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Why I am not going to buy a computer

karlvmuller.com

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Re: Why I am not going to buy a computer

#21

Post by changs »

datakan wrote: post #3

The uncanny valley is happening with enterprise work. My boss is in love with Copilot writing documentation that we've sorely needed for many years. He and I can bang out tons of it in minutes that would have taken months before. We do this and then no one reads it. I've asked people about it and they seem disillusioned. It wasn't written by a human so they see no human value in it. They view it as AI writing documen…

If the documentation is generated by AI, often it's better to just share the prompts used, instead of the documentation.

We do this to make sure people know what to ask for. The answer can be generated when they need it and it will be then based on the current state of things.

Re: Why I am not going to buy a computer

#22

Post by freediddy »

> AI is probabilistic and any probabilistic system can inherently never be perfect as it also still makes numerous mistakes. Work still needs to be reviewed by humans.

I don't know why people keep saying this. I don't believe code needs to be reviewed by humans. Are humans infallible? I think 80%+ of code is basically human slop. Do we review the assembly language that is generated by compilers?

I think given where AI-generated code is, and where it's going, all we need to do is test the outputs, basically turning us into QA. As someone who loves to code, yes I find it distasteful, but we don't get paid for our code, we get paid for our programs. I prefer being paid.

If you want to write beautiful code, you can do it as a side hustle at home, but I think very quickly, this is what our industry is turning into. In January, someone told me that an expert told him that software engineering would be dead in 3 months, and I scoffed at the time, but now I think it's pretty accurate. It definitely won't survive this year.

Re: Why I am not going to buy a computer

#23

Post by bLorax »

ge96 wrote: post #12

I like buying old flagships since I couldn't afford them like 5-10 years ago. Still a few on my list would be neat to try like Specter 360, eventually I want one of the current newest XPS-13s I recently got a Pixelbook for $80 running Ubuntu on that, great little device as far as thinness Also like buying/trying out weird computers or old, like the ASUS Eee PCs or Librettos

did you even read the blog post my guy

Re: Why I am not going to buy a computer

#24

Post by bcrosby95 »

datakan wrote: post #3

The uncanny valley is happening with enterprise work. My boss is in love with Copilot writing documentation that we've sorely needed for many years. He and I can bang out tons of it in minutes that would have taken months before. We do this and then no one reads it. I've asked people about it and they seem disillusioned. It wasn't written by a human so they see no human value in it. They view it as AI writing documen…

If someone writes content with AI, I don't exactly see a problem with people using AI to synthesize the content. It's a good default.

Re: Why I am not going to buy a computer

#25

Post by yoyohello13 »

datakan wrote: post #3

The uncanny valley is happening with enterprise work. My boss is in love with Copilot writing documentation that we've sorely needed for many years. He and I can bang out tons of it in minutes that would have taken months before. We do this and then no one reads it. I've asked people about it and they seem disillusioned. It wasn't written by a human so they see no human value in it. They view it as AI writing documen…

AI or not, most people never cared about documentation. I have always had to fight tooth and nail to get people to write shit down, and that hasn't changed with AI.

In 2021 I wrote a ton of docs for outlining our deployment and various how-tos, basically just got a "cool thanks bro" for my time. People never cared, I think AI is just a convenient modern excuse.

Re: Why I am not going to buy a computer

#26

Post by jasonlotito »

cogman10 wrote: post #8
datakan wrote: post #3

The uncanny valley is happening with enterprise work. My boss is in love with Copilot writing documentation that we've sorely needed for many years. He and I can bang out tons of it in minutes that would have taken months before. We do this and then no one reads it. I've asked people about it and they seem disillusioned. It wasn't written by a human so they see no human value in it. They view it as AI writing documen…

> He and I can bang out tons of it in minutes that would have taken months before Here's the problem I have. No doubt an LLM made it faster to write those docs, but did you fully spot check it for accuracy? A lot of people aren't which I think is why the average joe hates it. These docs can still have AI generated mistakes which are easily glossed over by a regular human.

> Here's the problem I have. No doubt an LLM made it faster to write those docs, but did you fully spot check it for accuracy?

Hi. I write lots of documentation already. I enjoy the taste of clean, fresh, accurate documentation.

Spot-check it for accuracy? I review it. The same way I would review other documentation in the past. The difference? Fewer errors and issues, and when I do find them, it's far easier to get things sorted out.

> A lot of people aren't

Correct. A lot of people aren't reviewing. Not even AI, just reviewing in general. And even when they review, they are only looking, not testing.

The difference is that before, it was a human mistake. Now it's an AI mistake, and people HATE AI mistakes. Even if the number of AI mistakes is fewer than the human mistakes.

I don't want to pretend that documentation is easy, and well-made human documentation is still far better than the best AI documentation for the most part. But... it depends on the audience and purpose. Most importantly, AI documentation is good enough for most cases, and well-made human documentation is far rarer.

Re: Why I am not going to buy a computer

#27

Post by michaelchisari »

datakan wrote: post #3

The uncanny valley is happening with enterprise work. My boss is in love with Copilot writing documentation that we've sorely needed for many years. He and I can bang out tons of it in minutes that would have taken months before. We do this and then no one reads it. I've asked people about it and they seem disillusioned. It wasn't written by a human so they see no human value in it. They view it as AI writing documen…

"If You are Asking for Human Attention, Demonstrate Human Effort"

https://tombedor.dev/human-attention-and-human-effort/

Re: Why I am not going to buy a computer

#28

Post by nemomarx »

datakan wrote: post #20
delfinom wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, AI writing is often unhuman. The biggest problem its more verbose than human writing. It adds additional not needed mental load in processing text. Even in code documentation, I just need a function block that says "DO NOT PASS A VALUE OF 2", with maybe a deeper comment that says "yea the math breaks here", instead of a 5 page discourse on why you should not pass a value of 2.

You make a good point but it's also subjective. The documentation we need is all technical in nature so we aren't looking for Shakespeare or Tolkien here. We just need it to be accurate and usable, which it is.

Part of being quickly usable might be the brevity or utilitarian style. Maybe it looks intimidatingly long?

Re: Why I am not going to buy a computer

#29

Post by cogman10 »

datakan wrote: post #11
cogman10 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He and I can bang out tons of it in minutes that would have taken months before Here's the problem I have. No doubt an LLM made it faster to write those docs, but did you fully spot check it for accuracy? A lot of people aren't which I think is why the average joe hates it. These docs can still have AI generated mistakes which are easily glossed over by a regular human.

> Here's the problem I have. No doubt an LLM made it faster to write those docs, but did you fully spot check it for accuracy? Yes. That was just the writing portion, there is a whole team that works on publishing and proof reading and there are acceptance levels all the way up to the CISO where people validate they read it and approved of the contents. Even with that, no one cares about it.

Yeah, IDK what to tell you then. Sometimes docs just go unread. There's a reason why "RTFM" is a meme.

It might be that they are wordy. It might be that your readers are lazy. It also might just be they don't realize the effort has been put in to make sure the docs are of high quality.

Re: Why I am not going to buy a computer

#30

Post by bcrosby95 »

delfinom wrote: post #7
datakan wrote: post #3

The uncanny valley is happening with enterprise work. My boss is in love with Copilot writing documentation that we've sorely needed for many years. He and I can bang out tons of it in minutes that would have taken months before. We do this and then no one reads it. I've asked people about it and they seem disillusioned. It wasn't written by a human so they see no human value in it. They view it as AI writing documen…

To be fair, AI writing is often unhuman. The biggest problem its more verbose than human writing. It adds additional not needed mental load in processing text. Even in code documentation, I just need a function block that says "DO NOT PASS A VALUE OF 2", with maybe a deeper comment that says "yea the math breaks here", instead of a 5 page discourse on why you should not pass a value of 2.

The AI seems to put it's internal reasoning into comments. I have to keep telling it to knock it the fuck off.
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