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Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

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Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#191

Post by heavyset_go »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #98
vrganj wrote: post #18

AI is fine . The hype is annoying. What's even worse though are the incredible amounts of money and energy that are being thrown at it, with no regard for the consequences, in times of record inequality and looming climate apocalypse. AI is the red herring that'll waste all our attention until it's too late.

> AI is fine. The hype is annoying. I'm finding the detractors worse than the hype, because it seems like a certain subset of detractors [0] formed their opinion on AI in late 2022/early 2023 when ChatGPT came out (REALLY!? Over 3 years ago!?) and then never updated their opinions since then. They'll say things like "why would I want to consume X amount of energy and Y amount of water just to get a wrong answer?" In…

> certain subset of detractors [0] formed their opinion on AI in late 2022/early 2023 when ChatGPT came out (REALLY!? Over 3 years ago!?)

I mean, you can get mad at people you made up in your head, that's a thing people do, but this caricature falls in the same comforting bucket as "anyone who doesn't like is just ignorant/stupid" and "if you don't like me you're just jealous".

Maybe non-straw people have criticisms that aren't all butterflies and rainbows for good reasons, but you won't get to engage with them honestly and critically if you're telling yourself they're just ignorant from the start.

For example, I will bet that non-straw people will take issue with this, and for good reasons:

> Hallucinations are exceptionally rare now

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#192

Post by jakelsaunders94 »

peterlk wrote: post #71

Modern AI is a miracle. The math that makes it work is beautiful and really impressive. For example, if you wanted to map all knowledge on earth, how would you do it? AI answers that question by building a high dimensional vector space of embeddings, and traversing that space moves you through a topology of basically every concept that humans have. Or another thought; why is it that a stochastic parrot can solve logi…

This is a really intersting take, and maybe shows that I haven't been thorough enough with my reading. My guess is that the deep technical articles are few and far between and the higher level 'hot takes' are what fills the room. Do you have any recommendations for interesting places to start?

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#193

Post by datsci_est_2015 »

vablings wrote: post #85
emp17344 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it’s… fine. Useful in a limited capacity. Not the machine god, but not machine Satan either. The reality is kind of boring.

This summarizes mostly how I feel about it. It's a tool like any other tool we have advanced since the beginning of human civilization Machine tools replaced blacksmiths CNC machines replaced manual machines. Robots replaced CNC machine tenders CAD replaced draftsman (and also pushed that job onto engineers (grr)) P&P robots replaced human production lines. The steam train replaced the horse and cart This is a tale a…

What do LLMs replace, pray tell? More like moving from a screwdriver to a drill, rather than replacing the carpenter all together.

Also note that there are inventions that may “replace” some part of a process, but actually induce a greater demand for labor in that process. Take the cotton gin, for example, which exploded the number of slaves required to pick cotton.

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#194

Post by nisten »

vrganj wrote: post #18

AI is fine . The hype is annoying. What's even worse though are the incredible amounts of money and energy that are being thrown at it, with no regard for the consequences, in times of record inequality and looming climate apocalypse. AI is the red herring that'll waste all our attention until it's too late.

In 2-3 decades 30% of the world population will be over 60 years old (~3 BILLION seniors).We don't have an economic model for it, nor does gen-z want to all be Personal Support Workers while paying rent. Nvidia only makes 6million data center GPUs a year. Huawei makes 900k. We need 10 to 100x more to be able to automate enough just to hold civilization together. Amazon built datacenters with near 0 water use but it used 35% more electricity overall. So tha problem can be solved however we need to change out of the whole scarcity mentality if we're going to actually make the planet nice.

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#195

Post by mostertoaster »

lpcvoid wrote: post #42
vrganj wrote: post #18

AI is fine . The hype is annoying. What's even worse though are the incredible amounts of money and energy that are being thrown at it, with no regard for the consequences, in times of record inequality and looming climate apocalypse. AI is the red herring that'll waste all our attention until it's too late.

AI is one of the causes that climate change is accelerating, which is another in a long list of reasons to hate it.

The EPA repealed its 2009 conclusion that greenhouse gases warm the Earth and endanger human health and well-being.

So this is not a good reason to oppose AI. Now the sheer energy it requires does mean we might want to go nuclear though.

Natural gas is nice though because it does pollute the air far less than coal.

You might argue the EPA only repealed that because of political agendas, but the same argument could be made for why it was passed.

A lot of people got very rich off the fear mongering from climate alarmists.

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#196

Post by d675 »

_doctor_love wrote: post #153

This might sound like snark, but I truly don’t mean it that way. I think what’s interesting about AI, and why there’s so much conversation, is that in order to be a good user of AI, you have to really understand software development. All the people I work with who are getting the most value out of using AI to deliver software are people who are already very high-skilled engineers, and the more years of real experienc…

absolutely. as a early/mid level SDET/SRE, I can move so fast on prototyping full good apps now. That style of thinking is serving me well, knowing about queues, docker, basic infra knowledge, good coding practices, is plenty to produce decent code. Interesting time to be laid off.

AI makes a ton of bad decisions too and it's up to you to work with it. If I had the knowledge of the dangers hidden in things I'm developing, I'd move even faster

Was able to make a great full web app, which I think is hardened for prod but it had to be refactored to do so. Which it happily did.

It's really about asking the right questions, breaking down tasks, and planning now. I'm going to tackle a huge project, hoping to share it here.

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#197

Post by lpcvoid »

xvector wrote: post #91
lpcvoid wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI is one of the causes that climate change is accelerating, which is another in a long list of reasons to hate it.

Seeing this kind of populist misinformation/bikeshedding on HN is particularly disappointing.

So then explain to me where I wrote misinformation?

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#198

Post by zer00eyz »

jvanderbot wrote: post #4

How do I answer this without spamming: Yes, very much. Everyone is in their own place adapting (or not) to AI. The disconnect b/w even folks on the same team is just crazy. At least it's gotten more concrete (here's what works for me, what do you do) vs catastrophizing jobpocolypse or "teh singularity", at least on day to day conversations.

I'm sure as hell bored of the current conversations people are having about ai.

> here's what works for me, what do you do

This is at least progress... but many want to remain in denial, and cant even contemplate this portion of the conversation.

We're also ignoring the light AI shines on our industry, and how (badly) we have been practicing our craft. As an example there is a lot of gnashing of teeth right now about the VOLUME of code generated and how to deal with it... how were you dealing with code reviews? How were you reviewing the dependencies in your package manager? (Another supply chain attack today so someone is looking but maybe not you). Do you look at your DB or OS? Does the 2 decades of leet code, brain teaser fang style interview qualify candidates who are skilled at reading code? What is good code? Because after close to 30 years working in the industry, let me tell you the sins of the LLM have nothing on what I have seen people do...

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#199

Post by lpcvoid »

sharemywin wrote: post #113
proc0 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People sure don't care about it anymore and it coincided with rise of AI. There's barely any mention of climate change compared to 5+ years ago. I really think this is all about how to keep the capitalist system from imploding because of so much debt (so the next big thing needs to happen to keep the growth).

climate change was an important issue when they were trying to peddle EVs and solar.

They == the lizard people, I assume?

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#200

Post by pojzon »

amelius wrote: post #173
_doctor_love wrote: post #153

This might sound like snark, but I truly don’t mean it that way. I think what’s interesting about AI, and why there’s so much conversation, is that in order to be a good user of AI, you have to really understand software development. All the people I work with who are getting the most value out of using AI to deliver software are people who are already very high-skilled engineers, and the more years of real experienc…

This is really not true. There are stories of people who had no background in software engineering who now write entire applications using AI. And I have personally seen this happen.

Its silly to say this but one such person is „pewdiepie”
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