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Everyone in Seattle hates AI

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Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#711

Post by nikkwong »

didibus wrote: post #669
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…

> I mean, they've made all of the progress up to now in essentially the last 5 years I have to challenge this one, the research on natural language generation and machine learning dates back to the 50s, it just it only recently came together at scale in a way that became useful, but tons of the hardest progress was made over many decades, and very little innovation happened in the last 5 years. The innovation has mos…

We're definitely in the territory of splitting hairs; but I think most of what people call modern AI is the result of the transformer paper. Of course this was built off the back of decades of research.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#712

Post by mips_avatar »

didibus wrote: post #674
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…

> You were a therapy session for her. Her negativity was about the layoffs. I think there is no "her", the article ends with saying: > My former coworker—the composite of three people for anonymity—now believes she's [...] I think it's just 3 different people and they made up a "she" single coworker as a kind of example person. I don't know, that's my reading at least, maybe I got it wrong.

I hate to be cagey here but I just really don’t want to make anyone’s life harder than it needs to be by revealing their identity. Microsoft is a really tough place to be an employee right now.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#713

Post by YZF »

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…

I think part of this is that there is no one AI and there is no one point in time.

The other day Claude Code correctly debugged an issue for me, that was seen in production, in a large product. It found a bug a human wrote, a human reviewed, and fixed it. For those interested the bug had to do with chunk decoding, the author incorrectly re-initialized the decoder in the loop for every chunk. So single chunk - works. >1 chunk fails.

I was not familiar with the code base. Developers who worked on the code base spent some time and didn't figure out what was going on. They also were not familiar with the specific code. But once Claude pointed this out that became pretty obvious and Claude rewrote the code correctly.

So when someone tells me "there's not much there" and when the evidence says the opposite I'm going to believe my own lying eyes. And yes, I could have done this myself but Claude did this much faster and correctly.

That said, it does not handle all tasks with the same consistency. Some things it can really mess up. So you need to learn what it does well and what it does less well and how and when to interact with it to get the results you want.

It is automation on steroids with near human (lessay intern) capabilities. It makes mistakes, sometimes stupid ones, but so do humans.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#714

Post by lambchoppers »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #568
lambchoppers wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think the industry will stop because of your concern? If for example, AI does what it says on the box but causes goiters for prompt jockeys do you think the industry will stop then or offshore the role of AI jockey? It's lovely that you care about health, but I have no idea why you think you are relevant to a society that is very much willing to risk extinction to avoid the slightest upset or delay to consumer…

> Do you think the industry will stop because of your concern? I’m not sure what this question is addressing. I didn’t say it needs to “stop” or the industry has to respond to me. > It's lovely that you care about health, 1) you should care too, 2) drop the patronizing tone if you are actually serious about having a conversation.

From my PoV you are trolling with virtue signalling and thought terminating memes.. You don't want to discuss why every(?) technological introduction so far has ignored priorities such as your sentiments and any devil's adovocate must be the devil..

The members of HN are actually a pretty strongly biased sample towards people who get the omelet when the eggs get broken.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#715

Post by int_19h »

neilv wrote: post #266

Lots of creators (e.g., writers, illustrators, voice actors) hate "AI" too. Not only because it's destroying creator jobs while also ripping off creators, but it's also producing shit that's offensively bad to professionals. One thing that people in tech circles might not be aware of is that people outside of tech circles aren't thinking that tech workers are smart. They haven't thought that for a long time. They are…

You have a very cartoon villain image of tech workers in your head. While Tesla-driving libertarian techbros are certainly a thing, this doesn't even accurately represent the majority of employees in Big Tech, nevermind the industry as a whole.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#716

Post by YZF »

thewebguyd wrote: post #337
mjr00 wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> simply because the market has never really punished people for being less efficient at their jobs In fact, it tends to be the opposite. You being more efficient just means you get "rewarded" with more work, typically without an appropriate increase in pay to match the additional work either. Especially true in large, non-tech companies/bureaucratic enterprises where you are much better off not making waves, and bei…

This is very true. So you can't just ask people to use AI and expect better output even if AI is all the hype. The bottlenecks are not how many lines of code you can produce in a typical big team/company.

I think this means a lot of big businesses are about to get "disrupted" because small teams can become more efficient because for them sheer generation of somtimes boilerplate low quality code is actually a bottleneck.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#717

Post by adastra22 »

voidhorse wrote: post #593
venturecruelty wrote: post #552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Getting everyone to even agree that this is a problem is impossible. I'm open to the universe of solutions, as long as it isn't "Anthropic and OpenAI get another $100 billion dollars while we starve". We can probably start there.

Yeah, unfortunately Marx was right about people not realizing the problem, too. The proletariat drowns in false consciousness :( In reality, the US is finally waking up to the fact that the "golden age" of capitalism in the US was built upon the lite socialism of the New Deal, and that all the bs economic opinions the average american has subscribed to over the past few decades was completely just propaganda and anyo…

There's a false dichotomy in that conclusion.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#718

Post by pzs »

gedy wrote: post #283
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…

Maybe not what the OP or article is talking about, but it's super frustrating recently dealing with non/less technical mgrs, PMs, etc who now think they have this Uno card to bypass technical discussion just because they vibe coded some UI demo. Like no shit, that wasn't the hard part. But since they don't see the real/less visible past like data/auth/security, etc they act like engineers "aren't trying", less innova…

Hmm, (whatever is in execs' head about) AI appears to amplify the same kind of thinking fallacies that are discussed in the eternal Mythical Manmonth essay, which was written like half a century ago. Funny how some things don't change much...

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#719

Post by alexashka »

venturecruelty wrote: post #552
adastra22 wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Marx was correct in his identification of the problem (the communist manifesto still holds up today). Marx went off the rails with his solution.

Getting everyone to even agree that this is a problem is impossible. I'm open to the universe of solutions, as long as it isn't "Anthropic and OpenAI get another $100 billion dollars while we starve". We can probably start there.

It's a problem, it's just not the root problem.

The root problem is nepo babies.

Whether it's capitalism or communism or whatever China has currently - it's all people doing everything to give their own children every unfair advantage and lie about it.

Why did people flee to America from Europe? Because Europe was nepo baby land.

Now America is nepo baby land and very soon China will be nepo baby land.

It's all rather simple. Western 'culture' is convincing everyone the nepo babies running things are actually uber experts because they attended university. Lol.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#720

Post by FrancisMoodie »

triceratops wrote: post #484
rpcope1 wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There can be a bunch of crazy people trading each other various lumps of dog feces for increasing sums of cash, that doesn't mean dogshit is particularly valuable or substantive either.

I'd argue even dogshit has more practical use than Bitcoin, if no one paid money for Bitcoin. You can throw it for self-defence, compost it (under high heat to kill the germs), put it on your property to scare away raccoons (it works sometimes).

Bitcoin and other crypto coins have a practical use. You can use them to buy whatever is being sold on the darkweb with the main product categories being drugs and guns. I honestly believe much of the valuation of Crypto is tied to these marketplaces.
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