post by malfist »

josephg wrote: post #421
venturecruelty wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, because they're more likely to understand that the computer isn't this magical black box, and that just because we've made ELIZA marginally better, doesn't mean it's actually good. Anecdata, but the people I've seen be dazzled by AI the most are people with little to no programming experience. They're also the ones most likely to look on computer experts with disdain.

Well yeah. And because when an expert looks at the code chatgpt produces, the flaws are more obvious. It programs with the skill of the median programmer on GitHub. For beginners and people who do cookie cutter work, this can be incredible because it writes the same or better code they could write, fast and for free. But for experts, the code it produces is consistently worse than what we can do. At best my pride dem…

By volume the vast majority of code on github is students. Think about that when you average github for ai

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#653

Post by prewett »

simianwords wrote: post #638
ohyoutravel wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I saw a post on Reddit the other day where the user was posting screenshots from ChatGPT about how they were using ChatGPT as a “Human OS” and outsourcing all decisions and information to ChatGPT. It made me queasy.

god forbid you outsource easy things to technology - that's how humanity has been progressing since forever. but sure, throw away your calculator and do it by hand if that makes you feel any better.

Well, if your calculator has a loose wire that sometimes flips a random bit somewhere, you might find that a slide rule that is consistently correct has a certain value.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#654

Post by crystal_revenge »

adamisom wrote: post #632
crystal_revenge wrote: post #595

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've generally found an inverse correlation between "understands AI" and "exuberance for AI". I'm the only person at my current company who has had experience at multiple AI companies (the rest have never worked on it in a production environment, one of our projects is literally something I got paid to deliver customers at another startup), has written professionally about the topic, and worked directly with some big…

Personally, I don't understand how LLMs work. I know some ML math and certainly could learn, and probably will, soon. But my opinions about what LLMs can do are based on... what LLMs can do. What I can see them doing. With my eyes. The right answer to the question "What can LLMs do?" is... looking... at what LLMs can do.

I'm sure you're already familiar with the ELIZA effect [0], but you should be a bit skeptical of what you are seeing with your eyes, especially when it comes to language. Humans have an incredible weakness to be tricked by language.

You should be doubly skeptically ever since RLHF has become standard as the model has literally been optimized to give you answers you find most pleasing.

The best way to measure of course is with evaluations, and I have done professional LLM model evaluation work for about 2 years. I've seen (and written) tons of evals and they both impress me and inform my skepticism about the limitations of LLMs. I've also seen countless times where people are convinced "with their eyes" they've found a prompt trick that improves the results, only to be shown that this doesn't pan out when run on a full eval suite.

As an aside: What's fascinating is that it seems our visual system is much more skeptical, an eyeball being slightly off created by a diffusion model will immediately set off alarms where enough clever word play from an LLM will make us drop our guard.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#655

Post by LaFolle »

nikkwong wrote: post #548
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…

As another Seattle SWE, I'll go against the grain and say that I think AI is going to change the nature of the market for labor for SWE's and my guess would be for the negative. People need to remember that the ability of AI in code generation today is the worst that it ever will be, and it's only going to improve from here. If you were to just judge by the sentiment on HN, you would think no coder worth their weight…

> code generation today is the worst that it ever will be, and it's only going to improve from here.

I'm also of the mindset that even if this is not true, that is, even if current state of LLMs is best that it ever will be, AI still would be helpful. It is already great at writing self contained scripts, and efficiency with large codebases has already improved.

> I would imagine the chance of many of us being on the losing side of this within the next decade is non-trivial.

Yes, this is worrisome. Though its ironic that almost every serious software engineer at some point in time in their possibly early childhood / career when programming was more for fun than work, thought of how cool it would be for a computer program to write a computer program. And now when we have the capability, in front of our eyes, we're afraid of it.

But, one thing humans are really good at is adaptability. We adapt to circumstances / situation -- good or bad. Even if the worst happens, people loose jobs, for a short term it will be negatively impactful for the families, however, over a period of time, humans will adapt to the situation, adapt to coexist with AI, and find next endeavour to conquer.

Rejecting AI is not the solution. Using it as any other tool, is. A tool that, if used correctly, by the right person, can indeed produce faster results.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#656

Post by abustamam »

hexator wrote: post #209
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.

Yeah, as a gamer I get a lot of game news in my feeds. Apparently there's a niche of indie games that claim to be AI-free. [0]

And I read a lot of articles about games that seem to love throwing a dig at AI even if it's not really relevant.

Personally, I can see why people dislike Gen AI. It takes people's creations without permission.

That being said, morality of the creation of AI tooling aside, there are still people who dislike AI-generated stuff. Like, they'd enjoy a song, or an image, or a book, and then suddenly when they find out it's AI suddenly they hate it. In my experience with playing with comfy ui to generate images, it's really easy to get something half decent, it's really hard to get something very high quality. It really is a skill in itself, but people who hate AI think it's just type a prompt and get image. I've seen workflows with 80+ nodes, multiple prompts, multiple masks, multiple loras, to generate one single image. It's a complex tool to learn, just like photoshop. Sure you can use Nano-Banana to get something but even then it can take dozens of generations and prompt iterations to get what you want.

[0] https://www.theverge.com/entertainment/827650/indie-develope...

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#657

Post by MobiusHorizons »

Well written! I’m Seattle based (although at Google) I think the mood is only slightly better than what you describe. But the general feeling that the company has no interest in engineering innovation is alive and well. Everything needs to be standardized and engineers get shuffled between products in a way that discourages domain knowledge.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#658

Post by abustamam »

pier25 wrote: post #469
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…

It’s not only the hype though. What about the complete lack of morality some (most?) AI companies exhibit? What about the consequences in the environment? What about the enshitification of products? What about the usage of water and energy? Etc.

Not to diminish your overall point, but enshittification has been happening well before AI, AI just made it much easier and faster to enshittify everything.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#659

Post by hodgesrm »

kevin948 wrote: post #598
nikkwong wrote: post #548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As another Seattle SWE, I'll go against the grain and say that I think AI is going to change the nature of the market for labor for SWE's and my guess would be for the negative. People need to remember that the ability of AI in code generation today is the worst that it ever will be, and it's only going to improve from here. If you were to just judge by the sentiment on HN, you would think no coder worth their weight…

This has been exactly my mindset as well (another Seattle SWE/DS). The baseline capability has been improving and compounding, not getting worse. It'd actually be quite convenient if AI's capabilities stayed exactly where they are now; the real problems come if AI does work. I'm extremely skeptical of the argument that this will end up creating jobs just like other technological advances did. I'm sure that will happe…

> the real problems come if AI does work.

Exactly. For example, what happens to open source projects where developers don't have access to the latest proprietary dev tools? Or, what happens to projects like Spring if AI tools can generate framework code from scratch? I've seen maven builds on Java projects that pull in hundreds or even thousands of libraries. 99% of that code is never even used.

The real changes to jobs will be driven by considerations like these. Not saying this will happen but you can't rule it out either.

edit: Added last sentence.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#660

Post by didibus »

The article seems full of made up things. The "coworker" isn't a real person, some kind of "composite of people", I'm then curious if the "she" is simply used as "a random made up person".

Then it says: "Engineers don't try because they think they can't." They don't try AI is what I understand, but that contradicts the whole article, that every engineer in Seattle is actively using AI, even forced too.

Then it says: "now believes she's both unqualified for AI work", why would they believe that? She's supposedly has been using AI constantly, has not been part of those "layed off", so must be a great AI talent.

Finally it says: "now believes she's both unqualified for AI work and that AI isn't worth doing anyway. She's wrong on both counts, but the culture made sure she'd land there." Which is completely usubstantiated and also coming from a person trying to grift us with their AI product which they want to promote and sell.

I don't know, it read like a shill article from a grifter.

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