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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

#41

Post by glaslong »

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.

In general people always seem to want documentation, so they can pull it up exactly when they need it, but will do anything to avoid actually having to read it until that singular moment.

The number of meetings where I can answer all the other attendees' questions because I'm the only one who even skimmed the presenter's docs, I swear.....

Re: Why I am not going to buy a computer

#42

Post by lardosaurusrex »

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…

my issue is that people insist their written ai work -- including documentation -- is correct only for myself and many others to repeatedly discover this isn't the case.

there's also the issue that people keep switching models when their quota is used up and so at first it seems to all be in order but upon digging in suddenly it hugely diverges in tone/usefulness if it doesn't just collapse in on itself outright; making diving into documentation even more of a hassle than it was before.

even worse is that when they bring back in the previous model upon quota reset it just consumes the information from the crappier/cheaper one and errors start compounding and you want to report it and they're like "sorry we closed our public issue tracker yoy have to join our discord server" and then you have to grab the attention of extremely unwilling developers who repeatedly insist there isn't a problem until you start copy-pasting their quite frankly shit documentation en-masse.

then its "oh that's a typo; the command is correct 25 pages/sections ago so why would you believe it in this section when it's obvious that its wrong here?" like it's your fault they can't keep their goddang slop together and parse through the glaring errors.

a manual should be able to be pulled off a bookshelf (or opened if digital) and allow you to flip to the relevant page so that you can refer to it as a reference and these jerks are hellbent on blaming users for when their jank documentation looks clearly hallucinated by 3 seperate LLMs.

it is beyond frustratung.

Re: Why I am not going to buy a computer

#43

Post by ai_fry_ur_brain »

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…

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Re: Why I am not going to buy a computer

#45

Post by jrochkind1 »

cogman10 wrote: post #29
datakan wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

In this case, effort has _not_ been put in to make sure the docs are of high quality, and the potential readers know that, which is surely relevant.

Re: Why I am not going to buy a computer

#46

Post by al_borland »

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…

My co-worker has been using Copilot for his readme files. It would be better to have nothing at all. Without a readme fill I would go to the code to find what I need, or ask him. With the Copilot readme file, I get a bit excited that I will save some time, read it, think some things sound a bit off, go to the code, find that the readme is a fabrication with no basis in reality, reach out to the co-worker to tell him what happened, wait for him to manually write a proper readme, and then I can carry on with my work.

I see these AI docs as a net negative. The uphill battle isn’t with the average Joe, it’s for the technology to live up to its promise, or to stop selling lies.

Re: Why I am not going to buy a computer

#47

Post by unicornops »

groestl wrote: post #5
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…

> It wasn't written by a human so they see no human value in it. Which is true, in a way, the data put down as documentation can now be calculated in seconds, and documentation is just a cache.

The truth is the documentation never had any value.

Re: Why I am not going to buy a computer

#48

Post by bLorax »

alain94040 wrote: post #18

Neither the original 1987 story nor the blog post make any sense to me. I feel the authors are focused on a niche aspect: exchanging deep human thoughts with other humans. For that use case, sure, don’t use a computer, don’t use AI. But there’s nothing wrong with a car made by a robot factory. The car is useful, regardless of how it was made. AI lets some people create new products, those may be useful.

I'm pretty undecided on where I stand on LLMs, but I have to point out that I use them before making my point. The thing with AI is that the output we get from it is not deterministic. With assembly lines you can get a good enough deterministic output (having component failures in mind) that everything is gonna be fine. I've never been to a car factory, but I'm sure there are guard rails in place to ensure minimum damage if something goes wrong. There is simply not such a thing with AI, thus the programmer has to be the guardrail. The blog post leans a bit heavy into sentimental words for the programmer's mind, but I'm guessing this is what they mean by the "deep human thoughts" part.

Re: Why I am not going to buy a computer

#49

Post by jollyllama »

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…

Probably because you and your boss have valuable context and historical knowledge about why things are the way they are, and this is of course lacking when you pawn the task off to Copilot.

Re: Why I am not going to buy a computer

#50

Post by happypappy123 »

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…

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