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Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

blog.jakesaunders.dev

371–380 of 570 posts

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#371
post #46

This is bad in tech. But at least we are (relatively) well equipped to deal with it. My partner teaches at a small college. These people are absolutely lost , with administration totally sold on the idea that "AI is the future" while lacking any kind of coherent theory about how to apply it to pedagogy. Administrators are typically uncritically buying into the hype, professors are a mix of compliant and (understandab…

Meh, today I opened twenty PRs and felt great. That's worth it to me. (/s)

https://twentyprsaday.github.io/

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#372
post #46

This is bad in tech. But at least we are (relatively) well equipped to deal with it. My partner teaches at a small college. These people are absolutely lost , with administration totally sold on the idea that "AI is the future" while lacking any kind of coherent theory about how to apply it to pedagogy. Administrators are typically uncritically buying into the hype, professors are a mix of compliant and (understandab…

By my understanding, the administrators at small colleges are among the least capable professionals one might find anywhere in the economy.

A friend and I have a contract with a local university here in Canada.

They paid for custom on prem software and in over a year, they have not fully provided both access and infrastructure for install it.

We have been paid already, but they paid for a tool they can’t get their shit together enough to let us install.

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#373

AI is starting to look like a net negative for humanity. I remember the early days of OpenAI. I was super excited about it. There was a new space to uncover and learn about. I was hopeful. Now I have this love/hate relationship with it. Claude Code is amazing. I use it everyday because it makes me so much more efficient at my job. But I also know that by using it I’m contributing to making my job redundant one day. A…

starting? it was pretty clearly a net negative from the get go

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#374
post #46

This is bad in tech. But at least we are (relatively) well equipped to deal with it. My partner teaches at a small college. These people are absolutely lost , with administration totally sold on the idea that "AI is the future" while lacking any kind of coherent theory about how to apply it to pedagogy. Administrators are typically uncritically buying into the hype, professors are a mix of compliant and (understandab…

When industrialization was taking root yes indeed the factory jobs sucked AND it was the future. Two things can be true

You left out the part that the non-factory jobs sucked more (or were just non-existent).

This is the opposite.

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#375
post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spot on take. The people I’ve noticed that say things like “it’s not useful” are the ones who are doing so little they can’t see the value. This isn’t to say there’s not hype. Just that if you’re not seeing big productivity gains you need to make sure you really are an outlier and not just surplus to requirements.

I rarely come across people who flat out say "it's not useful". They exist, but IME they're the minority. Rather, I hear a lot of nuanced opinions of how the tech is useful in some scenarios, but that the net benefit is not clear. I.e. the tech has many drawbacks that make it require a lot of effort to extract actual value from. This is an opinion I personally share. In most cases, those "big productivity gains" are…

"productivity" is a misnomer. Sort of. The things I'm building are all things I've had on the back burner for years. Most of which I never would have bothered to do. But AI lets me ignore that excuse and just do it.

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#376

I'm like 99% convinced that most of the AI conversation upvotes at this point is astroturfing. I just don't see the correlation with the sentiment I get from talking to people in the real world (mostly negative AI sentiment) vs what I see here

I think some companies are just behind the curve, so this sentiment seems bizarre to some. At my big tech, AI is every conversation with everyone, every day. Becoming AI native is a huge deal for us. Literally everyone is making AI usage a core part of their job and it's been a big productivity accelerator. Perhaps it's different where you work, so you don't see the sentiment.

> AI is every conversation with everyone

Wow that sounds horrible.

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#377

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…

Completely agree. It’s very telling that the majority of write ups on effect agentic coding are essentially summaries of software engineering best practices.

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#378
Initially I rally had a bad taste in my mouth. It had forced me to close a business (video editing). Recently its gone a different direction so I would say the "interest" part got a resurgence for me. I'm seeing all of theses tools, people, and systems promise "can do this..." and "can do that..." but because I have a background in trust law and trust creation I've looked at things differently.

I think the "can do" part gets boring but now I'm paralleling this to trust relationships and fiduciary responsiblities. What I mean is that we can not only instruct but then put a framework around an agent much like we do a trustee where they are compelled to act in the best interests of the beneficiaries (the human that created them in this case).

Anyway it's got me thinking in a different way.

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#380
post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, on the other hand, software isn’t all about checking emails. I know someone who worked for a nonprofit that made pregnancy health software that worked over text messaging. Its clients were women in Africa who didn’t have much, but they had a cell phone, so they could get reminders, track vitals, and so forth. They had to find enough funding to pay several software engineers to build and maintain that system. If…

This is awesome. It's sad that examples like this are few and far between.

Are they? Or do you just mean that it's few and far between that we hear about them? If it's the former, I think there's a much bigger universe of this kind of stuff than most people realize. Otoh, if you're just commenting on the lack of coverage, then, yeah I agree I wish more publicity was paid to small software like this. Maybe we need a catchy term - "organic software"? "Locally grown software"?
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