731–740 of 1001 posts
Very new ex-MSFT here. I couldn’t relate more with your friend. That’s exactly what happened. I left Microsoft about 5 weeks ago and it’s been really hard to detox from that culture. AI pushed down everywhere. Sometimes shitty-AI that needed to be proved at all cost because it should live up to the hype. I was in one of such AI-orgs and even there several teams felt the pressure from SLT and a culture drift to a dysf…
What I don't understand is where the AI irrationality is coming from: the C-suite (still in B37?) are all incredibly smart people who must surely be aware of the damage this top-down policy is having on morale, product-quality, and how the company is viewed by its own customers - and yet, they do.
I'm not going to pretend things were being run perfectly when I was at MS: there were plenty of slow-motion mistakes playing-out right in front of us all[1] - and as I look back, yes, I was definitely frustrated at these clear obvious mistakes and their resultant unimaginable waste of human effort and capital investment.
Actually, come to think about it... maybe perhaps things really haven't changed as much? Clearly something neurotoxic got into the Talking Rain cans sometime around 2010-2011 - then was temporarily abated in 2014-2015; then came back twice as hard in 2022.
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[1]: Windows 8 and the Start Screen; the SurfaceRT; Visual Studio 2012 with SHOUTY MENUS and monochrome toolbar icons; the laggy and sluggish Office 2013; the crazy simultaneous development of entirely separate new reimplementations of the Office apps for iOS, Android, WinRT, the web. While ignoring the clear market-demand for cloud-y version of Active Directory without on-prem DCs (instead we got Entra, then InTune).
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Some people take find their life meaning through craft and work. When that craft is suddenly less scarce, less special, so does that craft-tied meaning. I wonder if these feelings are what scribes and amanuenses felt when the printing press arrived. I do enjoy programming, I like my job and take pride on it, but I actively try for it not to be the life-mean giving activity. I'm a just mercenary of my trade.
I mean, I would still hate to be replaced by some chat bot (without being fairly compensated because, societally, it's kind of a dick move for every company to just fire thousands of people and then nobody can find a job elsewhere), but I wouldn't be as mad if the damn tools actually worked . They don't. It's one thing to be laid off, it's another to be laid off, ostensibly, to be replaced by some tool that isn't eve…
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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…
This feels like a mentality of "a solution trying to find a problem". There's enough actual problems to solve that I don't need to create more.
But sure, the extension of this is "Then they go home and research more usages and see a kerfluffle of legal, community, and environmental concerns". Then decides to not get involved in the politics".
>Either way, the market is going to punish them accordingly.
If you want to punish me because I gave evaluations you disagreed with, you're probably not a company I want to work for. I'm not a middle manager.
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The product website isn't convincing either. It's only in private beta, and the first example shows 'A scenic walking tour of Venice' as the desired trip. I'll readily believe LLMs will gladly give you some sort of itinerary for walking in Venice, including all highlights people write and post about a lot on social media to show how great their life is. But if you asked anyone knowledgable about travel in that region…
If it’s your first time going to Italy you absolutely should visit Venice. The crowds are unpleasant, but so what? Are you going to avoid Rome too? Only go to little provincial villages?
No, you don't have to avoid Rome — it's not as bad as Venice, and can support more people — but plan ahead and don't just do a tour of all the 'must see' highlights. Look into the off season if you are a history buff with a hyperfocus on Rome — you won't be able to finish your list otherwise due to all the pointless waiting around.
And yes, visit provincial villages and eat in an authentic Italian restaurant where tourists are mostly other Italians. Experience the difference. But you are not limited to villages. Italy is huge, and there are a lot of cities with remarkable museums, world-renowned festivals, great cuisine, and where your money is more than welcome and your stay won't be marred by extreme crowds and pushy con artists in faux Roman gladiator gear.
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ChatGPT is one of the most used websites in the world and it's used by the most normal people in the world, in what way is the opinion "generally negative"?
ChatGPT for the common folk is used in the same way PirateBay is. Something can be "popular" and also "bad"
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> 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.…
If the stories were more like this where AI was an aid (AKA a fancy auto complete), devs would probably be much more optimistic. I'd love more debugging tools.
Unfortunately, the lesson an executive here would see is "wow AI is great! fire those engineers who didn't figure it out". Then it creeps to "okay have AI make a better version of this chunk decoder". Which is wrong on multiple levels. Can you imagine if the result for using Intellisense for the first time was to slas your office in half? I'd hate autocomplete too?
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> 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.
Yeah, stock prices, unregulated consolidation, and a chance to replace the labor market. Next to penis enhancement, it's a CEO's wet dream. They will bet it all for that chance.
Granted, I think its hastiness will lead to a crash, so the CEO's played themselves short term.
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…