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Everyone in Seattle hates AI

jonready.com

831–840 of 1001 posts

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#831
post #786

Someone wrote on HN the (IMO) main reason why people do not accept AI. AI is about centralisation of power So basically, only a few companies that hold on the large models will have all the knowledge required to do things, and will lend you your computer collecting monthly fees. Also see https://be-clippy.com/ for more arguments (like Adobe moving to cloud to teach their model on your work). For me AI is just a natur…

> This enhances my work. However other people seem to feel threatened. I wish people would stop spreading this as if it were the main reason. It’s a weak argument and disconnected from reality, like those people who think the only ones who dislike cryptocurrencies are the ones who didn’t become rich from it. There are plenty of reasons to be against the current crop of AI that have nothing to do with employment. The…

Would you say there's at least fifty percent of people who are informed about these?

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#832

I was at Microsoft until July of this year until I left for an SF-based company (not AI though). The difference between the two with regards to AI tool usage couldn’t be more different- at Microsoft, they had started penalizing you in perf if you didn’t use the AI tools, which often were under par and you didn’t have a choice in. At the new place, perf doesn’t care if you use AI or not- just what you actually deliver…

> they had started penalizing you in perf if you didn’t use the AI tools

That is kind of insane right? They are practically mining their own people for data, one wonders what they would not do to their customers.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#833

I am not in Seattle. I do work in AI but have shifted more towards infrastructure. I feel fatigued by AI. To be more precise, this fatigue includes several factors. The first one is that a lot of people around me get excited by events in the AI world that I find distracting. These might be new FOSS library releases, news announcements from the big players, new models, new papers. As one person, I can only work on 2-3…

> I am actually impressed with and heavily use models. The tiresome part now are some of the humans around the technology who participate in the behaviors listed above.

the AI just an LLM and it just does what it is told to.

no limit to human greed though

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#834
post #830

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But AI allows us to make customised enshitification, think of the possibilities!

We don't need to spend money on customer support!

hell we don't need customers. we'll just get MS or Nvidia to invest in us, while leaning on their offerings.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#835

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>there's something real that everyone wants to hitch on to. 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.

Sure, but under it all there's something of value... that's why it's a much larger hype wave than dick pills

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#837
post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is your "etc." keep repeating the same two points you did in your list of four?

What about the RAM price surge?

What about diverting funding from much more useful and needed things?

What about automation of scams, surveillance, etc?

I can keep going.

There are plenty of reasons to hate on AI beyond hype.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#838
post #786

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This enhances my work. However other people seem to feel threatened. I wish people would stop spreading this as if it were the main reason. It’s a weak argument and disconnected from reality, like those people who think the only ones who dislike cryptocurrencies are the ones who didn’t become rich from it. There are plenty of reasons to be against the current crop of AI that have nothing to do with employment. The…

Would you say there's at least fifty percent of people who are informed about these?

It’s not clear to me what exactly you’re asking, but I’ll try to answer it anyway. I’d say that of the people who are against AI, fewer than 50% (to use your number) aren’t against it solely (or primarily, or at all) because they feel threatened for their job. Does that answer your question?

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#839
post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the list of people who write code, use high quality LLM agents (not chatbots) like Claude, and report not just having success with the tools but watching the tools change how they think about programming, continues to grow. The sudden appearance of LLMs has had a really destabilizing effect on everything, and a vast portion of what LLMs can do and/or are being used for runs from intellectually stifling (using LLMs to…

> There's no way someone that works with real code all day could spent an honest few weeks with a tool like Claude and come away calling it "hype". someone might still not prefer it, or it's not for them, but to claim it's "hype", that's not possible. I've tried implementing features with Claude Code Max and if I had let that go on for a week instead of just a couple of days I would've lost a week's worth of work (it…

my current job /role combinations has me working in a variety of projects which feature tasks to be done in: Python/SQLAlchemy (which I maintain), Go, k8s, Ansible, Bash, Groovy, Java, Typescript, javascript, etc. If I'm doing an architecture-intensive thing in SQLAlchemy, obviously I'm not going to say "Claude here go do this feature for me". I will have it do things like write change notes (where I'll write out the changelog in the convoluted and overly technical way I can do in 10 seconds, and it produces something presentable and readable from it), set up test cases, and sometimes I will give it very specific instructions for a large refactoring that has a predictable pattern (basically, instead of me figuring out a complex search and replace or doing it manually). For stuff I do in Ansible and especially Groovy (a horrible language which heavily resists being lintable), these are very simple declarative playbooks or Jenkins pipeline jobs, I use Claude heavily to write out directives and such because it will do so without syntax errors and without me having to google every individual pattern or directive; it's much easier to check what it writes and debug from there. But I'm also not putting Claude in charge in these places, it's doing the boring stuff for me and doing it a lot faster and without my having to spend cognitive overhead (which is at a premium when you're in your late 50s like me).

> The one part I would say LLMs seem to help me with is medium-depth questions about DirectX12. Not really how to use it, but parts of the API itself. MSDN is good for learning about it, but I would concede that LLMs have been useful for just getting more composite knowledge of DX12.

see there you go, I have things like this I have to figure out many times per week. so many of them are one-off things I really dont need to learn deeply at the moment (like TypeScript). It's also very helpful to bounce off ideas, like when I need to achieve something in the Go/k8s realm, it can sanity check how I'm approaching a problem and often suggest other ways that I would not have considered (which it knows because it's been trained on millions of tech blogs).

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#840
post #783
post #624

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes you get it. Obviously “writing code” will die. It will hold on in legacy systems that need bespoke maintenance, like COBOL systems have today. There will be artisanal coders, like there are artisanal blacksmiths, who do it the old fashioned way, and we will smile and encourage them. Within 20 years, writing code syntax will be like writing assembly: something they make you do in school, something that your dad re…

But Claude cannot code at all, it's gonna shit the bed and it learns only on human coders to be able to even know an example is a solution rather than a malware...

Every greenfield project uses claude code to write 90+% of code. Every YC startup for the past six months says AI writes 90+% of their code. Claude code writes 90+% of my code. That’s today.

It works great. I have a faster iteration cycle. For existing large codebases, AI modifications will continue to be okay-ish. But new companies with a faster iteration cycle will outcompete olds ones, and so in the long run most codebases will use the same “in-distribution” tech stacks and architecture and design principles that AI is good at.

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