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Everyone in Seattle hates AI

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Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#841

Post by basscomm »

ajkjk wrote: post #555
basscomm wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not about their careers. That's the thing, though, it is about their careers. It's not just that people are annoyed that someone who spends years to decades learning their craft and then someone who put a prompt into a chatbot that spit out an app that mostly works without understanding any of the code that they 'wrote'. It's that the executives are positively giddy at the prospect that they can get rid of som…

disagree completely. You're doing the thing I described: assuming it's all ultimately about personal benefit when they're telling you directly that it's not. The same people could trivially capitalize on the shifting climate and have a good career in the new world. But they'd still be pissed about it. I'm one of these people. So is everyone I know. The grievance is moral, not utilitarian. I don't care about executive…

> You're doing the thing I described: assuming it's all ultimately about personal benefit when they're telling you directly that it's not.

It doesn't matter how much astroturf I read, I can see what's happening with my own eyes.

> The grievance is moral, not utilitarian.

Nope, it's both.

Businesses have no morals. (Most) people do. Everything that a business does is in service of the bottom line. They aren't pushing AI everywhere out of some desire to help humanity, they're doing it because they sunk a lot of resources into it and are trying to force an ROI.

There are a lot of people who have fully bought in to AI and think that it's more capable than it is. We just had a thread the other day where someone was using AI to vibe code an app, but managed to accidentally tell the LLM to delete the contents of his hard drive.

AI apologists insist that AI agents are a vital tool for doing more faster and handwave any criticism. It doesn't matter that AI agents consume an obscene amount of resources to do it, or that pretend developers are using it to write code they don't understand and can't test that they're shoving into production anyway. That's all fine because a loud fraction of senior developers are using it to bypass the 'boring parts' of writing programs to focus on the interesting bits.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#842

Post by IAmBroom »

SecretDreams wrote: post #14

> My former coworker—the composite of three people for anonymity—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. I'm not sure they're as wrong as these statements imply? Do we think there's more or less crap out now with the advent and pervasiveness of AI? Not just from random CEOs pushing things top down…

Getting a real Jonathan Coulton "Skullcrusher Mountain" vibe here from the author (where vibe has its traditional meaning)...

"I made this half-pony, half-monkey monster to please you

But I get the feeling that you don't like it

What's with all the screaming?

You like monkeys, you like ponies

Maybe you don't like monsters so much

Maybe I used too many monkeys

Isn't it enough to know that I ruined a pony

Making a gift for you?

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#843

Post by zzzeek »

sensanaty wrote: post #784
zzzeek wrote: 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…

> 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. My company is basically writing blank cheques for "AI" (aka LLM, I hate the way we've poisoned AI as a term))tooling so that people can use any and all tooling they want and see what works and d…

never give an LLM to your junior engineers. The LLM itself is mostly like a junior engineer and will make a complete mess of things if not guided by someone with a lot of experience.

Basically if people are producing code or documentation that looks like an LLM wrote it, that's not really what I see as the model that makes these tools useful.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#844

Post by Thews »

encyclopedism wrote: post #804
p0w3n3d wrote: post #752

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…

> AI is about centralisation of power I do not believe this is the main reason at all. The core issue is that AI is taking away, or will take away, or threatens to take away, experiences and activities that humans would WANT to do. Things that give them meaning and many of these are tied to earning money and producing value for doing just that thing. As someone said "I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I ca…

It sounds like you agreed by the end, just with a slightly different way of getting there.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#845

Post by HumblyTossed »

palmotea wrote: post #298
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…

> We hear AI advocates say that their workflow is amazing, but we watch videos of their workflow, and it doesn't look that great. We hear AI advocates say "the next release is about to change everything!", but this knowledge isn't actionable or even accurate. There's a lot of disconnected-from-reality hustling (a.k.a lying) going on. For instance, that's practically Elon Musk's entire job, when he's actually doing it…

Yes, much the way some used to (still do?) try and emulate Steve Jobs. There's always some successful person these types are trying to be.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#846

Post by KptMarchewa »

sunaookami wrote: post #822
KptMarchewa wrote: post #811

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the epitome of the "yet you participate in society" gotcha.

No it's not. No one is forced to use ChatGPT, it got popular by itself. When millions use it voluntarily, that contradicts the 'generally negative' statement, even if there are legitimate criticisms of other aspects of AI.

I can criticize cities overreliance of cars for transport, yet own a car and even sporadically use it. The same applies here.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#847

Post by wseqyrku »

latexr wrote: post #838
wseqyrku wrote: post #831

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I meant more about this part:

> The threat to the environment, the consolidation of resources by the ones at the top, the spread of misinformation and lies, the acceleration of mass surveillance, the decay of critical thinking

My question was that how many people are actually concerned about those things? If you think about it it's kind of obvious but it takes conscious effort to see it and I suspect not many people do.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#848

Post by doom2 »

Esophagus4 wrote: post #586
r0m4n0 wrote: post #404

I feel like there is an absurd amount of negative rhetoric about how AI doesn't have any real world use cases in this comment thread. I do believe that the product leadership is shoehorning it into every nook and cranny of the world right now and there are reasons to be annoyed by that but there are also countless incredible use cases that are mind blowing, that you can use it every day for. I need to write about som…

> I feel like there is an absurd amount of negative rhetoric about how AI doesn't have any real world use cases in this comment thread Yep. I feel like actually, being negative on AI is the common view now, even though every other HN commenter thinks they’re the only contrarian in the world to see the light and surely the masses must be misguided for not seeing it their way. The same way people love to think they’re…

I think the disconnect for me is that I want AI to do a bunch of mundane stuff in my job where it is likely to be discouraged so I can focus on my work. My employer's CEO just implemented an Elon-style "top 5" bi-weekly report. Would they find it acceptable for me to submit AI-generated writing? I just had to do my annual self and peer reviews. Is AI writing valid here? A company wanted to put me, a senior engineer, through a five stage interview process, including a software-graded Leetcode style assessment. Should I be able to use AI to complete it?

These aren't meant to be gotcha rhetorical questions, just parts of my professional life where AI _isn't_ desirable by those in power, even if they're some of the only real world use cases where I'd want to use it. As someone said upthread, I want AI to do my dishes and laundry so I can focus on leisure and creative pursuits (or, in my job, writing code). I don't want AI doing creative stuff for me so I can do dishes and laundry.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#849

Post by Zoquento »

latexr wrote: post #786
p0w3n3d wrote: post #752

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…

Don't forget the fact that most of the time, the AI tools don't actually work well enough to be worth the trouble.

AI meeting notes are great! After you spend twice as long editing out the errors, figuring out which of the two Daves was talking each time, and removing all the unimportant side-items that were captured in the same level of detail as the core decision.

AI summaries are great - if you're the sort of person that would use a calculator that's wrong 10% of the time. The rest of us realize that an hour spent reading something is more rewarding and useful than an hour spent double checking an AI summary for accuracy.

AI as Asbestos isn't even an apt comparison, both are toxic and insidious, but Asbestos at least had a clear and compelling use case at the time. It solved some problems both better and cheaper than available alternatives. AI solves problems poorly and at higher cost, and people call you "threatened" if you point that out.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#850

Post by jordanb »

viking123 wrote: post #810
assemblyman wrote: post #269

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 hate scammers like many of the Anthropic employees that post every other week "brooo we have this model that can break out of the system bro!" "broo it's so dangerous let me tell you how dangerous it is! you don't want to get this out! we have something really dangerous internally!" Those are the worst, Dario included there btw, almost a worse grifter than Altman. The models themselves are fine except Claude that c…

Dario wishes he was the grifter Altman is. He's like a kirland brand grifter compared to Altman. Altman is a generational level talent when it comes to grifting.
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